Best of Myles

by Flann O'Brien

  ‘I think you are well rid of that fellow,’ he said. ‘He was a sullen lout.’

  Keats shook his head despondently.

  ‘The last rays of feeling and life must depart,’ he said sadly, ‘ere the bloom of that valet shall fade from my heart.’

  Chapman coughed slightly.

  BRAINS AND BRAWN

  Chapman’s fag at Greyfriars was a boy called Fox, a weedy absentminded article of Irish extraction. One evening, shortly before the hour when Mr Quelch was scheduled to take the Remove for prep., the young fellow was sent down the High with a jug and strict instructions to bring back a pint of mild and bitter without spilling it. The minutes lengthened and so did Chapman’s face, who disliked going into class completely sober. He fumed and fretted, but still there was no sign of the returning fag. In the opposite armchair lay Keats, indolently biting his long nails. He thought he would console his friend with a witty quotation.

  ‘Fox dimissa nescit reverti,’ he murmured.

  ‘Dimissus!’ snapped Chapman, always a stickler for that kind of thing.

  ‘Kindly leave my wife out of this,’ Keats said stiffly.

  THAT MAN KEATS

  Once when Keats was rotting in Paris a kind old lady gave him a lump of veal and advised him to go home and cook and stuff it into himself. During a desperate attempt to grill it with a tongs over an open fire, the meat caught alight.

  The poet is thought to have muttered something like ‘la Veal lumière’ (under breath that hinted of bountifullest barleycorn). Chapman was out at the Folies.

  KEATS, when living in the country purchased an expensive chestnut gelding. This animal was very high-spirited and largely untrained and gave the novice owner a lot of trouble. First it was one thing, then another but finally he was discovered one morning to have disappeared from his stable. Foul play was not suspected nor did the poet at this stage adopt the foolish expedient of locking the stable door. On the contrary he behaved very sensibly. He examined the stable to ascertain how the escape had been effected and then travelled all over the yard on his hands and knees looking for traces of the animal’s hooves. He was like a dog looking for a trail, except that he found a trail where many a good dog would have found nothing. Immediately the poet was off cross-country following the trail. It happened that Chapman was on a solitary walking-tour in the vicinity and he was agreeably surprised to encounter the poet in a remote mountainy place. Keats was walking quickly with his eyes on the ground and looked very preoccupied. He had evidently no intention of stopping to converse with Chapman. The latter, not understanding his friend’s odd behaviour, halted and cried:

  ‘What are you doing, old man?’

  ‘Dogging a fled horse,’ Keats said as he passed by.

  KEATS AND ALL THAT

  It is not generally known that …

  O excuse me.

  Keats and Chapman (in the old days) spent several months in the county Wicklow prospecting for ochre deposits. That was before the days of (your) modern devices for geological divination. With Keats and Chapman it was literally a question of smelling the stuff out. The pair of them sniffed their way into Glenmalure and out of it again, and then snuffled back to Woodenbridge. In a field of turnips near Avoca Keats suddenly got the pungent effluvium of a vast ochre mine and lay for hours face down in the muck delightedly permeating his nostrils with the perfume of hidden wealth. No less lucky was Chapman. He had nosed away in the direction of Newtonmountkennedy and came racing back shouting that he too had found a mine. He implored Keats to come and confirm his nasal diagnosis. Keats agreed. He accompanied Chapman to the site and lay down in the dirt to do his sniffing. Then he rose.

  ‘Great mines stink alike,’ he said.

  MEMORIES OF KEATS

  Keats and Chapman once climbed Vesuvius and stood looking down into the volcano, watching the bubbling lava and considering the sterile ebullience of the stony entrails of the earth. Chapman shuddered as if with cold or fear.

  ‘Will you have a drop of the crater?’ Keats said.

  An ancestor of Keats (by the same token) was concerned in the dread events of the French Revolution. He was, of course, on the aristocratic side, a lonely haughty creature who ignored the ordinances of the rabblement and continued to sit in his Louis Kahn’s drawing room drinking pale sherry and playing bézique. Soon, however, he found himself in the cart and was delivered to execution. He surveyed the dread engine of Monsieur Guillotine, assessing its mechanical efficiency and allowing it some small mead of admiration. Then turning to the executioner, he courteously presented his compliments and prayed that he should be granted a simple favour on the occasion of his last journey—that of being permitted to face away from the guillotine and lean back so that the blade should meet him in the throat rather than that he should adopt the usual attitude of kneeling face down with his neck on the block.

  ‘I like to sit with my back to the engine,’ he explained.

  Chapman, during his biochemistry days at Munich, had spent years examining and cataloguing all the human glands. He designated each according to a letter of the alphabet, and when he had them all isolated and labelled, he settled down to write a minute medical monograph on each one of them. Gland A, gland B, gland C—Chapman’s scholarly dossiers accumulated. Keats looked in to see him one day and found him apparently stumped. One of the glands would not yield to the experiment.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’ Keats said.

  ‘This gland N,’ Chapman replied, ‘is giving me a lot of trouble. But I’m going to keep after it. I won’t let it beat me. I’ll win yet.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ Keats said. Then he began to potter about the place, whistling some tune. Chapman pricked up his ears.

