Best of Myles

by Flann O'Brien

  FUTILE, FUTILE

  I see (where) Sir Bernard Shaw has been writing letters to the papers in reply to a meaningless controversy as to where ‘St Joan’ was written. He explains that there is no foundation for ‘the belief that a dramatic poet, when he writes a play, sits down on a particular spot on the earth’s surface and does not rise until, in a frenzy of inspiration, he has dashed off the play, the process taking, say, two hours or less’.

  In My Lordship’s view that statement is memorable merely for the creaky defective English: If a man sits down, he necessarily sits down on a ‘particular’ spot and the spot (I hold) must necessarily be on the earth’s surface (unless he is a miner as well as a ‘dramatic poet’). Phrases like ‘frenzy of inspiration’ and ‘dashed off’ are not admissible in any context, though heaven knows what is regarded as English in Synge Street. Moreover it is sheer nonsense to say that a play cannot be written in two hours. What is much more stern a task is to spend two hours looking at a play. Above all, it is of no consequence at all where ‘St Joan’ was written and it is the height of damn nonsense to suggest that admirable Glengarrif is to be admired because some play was written there. (Not that Shaw and I have quarrelled: far from it. We remain the best of friends. It is merely that in some issues we go two ways.)

  I LIVE in Warrenpoint and the paper reaches me nearly a month late. Hence it is only now that I come to deal with a remark made by our Cinema Critic in respect of General Suvarov, shown in the old ‘Empire’ by the Royal Irish Film Society. ‘Made two years ago,’ I appear to read, ‘and directed by the renowned Pudovkin, this historical epic has little about it to distinguish it from a Hollywood picture of the same type …

  I see. (Fearful frown gathering on the ‘brow’.) I see.

  I don’t seem to have any free nights these times and it happens to be true that I haven’t been to the pictures for near on thirty odd years last time I tried to crash a show was in the old Electric there in Mary street. Jimmy Joyce back from Paris gives me the cold shoulder doesn’t know annyone it wouldn’t have been old Simon’s way.

  But don’t think that because of that I know nothing of this business. Nothing, is it? Pish! Who stood behind Lumière and held his hand? Who coached Schufftan? Who put the Warner brothers on their feet? Who put their feet on Warner brothers? Pathé Frères? Who suggested to Griffith to move the camera in a bit nearer (one night there above in the Bailey)? Who discovered Miss Gustafsson? Pabst, Périnal, Lang, Metzner, Tisse? Who stood up to the Wall-street boys? Not Zanuck, not Joe Meyer nor the brother Kuno, not Thalberg., not Schenck—ME. Me. Kaplan.

  But don’t get me wrong, don’t think I haven’t been around, don’t think that time and time again I haven’t had to watch Duvivier, Epstein, Feyder, aye and Renoir too, and Cavalcanti, making fairhaired fools of theirselves and then come along grovelling and flattering me with their eh bien, Myles, mon vieux, tu veux nous aider encore une petite fois, n’est-ce pas?

  Aw, bah!

  And do you know what I’m going to tell you, the crowd beyond in St Pethersburgh is every bit as bad, for all the long words and scratched sepia negatives they are a lot of small boys if you compare them with the men on the coast and that’s what they are a lot of small boys. The renowned Pudovkin…if you don’t mind. Oho, I could tell you a few things there. That’s a man didn’t know a threatment from a continuity when I took him in hand. I seen him there one night in the projection room checking a few rushes and do you know what I’m going to tell you the operator ran the spool through the machineupsidedown and your man never knew. Never knew. And as for Dovjhenko, Alexandrov, Dvertov, Timoshenko, yes, there was a Timoshenko in the game—and … ho-ho … Misther Sergei Eisenstein don’t be talking how far do you think he’d have got with his overtonal montage and his theory of the ‘dynamic square’ if there hadn’t been a certain modest Dublin man with nothing but a sound Synge Street education no names no pack drill at his side night and morning dinning it into him and writing it all out for him in black and white in the heel of the hunt. The Russian man … is a very nice man … a very dacent man … and can handle a hurley with anny man … (pause, eyes dropped demurely, then a frightful roar) BUT DON’T FOR THE LOVE OF HEAVEN LET HIM NEAR A CAMERA BECAUSE DO YOU KNOW WHAT I’M GOING TO TELL YOU HE’LL WRECK IT HE’LL WRECK IT. (Don’t interrupt now or you’re ruined). DE MILLE? DE MILLE, IS IT? CECIL WOULD TAKE THE WHOLE BLOOMING SHOOTING MATCH OUT AND LOSE EVERY MAN JACK OF THEM AT THAT GAME!

