Myles Away From Dublin

by Flann O'Brien

  What Conclusion?

  What is one to make of the whole story? It is not easy to say, at least by those who have a poor grasp of staggering figures. Ford ignored trade unions but paid a far higher rate than the minimum they prescribed. He refused to enter into any agreements or conventions with other motor-makers. As his organisation developed, he did not see why he should pay merchants or middlemen for timber; so he bought, maintained and developed his own forests. He equally disdained shipping companies and soon had his own vessels for transportation of his cars overseas. Later he was to realise that this transportation was in itself wasteful and that his cars should be made or assembled at various spots throughout the world. In the United States alone he founded 34 assembly plants and now Ford factories exist in many parts of the world, manned almost wholly by natives.

  Talking of Dr Diesel

  Having written last week about Henry Ford and his famous Model T, I feel I should say something this week about the diesel engine. The theme is gruesomely topical, for the Eichmann trial has revealed that one of the ‘quick and easy’ methods of murdering Jews, locked in a road truck, was to divert the exhaust gas of its diesel engine into it. The irony of that sort of tragic killing lies in the fact that the inventor of the diesel engine was a German.

  Some of the books say he wasn’t, for he was born in Paris in 1858. But both his parents were German, and nearly all his education took place in Munich. A technical paper he published, in English named The Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat Motor‚ led to the making of the first engine by Rudolf Diesel, and to the diffusion of the principle he discovered today throughout the world. The engine was first publicly shown in Munich in 1898, and in the same year an American (?) named Busch paid Diesel one million gold marks for the rights of US manufacture. The soundness of his idea was self-evident.

  Rudolf Diesel’s life (1858–1913) was ended in a way not to be expected in the regime of a skilled and original engineer. On the night of September 29–30, he fell off the Antwerp-Harwich steamer and was drowned.

  The Diesel Principle

  Most of us have a fair idea of how the petrol engine works. A mixture in the form of gas prepared in the carburettor in the air-fuel ratio of 14.5:1 is introduced to the cylinders and exploded by means of sparking plugs, which are activated by an intricate electrical system.

  Diesel knew from miscellaneous experience that compression itself meant the spectacular generation of heat and the principle of his engine is based on the theory that the sparking plug is not necessary to achieve combustion. In his cylinder, ordinary air is compressed to about 500 lb per square inch, which raises its temperature to 1000 F. This has been defined as red-hot air, and into it is injected a spray of atomised oil. There is an instant explosion. The event is spontaneous, and the machine begins to work.

  Yet the diesel engine has certain inherent delicacies. In this country the steam engine, having served faithfully for a century, is steadily being ousted by diesel locomotives, and never have traction breakdowns been so frequent. The steam engine has always been a notoriously inefficient machine, a great amount of its energy being spent on moving itself; it has been a sort of diabolical creature, breathing fire, shaking the earth and causing enormous uproar. But its sheer brute-strength made it the pivot of a whole era, just as Henry Ford’s Model T was later to do.

  Is Petrol Obsolete?

  Nowadays several makes of car are offered with, at the option of the purchaser, petrol or diesel engines. Some people think petrol is on the way out, for the cost of unearthing, transporting and refining it is vastly higher than the crude stuff a diesel engine uses. This is indeed a half-truth. The petrol engine is far more versatile than the diesel, universally understood and capable of being serviced anywhere. On the other hand, the diesel is more suitable and economic for really heavy work such as driving ships, moving earth, powering military tanks, or driving the machinery of great factories.

  Man has not yet found the ideal method suitable for all purposes‚ though he seems to have decided that steam will no longer do.

  There are still in the far corners of Ireland the quiet man who thinks he found the true answer when he was a little boy, and still believes in that answer. It does not entail crankshaft, injectors or plugs. You just get a simple cart and yoke a donkey into it.

  The folly of the answer game

  I am sure many readers share my horror of the quiz. It is a useless and infuriating abomination, and it is infernally ubiquitous. One can scarcely take up any magazine or newspaper (The Nationalist and Leinster Times honourably excepted) without encountering it in one form or another. Versions of it occur on the cinema screen. Turning on the radio is a matter of deadly risk. When I personally do so, I am almost certain to hear the voice of my friend, Joe Linnane.

  ‘Now, Number One. This is a six-mark question. How much are two and two? If you add two and two together, what do you get?’

  (Pause).

  ‘Em … five.’

  ‘No. Hard luck, Number One. The correct answer is four.’

  (This last, as an absolute statement, is in fact wrong. There are fluids, also gases, which when combined equally in two-part quantities, do not achieve a total of 4 but sometimes as low as 3½ because the combination brings about a change in the overall molecular structure.)

  Crosswords, the yo-yo and whistling in the bus are all bad. But the quiz is worst of all.

  Is It Good For You?

  The firm of Guinness is world-renowned, chiefly for the gift of making good stout and producing sundry kindred brews. Quite recently they have seemed to have gone wild and produced a massive book of 280 large pages. A treatise on brewing? Not at all, but the answers to quiz questions on every subject under the sun, a unique compendium of useless knowlege. There is scarcely any mention of Guinness itself except an oblique one when, having disclosed that the largest brewery in the world is in the US, it adds that the largest in Europe is none other than Arthur Guinness, Son and Company Ltd.

