Best of Myles

by Flann O'Brien

  I have no intention of entering into the contents of the perturbing preliminary reports I have mentioned, or describing the larger objects stated to have been dug up. I illustrate here, however, a few of the smaller and less disturbing relics which were unearthed. The figures shown over are carved in stone. As a laymen I do not know what to make of them. The lower stone seems to be a representation of primitive greyhound racing, with every chance that our friend in front will clock 30.15. The upper stone may mean that we once had a national sport of fish-racing.

  An observer on the spot, and who assisted in some of the excavations, has given me a somewhat far-fetched story which I pass on for what it is worth (and not, mark you, for what it is not worth). According to him the primeval human remains unearthed were fossilised, and bore on the legs certain serrated markings that suggested corduroy. Various other aspects of hair remains, neckwear remains and whatnot provided an impressive accumulation of evidence that the Corkadorky Man was an Ice Age fly-boy and the progenitor of the present indefeasible Irish nation. It will be a nice cup of tea for the G.A.A. if this is proved to be the case.

  I will have more to say on this subject.

  A SPECIAL despatch from the explorers sent to Corkadorky by the Royal Myles na gCopaleen Institute of Archaeology states that large masses of diorite rock have been unearthed. The rocks look like adamellite and contain orthoclase, plagioclase felspar, micropegmanite starch, igneous hornblende, baking soda, gangrene-pale pyroxene, not to mention andesine strata tinged with accessory deposits such as zircan and apatite.

  The Plain People of Ireland: Begob appetite is right, you’d need a square meal and a pint of stout after that mouthful of chat. What book did you cog all them jawbreakers out of?

  Myself: The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  The Plain People of Ireland: And a fine man he is when he’s at home, God bless him.

  IN CORKADORKY

  The savants sent to Corkadorky by the Royal Myles na gCopaleen Institute of Archaeology continue to send back curious despatches. The latest says that the Corkadorky Man is at last a reality. It appears that he is streets ahead of the famous Monmouthshire Man, nor has he anything to fear from Iceland’s renowned Stelvik Man. He is one of the most interesting men ever discovered, and while an account of his more singular characteristics must be postponed to a future article, I may say here that one remarkable feature about him is the right index finger. Beyond yea or nay, it is the longest finger ever encountered by anthropologists. The Long Finger of the Corkadorky Man has, in fact, fascinated the explorers, and keeps continually cropping up in their somewhat incoherent messages. There is a long indentation or sign of wear on the top of it and the archaeologists argue that this must be proof of the Man’s practice of putting things on the Finger and keeping them there for lengthy periods. ‘Lengthy periods’ in this context would, of course, mean centuries. This corroboration of the well-known folk idiom about putting things on the long finger is curious and may mean that the Corkadorky Man may explain for us at last why our record in the world as men of affairs has always been so miserable.

  From inquiries I have made, I am glad to say that no traces of old fossilised meal have been found in the Man’s mouth and that the hands bear no traces of cheese or of the despised cheese-paring tool. That is something to be thankful for and something to be going on with.

  A ROVING PARTY from the Myles na gCopaleen Institute of Archaeology have arrived in Killarney and have chosen to start excavating at the bottom of the lakes. It is a safe bet that nobody else in the world would have thought of doing that or anything like it. As usual, the operations have resulted in a flood of wild rumours. Preliminary messages arriving in Dublin say that the explorers have found that the bottom of the lake consists, not of the usual mess of muck and weeds one might expect, but first-grade waterproof concrete. The Institute contends that this (with other proofs they have) goes to show that Killarney is not a divine accident of nature or ‘heaven’s reflex’, but the personal handiwork of our crafty ancestors. If the Institute is correct, the whole hash of lake and mountain with its wealth of sublimely inconsequent nuance was carried out with hod, trowel, plumb-line and muck-bucket. It seems also that the whole place is a network of hot pipes and that it is thus that the sub-tropical vegetation effects were got. The pipes are buried at varying depths and are said to be connected with hot subterranean spas in Clare and places even more distant. Apparently what the Institute is getting at is that the whole of Ireland is a vast construction job and that we have nobody but ourselves to thank for our peerless scenery. Sea shells have been found on top of the Devil’s Mountain, proving that sea-level soil was heaped up by human agency to make the mountain. It is thought that the Firbolgs (or ‘Bagmen’) were the slave-artisans who did the carrying work in primitive times. The large hollow left by the excavation necessary to construct even a small mountain was always carefully concreted and filled with water.

  The savants who are in Kerry hope to produce a Killarney Man in due course. What they intend to do with him we can only guess.

  CLOVING

  A MAN I know got wind last week that cloves were going to be rationed. He was cute and set about buying up every vestige of this commodity that was on offer. Carts, vans and boys on bicycles began to arrive in an endless stream at his modest suburban house. Soon the place was packed out from floor to ceiling with barrels, boxes and sacks full of cloves. He had managed to corner about half the nation’s supply, and possibly could be excused the chilly Shylock smile that had begun to creep about his well-kept clock. He got a nice let-down, with parsley on it, when he learnt later that it was clothes—not cloves—the people had been talking about.

