Myles Away From Dublin

by Flann O'Brien

  In the Retirement he deduces enormous possibilities from what he calls the arrival of the ‘Atomic Age’ but never mentions the chance that nuclear science could lead to the extermination of the human race. The form of uranium known as U235 could produce rays so powerful as practically to abolish disease.

  If you are now thirty or so, he says, ‘women will finish with child-bearing in their mid-twenties, children will learn how to shift for themselves around sixteen. Parents will be on their own soon after forty, with the wide, wide world ahead of them and everywhere to go.’ One can only reflect that people of that kind must have been mighty precocious.

  If the mother had 4 children she must have been married at perhaps 17. If those children were considered to be on their own at 16, they could have had little more than an elementary education, and the father (just like those children) must have collared a fat job with no qualifications for it, to support such a household, having married at 18.

  How did he save the money to travel the wide, wide world with his wife when both were just over forty? He solves this simply by saying that twelve shillings out of every pound are in the pockets or the banks of people over fifty.

  In regard to health, he mentions countless revolutionary discoveries of the Atomic Age, many still top-secret. Fourteen years ago, he asks, who had heard of penicillin … or curare?

  I would reply that the curative principle of penicillin has been known for centuries in rural Ireland, usually associated with cow-dung which has been some time lying in the field. Curare? It was in use by the Indians of Southern America even in primitive times.

  But don’t worry. He says that the Russians have completely cured tens of thousands of people with a new serum they have developed. What’s more, influenza is no trouble, for doctors everywhere are using a vaccine which abolishes it. Can peptic ulcers be cured without drugs or an operation? Of course. The correct treatment is now routine.

  Of cancer (the top killing disease in Ireland for a long, long time) he says that now most cases can be wholly cured or alleviated if caught early. Arthritis is a fairly common affliction which can be so deadly as to amount to paralysis.

  It would be tedious to pursue Mr Pitkin further in his role of therapist but perhaps it is worth mentioning his view concerning the ice-cap of Greenland.

  This ice-cap could be easily melted by atom bombs, and geophysicists have testified that the ice would never return there. The result of this operation would be startling, according to our author.

  ‘England would bask under the sun of Seville, while the Scots would give up oatmeal and go in for homemade orange juice.’ But he is wary here and counsels against atom-bombing the ice-fields of Antarctica.

  Such a move would release so much new water that great London and Calcutta would be submerged to a depth of 150 feet of blue water.

  But what are his positive recommendations for attaining and spending the Best Years? After passing forty, he should start a tapering-off process to get mind and body gradually attuned to the condition of doing no work.

  Naturally there is any amount of money laid by in the bank but an abrupt stoppage of work at 50 would be a very serious mistake, possibly fatal.

  He should start ‘vacating’ from his office several times a year. (For most of us people here, that would be just not going to work and would mean the sack.) But for the retiring American, this procedure would make other members of the firm get used to the idea that he was not indispensable.

  As the years went by he would step up this procedure by going in to work only three or perhaps two days a week. On attaining fifty and on the brink of enjoying the Best Years, he would be practically non-existent as a worker.

  After that, his life is generously left to his own personal inclinations. A tour of the wide, wide world and a dumb stare at the Taj Mahal? Certainly. By all means he should read books, though think twice about trying to write them.

  Woodworking (but with power tools) is a grand way of spending post-50 days, and so is golf in strict moderation. Home-made movies, membership of useful clubs and philanthropic activities can be absorbing. And so on.

  I don’t think this book is convincing anywhere. It was written in 1947, when presumably Mr Pitkin had reached the Best Years himself, and that would make him today at least 80. I wonder is the gentleman still alive?

  To hang or not to hang

  There was curiously little public interest or comment when it was recently announced in the Dáil that the Government would shortly take steps to abolish capital punishment ‘except in certain cases’.

  In fact we are one of the few sovereign civilised states west of the Curtain to retain it. Leaving aside time of war and martial law, it has not existed in Austria since 1918, Belgium 1873, Finland 1889, Holland 1870, Norway 1875, Portugal 1886, Spain 1932, Switzerland 1874, New Zealand 1941.

  It has been abolished (with certain qualifications) in all the republics of Latin America. Curiously, however, it has been abolished in only six of the United States, the others variously prescribing hanging, the choice of shooting or hanging, and electrocution.

  Arguments

  It is to be hoped that we will not have in Ireland when the matter comes to legislation a re-recital of all the tedious arguments pro and con the decision. We are entitled to rely on the experience of countries which have been long without this penalty and to decide, its barbarity apart, whether its retention in the statute book acts as a deterrent upon the criminal-minded.

  All the figures prove that it does not. The usual explanation for this result is that in practice very few murders are premeditated, and in the temper and passion which dominate the committing of the foul deed in other cases, no penalty can overshadow the moment of crisis.

