Best of Myles

by Flann O'Brien

  IT’S TO-DAY’S. Can’t you look at the date.

  I don’t have to look at the date, I know very well it’s yesterday’s. I’m not a fool. I distinctly remember that picture in yesterday’s paper, every single day that passes I have to turn the house upside-down to get my own newspaper. I spend half my life going round my own house like a lost fool, I ask a civil question about my own newspaper that I purchased for tuppence and I am practically called a liar to my face …

  SOCIAL AND PERSONAL

  I overheard a curious snatch of conversation at one of the weekly socials that are run at the Club Cruiskeen. A pretty golden little baggage was talking to her lover.

  ‘D’you know, Godfrey, only last night I learnt many interesting things about my family. D’you know that my great-grandfather was killed at Waterloo?’

  ‘Rayully, sweetness, which platform?’

  The golden head was tossed in disdain.

  ‘How ridiculous you are, Godfrey. As if it mattered which platform.’

  Naturally, I cannot guarantee that this couple said these words or even opened their beaks at all. The room was full of my Escorts.*

  THE FIRST TIME I woke up to Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ was when I noticed a film writer in the Irish Press saying that Disney fans were now known as ‘Fantasians’. When I read this I flew into a temper. Immediately I demanded to know from all the hacks who write this stuff for me why we had not thought of this first. Memo from the Boss. Please furnish written explanation. What is the reason? WHAT IS THE REASON? (Your man is in a fierce temper, walking up the walls above in his office, chawin the face of everybody that puts his head in.) A disused National Teacher that works for me—as a matter of fact he wrote that Escort Service stuff we had some months ago, the stuff that had to be taken off because it smelt—well, this man had the cheek to say that he had thought of it all right but decided not to use it because it was not up to ‘our standard’. I didn’t quite know what to say to this because maybe he wasn’t far wrong.

  Anyhow, this ‘Fantasia’. Listen to what a writer in this very newspaper said recently:

  ‘“Fantasia”, in my humble opinion the highest form of cinematographic art imaginable—make no mistake about that—is no feast for children.’

  Make no mistake about what? This adult’s humility?

  ‘Fantasia’ is (in my snivelling, fawning, obsequious, cringing opinion) quite the last crippling feat of virtuosity in the art of sub-vulgarity. It will induce in decent people a feeling of shame and humiliation.

  Take it this way. Charlie Chaplin was once a great clown. In the ’twenties I was laughing myself (sic) at his jerky funniness. He was good. He was a terrible hard case—but the lower-cases (‘film art: an international review of advance guard cinema’) found him out. One day some toad—some velveteened work-shy ‘marxist’ toad—sternly reproved people for laughing at Mister Cheplin. Do you not see, old boy, thet in Cheplin we hev an expression on the highest artistic plain of all our pathetic human striving. I mean the pursuit of heppiness and all thet, our poor frustrated human nature. The little tremp, I mean, is you and I. Cheplin is a great artist, I mean. You mustn’t loff, you now. Such pure, such exquisite sensibility!

  And poor Chaplin, a simple soul if ever there was one, gets to hear this chat and makes ‘The Great Dictator’. The end of ‘The Great Dictator’ is also the end of what is possible in the sphere of human degradation. I remember blushing.

  Now take a gander (or a donalduck) at Disney. This man (milord) would mind mickeymice. He was the best man in the world for clever honest fun, for sneering at bores, buffs and bowsies, the best man for drawing, invention, imagination and vituperation. He was one of the smartest boys that ever came out of Beverley Hills. (There’s Goldwyn, by the way, in them thar hills.) And then Mr Stokes, who for years has been selling ‘Music’ to miniature American snobs (on a bach market) hears about Mr D., whose sensibility and purity of sentiment have by now been freely commented upon by the high-browed hybrids. So with the assistance of the philadelphian eu-phonies and the Canadian North West Montage, Mr Michael Mouse becomes part of the material of art. He becomes, as The Bell would say, something taut, alert, an intimate thing in aesthetic experience. And his father, poor Mr Disney, begins to neglect his dress, try to look a bit wild-eyed and go for long walks in the rain. Next thing you know will be an agitation for little shaded lights so that every cod that walks can arrive to ‘Fantasia’ with a miniature score (to be held carefully up-side-down). I mean, a synthesis, old man, of artistic apprehension in terms of line, colour and sound. Quite definitely the highest form of cinematographic art imaginable. A multi-plane spiritual anabasis in the filmic métier, UNITING FOR THE FIRST TIME ON ANY SCREEN all that is best in Beethoven, George Raft, Diaghilev and Tom Mix. With an orchestra of 800 blonde cuties and thousands of trombone players.