  Phew …!

  I HAVE NOT, of course, seen Mr Carroll’s new play. ‘The Wives Have Not Spoken’. But the title is good. Take myself. Had a fearful row with the wife about a fortnight ago—over Picasso, of course. Any word uttered in my house since then was uttered by the BBC announcer.

  But this play, I am told—how reliably I cannot say—that all the characters in it go mad one by one. That, of course, is fine. It is not European, but it is fine. It gives me a thrill. One after another, they all go mad. At the end, everybody’s crazy and you have … tragedy. (But have you? Surely, I mean … for … tragedy, you must have somebody there sane enough to experience pity … and terror …? Surely … the Greeks … still mean something … in this old Georgian Athens of the West …?)

  I may, of course, be misinformed about ‘The Wives Have Not Spoken’ but what I heard gives me an idea for a fine play, three bangs of the gong up with the curtain and on the stage twelve characters sunk in a frightfully celtic condition of rural lunacy. Then one by one they all get better. Doctor chap comes in, cerebral electrolysis, occupational therapy, most modern drugs and they all respond, soon the house is happy, everybody has a healthy mind. They all become registered readers of The Standard, develop ‘a healthy outlook’ on life and one by one, they go up to Dublin and become fully-fledged Knights.

  If Mr Carroll’s theme is tragedy, is mine comedy? I don’t think so. Mine’s rather tragic, too, you know.

  CAN WE awful Irish louts (leaving aside for the moment our red faces, high cheek bones and gnarled hands) ever be made into little jintlemen? One may wittily reply that where there’s a will there’s a way.

  The current report of the Friends of the National Collections says: ‘Anyone who has the future welfare of Ireland at heart cannot fail to be deeply touched by Mrs Shaw’s wish that graciousness should flourish in our land, and the fine gesture by which she has pointed the way to its fulfilment.’ It is true to say that this is a deplorable little piece of English, pocked with clichés; it must be sighed out rather than spoken to get the delicate custard-coloured winsomeness of ‘our land’ and ‘graciousness’. It is entirely odious.

  How wonderful to be told by these ‘Friends’ that we must be ‘gracious’! This word, according to my dictionary, means ‘agreeable, pleasing (archaic); kindly, benevolent, courteous (chiefly poet.); condescending, indulgent & beneficent to inferiors …’ Its present connotation in Ireland is rather different. If you would be gracious in Dublin, for instance, number wan is the little shelf with nothing on it bar the paper-covered novels, all written in the French. Next, the drop of red wine and the pot of French mustard. Next (and all the time breakfast dinner and tea) the monstrous crippling chat about ‘art’ and ‘pictures’ and Cossa and Tintoretto and Piombo (by yer honour’s lave), not forgetting Filippino Lippi, that poor man with the trench mouth. (One does not … talk … about the moderns any more. Nao. One goes back. Fundamentals, I mean. These … strange times.)

  ‘Art’ surely is a laugh. It is not, of course, distinguished as such among a people to whom an artistic perception is traditional and natural. In the great gombeen metropolis of ‘our land’, it is the one thing that your newly-emancipated peasant finds irresistible; even after two generations he is still flabbergasted at the idea of seeing books that are not almanacs, pictures that are not given away with Christmas numbers of religious periodicals, and ‘drink’ that is not lethal two year-old Irish. Selfconsciousness about ‘Art’, then, is the stamp of the gombeen-bourgeoisie. Myself, children and wives have
always known about art and we were always absolutely saturated with graciousness. Nor do we talk about Money or ‘the price of things nowadays’. We always had money. Neither do we ask you to hear us on the subject of our ‘rights’. You see, we have no ‘rights’. Only serfs or ex-serfs find it necessary to draw up a statement of their ‘rights’.