  Which is the largest airline in the world – TWA or Pan-American? Neither. It is the Russian airline ‘Aeroflot’, which operates 1,006 aircraft.

  Which distinguished singer earned most in the course of his career? Caruso, of course. No, no, you are wrong. It was our own John MacCormack, who piled up a total of £1,400,000.

  Still talking of music, this book can be funny, though the editors swear every word they print is true. It is useless asking the reader where and when was the vastest orchestra ever assembled, what sort were the instruments and how many of them were there. The respective answers are Trondheim, Norway, August, 1958; brass 12,600. Is this true? I cannot help doubting it, for I was in this country in 1958 and in my health and I did not hear the recital.

  A Few More Facts

  It is impossible to give the reader a true notion of this remarkable compendium but I will quote a few more facts entirely at random. The palm for prodigious literary output goes to an American, Eric Stanley Gardner, aged 70. He dictates up to 10,000 words a day and is usually engaged on seven novels simultaneously. What I personally admire here is not so much the output as the uncanny control which prevents a character in one book from accidentally straying into another and thus snarling up both books.

  The highest spire in the world is that of the Protestant cathedral at Ulm, Germany; 528 feet. St Paul’s in London was a mere 489 feet but was struck by lightning in 1561. (I did not know St Paul’s existed then.) But when it comes to a question of ecclesiastical age, we need not bang our own heads. The Gallerus Oratorio near Kilmalkedar, Co. Kerry, reputedly dates from AD 550!

  The heaviest beer-drinking country in the world is Belgium.

  Between 1940 and 1955 a number of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were executed in China. How many? At least 20 million.

  The last public hanging in London was in 1868, the distinguished main actor being Michael Barrett, a Fenian.

  The country with most psychiatrists (13,425) – it’s an easy guess – the Unit
ed States.

  One more Guinness

  Does stating something as a fact make it true? That is a more complicated question than it sounds, for what begins as lie can in time become truth. When Hitler told the German people, for purposes of his own, that Germany’s dearest friend was the Soviet Union, he was believed and Germans in general became very friendly with Russians. That both nations tried later on to exterminate each other is irrelevant. The mutual esteem, while it lasted, was genuine.

  This week I return, as threatened, to the Guinness Book of Records. This book is full of extraordinary allegations, for the veracity of which no source or proof is given. On the other hand, there is no reason to suppose that this majestic firm should go out of its way to circulate a parcel of lies. We must take the material on trust, as we do the contents of newspapers.

  The Mostest

  In the matter of printed books, the bestseller of this era was Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. It deals with the American Civil War and has become so well-known that it is casually referred to in many publications merely as GWTW. Twenty years ago I felt I must be stupid and illiterate for not having bought and read it. I bought a copy all right but in the course of four heroic attempts to read it I broke down. Frankly, I found it unreadable, badly written, dull.

  Hollywood nearly strangled itself in an effort to make it the greatest film ever. Even the film I found dull, ridiculously elaborate and far too long. I do not doubt that the fault is in myself.

  Turning to the Guinness Book, there is a statistic concerning the longest run of a play. The play in question opened in Los Angeles on July 6, 1933, and, playing one show a night, lasted until September 6, 1953. The title of this play? The Drunkard.

  The reader may well ask why it stopped at all after over twenty years. The answer is that it didn’t. The play was made the subject of a musical adaptation called Wayward Way and this piece was played on alternate nights with the original until October 1959. When finally discontinued, The Drunkard had been played 9,477 times.

  I feel there must be a moral buried here. For some people drink itself is a fascination but for a far greater number, all total abstainers, the subject of drink and drunkenness fascinates. No doubt The Drunkard is a burlesque and funny in its own right, like Ten Nights in a Bar-room as played in Dublin years ago by the Edwards-MacLiammoir company. All the same, I cannot think of any other theme that could stand up to the harrowing friction of a 26 years’ run. No doubt the players themselves had to be changed, for one who was a pretty young lady at the start would have become a middle-aged matron by the end.

  Other Strange Facts

  The heaviest bell in the world is known as the Tsar Kolokol, cast in Moscow in 1733. It weighs 193 tons and is not to be mentioned in the same breath as the heaviest in Britain, the Great Paul in St Paul’s, London, a toy that weighs a mere 16 tons.

  In the US, an outfit named Kraft Foods entered into a contract with the singer Perry Como (48) for a one-hour appearance daily on colour television. Including production expenses, the money involved was £8,928,000. This seems to prove we are all in the wrong country.

  The largest store in the world is R.H. Macy of Broadway. I will not trouble the reader with details of the staggering daily sales beyond saying that it has 11,000 employees. The floor space is 46.2 acres, and I do not find it feasible to work out how many times bigger this is than Croke Park.