  But treason, it may be remarked, is another matter, It can be argued that the culprit who is shown to have menaced not an individual but a whole community must be put condignly to death, if only as the most effective form of warning to others.

  Within the longest memory Ireland has never had a native hangman. Many years ago the present writer entered Fanning’s public house in Lincoln Place, Dublin (Oliver Gogarty’s ‘Indignation House’), just to have a quiet, solitary drink.

  Present at the counter however was an elderly, low-sized, darkly dressed gentleman complete with bowler hat. A staid family solicitor, perhaps. He was accompanied by a much younger man. After casual salutation we got talking and it was not long until I realised that my new acquaintance was Pierpoint, the public executioner, over here to do ‘a job’.

  His predecessor Ellis, I recall, had committed suicide. His young companion was a nephew who was learning the trade and, I was told, ‘another few necks and ’e’ll be ole reight.’

  While dealing appreciatively with a pint of stout, Pierpoint without any shyness said that the fee he got for a ‘job’ in Dublin was ten guineas plus generous travelling and subsistence allowance, the latter expenses also extending to the nephew.

  On one occasion our parsimonious and incredibly tactless Department of Finance tried to tell Pierpoint that there had been a reprieve at the last minute and in the circumstances expenses only would be payable. Apparently the flare-up which followed was momentous.

  The hangman pointed out that it was not he who had granted the reprieve, that he would sue the Irish Government for breach of contract, and that he would never come here for another ‘job’ again. The Department quickly paid up, for a public court hearing on such an issue was unthinkable.

  Pierpoint told me that he personally did not accept the widely believed and indeed propagated view that death by hanging was instantaneous through fracture of the spinal column by reason of the ‘drop’. Many men he had hanged had shown many signs of life for up to ten minutes after the launch into eternity.

  20 Minutes

  It is scarcely possible for anybody to be sure that such signs are not merely post-mortem reflexes of the physical apparatus but it is a fact that the hanged man is not cut down until at least twenty
minutes have elapsed.

  One of the results of the descent of Roy Thomson on Fleet Street, London, was the disappearance of the Sunday Dispatch, originally the Weekly Dispatch.

  In 1850 Charles Dickens wrote to the Editor protesting against the shocking scenes he had witnessed at the public hanging of a Mr and Mrs Manning for shooting dead one Patrick O’Connor for his money. Extracts:

  ‘As the night went on, screeching and laughing and yelling in strong chorus of parodies on negro melodies, with substitutes of “Mrs Manning” for “Susannah” and the like, were added to these. When the day dawned thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour.

  ‘Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police with their dresses disordered gave a new zest to the general entertainment …

  ‘When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, no more pity, no more judgement, no more restraint in any of the previous obscenities than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world…’

  Public hangings in England did not cease until 1868.

  Firmness about farms

  Much credit must be granted, not only in mart and tavern but also at the bank, to this newspaper for last week’s supplement on agriculture. Yet – need I say it? – not the theme but the attitude fills me with disquiet.

  Is agriculture creditable or is its pursuit defensible at all? Maybe I read too many foreign papers and magazines to claim an impartial adjudication on those conundrums but if I were in good form (which please God I will be after Easter) I believe I could pile up a fearsome mountain of anti-agriculture facts. This week I mean merely to toy with the subject.

  First, agriculture is alien and un-Irish. Cultivating the soil was never part of Irish heritage. Visually, the conspect of the older Ireland was forest, shoulders of mountain, bog and intervals of grassland pasturage. The fundamental of diet was hunting and domestic cultivation of livestock including deer. Grain crops were unknown.

  Poetry may seem a very tenuous link in the formulation of social history but in all of the mass of it I have studied in the past, there is no mention in the period that is material to these notes (say 1500–1750) of cultivation or grain crops.

  Bread is hardly ever mentioned and the one plant which was the cause of the country’s greatest single disaster – the potato – had never been heard of. Notwithstanding that it is clear enough that certain grains had been imported in small quantities and that a lord might produce bread with the same air as a lordling of today who would produce truffles from Normandy; bread was un-Irish.

  And liquor? There is ample evidence that the potheen-maker was as active in past centuries as he is inextinctible today, but the Irish gentry drank wine when they could get their hands on it. Their link with the continent was not only venal but vinous. The French were nearly always in the bay.

  But let us not dwell in the past – avoid the present as much as possible also and look to the future. For a long time one of the least appetising things piled on President Kennedy’s plate in the US has been agriculture.

  In the great prairie sectors of that continent even the farmers have votes and they must in the political interest be treated carefully and kindly. For many years a fabulous system of farm price-support has been in operation in the US whereby there has been an induced production of foodstuffs – mostly grain – in bulk, many hundreds of times more than the US people could consume.

  Apart from the cruel drain on public funds, with the taxpayer inarticulate with rage, the mere storage of grain has been a considerable technical and financial problem, and even a policy of ‘take-it-away-for-nothing’ has proved to be a very costly recourse by the State.

  Tens of thousands of tons have been shovelled buckshee to Germany, Poland, some Scandinavian intake points, South America and even sub rosa via Hong Kong to Communist China. The US has found that growing more than a little food is a dead loss.

  Little Ireland has today a population totally less than half of greater London. One is staggered to reflect on how, say, milk is got every day to the inhabitants of that city, how, where and when bread is baked to feed them, and with what.

  The human intellect boggles at such tasks with the Fathers at Dalgan Park, rather than face up to them. Yet one of the kingpieces of our economy here is the cattle trade.

  Many people – including members of the Government – seem to think that it is a proud boast that we find our tiny motherland spacious enough to breed and fatten cows to grace British tables, no matter if our native herds of humans have to emigrate to get anything as nourishing as the life the bullocks get here.

  It will take a great shock, caused possibly by use of dynamite, to blast away my conviction that agriculture is a slave occupation. A greater detonation ( – hydrogen bombs?) may be necessary to blast away the same conviction from the country people. Why do so many people born to the land want to leave the country and start elsewhere making motor cars?

  With its surplus wheat the United States could feed this country many times over without feeling anything out of the way had been done. Meantime at Shannon Airport a considerable enterprise in precision manufacturers has been developed, the nucleus of the sort of national activity that has made the little Netherlands formidable counters in the industrial free-for-all of today’s Europe.

  It sounds pathetic and to some even offensive, but could Paddy not grow up? Give his pig a skelp and tell it to get out of his sight? Use his intelligence?

  Don’t say yes – say maybe!

  When invited to do something that looks easy and appears even pleasant enough in prospect, as well as financially rewarding, the best thing is to say that you’ll think about it rather than say YES straight out. That’s the sort of thinking I’m doing here this week.

  A Very Important Person asked me would I write an article, one of a series by other persons as distinguished as myself, and all treating of the same theme? The theme was ‘The First Book I Ever Read’.

  Yes, it looks easy. But is it? Ponder it for a minute and you will possibly agree that it is not easy at all. Taken seriously, it may be impossible. It may even be in the same category as would be the theme ‘The Last Book I Shall Ever Read’.

  In the ordinary meaning of the word, history is a vast and complicated panorama of man’s existence on this planet through the countless ages, his doings, his glorious achievements and his collapses in torrents of blood.

  History embraces even the development of the human mind, the attempts of reason to grapple with the mysterious and hidden nature of the universe, the immense minuteness of the Creation, and the task of locating and knowing God.

  Indeed, the concept of history is more than any one human head can contain, and this will be plain enough to any man who tries to confine his study to the history of his own individual self. Just try it, and see how often you will be pulled up by faults of memory and record and by many inexplicable confusions.

  For instance, nobody can remember being born. That is easy, you may say, I know my birthday and can get my State birth certificate from the Register-General for three shillings and sixpence. Well, perhaps. But things were not always thus.

  It is only within the last 25 years or so that persons otherwise qualified could automatically get the old age pension. Before that an applicant had great difficulty in establishing that he had reached the age of 70 because compulsory notification of birth, marriage and death did not exist at the time he was born; baptismal records where they survived sometimes helped, as did the testimony of other grand old neighbours.

  Leaving milk aside, who could write an account of the first meal he ate? Theologists hold that a normal person attains the use of reason between the age of 7 and 8, and memory, as a rational process,
can scarcely be said to be functioning before that age. True, most of us have glimpses of things which happened or things we did as babies, but they are fleeting inchoate visions, quite unreliable; some of them may be fancies, or even dreams.

  But leaving childhood aside, it is notorious that some of us have very bad memories at the best of times, and I’m not hinting at that ten-bob note that was never returned. Most male adults of today take a drink. How many of them remember the time and occasion of their first pint? Curiously, I can do so. I think it is because there was a pub across the road from where I went to school and at lunch-break one day a fellow student gave me an invitation (which I took as a challenge) to hop across the road with him and have one. It was strong plain porter and cost sevenpence.

  But countless other important and even momentous milestones are unmarked in memory’s record. When did you have your first smoke, for instance? What was the date of that disaster that was to condemn you to years of coughing, spitting and reckless waste of money? Bitterly let us confess we cannot tell.

  When did you discard short pants for long trousers and how did this sharp step from boy to man feel at the time? Shaving, too – when did that begin? Most boys owned a bicycle, but when did the first one arrive? Or how about learning to drive a car?

  Before attempting that ‘First Book I Ever Read’ I should like to see the accounts given by some of the other persons invited. I feel a fair sprinkling of humbugs and hypocrites would be bound to emerge. Very likely some smug fellow would calmly say that the first book he ever read was the first Book of Homer’s Iliad (though I think the title of the theme excludes school books). Another high-minded character might claim that the first book he ever read was the Penny Catechism – which now costs, I am told, one and three. And some wily smart-alec might distort the theme and write about the first book he ever made, being even in earliest youth very interested in the ponies.