Myles Away From Dublin

by Flann O'Brien

  And now consider that rare and delightful soul (admittedly he lives mostly in the Balkans) – the illiterate. Think of his quiet personal world, so untroubled by catastrophes, threats of war, cures for heart disease, the fact that it is high water at Galway at 2.47 p.m., or even the death at an advanced age of a distinguished prelate who had reflected the light of heaven on his flock for 53 years. Recall the paragraph of a brother-scribe of mine who saw a poor countryman ‘reading’ the morning paper upside-down and remarking that there was another big one sunk as he gazed at the picture of an inverted liner. Think of the illiterate’s acute observation of the real world as distinct from the pale, print-interpreted thing that means life for most of us.

  If you know such a person, leave him to his happiness. Do not pity him or patronise him, for he is suffering from nothing more terrible than innocence. Of all the things you read yourself, you know the great majority are unpleasant, sad or worrying. And if you can read, reflect that your accomplishment is irreversible. You cannot discard it as you would an old jacket that is a bit tattered and no longer fits properly. Those marching schoolboys will have many a chance later on to reflect soundly on those exams that they once got so excited about. ABC is the beginning of pain and boredom.

  Some are ‘out of line’

  I am sure many people were amused at the suggestion made in the Dáil last week by Mr ‘Pa’ O’Donnell (FG) that a book on etiquette should be compiled for use in our schools and for circulation to adults through the libraries.

  It would be troublesome and tedious to decide which one of all the legislative assemblies in the world merits a gold-plated cup for being in its proceedings the most unmannerly, scurrilous and reeking with insults and contumely but it is a sure thing that Dáil Éireann would be very high up on the list.

  I speak as one who had to frequent Leinster House for many years, and my memories are grim. Language apart, it is a fundamental of politeness in a man joining a company or exhibiting himself in public that he should be presentable in his person and recently washed.

  It is only their familiarity with them on the part of the ushers and Guards that prevents the arrest of many shabby, unshaven, often tieless characters who may be seen in the corridors and bar, and even occasionally getting up to speak in the chamber.

  But as usual I can come to the rescue. I have a book called Etiquette for Men by G.R.M. Devereux and published in the last century. Today I will give readers some of the pithy maxims at the end of the book; some of them may seem a wee bit dated but no true Nationalist reader can fail to benefit.

  Don’t wear a low hat or a straw with a frock, or tail coat.

  Don’t clean or pare your nails anywhere but in your own room.

  Don’t caress your moustache incessantly, however delicate or robust its growth; nothing is more annoying or unpleasant to those who have to witness it, or makes the owner of the appendage look more silly.

  Don’t take down a whole glass of wine at one gulp.

  Don’t mash your food all up together on your plate.

  Don’t turn your meat over continually on your plate, as though examining it. Avoid all appearance of wrestling with your food.

  Don’t produce your own cigar or cigarettes at a dinner party, and smoke them in preference to those of your host.

  Don’t make noises with your mouth when eating or drinking.

  Don’t keep your mouth open while eating or listening or at any time.

  Don’t refrain from offering your seat for fear of your offer being accepted.

  Don’t use a toothpick in public; it is a disgusting habit.

  Don’t break your bread and drop pieces in the soup.

  Don’t turn an egg out into a glass or cup to eat it; an egg should be eaten with the utmost daintiness.

  Don’t say ‘good-afternoon’ or ‘good day’ when taking leave of your host, a friend, or anyone who is your equal. ‘Good-bye’ is the correct term.

  Don’t turn your trousers up at the bottom, unless there is real mud about.

  Don’t stir the fire with your foot, or put coal on with your fingers.

  I am leaving two of the most striking admonitions to the end, but meantime, dear reader, have you noticed anything peculiar about the foregoing prohibitions? They have one quality, explicit in some and implicit in them all. Look over them again, if you like.