  But what one finds really disquieting in ‘our land’ is the vast number of individuals and organisations who are profoundly dissatisfied with the people here and who issue instructions to them as to how they should behave. For example, these ‘Friends’ tell us that we should be gracious. By what authority do they issue this impudent admonition? Who are they to talk? One passes by a street corner to hear oneself being told by a brat standing on a stool that one should be ashamed of oneself, that one has betrayed Emmet and Lord Edward and Tone, that an Ireland without Gaelic is no Ireland at all. The speaker can hardly speak English himself and is evidently uneducated. An Anti-Vivisection group forbids me to cut the head off my dog, even though he has bitten the leg off myself. Muintir na Tire takes a very poor view. The Monetary Reform Association takes a very poor view. The Standard takes a very poor view. The Leader is very unhappy. The GAA will not allow that one is Irish at all. Dear one! Dear me, I mean.

  How frightfully eccentric to behave precisely as one thinks fit, without taking orders or advice from any self-appointed pedagogue! Yet how frightfully ungracious, how unFriendly!

  OCCASIONALLY I have hard words to say here about aesthetes. For sensibility, paranoiac reception and all the sublunar paraphernalia of infrapsychic recordings I have not, it is true, concealed my contempt. For appreciation, discrimination and good taste I have nothing to say. These matters do not concern me or any adult. They are the things of childhood and together with the Meccano jersey in purest jaeger, the cogged ekkers and the consumption of neat lemonade, I have cast them behind me.

  Search any old lukewarm bath and you will find one of these aesthetical technicians enjoying himself. He is having a luke-warm bath, it is rather good, it is something real, something that has its roots in the soil, a tangible, valid, unique, complete, integrating, vertical experience, a diatonic spatio-temporal cognition in terms of realistic harmonic spacing, differential intervals and vector (emmanuel) analysis, of those passional orphic inferences which must be proto-morphously lodged in writing with the Manager on or before the latest closing date. Hmmmm. All round this person in the bath life is going on, nothing is ever lost, over in Harlem Einstein is testing a diminished seventh for over-stimulated thyroid, in Milan Buonaparte is writing the letter that ends Ah, Joséphine! Joséphine! Toi! Toi!, in the Bank of Ireland Silken Thomas has laid his sword on the counter what will they allow him on it, in Bohemia they are throwing the Emperor’s ambassadors out of the window while always waddling comically into the polyphonic aureole of the sunset recedes the tragic figure of Charlie Chaplin. This is life, and stuffed contentedly in the china bath sits the boy it was invented for, morbidly aware of the structure of history, geography, parsing, algebra, chemistry and woodwork; he is up to his chin in the carpediurnal present, and simultaneously, in transcendant sense-immediacy, sensible that without him, without his feeling, his observation, his diapassional apprehension on all planes, his non-pensionable function as catalyst, the whole filmy edifice would crumble into dust. He likes the lukewarm water. He likes himself liking the lukewarm water. He likes himself liking himself liking the lukewarm water. Aesthetics, in other words, is a mental ailment, the perversion whereby the sufferer believes that to be consistently … passive is the prime bacon, the summum bonham. The perfect aesthete logically feels that the artist is strictly a turkish bath attendant. This is true nearly always but … consider my own case. Suppose I write a symphony. No, that is a crude way of putting it. Suppose that contained in my cranium is a work of dimension so vast, of nature so autonomous, supreme, trismegistous in its modes, that it cannot be noted down on paper. Suffice it that it … explores, discovers, dismantles, inaugurates … stuns! Its composition was achieved not without a succession of cosmopathic agonies in my heart. This effort was, of course, in itself a complete artistic event. Now it seems superfluous to say this, but I did not … could not … would not perform the moyen age crudity of … of … scoring this work. Why should I? How to orchestrate something the instruments for the performance of which are incapable of being constructed by ham-like contemporary machine-hands? Why note an opus, all the virtuosi being dead or as yet unborn? How to convey the sense of a work when the very notation I had to invent for it would be incomprehensible to my contemporaries? But, most blindingly significant of all, why or to whom should I wish to convey … anything? What is added to the grandeur, the immensity of my art by … expressing it? I should expose it to—Swede Evans, this were folly!—the … appreciation … of … persons of sensibility? I should stand by and watch these people founding the Royal Irish Academy of Myles-ian Art? The Rt. Honble. The Friends of the Nagcoplian Collections? The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Cruiskeens and the Fiends of the O’Kaddemagh of Lettuce? Never! Better far better that I should elect to become that oddly speechless mouth-wash, a mute Englorious Milton! They can’t take that away from me.

  IN THIS BOOK I mentioned yesterday—‘Irish Art’—there is a shampoosium entitled ‘What is a Portrait?’ and there are some damn fine things in it. ‘It must be admitted,’ one savant says, ‘that the standard of achievement is conditioned to a great extent by the subject matter which the artist has to work upon, and so many portraits are of those people whose highest aim in life or the summit of whose ambition is merely to be captain of the golf club, president of some trade association, chairman of a commercial enterprise, or the wife of one of these.’

  I do not know what the wife of a commercial enterprise is, nor does heaven vouchsafe me the wit to understand the distinction that is made between the summit of ambition and the highest aim in life. But this much I do know—(face gets very red and neck bulges) this much I do know—that there is nothing contemptible about being the captain of a golf club or owning a jam factory that makes a lot of money and if the eldest girl now in Eccles Street manages to become the wife of a jam factory, there certainly will be no complaints from yours truly; it will be a little bit more satisfactory than having her mess up bits of canvas as well as her face with ‘paints’. Or is it suggested, forsooth, that it is ‘easy’ to succeed in business? (I can’t off-hand think of anything easier than to be an ‘artist’ in Ireland today—if it be not to be a newspaper funny man.)

  ‘Let artists once free themselves,’ this writer continues, ‘from the influence of those women whose worldliness they must always resent—and seek their inspiration elsewhere and we shall see a fresh flowering of an art which in its delineation of creation at its highest point and deepest significance comes nearest to depicting the meaning of life.’

  The first thing I must make clear is that women are part of the creation. It cannot too often be pointed out that women are people. The creation has no ‘highest point’ (apart from the top of Mount Everest) nor is its significance distinguished as between deep, deeper and deepest. The creation is the creation. Art has nothing to do with the ‘delineation of creation’, whatever about the creation of delineations. And it is news to me that there are still people in the world who are still brooding on that tawdry old conundrum, ‘the meaning of life’. Would readers who are troubled in this regard write to me in confidence, enclosing a stamped addressed envelope?

  Another man writes: ‘It was not until the time of Donatello in sculpture and Botticelli, Mantegna, Dürer and Van Eyck in painting that men and women were portrayed as the artist saw them. This has gone on ever since.’

  I beg this man’s pardon. Gone on ever since it certainly has not. Even getting the ‘likeness’—most rudimentary of studio chores when I was a student—is entirely beyond not a few of your present-day ‘artists’. As for drawing hands …

  The only other thing I have space to n
otice today is a curious misprint in a fine article by Mr Sean O’Sullivan R.H.A.:

  ‘The dullness of many portraits,’ he is made to say, ‘may often be traced to the timidity of the painter who fatally allows himself to be intimidated by his sitter …’

  It is clear that ‘sitter’ is wrong in that context, but which should it be—‘sister’ or ‘setter’?

  (Reminds me that I must feed that bone-setter of mine.)

  READING, not with distaste, Mr Raymond McGrath’s article in ‘Irish Art’ on the prefabricated house, it occurs to me to point out that houses traditionally rise from ground-level to the sky only because our primal forbears were not interested in excavation. Yet there is no good reason why a house should be built up rather than sunk. The advantages the conventional house is supposed to have in respect of light and fresh air can be largely discounted in these days of air-conditioning and ubiquitous E.S.B. Here are a few things in favour of the downward house.

  1. Most of the animals live underground and apparently find the situation healthy, warm and hygienic.

  2. At least three-quarters of the over-ground house is not used during daylight hours and might as well be underground so far as light is concerned; and the entire first floor of the underground house, being glass-roofed, will be day-lit.

  3. Indoor heating will only be a fraction of present costs as the loss of heat by radiation from over-ground wallsteads will be eliminated.

  4. Construction costs will be only a fraction of present costs because the ‘house’ will have no outside and the householder will no longer have to submit to acute interior discomforts because his home is designed primarily to present a pleasing exterior to the eye of a lot of strangers who pass in the street.