  ‘What’s that your whistling?’ he asked.

  ‘Wir fahren gegen N-gland,’ Keats said.

  Chapman suddenly swallowed some chemical potion he had been working at.

  PEOPLE WHO come to see me with their problems often wonder at the queer name I have on my house—‘The Past’. Is it so queer after all? Is it not better than, say, ‘The Present’? ‘The Present’ seems to imply that the house is the gift of some friend rather than the result of my exertions as secretary of the Gaelic League, a post which I held at a time when the language was neither profitable nor popular, at a time when the sycophant and time-server dominated the counsels of the Irish nation, at a time when our land, broken and bleeding, yielded—nay, proffered—the hand of friendship to her own exiled kith and kin resident in the distant continent of America, AT A TIME WHEN—

  Excuse me.

  But about this house of mine, I often hear people saying: ‘Ah, that poor man. Sure that poor man is living in “The Past”!’

  And so I am. The poor law valuation is fifty quid.

  KEATSIANA

  The ‘abstract’ painter Franz Huehl, son of a Dresden banker, was living in Zurich eking o. a p. 1-hood (like manny a betther man) during the last European war. He was happily married, and his wife, not knowing that young Huehl’s allowance had ceased many years ago (in fact when he painted a ‘portrait’ of his father), was pleased with their comparative prosperity; Huehl—an incorrigible gambler—had had a run of luck at the tables and had won enough to put him on velvet for eighteen months. The wife knew nothing of this. However, the money eventually ran (out) and, very worried, the young wife went to consult Keats, who at that time was supervising the construction of tramcars for the Zurich Corporation. Keats heard her (out). Sympathetic, he determined to tell her the truth.

  ‘My dear girl,’ he said, ‘you have been living in F. Huehl’s pair o’dice.’

  When she was gone he turned to Chapman.

  ‘F. Huehl and his Monet are soon parted,’ he observed.

  Chapman bought the picture next day, for one of his spare lieder.

  By the way (whatever that idiot phrase means), we newspaper people often refer laughingly to Schubert as a lieder-writer.

  THE medical profession, remember, wasn’t a
lways the highly organised racket that it is to-day. In your grandfather’s time practically anybody could take in hand (whatever that means) to be a physician or surgeon and embark on experiments which frequently involved terminating other people’s lives. Be that as it may, certain it is that Chapman in his day was as fine a surgeon as ever wore a hat. Chapman took in hand to be an ear nose and throat man and in many an obscure bedroom he performed prodigies which, if reported in the secular press, would have led to a question in the House. Keats, of course, always went along to pick up the odd guinea that was going for the anaesthetist. Chapman’s school-day lessons in carpentry often saved him from making foolish mistakes.

  On one occasion the two savants were summoned to perform a delicate antrum operation. This involved opening up the nasal passages and doing a lot of work in behind the forehead. The deed was done and the two men departed, leaving behind a bleeding ghost suffering severely from what is nowadays called ‘postoperative debility’. But through some chance the patient lived through the night, and the following day seemed to have some slim chance of surviving. Weeks passed and there was no mention of his death in the papers. Months passed. Then Chapman got an unpleasant surprise. A letter from the patient containing several pages of abuse, obviously written with a hand that quivered with pain. It appeared that the patient after ‘recovering’ somewhat from the operation, developed a painful swelling at the top of his nose. This condition progressed from pain to agony and eventually the patient took to consuming drugs made by his brother, who was a blacksmith. These preparations apparently did more harm than good and the patient had now written to Chapman demanding that he should return and restore the patient’s health and retrieve the damage that had been done; otherwise that the brother would call to know the reason why.

  ‘I think I know what is wrong with this person,’ Chapman said. ‘I missed one of the needles I was using. Perhaps we had better go and see him.’ Keats nodded.

  When they arrived the patient could barely speak, but he summoned his remaining strength to utter a terrible flood of bad language at the selfless men who had come a long journey to relieve pain. A glance by the practised eye of Chapman revealed that one of the tiny instruments had, indeed, been sewn up (inadvertently) in the wound, subsequently causing grandiose suppurations. Chapman got to work again, and soon retrieved his property. When the patient was re-sewn and given two grains, the blacksmith brother arrived and kindly offered to drive the two men home in his trap. The offer was gratefully accepted. At a particularly filthy part of the road, the blacksmith deliberately upset the trap, flinging all the occupants into a morass of muck. This, of course, by way of revenge, accidentally on purpose.

  That evening Chapman wore an expression of sadness and depression. He neglected even to do his twenty lines of Homer, a nightly chore from which he had never shrunk in five years.

  ‘To think of the fuss that fellow made over a mere needle, to think of his ingratitude,’ he brooded. ‘Abusive letters, streams of foul language, and finally arranging to have us fired into a pond full of filth! And all for a tiny needle! Did you ever hear of such vindictiveness!’

  ‘He had it up his nose for you for a long time,’ Keats said.

  CHAPMAN thought a lot of Keats’s girl, Fanny Brawne, and often said so.

