Best of Myles

by Flann O'Brien

  I admit it is dangerous suggesting that we do wrong by eating certain things on the mere ground that they can be manufactured into prams, pipe-racks or even newspapers—things obviously more important than grub. I would be personally bereaved if a way were found to convert oysters into policemen’s leggings. Such is the persistence and might of industry that ever after there would be no oysters nowhere. And who wants to go up to Jack Nugent for brown bread, stout and half a dozen leggings. As well expect policemen to put shells on their legs—even if it gives you the chance of making some joke about leg-shells.

  PEOPLE—I suppose they are people really—frequently speak to me at some length on the subject of my ‘versatility’ and—Heaven forfend!—I am compelled to listen to their incomprehensible attempts at communication. On such occasions it is, as you may imagine, simply that I have permitted myself to be lured into making one of my rare appearances in public. (The making or even assembling of such appearances, whether in public or in private, has now been absolutely prohibited by Emergency Powers Order No. 487/e/iv—so do not blame your grocer, he is doing his best in difficult circumstances.) Is it … is it imagined that this chat … amuses … interests or even—O monstrous presumption—flatters me? I am quite appalled. It is like … it is like those rich young baggages who—good heavens, how coyly!—‘tell’ me that my personal beauty is of an unusually high order. But of course, of course. I know. The trivial iteration of facts adds nothing to my … enjoyment of life. Life … j’ai … j’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage. And … versatility? Is the bird of the air, forsooth, to be praised for flying, singing and laying edible eggs in the perilous tree-tops? It is, I think, natural for a person of my stamp (as poor Rowan Hamilton used to say) to embrace all human perfections and accomplishment (but excluding such as may be evil) within the mastery of my superb intellect, gracing not myself but all humanity with an artistic preminence that is withal saturated with an exquisite humility.

  ‘But … don’t you ever run short of ideas? How can you always write so … interestingly … so … so authoritatively about such a variety of things. Seldom, I mean, have … so many things been written for so many people … by so few a man.’

  My reply is simple and, as always, truthful. ‘Madam, writing is the least of my occupations. Many other things, many many other things contribute to the sum of my cares. Vast things, things imponderable and ineluctable, terrible things, things which no other mortal were fit to hear of—things I must think upon only when utterly alone. Writing is surely a small thing, indeed. Difficulties Mmmmm. One is not conscious of them. There are, of course, five things and five things only that can be written about and though for me they have lost all interest as problems, I continue to write out of the depth of my feeling for dark groping humanity.’

  With a slight bow I am about to turn when I am again assailed by my gross female interlocutor. Will I not tell her what these five things are?

  A flicker, just a cup-shake, deforms the austere granite countenance, but true to the traditions of race and caste a courteous answer is forthcoming, courteous but with the sonorous quiver of doom rippling up to the calm word surface of my utterance. ‘The fastness of friendship, ma’am, the treachery of one’s nearest; the destruction of good by good. Passion which over-rides reason. VIOLENT AND PROUD DEATH!’

  Sometimes I smile. I am not of this country, and my agriculture is essentially altero pede. But long as I am here I cannot contemplate unmoved the pageant of your great national bilingual revival as it so heroically unfolds itself in a positively promethean agony. The struggle is so unequal. On the one hand one sees massed the degrading influences of occidental Europe, dedicated—one appreciates—to the destruction of everything Irish. The sympathetic spectator like myself, who wishes you all so well, cannot but feel at the same time that this great polyglot … un-Irish monster will stop at nothing to achieve its evil ends. Its fearful decivilising influences, dominated by the internal combustion engine and with the anticipation of even greater domination in the world of the future saturated (as it will be) with the anti-gaelic evil of plastics, air-travel, television and mixed cinemas, will not be nullified without a long and bitter struggle.