  Talking again of shops, what is the longest chain of chain-shops? In the US there is an enterprise known by the long-winded name of The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company; they have 120,000 employees, 4,276 branches, and operate two laundries of their own for dealing with the workers’ uniforms. Outside the four county boroughs, no town in Ireland has anything like the population of the GA & PT’s staff. Maybe it is just as well.

  The largest tractor in the world (naturally a product of the US) was exhibited in May last year. It weighs 50 tons.

  This Guinness Book is getting under my nails. Very likely I will be back to it again next week.

  As noble as our newspapers

  A newspaper is like the man: it behaves itself, does not print scandalous matter, achieves dignity, worships truth, and refrains from libel. Most of us would like to be men as noble as our newspapers.

  A friend recently gave me a copy of the Evening News. Dublin people are mightily surprised that London, a town with a population approaching 9,000,000, has only two evening papers, whereas Dublin has three. It makes no difference. The contents are the same. Even the type-faces don’t vary.

  First Issue

  This copy of the Evening News, still going strong, was presented to readers on Tuesday, July 26, bearing the date 1881. It was a reproduction of the first issue of a publication that prospered. It is a curious thing to look at in 1961. Very different people from us must have read it. And they must have had better eyes.

  It is not too easy to isolate what is different about it, apart from some obvious physical things. I should say that the main differences lay in editorial attitude. The news was presented with a take-it-or-leave-it gesture. It didn’t matter very much. Neither did the reader.

  No Headlines

  Perhaps the most impressive fact about the publication was the absence of display type. There were no headlines. The death of a dog in Hammersmith got the same show as the suicide of the head of a ruling house in Europe. Ireland was never mentioned at all, but plenty of space was given to cricket.

  Absence of display type meant that births, marriages and deaths got mixed up with mattresses, honey, and goings-on in South Africa. In that year of 1881, it will be recalled, the Queen was on the throne. Mr Gladstone was performing in the House of Commons. It was the Age of Peace, at least for Britain. The great Empire was still there.

  Yet that paper shows some curiosities. I don’t mean that it announces its price as one halfpenny (as it does) but hints at a different social attitude. Everything is mentioned in monotone, as if it did not matter very much. Generally, one feels that the Evening News of 1881 is very different from today’s Daily Express. Is it better? It is not easy to answer that question. I would say it is more restful. It would be unlikely to give you a heart attack in bed in the morning.

  Siberian Plague

  No occurrence, however catastrophic, rated a greater display than the upper case of the text, or just plain capital letters. Thus one read a heading such as Outbreak of Siberian Plague without being unduly disturbed. Another report was headed Punishment at Sea. Still another – please remember the date – was headed The Russian Imperial Family.

  News reports are announced as ‘Telegrams’, thus paying tribute to the new invention, and there is an enormous, very heavy leading article about the Transvaal. There were no features, no glimpse of the common man.

  Yet perhaps he did intrude a little bit.

  One man inserted a notice saying that he was selling first quality salt. That was fair enough, and several other people were doing the same. But this man said that there was a reduction in price of 10 per cent for total abstainers.

  I think I had better end here.

  The world is right-handed

  I think I mentioned some weeks ago that I had smashed my right fore-arm. It may be that a person who expatiates on such an injury is to be likened to the lady who talks endlessly and minutely (for at least forty years, anyhow) about her operation, conferring excruciating boredom on her listeners and making them want to run away.

  I don’t think, however, that the two situations are identical. For instance, no operation lasts for several weeks and in practice, anybody who undergoes a serious operation can know nothing about it.

  Twin Organs

  I may be permitted initially a few general observations. The human being is fitted out with certain twin organs such, for example, as the arms, legs, eyes, ears, kidneys, lungs. It is unprecedented for each of the twins to operate with equal efficiency.

  Everybody has a master eye. How often does a companion say to us: ‘Walk on
this side of me. I’m deaf in the left ear.’ Disease frequently appears in one lung and not in the other, and this is also true of the kidneys.

  Ambidexterity, or the use of either hand with equal ease, is more a word than a fact. Even skilled and well-trained boxers do not have it. Biologists have often recommended that children should be meticulously trained in ambidexterity but since it is the left hemisphere of the brain which controls the motor apparatus of the right side of the body, other commentators have said that the equal development of the right hemisphere would cause speech impediment.

  Got a Hiding

  In practice, what happened when we were all very young? Those of us who showed a clear tendency to use the left hand as the primary corporal tool got a severe hiding for our pains. All the same, there are many left-handed people in the world – particularly, for some reason, cricketers. The ‘normal’ person’s left hand and arm is almost quite useless except for assisting the right.

  If, however, one closely observes a person who is well and truly left-handed, one soon notices that his right hand is by no means as useless as the ‘normal’ person’s left. It has a real though diminished usefulness. I think I know why.

  Are parents who sternly discourage a left-handed attitude on the part of their children ignorant and eccentric people? I do not think so. They are really trying to save the child from a lifetime of inconvenience, and even situations of physical danger. The reason is that the whole world is organised on the basis that everybody is right-handed. That is why left-handed adults must put the right hand to some use, whether they like it or not, and attain gradually a certain proficiency in its use.