  The Editor: Have you seen this picture?

  Myself: No.

  The Editor: Why?

  Myself: Because the free list is suspended.

  The Editor: But why condemn something you have not seen?

  Myself: Why suspend the free list?

  The Editor: Then is all this an exhibition of spite because you are not admitted free?

  Myself: Not necessarily. It is something taut, elegant, alert.

  FLASH! When the roof leaks and the piano needs tuning, when the geyser explodes and the brother (home on leave) slips quietly into the jigs, what do I do? I send for the expert, the trained man, and leave the solution of my problem to him. And when the day of reckoning comes I fix up according to the standard rates hallowed by a couple of centuries of collective bargaining. When I want to read anything, however, I usually write it meself.

  But recently on the newstands I have noticed PUCK FARE printed regardless on white paper fully glazed and fashioned and dedicated to the nice whimsy that the writer—the writer, do you know—is a professional man, a craftsman, a highly trained party who should never be paid less than five bar for a good job. (I could do it for four and a kick, Mr O’Faoláin, but it wouldn’t be a job.)

  Since this magazine is offered as evidence of the spontaneous adoption by a whole nondescript gang of professional status and since the contributions of these ex-waamateurs may be considered as perfect technical jobs at least (‘Art, finally, is not measurable by (sic) a footrule’) the layman may be permitted to check admiringly over the shining machinery. Grammar and spelling, I mean—we know it’s all right but we’d like to look. The emptor is entitled to demand that his hired literary man be literate at least.

  Page 19 is devoted to the ballet but the author found it necessary to refer twice to a foreign gentleman by the name of Jooss, economically cropping an ‘s’ from his name each time and thus saving paper. Ten pages later the head pen-waama presents a piece beginning ‘Seano Carissimo’ and lashes on at a pressure of five hundred pounds per square inch to ‘What did I hear but a piano, behind one of those lighted yellow blinds, flinging out the grand ripe, thunderstorm drops of the Concerto in G Major!’ Anybody that can play a concerto on a piano deserves more than five bar anny day of the week. Two more foreign gentlemen appear and the writer imagines that they are called Breughel and Bocaccio. The curious phrase, too, ‘cario mio’ which appears towards the end of this work does certainly suggest some romance language. (And what’s more, ‘cyclops’ is singular.)*

  On page 35 we catch a glimpse of ‘Robert Emmett’, but there is no mention of ‘John Mitchell’ or ‘Arthur Griffiths’. Two pages later we are introduced to the Gaelic novelty. ‘Ni thagaim geilleadh do’n chúirt seo Guvóradeeaurinn!

  Page 41 brings us to an exquisite divertissement (or what they would certainly call a divertisement)—an interview with The Bellman. The literary tone is higher even here, even if ‘Dinneen’ gets a total of only two ‘n’s’ and atrocities like Faoileánn, Faoileánnda and Faoileánndacht are gratuitously attributed to the great lexicographer. Here also appears for the only time in literature the word tournédos.†
(We have them all right but not with that accent old boy.) On page 42 we view from below our arched eyebrows the sentence ‘Night after night I’d fill up my pal with these horrific stories of Jean-Jacque’s’ (absolutely sic).

  All this reads like petty quibbling; I’ll agree with you there, it certainly does. But the point is this: if these uppish highly trained writing savants who are sure they are worth more than five bob insist on dragging in foreign words by the scruff of the fair hair, why not do it accurately and thus show that the use of these words is perfectly natural and the result of long sojourns abroad?