  Of course there’s a moral in this. Be careful lest you inadvertently season your hot whiskies and pies with old clothes.

  Waiter, what’s this?

  That’s a bit of an old shirt, sir.

  What—in a pie?

  Yessir. We couldn’t get cloves, sir, so we had to use an old shirt, sir.

  The result would be no tip, of course.

  ANOTHER MATTER

  Talking of the general question of supplies, could not our foodstuffs be augmented by doing something about the many thousands of mealy-mouthed persons we have in this country? The meal could be extracted from their mouths, sterilised and packed away in sacks. (And please don’t blather to me about the legal snags in such a matter or the ‘liberty of the subject’—you can do anything from frying onions to squirting old chocolate on a fly boy’s yellow shirt under the Emergency Powers Act).

  And then what about all the cheese-paring types we have also? Why can’t we collect all the cheese-parings, melt them down into 1lb lumps and add them to our dwindling stock of vitaminous eatables? All we want is a little bit of organisation and energy.

  YOUR GRANDMOTHER’S EGGS

  All right, you don’t like your eggs hard. Very well. But stay. Do you feel hot and angry when some unspeakable hack writes: ‘This book is like the curate’s egg—good in parts’? Does that hideous cliché make you close your fist in murderous resolve? Does it kill you? Very well. Look at my machine.

  The hollow central cylinder A slides over the other cylinder B, containing a notch in which the trigger C will catch when the upper cylinder is pressed down. Put the whole shooting gallery into a saucepan of cold water, press down A until the eggs are immersed, lock all doors, pull down the blinds, hang some crêpe on the hall door and then light the forbidden gas. As soon as the eggs are cooked, the pressure of steam will release the trigger and the spring in the central cylinder will yank up the eggs clear of the water and at the same time raise the lid of the saucepan. By a screw attachment to the trigger the time of cooking may be regulated. The machines are thirty shillings each, direct from this office.

  The idea came to me in 1893, when I was firing the Dublin-Drogheda run.

  SOCIAL AND PERSONAL

  Myles na gCopaleen has left 31 Westmoreland street, and will be away for twenty-nine year
s.

  WE ALL MAKE his praise: William Shakespeare. Governs a nice quiet land: Victoria, England’s queen. Do you get it? Anagrams. Not everybody can make good anagrams and hardly anybody can do the smart job I’ve done above—make another phrase appropriate to the phrase worked upon.

  Now in your father’s day making anagrams was a polite occupation and was encouraged in girls’ schools. But, of course, all that is changed, old boy. If you were found nowadays sitting in an old rose garden making anagrams, people would ask you to run messages for them, or keep nix while the new lodger’s letters are being steamed. Indeed now, faith, times change. Well do I remember taking my seat on the first train ever run on the old Kingstown Atmospheric Railway, using a pass kindly given to me by my old friend, Sir Albert Hall. Your mother, child, was the engine driver. How we met is another story, and one not entirely without charm. Hand me my old album there till I show you my 1876 sprig of fern.

  To come back for a moment, the Northern Premier said recently that ‘Sir Dawson Bates enjoyes my implicit confidence.’ The Oxford Dictionary says that the word implicit means ‘entangled, entwined…: implied though not plainly expressed…: resting on the authority of another, as ‘implicit faith, belief’, etc. Hence erroneously, absolute, unmitigated.’

  It is a nice thing to find that the King’s English is as weak in Belfast as elsewhere. What must these people’s Irish be like?

  OFTEN I SIT here remembering, the eye glazed and meditative, beautiful in reverie despite the old trachoma scars. I often wonder does anybody remember as much as I. The great Irish Language Procession of 1903, yes, we all remember that. I wheeled the first Irish-built bicycle in it. But do you remember the Tottenham Court road in that terrible winter of 1876, the dark slime on the road, the slow clip-clop of walking horses, the foul icy fog punctured for a second by a drab lighting a cigarette with a pale lucifer match? Shaw and I often look back on those days, but there’s no nostalgia nonsense about us. Neuralgia, if anything.

  OBVIOUSLY GENUINE

  I am continually overhearing chat like this, and I (make you a present of it) (for what it is worth).

  Do I know the Bottle-o’-Bass Quinn? Do I kn—? Do I—? (Here there is simulated incoherence and inarticulateness to convey that the question is almost comically unnecessary.)

  Do I KNOW him? Sure didn’t we go to school together man.

  But do you know what it is. I wouldn’t know him now if I saw him.

  You would boy you would then, he’s always the same.

  Is that a fact?

  The Bottle-o’-Bass didn’t grow older … and he didn’t grow younger in the last twenty years.

  Well is that a fact now. Do you know what it is, the Bottle-o’-Bass was a topper. A topper.

  What’s that you said? (This is the fiction of deafness, which conveys that the statement made is so obviously true that it is an abuse of speech to make it at all.)

  I said he was a topper.

  A topper …? (A pause here and a lowering of pitch.) Do you know what it is Bottle-o’-Bass was too good that’s what he was he was too good.

  You might well say it sure he was a cousin of me own.