  ‘Do you know,’ he remarked one day, ‘that girl of yours is a sight for sore eyes.’

  ‘She stupes to conquer, you mean,’ Keats said.

  A MEMOIR OF KEATS

  Keats and Chapman once lived near a church. There was a heavy debt on it. The pastor made many efforts to clear the debt by promoting whist drives and raffles and the like, but was making little headway. He then heard of the popularity of these carnivals where you have swing-boats and roundabouts and fruit-machines and la boule and shooting-galleries and every modern convenience. He thought to entertain the town with a week of this and hoped to make some money to reduce the debt. He hired one of these outfits but with his diminutive financial status he could only induce a very third-rate company to come. All their machinery was old and broken. On the opening day, as the steam-organ blared forth, the heavens opened and disgorged sheets of icy rain. The scene, with its drenched and tawdry trappings, assumed the gaiety of a morgue. Keats and Chapman waded from stall to stall, soaked and disconsolate. Chapman (unwisely, perhaps) asked the poet what he thought of the fiesta.

  ‘A fête worse than debt,’ Keats said.

  Chapman collapsed into a trough of mud.

  LITERARY CORNER

  Chapman was once complaining to Keats about the eccentric behaviour of a third party who had rented a desolate stretch of coast and engaged an architect to build a fantastic castle on it. Chapman said that no sane person could think of living in so forsaken a spot, but Keats was more inclined to criticise the rich man on the score of the architect he had chosen, a young man of ‘advanced’ ideas and negligible experience. Chapman persisted that the site was impossible, and that this third party was a fool.

  ‘His B.Arch. is worse than his bight,’ Keats said.

  A GLIMPSE OF KEATS

  Keats and Chapman were conversing one day on the street, and what they were conversing about I could not tell you. But anyway there passed a certain character who was renowned far and wide for his piety, and who was reputed to have already made his own coffin, erected it on trestles, and slept in it every night.

  ‘Did you see our friend?’ Keats said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Chapman, wondering what was coming.

  ‘A terrible man for his bier,’ the poet said.

  KEATS (in his day) had a friend named Byrne. Byrne was a rather decent Irish person, but he was frightfully temperamental, politically unstable and difficult to get on with, particularly if the running board of the tram was already crowded with fat women. He frightened (the life) out of his wife with his odd Marxist ideas.

  ‘What shall I do?’ she implored Keats. ‘Politics mean nothing to me; his love means much.’

  Keats said nothing, but wrote to her that night—‘Please Byrne when Red.’

  KEATS once bought a small pub in London and one day he was visited by Dr Watson, confrère of the famous Baker Street sleuth. Watson came late in the evening accompanied by a friend and the pair of them took to hard drinking in the back snug. When closing time came, Keats shouted out the usual slogans of urgent valediction such as ‘Time now please!’, ‘Time gents!’, ‘The Licence gents!’ ‘Fresh air now gents!’ and ‘Come on now all together!’ But Dr Watson and his friend took no notice. Eventually Keats put his head into the snug and roared ‘Come on now gents, have yez no Holmes to go to!’

  The two topers then left in that lofty vehicle, high dudgeon.

  A MEMOIR of Keats. Number eighty four. Copyright in all civilised countries, also in ‘Eire’ and in the Sick Counties of Northern Ireland. Pat. Appd. For. The public is warned that copyright subsists in these epexegetic biographic addenda under warrant issued by the Ulster King of Farms (nach maireann) and persons assailing, invading or otherwise violating such rights of copy, which are in-alienable and indefeasible, will be liable to summary disintitulement in feodo without remembrances and petty sochemaunce pendent graund plaisaunce du roi.

  A Memoir of Keats. No. 84. Copyright.

  Keats once rented a trout-stream and managed to kill a sackful of fish every day. Transport was poor and he had no means of marketing the surplus, which, however, was not large. Chapman, hearing of this, presented his friend with a small mobile canning plant. (He managed to pick up (rather than buy) this machine for that odd mercantile cantata, a song.) Calling to see the poet some months later, he was astonished at his robust and girthy physique.

  ‘You must be eating a lot,’ Chapman said. ‘I suppose you are making money out of the canned trout?’

  ‘I eat what I can,’ Keats said.

  CHAPMAN had a small cousin whom he wished to put to a trade and he approached Keats for advice. The poet had an old relative who was a tailor and for a consideratio
n this tailor agreed to accept the young man as an apprentice. For the first year, however, he declined to let him do any cutting, insisting that he should first master the art of making garments up.

  One day Chapman accidentally spilled some boiling porridge over his only suit, ruining it completely. The same evening he had an appointment with a wealthy widow and was at his wits’ end to know how he could get another suit in time. Keats suggested that the young apprentice should be called upon in the emergency. Chapman thought this a good idea and sent the apprentice an urgent message. Afterwards he had some misgivings as to the ability of a mere apprentice to produce a wearable suit in a few hours.

  ‘He’ll certainly want to spare no effort to have it finished by six o’clock,’ he said gloomily.

  ‘He’ll have his work cut out,’ Keats said reassuringly.