  Get back to the bucket. On page 55 a work of Mr Joyce is referred to as ‘Finnegan’s Wake’. That poor writer’s end was hastened by that same intrusive apostrophe. On page 63 there is an allusion to Homer’s ‘Illiad’; on this page too the word Primevera follows the article Le, the word Pièta appears where apparently Pietà is intended, triptych is rendered tryptich and Miss Jellett’s name lack a ‘t’, a thing that doesn’t suit her to a

  Any professional hack would be sacked overnight if he were guilty of the things I have mentioned. The parties responsible may be worth one and six in the writing world but certainly not five bob.

  A WORD ABOUT MUSIC

  The ‘guest conductor’ act is a good one. Bring over to this country some silvery-haired gentleman that is supposed to understand about bands and the theatre will be stuffed while you wait. Did you ever notice that he never needs a score? Did you ever notice that if the cor anglais is .0000013 of a tone out in the second movement of the Franck D Minor he has to have injections to bring him round? O yes, took the orchestra through the whole thing without a note of music in front of him. As if ‘a note of music’ would have helped.

  It’s a fake act, of course. Look at it this way. Take a list of the boys starting anywhere. The actual symphony concert range is a strictly ding-dong limited list for a kick-off: Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Berlioz, Schubert, Haydn, Mozart, Mahler, Handel (let us say)—then a couple of fellows with slav-minds, Rimsky-K., Tschaik., Prokoviev, Straw., Dvorak and this new bags, Shostakovich. Then a few ‘modern’ buffs and how often do you hear them—Schönberg, Bloch, Bartok, Honegger, Satie, Hindemith, an dochtúir O Dubhthaigh, and folky persons like Gus Holst. Throw in a dozen operas (and the man that does Wagner won’t be asked to do Verdi) and there you are. Of each of these composers only a limited number of pieces is listed. Say the whole works is twenty symphonies, ten concertos and a few miscellaneous suites and overtures. Sure anybody with a sound national school education could master that much in no time and if you compare it with the versatility that’s expected from myself, an actor, a chef or a civil servant, what have you got?

  LITERARY CRITICISM

  My grasp of what he wrote and meant

  Was only five or six %.

  The rest was only words and sound—

  My reference is to Ezra £.

  A LIFETIME of cogitation has convinced me that in this Anglo-Irish literature of ours (which for the most part is neither Anglo, Irish, nor literature) (as the man said) nothing in the whole galaxy of fake is comparable with Synge. That comic ghoul with his wakes and mugs of porter should be destroyed finally and forever by having a drama festival at which all his plays should be revived for the benefit of the younger people of to-day. The younger generation should be shown what their fathers and grand-daddies went through for Ireland, and at a time when it was neither profitable nor popular.

  We in this country had a bad time through the centuries when England did not like us. But words choke in the pen when one comes to describe what happened to us when the English discovered that we were rawther interesting peepul ek’tully, that we were nice, witty, brave, fearfully seltic and fiery, lovable, strong, lazy, boozy, impulsive, hospitable, decent, and so on till you weaken. From that day the mouth-corners of our smaller intellectuals (of whom we have more per thousand births than any country in the world) began to betray the pale froth of literary epilepsy. Our writers, fascinated by the snake-like eye of London publishers, have developed exhibitionism to the sphere of acrobatics. Convulsions and contortions foul and masochistic have been passing for literature in this country for too long. Playing up to the foreigner, putting up the witty celtic act, doing the erratic but lovable playboy, pretending to be morose and obsessed and thoughtful—all that is wearing so thin that we must put it aside soon in shame as one puts aside a threadbare suit. Even the customers who have been coming to the shop man and boy for fifty years are fed up. Listen in the next time there is some bought-and-paid-for Paddy broadcasting from the BBC and you will understand me better.

  This trouble probably began with Lever and Lover. But I always think that in Synge we have the virus isolated and recognisable. Here is stuff that anybody who knows the Ireland referred to simply will not have. It is not that Synge made people less worthy or nastier, or even better than they are, but he brought forward with the utmost solemnity amusing clowns talking a sub-language of their own and bade us take them very seriously. There was no harm done there, because we have long had the name of having heads on us. But when the counterfeit bauble began to be admired outside Ireland by reason of its oddity and ‘charm’, it soon became part of the literary credo here that Synge was a poet and a wild celtic god, a bit of a genius, indeed, like the brother. We, who knew the whole inside-outs of it, preferred to accept the ignorant valuations of outsiders on things Irish. And now the curse has come upon us, because I have personally met in the streets of Ireland persons who are clearly out of Synge’s plays. They talk and dress like that, and damn the drink they’ll swally but the mug of porter in the long nights after Samhain.

  The Plain People of Ireland: Any relation between that man and Synge Street in Dublin where Bernard Shaw was born?

  Myself: I don’t think so, because Bernard Shaw was born before Synge.

  The Plain People of Ireland: The Brothers run a very good school there—manys a good Irishman got his learnin there. They do get a very high place in the Intermediate and the Senior Grade every year.

  Myself: Faith you’re right.

  The Plain People of Ireland: But of course your man Shaw digs with the other foot.

  Myself: Aye.

  SINCE THE controversy over the Rouault picture raises important issues in the sphere of aesthetics and public morality. I know that many readers will look to me for an authoritative pronouncement.

  The picture was bought for £400 by the Friends of the National Collections and offered as a gift to the Municipal Gallery. (Here let me digress to reiterate once more my demand that that narrow thoroughfare in Parnell Square where the Gallery stands should be re-named Hugh Lane.) The Board of the Gallery, presumably composed of members of the Corporation, rejected the picture. The ex-Lord Mayor, Mrs Clarke, is quoted as having said that the picture is ‘a travesty’ and ‘offensive to Christian sentiment’. Mr Keating says it is ‘childish, naive and unintelligible’. On the other hand, a foreign nobleman is cited as praising the work. M. Rouault himself preserves silence.

  The picture is executed in the modern manner, and could not be expected to please persons whose knowledge of sacred art is derived from the shiny chromo-lithograph bon-dieuiserie of the Boulevard Saint Sulpice, examples of which are to be found in every decent Irishman’s bedroom. Such persons, however, never enter picture galleries, and there is no obvious reason why their opinion should be considered at all. What is important is the attitude of the ‘intelligent’ person. Many forms of modern art are devoid of rules. The artist makes his own. However formless or chaotic the manifestation, it is art if it expresses something, possibly something bad and negative. Even our own pathetic and untidy advance guards who have never learnt to draw are artists because they express artistically (and convincingly) the fact that they can’t draw. But inasmuch as the modern artist makes his own rules, the onlooker must also be permitted to fix his own standards of appraisal. In other words, the faculty of appreciating a ‘modern’ painting is just as personal and
individual as that exercised by the artist. A ‘representational’ portrait of a bishop (such as is carried out so embarrassingly often) can be assessed by merely mechanical standards. The best judge of such a picture would be a child of three who could say authoritatively whether ‘it is like him’. But what different dual parts of a garment is the ‘modern’ picture?

  Pair of sleeves.

  It is safe to say that, while the bishop’s portrait strikes everybody in the same simple way, it is scarcely possible that the reaction of any two individuals to Rouault’s work could be identical. Indeed, how divergent they may be has been demonstrated. His picture has been stated to be ‘blasphemous’ and ‘charged with deep religious significance’.

  It will be seen, then, that the charm and value of such work lies in the diversity of the communications achieved by the artist. The attitude of each individual to the picture is personal, and is not necessarily related to any conventional artistic criteria. For that reason it is an impertinence for Mr Keating to say that the picture is ‘childish’. Nobody wants to be bothered with Mr Keating’s opinion. We can form our own. Equally inadmissible is the attitude of other commentators who have assured us that Rouault was taken a high view of by the stained-glass man Healy, and that a bunch of Frenchmen (who alone in the world understand good taste) thought so much of him that they devoted a whole room to a display of his work. What has that got to do with it? Must we ‘like’ whatever some individual or coterie has pronounced to be good?

  Impertinent as the expression of individual opinions must be in such a situation, it is a gross outrage that this Board of the Municipal Gallery, having apparently formed opinions desperate and dark of hue, should decide that the citizens of Ireland should not be permitted to form any opinion at all. By what authority does this bunch take custody of the community’s aesthetic conscience?