  I APPROVE of those Children’s Allowances (of course). For me the family is … everything. And what more lovely than a family of girls! Any person calling himself a man, any male party being one of H.M. Family Men in the U.K., anyone taking to himself the honourable style of Parent—nay, Guardian—any such jolly defendant leading (how false there sounds the Active Voice!) a life of quiet desperation, knows but too well what resinous high-tensile heartstrings bind the girls to … the grandest, finest, best and bravest old … Momma in Earl DeWarr, sorry in all the world. How dear to such fellows the familiar scene around the crackling log fire in the vast baronial hall assuming—just for the hell of it—a maximum fibre stress of 1,000 lbs/in (sq.) for each log. (Log tables may be obtained from the superintendent, need I say?)

  Candle light twinkles wittily in the gleaming texture of the mahogany polished for many years by the Rt. Honble. Viscount French (himself). Vast elk-hounds sprawl on the tiger-skin pretending to be bored. Nervous under-proof malt pours itself obsequiously into gem encrusted goblets—thence as though by M’Gick into Jem’s encrusted gullet. Ha-ho! The festive season is over and grouped demurely around their lady mother’s skirt sit the daughters, fairest flowers in all of luxuriant Dublinshire, brightest jewels in Milord’s unmortgaged coronet—though of course he also takes ESQUIRE (out of the Club reading-room, egad!)—fifteen lovelier hawsies Herr Kuehls himself could not find in all the Emerald Doyle. And who knows it better than papa himself … if it be not his good lady, née Locke (—Lough Neagh is another day’s work, Joe). What an old … saint she is! Look at her, look at her …! Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are come’ … and the eye-lids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how they would be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampi … (O blast, wrong job—get me the works; this means that Flanagan must go.) I must apologise for that break in the programme; it was due to … technical trouble beyond our control. We hope to resume in a few minutes and … in the meantime perhaps you would care to listen to some organ music. (Not merely organ parsley.)

  While we’re waiting, here’s a few jokes. Did you ever look up Thom’s Directory under Chatham Row? Do you know what they have—this’ll make you laugh. They have THE MUSICIPAL SCHOOL OF MUSIC. Isn’t that funny? The last word, of course, should be MUNICH. (Don’t münchen it Mac.) Ah, here’s the programme back again. Good … look at her, gentlemen, positively twinkling with affection and humour under the snowy aureole of her fine-spun white hair coiled in its bower of petit point; look at those fine hands, never idle; regard only, I pray, the curve of that exquisite mouth, so pregnant of joy and humour, see but the little droop at the lip’s corner … Ah yes, this is beauty, not perhaps as the world knows it, but this is the species faciei super stabilem aetatem indeed. And the little jests, the little family quips, how endearing. ‘Children!’ ‘Yes, dear Momma!’ The eager loving faces, elfin in the flicker of 20,000 candles. ‘Which loves Mother most?’ It is little Myrtle, of course, who answers before the pack; not least in beauty she, not greatest in knowledge of the ‘world’. ‘I, Momma, darling!’ ‘Right. Get the medicine bottle from the top left hand drawer of the dressing table.’ And off goes the young angel, but not without inquiring: ‘Shall I bring the vermouth or will you have it neat, dear Momma?’

  Ah dear me.

  I AM, of course, terribly interested in matter. We are not the men our fathers were. (A good job, in a way. If we were, we would be … terribly old.) It is becoming more and more difficult to gr
ow wheat in this country. The climate yearly grows less frigid. I have not had my skates on for forty-eight years. We have little phosphates. The wild raspberry is now rarely seen.

  But this is very confused. This morning I wish to draw attention to a very serious matter. My theme—though difficult, I will endeavour to propound in a number of simple propositions. Attend, please—all!

  1. Matter is indestructible.

  2. Matter in the raw is apprehended as earth or ‘dust’.

  3. Matter, through the action of living cells which pervade it, changes itself into many forms. What was clay a while ago now appears for a brief moment as a flower, a tree or a cow. Each of these things ultimately ‘dies’ and returns to be clay.

  4. Everything that the eye can see, with the possible exception of fire and water, is made of clay.

  5. It is beyond question that the chemical composition of clay governs the type and vigour of, say, the crop it will grow, and the Department of Agriculture maintains a Soil Testing Station to advise agriculturists in this regard.

  6. Certain manures and fertilisers are known to be necessary for the raising of crops and other dressings are required to combat specific diseases to which certain crops are prone.

  No sane person will question the truth of these six propositions. The only other point I wish to make is this—that man also is clay. The mass of the human body (we confine ourselves strictly to the physical here) is made up of the soil where it grows up. The food that nourishes it is the clay, which yields up its salts and substances in the appetising and attractive form of cabbage and beef and spuds. A man born in Ireland and reared here is therefore an Irishman according to far more extreme criteria than the speaking of Gaelic, wearing bicycle-clips at dances, or winning hand-ball medals. He is Ireland. He is temporarily a little bit of Ireland walking about on two rather ungainly pink stilts.

  To say this is probably to say what everybody knows and admits. Why then do we not use this momentous grain of knowledge? For years most of the inhabitants of Glasgow were bandy-legged. This was due, it was discovered, to a deficiency of lime in the city’s water supply. Lime was added, and now Glasgow has a straight-legged citizenry. Why cannot regard be had to far more critical deficiencies in soil? Why must tuberculosis flourish in this country, and bad teeth, and rickets, and all manner of respiratory diseases. Simply because the chemical composition of the soil of Ireland is unbalanced. The authorities have the matter in hand, of course. They are talking, I think, of … adding calcium to … flour! Why not add calcium to Ireland? Flour is only a tiny fraction of Ireland; calcium is also needed in many other fractions.

  Even leave aside disease for the moment. We have the name of being a quarrelsome and intractable people. This is due to some unbalance in the composition of the soil. If, many years ago, people who came here with fire and sword to bend us to their will had brought instead great shiploads of, say, sodium bicarbonate and dumped the stuff everywhere, we would now be … well, very different persons, with very dissimilar politics. Possibly there would have been less trouble in the past.

  What is Ireland? Even the Chief State Chemist would probably reply ‘an island surrounded by water’. I suggest that it is about time somebody found out what Ireland is. People keep saying glibly that agriculture is ‘important’. If they only knew how important!

  How very very enlightening to analyse the soil of the Six Counties! Have you not there a key to the problem of Partition?

  WERE CLEMENCEAU alive today, he would be the first to admit that he and I went rather too far in respect of ‘democracy’ and ‘self-determination’ some years back when in a Swiss city, surrounded by the Higher Executive Officers of the European, Asiatic and Eurasian civil services, we sought far into the night to … to … unmess the peoples of this hemisphere. There was not a man of our obsequious pale-handed advisers who was not on his max., not a few held directorships, not unfee-ed in prosperous mercantile undertakings and some—heavens!—swaggered into the Blue Train on some sort of a Director’s Pass. They were very fine, entirely reliable, they had several matters under active consideration. I am convinced that Clemenceau and I listened too much to these people. We were misled on the nature of human happiness. We thought—heaven help our wit!—that happiness could be devised and legislated. We did not then realise that the science of politics—being the name for continual and malicious interference with the primitive structure of society by so-called intellectuals—was the fons et orig O’Malley.

  At that time I was ignorant of the Chinese tongue, my knowledge of the Tibetan dialects was imperfect; of Bulgar poetry I knew but little—yet I can now say, after many years of retirement and study, after a perusal of all the literatures of the earth (nor does the last word exclude the hydroïc esquimeau ethos), after an appraisal of all civilisations not incompatible with the Gaelic norm to which all legitimate human sophistication must be related, I have seen it to be universally acknowledged that all sound and stable pre-political communities were composed of peasants and kings—and of nothing else. It seems that the love of a princeling for a commoner was everywhere the beginning of politics, for instantly ‘councillors’ had to be summoned, a scandal averted, someone whisked out at midnight through the postern gate. At that humble back-door was the civil service born. Yet this mésalliance persisted and the offsprings of it today people the earth. Those who are not kings and not peasants. The egregious, the degenerate, those strayed from two folds. The trouble-makers. The War-makers.

  Sceptre and crown must tumble down, Shirley said, and in the dust be equal made, with the poor crooked scythe and spade. Observe this same theme in the Gaelic:

  Is mochean in maiten bán

  no taed for lár mar lasán;

  is mochen do’n té rusfoi,

  in maiten buadach bithnái …

  Atchí aiged cach tige

  soillsigios tuath is fine …

  This idea persists in all primitive literatures, even to the exclusion of the love theme. Observe even Horace:

  ‘Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede

  pauperum tabernas

  Regumque turres …’

  It was, as I have discovered, the upset of that antithetical human relationship—the ‘progress’ of the ‘under-privileged’, moryaa—that has led to the present mess. I confess I speak as a member of the ruling classes yet I have no bitterness and if all the male members of the tenantry I am, before heaven, entitled to have, are policemen in Detroit, I can say from my heart that I pity them. In me they would have known a loving father.

  All this is apropos of what? I read in the papers that some fine Irishmen have declared that we must all live like the good folk in the Gaeltacht, leading that simple life, speaking that far-from-simple language, presumably occupying ourselves with the uncomplicated agricultural chores which distinguish all ethnic groups the world over which have been denied the enervating influence of H.M. English language. Uniquely, a large section of our people wish to be peasants, thus giving hope of a return to the primal balance to which I have referred. To the plain people of Ireland I will make a fair offer. If, gathering together in solemn conclave ye pledge yerselves to be humble unsophisticates unacquainted with English, innocent of all sciences save that of the smiling Irish fields, I, for my part, am prepared to be King. His Most Gracious Majesty, Myles the First.

  NO DOUBT you saw at the Planning Exhibition the big map of Ireland laid out on the floor, you stopped and saw the bulbs go on showing where everything would be in the future. You were very interested in it all and left, reflecting that at no far distant day Ireland would take her place among the nations of the earth. You may have speculated, as I did, on the mysterious alternative that might admit Ireland to that sinister conclave, the nations not of the earth.

  In certain of their moments, the planners surprise me. At one point they turned on a little forest, one at every important point in the country. Do you know what these lights stood for? Great new sanatoria! Do they … do they mean to tell
me that we are going to have … disease…in the new planned Ireland. Have they a dastardly scheme under which pain will still be possible? Are we—great heaven!—to be permitted to … to … to die in the new Ireland? If the answer to these questions is yes, then I say all this planning is a ramp. I solemnly warn Pat to look out for himself. Hospitals are being planned for him, clinics, health centres, streamlined dispensaries. I can see the new Ireland all right, in mime-hind’s eye. The decaying population tucked carefully in white sterilised beds, numb from drugs, rousing themselves only to make their wills in Irish. Outside, not a stir anywhere to be discerned—save for the commotion of funerals hurtling along the vast arterial roads to the vast arterial cemeteries—planned by architects, need I say—where tombs and tomb-stones are prefabricated in plastics. It is my considered view that Paud keeping step with world hysteria in the belief that he is being ‘modern’ is a woeful spectacle, is nowise funny. He has got himself a lot of graphs and diagrams and he is beginning to babble about ‘built-in furniture’. Give him just a little rope and he will demolish any decent houses he may have and go and live in insanitary ‘prefabricated’ shells, the better and the sooner to qualify for the new glass-brick sanatorium.

  Dublin must do without the boon of an underground because it lacks the density of population that would sustain such a system economically. Similarly, the whole country lacks the population that would sustain even the fraction of ‘planning’ that is proper to the temperament and economy of this country. Eighty percent of what has been put before us is blatant imitation of what tremendous and strictly local revolutions have thrown up elsewhere and our ‘planners’ have lacked the wit to dish up even some native sort of jargon. The problem to be addressed here is simply that of the falling birth-rate; time enough to build your—well yes, vast arterial—roads with eight carriage-ways when the day has come in rural Ireland when from every house another house is to be seen, when ‘conversation’ in rural Ireland no longer means a demented monologue muttered through toothless gums, the old man crouched over the fire nursing the noggin of lethal ‘tea’.