  Many’s the time I’d go down there selling fish and no matter what hour of the morning it was you had to go in and there was a big mug of tea planted down in front of you.

  I believe you, I believe you.

  And if you wouldn’t take it …

  I know, there’d be a sour …

  And if you were there about lunch time begob in you’d have to go there like the rest of them.

  I can believe it of him.

  And if you went along there around tea-time …

  If you didn’t go in you were the worst in the world.

  Ah yes, the Bottle-o’-Bass…

  HERE IS SOMETHING I bet you did not know—that your second finger (beside the little finger) is longer than the other one beside it, all appearances and preconceived notions to the contrary. Lay your hand palm down on the table and measure both fingers carefully along the left edge.

  Some days ago, when Caucasian Armavir was captured, I was thinking of trying to link the event with prophetic Virgil. (qui ce-cinit ca-casum Troiae). But my restless wasplike mind moved away from Troy to Troytown, from that to Shawn Spadah and thence to noble Orby that sleeps under the great rock at Boss Crokers in Glencairn. You are too young to remember them but they were kingly animals, each of them carried enough real nobility in one fetlock to blast skyhigh all the egalitarian spoof ever mouthed by your unkempt work-shy Marxists. I had five shillings on Troytown (borrowed from one of our gardeners) and that night, with no warning at all, I asked that pink empire of flesh which I own to deal with its first bottle of Guinness’s stout, brewed within a stone’s throw of the little house where first I saw the light of day. I was fourteen, I think, on the day when Troytown showed them all what an Irish horse was, and I remember being afraid to go home while carrying internally my tuppence-worth of infantile inebriation. But the grandfather, with whom I was staying, had also known a thing or two that day and was above in the bedroom being undressed by the gardeners. To this day I hear his frenzied screams of ‘Up the Boers!’

  Troytown. Troy. As yes. How time flies! How the bird wingeth! How fast the great black oxen trample us down, in a wild phantom mess of Disney technicolour! Why do we wonder at war today and blame poor Baldwin when the earliest surviving flights of the human intellect could deal with nothing else? Arma virumque cano.

  There is some Hungarian Count Kano concerned in the present Krieg, on one side or another. Arma virumque Kano?

  Or what about Armagh virumque cano?

  Remember my old one? You can’t have your Caucasus and eat it.

  When is a sign refreshing?

  When it is of the times.

  When does it boil down to the same thing?

  When all is said and done.

  What does a thing suffer through the centuries?

  Many vicissitudes.

  In what is the origin of the Irish round towers shrouded?

  The mists of antiquity.

  You have discovered by now, I suppose, that the statement made at the beginning of this article is a lie. Do you realise that I have thieved several seconds of your life from you without a hope of recompense? Your little store of time is smaller. The bird, etc. And good enough it is for you, sticking your beak into the papers when you should be working.

  If you are a lady, please overlook the asperity of my tone. Sit down and on mauve note-paper of rarest fragrance write me a letter that reeks with passion, with the warm travail of the heart. That will keep me quiet for a while.

  THE POST OFFICE has asked me to explain in detail how to make a ‘Personal’ Trunk Call. (Is that your personal trunk, Miss Garbo, or is it only a lay figure?)

  The particulars of the call should be given to the Trunk Operator (who, being an elephant, will remember them), as follows:—

  (a) Assuming that Mr Kelly (Killanne 12345) wants to speak to Mr Doyle (Erin 9876), or, failing him, Mr Burke (of Messrs Kelly Burke and Shea, Solicitors, Commissioners for Oaths, Parliamentary Agents and Registered Undertakers); Mr Kelly should say: ‘Erin 9876, Mr Doyle or Mr Burke (of Kelly, Burke and Shea) wanted by Dublin 12345, Mr Kelly.’

  (b) If Mr Kelly wants to speak only to Mr Doyle, Erin, who may be at another telephone station in the same local fee area, he should give this other telephone number as a second choice. If Mr Doyle (or, indeed, Mr Burke) cannot be found, or will not be available until later, Mr Kelly will be so informed, and it will be ‘open to him’ (as civil service cliché-mouthers would have it) to slip down to the local public house for a pint (unless it is closed to him).

  That is how the telephone book has it, and I suppose it is all simple enough. But I wonder is it? Suppose you can’t (for the life of you) remember Doyle’s name? Supposing you’ve forgotten your own name—a situation not uncommon with professional debtors? Supposing your humping name isn’t Kelly—this last is
my own problem? The G.P.O. seems to think that Dublin is Baile Atha Kelly be the look of things. Supposing you ring up Myles na gCopaleen and a lady answers, what then? Supposing you could swear it was your wife’s voice? Supposing the whole telephone installation falls out of the wall and crushes your feet? Supposing you cut the finger off yourself trying to get your pennies back? Supposing you smash your nail, break it right across the middle after accidentally bending it back until it—

  The Plain People of Ireland: Thop that! THOP!

  Myself: All right, squeamish.

  There is another thing about the telephone. At least once in a life-time one’s telephone call happens to be answered by a person who had never used the telephone before, a young maid, possibly, or an imbecile gardener. You say ‘Hello’. Back comes an answering hello. Then you say: