Such were the stories my father would tell me, gleaned or reinvented, I suppose, from early speculative fiction cinema and obscure Esperanto novels, which language he had learned in order to subvert the world dominance of English. He corresponded with fellow Esperantists in the Soviet Union, China, Holland, the Vatican City, and Springfield, Massachusetts. Just after the war, one of his agents in a remote province of the eastern Union had imparted, through their long-established book-code, the news of some great cataclysm in the forested interior, whose epicentre was a disused salt-mine. These details tallied with his recollections of the sudden demise of the Star Factory.
As he told it, I could visualize the mine’s Darwinian interior, fossil-strewn, honeycombed with snow-crystal-starred vaulted caverns lighted flickeringly by antiquated flambeaux. Hoary workers, beards and eyebrows rimed with salt like polar explorers, struggled doggedly among its veins and seams and lodes and nodes of rare commodity. Gangs of metronomic hod-carriers moved in insect single file on regiments of scaffolding and ladders, as if reconstructing Babel underground; their whispered echo-chambered conversations sounded like white noise.
This, in turn, might lead to the story of why the sea is salt, or we might ponder the meaning of the phrase ‘to salt a mine’ – ‘to introduce pieces of ore, etc. into the workings so as to delude prospective purchasers or share-holders into the idea that a worthless mine is in reality a profitable investment’, and my father would then recall that Judas Iscariot is identified in Leonardo’s Last Supper by the salt-cellar knocked over accidentally by his arm. Salt of baptism, salt of preservation, salt of salary, salt of the earth: in its ritual duplicities and confirmations, a grain of salt could be an emblem of the Star Factory, and it was likely that the Grail which lay at the Factory’s heart was saline. Those who sought the starry rock did so out of many motives – selfish, altruistic – and their findings were ambiguous, since what they found, invariably, was not what they were looking for. Some were disappointed by this narrative device; others were illuminated; none could relate what they had seen, since this too was a precondition of the story – that its unexpected obstacles, its twists of character and plot, remain unsharable.
In other versions, the Grail would take the form of an Aztec crystal skull, where the explorer was required to plunge his thumbs into its empty eye-sockets, with dazzling effect. We saw liana-tangled cities of the recently discovered lost Americas; jungle-torn pyramids and pylons soared through tattered wraiths of cloud; unknown, multicoloured birds arrayed the spars of a galleon stranded in the tree-tops; and recumbent idols gazed at us with baleful eyes and lips. Following with difficulty the timeworn sketch-map, we would fall through trap-doors in the forest floor, or were caught in sudden snares that left us dangling by one leg in mid-air; we encountered snakepits, blowpipe ambushes, and secret passageways that ended in a blank Inca stone wall.
Nevertheless, such parables – for parables they were, each with its internal moralistic tract – contained a whole array of escapologists’ routines. These confirmed the usefulness of cliché, as in ‘with one bound Jack was free’, the supposed opening sentence of a chapter of the serial, where its antecedent ended with your man manacled and shackled in a dungeon. Such was the muscular force of Christianity, which lay close to miracle. Sudden leaps of logic, intermedial dénouements and deviations from the beaten track were typical, as in the Celtic Twilight Zone where ‘Gospel truth’ met ‘myth’. St Patrick has a dream wherein he hears the voices of the pagan Irish cry out for salvation. Oisín, coming back from Tír na n-Óg (The land of youth), falls off his magic steed and is transformed into an ancient. Patrick, eventually baptizing him, accidentally sticks his crozier into Oisín’s foot; the old warrior grins and bears it, thinking it to be an element of rite de passage. Patrick banishes the serpents.
The serial mode allowed ample scope for such scenarios, whose iconic details might be mirrored over many episodes, in different shifts of emphasis or context. At such points, my father’s voice would elevate and quicken, since remembering the narrative depended on these rhythmic clusters or motifs. Compressed mnemonic musical devices, each contained within itself the implications of its past and future, like a Baroque phrase which undergoes conversion and inversion as the tune proceeds in constant renegotiation. They were aides-mémoire for both audience and teller.
It has been suggested that the mind of the storyteller is inhabited by constellations of such crucial points, whose stars are transformed or regurgitated into patterns of the everyday. A kitchen interior, for example, is a suitable location, wherein its panoply of objects – soup tureens, check tablecloth, an icon of the Sacred Heart, a kettle steaming on the hob, the cast-iron mincer clamped to the deal table, its drawer crammed with ranks of jostling cutlery – become hooks on which to hang the items of the story; the room becomes a virtual embodiment of many stories. That plume of steam, for instance, could be the bugle of an army, or the imminent arrival of an unpunctual local train: both are equally important in their contexts. A sod of turf becomes a parable of poverty or labour. The votive lamp beneath the Sacred Heart reminds one of the power of electricity or the skull-and-crossbones of a pirate ship. The hands of the grandmother clock can smile or frown.
As more and more stuff, and its constituent warps and woofs, are tacked to the contents of the memory theatre, there is still room for more. The edeitic storyteller will develop spatial knacks and tricks, such as placing seven ornamental eggs, each with its proper daily function, within the delph hen, which utters different spakes according to your angle of approach.
The dresser, which in ‘real’ life is a family repository, is an important focal point within the system. We need not, here, consider the elaborations of its ornamental plate display, nor the obvious mugs; let us concentrate, instead, on the contents of a drawer filled with bits of string, a bunched red fist of rubber gloves, empty cotton reels, an elastic-bound, dog-eared deck of cards, a two-point electric plug, a measuring tape, two brass door-knobs, three mouth-organs, and a solitary knitting-needle – these are but some of the objects I retrieved just now, perusing one adjacent drawer of the table under the machine on which I’m typing. How many hands of cards were dealt, how many conformations? How many skirts were hemmed, how many buttonholes? What wild tunes were played, how many dirges? What squeaking cleanliness of dinner plates? How long is a piece of string? Everything you open seethes with memory.
Within one alcove of the dresser, you are sure to find a chocolate-tin button-box – Quality Street springs to mind, with its Dickensian vignettes of ladies in white muffs, and their top-hatted consorts – that made a Tannoy backwash as your wrist sagged beneath its weight of shifting jostling contents: shingly mock tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl, clouded amber plastic, beads of jet and jade, squeaky plaited leather mushrooms, the synthetic horn of a duffel-coat toggle, a spiky thistle brooch with a broken catch. Each of these were implicated, for each could tell its tale of dangling by a thread before it teetered off into a narrative abyss.
There are other alcoves, other niches, each a cornucopia of past associations, so that when the storyteller leaves this present world and enters the domain of recitation, he is faced with a dilemma: if he is to use the dresser as a storyboard, with its strategically memorized loci, he must either wipe out their implications in his own life, or acknowledge them.
The erasers adopt a variety of expedients. A popular method is to take the various thingmajigs and place them in a vast imaginary Belfast sink, and wash them, leaving them to dry on a mental rack before they are replaced; another is to chalk their cartoon outlines on a mind’s eye blackboard, before you wipe them off with a yellow duster. Some masters of the genre hold post-cerebellum public auctions, complete with expensive admission-price catalogues, whereby they sell off the entire contents of the house, and then return to each purchaser, buying the object back at an invariably higher price; but this is no odds, since making money is an act of will.
The eraser mode is
necessarily self-abnegative. In the rare instances where the story is narrated in the first person, the audience will assume it to be code for third person; so, the storyteller becomes someone else in their ears, and all they know of his identity is what he tells them. Yet, he might reveal a detail of himself unwittingly, or show himself to be naive about the implications of his story. The story had been made by others who preceded him, who understood the contradictions of omniscient narration. The eraser contemplates an idiom whereby he becomes invisible, a mere conduit for the ornamental flourishes received from generations past, yet mitigated by the grain and circumstances of his voice, his presence into the literal room. In this way, he becomes himself.
The acknowledgers of personal mnemonic must have different strategies. That brown glazed mixing-bowl, for instance, in a Giant story, is where he imprisons humans with a delph plate; it also summons up the whole of a sunlit, oven-warm kitchen where the embryonic storyteller remembers his mother’s churning air in or bubbles out with a wooden spoon, his licking off the thick buttery glop, then scouring the white of the bowl with fingertips; and this skim or residue must leak into the story, or be incorporated into it. This terrain is honeycombed with oxymoron and diversion, and the tiny ancillary moments of your life assume an almost legendary status. There are holes within holes, and the main protagonists are wont to disappear at any time, as in my father’s story, which follows:
THE FRONTIER SENTINEL
Johnny McQueen and Agnes Reed were married during the war, and at that time houses were difficult to rent; and the couple couldn’t afford to buy one. At the time of the story, they were living in two cramped upstairs rooms in Newry town. They had none of the modern amenities that newly married couples expect now: all they had was a gas ring for cooking, and access to an outside loo. Times were hard for them.
The McQueens would have liked nothing better than a house of their own, and they devoted many prayers to this intention. One morning, as he read the paper, Johnny spotted an ad for a cottage that was up for rent in Mullaghbawn, with half an acre attached. ‘I’ll go to Mullaghbawn today,’ says he to Agnes, ‘and by the grace of God, perhaps we’ll be in luck.’ Away he went, and to cut a long story short, he got the house. The pair wasted no time, and the next day they were installed in their own little house in Mullaghbawn.
Before, Johnny would have gone out for the odd jar, and was into sport too, going to soccer on a Saturday and Gaelic on the Sunday; but now, he never went out at all. He was too busy painting doors and walls and windows; but the time came when there was nothing left for him to do, and the house was like a little palace.
One night, when he was sitting by the fire, contentedly smoking his pipe, Agnes says to him ‘Johnny dear, you’ve nothing to do tonight. Why don’t you take yourself off to the pub, or you could go to the big match in McArdle Park; I believe Crossmaglen Rangers are playing tonight.’
‘Do you know, Agnes,’ says Johnny, ‘I don’t seem to have any interest in that kind of thing any more. I think I’ll go into Newry town tomorrow and see if I can buy a spade and a shovel or whatever, and maybe I can do something with that half-acre out the back, for it’s in pretty bad shape, and I’d be better off doing that than watching football.’
The next day, Johnny was up at the scrake of dawn. He went into Newry town on the bus and bought what he needed. He was no sooner home than he went out the back and started to dig. After a while, Agnes calls out to him:
‘Johnny, your breakfast’s ready!’
‘I’ll be in in a while,’ says Johnny, and goes on digging.
After another while Agnes looks out. Johnny had a big hole dug, with two big heaps of soil on either side of it.
‘Johnny,’ she calls out, ‘your breakfast’s getting cold!’
‘Sure I can warm it up myself when I’m finished,’ says he, and he digs on.
A couple of hours went by and Agnes looked out again. She couldn’t see Johnny at all; he was down in this great hole, digging for all he was worth. So out she goes, and says:
‘What in God’s name are you at, at all?
Johnny emerges from the hole and stands looking at it proudly.
‘By God,’ says he, ‘isn’t that a beautiful hole? What do you think, yourself?’
‘Think?’ says she. ‘Are you telling me that you’ve been out all day digging a hole? What use is it? What can you do with it?’
‘I know what I can do with it,’ says Johnny, ‘I can put it in the paper and sell it, that’s what I’ll do.’
The next day Paddy Murphy was eating his breakfast and reading the Frontier Sentinel in his house in Newry town.
‘Listen to this, Kathleen,’ he says to his wife, ‘here’s the most peculiar ad I’ve seen in a long while: SUPERLATIVE HOLE FOR SALE; ALL ENQUIRIES TO “FOUR WINDS”, MULLAGHBAWN, CO. ARMAGH. I think I’ll take a run over there right now, and see what it’s all about.’
Paddy got the bus to Mullaghbawn, asked for directions, and it wasn’t long till he stood outside McQueen’s. He knocked on the door and Johnny came out.
‘Are you the man that has the hole?’ says Paddy.
‘I am,’ says McQueen, ‘are you interested?’
‘I am,’ says Murphy, ‘but I’d like to view before I buy.’
‘This way,’ says McQueen, ‘it’s out the back. It’s a bloody great hole. Satisfaction guaranteed.’
He took Paddy out and showed him the hole.
‘That’s her,’ says he. ‘What do you think?’
Paddy looked into the hole.
‘By God,’ he says, ‘I never saw such a hole in my life. She must be thirty foot deep.’
‘She is,’ says Johnny, ‘and maybe more. Are you for buying?’
‘I am, surely,’ says Paddy, ‘how much are you looking?’
‘Well,’ says Johnny, ‘she’s worth twenty pound, for she took me the guts of a whole day digging her, but seeing I’m a Newry man myself, I’ll let her go for ten.’
‘Fair enough,’ says Murphy, ‘it’s a deal.’ He hands McQueen a tenner. Then he began to think.
‘I’m living in Newry,’ he says, ‘and this hole’s in Mullaghbawn. How am I to get her from one place to the other?’
‘Well,’ says Johnny, ‘there’s always the Ulster Transport Authority.’
‘Right enough,’ says Paddy, ‘I’ll go there straight away. Good luck to you, sir, and thanks for the deal.’
Paddy landed at the UTA depot in Newry, and he said to the clerk: ‘I’m just after buying this hole beyond in Mullaghbawn. She’s a beautiful hole; she must be forty foot deep and broad to boot, and I’d like to hire a lorry and six men to bring her back to Newry.’
He gave the clerk the particulars about the current location of the hole, and where he wanted it to be deposited.
‘That’s all in order,’ says the clerk, ‘I’ll have a lorry and a gang of men out there in no time, and you should have the hole some time tomorrow afternoon.’
Murphy thanked the clerk and went straight home, and said to his wife: ‘Do you mind that hole I saw in the paper? Well, I’ve bought it, and it should be here tomorrow afternoon.’
Paddy spent the whole afternoon pacing the floor, waiting for the hole to arrive. Night came, and there was no word of the hole. At last he had to go to bed, but he didn’t sleep a wink, thinking of the hole that never came.
He got up at the scrake of dawn, and as soon as the UTA office had opened, he went in and demanded to see the manager.
‘Good morning, sir,’ says the manager, ‘and what can I do for you?’
‘It’s like this,’ says Murphy, ‘I bought a hole beyond in Mullaghbawn. You never saw the equal of this hole: as near fifty foot deep as makes no odds, and broad to boot, and I was looking forward to having her installed in the back garden, and I hired a lorry and six men in this very office for the job, and damn the hole have I seen yet. What kind of service do you call that?’
‘You’re right,’ says the manager, ‘this won�
�t do at all. Who did you give the order to?’
‘That wee red-haired man over there,’ says Murphy.
The manager called over the wee red-haired man. ‘Mr Green,’ says he, ‘this gentleman is telling me that he bought a hole yesterday in Mullaghbawn. This hole was sixty foot deep, and broad to boot; and moreover, the honourable gentleman tells me that he hired a lorry and six men – and that it was yourself who dispatched the order – to take this hole to his place, and that the hole hasn’t arrived yet. Have you any explanation?’
‘Oh,’ says Green, ‘are you the man that bought the hole? Well, I sent out a lorry and a gang of men to Mullaghbawn, and after struggling with this hole for seven hours, they eventually succeeded in placing her on the back of the vehicle; but there’s a wild steep incline between Mullaghbawn and Newry, and the hole fell off the back of the lorry. The men were trying their level best to get the hole back on, when the lorry fell into the hole. The men then tried to haul the lorry out of the hole, but fell in themselves, and we haven’t seen sight nor hair of them since!’
THE NEW OXFORD BILLIARD HALLS
I translated that story from my father’s recounting of it (I heard it many times as a child) in his slim compendium of anecdote and memoir, ‘Seo, Siúd, agus Siúd Eile’,1 which might be rendered as ‘Here, There, and There Again’, or ‘This, That, and The Other’; or, simply, perhaps, ‘Miscellanae’. Translation seems implicit in the title, not least in the sense of moving a thing from one place to another. Its rambling ambiguity appeals to me, since it’s pretty close to what I’m doing now, as I beat about the bush of this book, hedging my bets, dodging the issue within a woolly discourse, while trying to snag a thread which might be spun into a yarn.
The Star Factory Page 7