  Got it? They are addressed exclusively to men! I suppose it would be risky to assume that all ladies were so well brought up in those days that they were in no need of advice. Victoria, if I am correctly informed, was a very grumpy old lady, and indeed she used to sit, very brazenly, outside Leinster House. But here are the last two massive don’ts:

  Don’t speak of an umbrella as an umber-ella, nor of a brougham as a broo-ham; never sound the H.

  Don’t sound the L in golf; speak of it as goff, not gauff.

  You could set the last one to music, recording it in tonic soffa!

  Ah, barefoot days!

  It is not because my hands are full but this week I would like to talk, if I may, about my feet. I am wondering if what I have to say will awake an echo in some reader’s mind?

  When the world was trying to recover from the Great War I was a young fellow in Dublin, a bold strap of a chisler, on the brink of being sent to school, and I would say that my people – what I wouldn’t have dared to have said then – were lower middle class. That connotes, of course, ultra respectability, carefulness amounting to perhaps contempt for the real poor. Yes, a lot of us were like that!

  Such families were subject to all kinds of fads. Many fathers believed that sugar, for instance, was very bad for a growing youngster; he was not allowed to have it at any meal, and would get a hiding if caught eating sweets. Other fathers thought that tea was poison for a youngster and totally prohibited it. Butter, white baker’s bread, pork, ice cream, chocolate and goodness knows what other everyday item was also on somebody’s forbidden list. It all looks very silly now in retrospect, particularly when the tiny citizens feel deprived without a supply of purple hearts or marijuana cigarettes.

  But I remember one fad that simultaneously struck my own parents as well as those of practically all my hoity-toity companions. And I hesitate to call this a ‘fad’ because, to this day, I believe the idea was very sound, and is still very sound. Perhaps the thing started innocently and quietly enough in a newspaper article but I know it spread through our people like wildfire. The theory was that boots or shoes (and shoes were a rarity in those days) should never be worn by young growing children because they distorted and deformed the little feet then in process of being shaped, and could leave a youngster permanently gammy footed for life.

  So we were all ordered to go about barefoot, like dogs or cats or the birds of the air. At this remove it may sound barbarous, particularly in the case of youngsters whose neatness in dress was a matter of family pride. But I do remember that after the first few days we thought nothing of it and even the grown-ups in the street soon stopped taking notice of respectable barefoot boys, there were so many of us.

  Without attempting a pun I may say that Mother Nature took this sort of thing in her stride. After quite a short time something approximating to a natural sole, thick and nerveless, began forming on the nether surface of the feet, and soon the roughest or sharpest ground did not cause the slightest pain or inconvenience; even an odd bit of broken glass could be negotiated without injury. In fact we got TOUGH.

  I can’t remember now, alas, when the pressure of convention forced me to resume wearing boots, or how footwear can be justified at all in view of how happily and healthily one can carry on without it. I suppose somebody will mutter something about fashion. If you look at a pair of boots or shoes coldly in the face, you will find they are awkward, cheap-looking and vulgar – certainly far from elegant. More than likely you will find they are dirty, neglected, unshined for days, possibly broken and leaking. No matter how smart and new your suit is, your whole appearance is utterly betrayed by a b
ad pair of shoes. And as I have said above, they are utterly unnecessary.

  Some unthinking people may be horrified at the idea of adults going about their everyday business in bare feet, but that is merely the force of irrational convention, possibly allied to the secret knowledge that a lot of poor feet are not much to look at with their bunions, corns, twisted toes and broken nails. All that sort of wreckage comes from wearing shoes, for it is more than likely that the shoe that fits properly has not yet been made. Many of the fleetest runners who have run away with world records have done so in their bare feet, and all swimmers have found that it is better to leave their shoes on the shore.

  Next time you have a chance, have a good look at the bare foot of a healthy, young, well-developed man: you will see that it is a thing of beauty, style, complexity and elegance, a tool of movement and power, something certainly not to be hidden away in shame. For if the human feet are ugly and shameful, why are we not also self-conscious about our hands, and blush to think of holding it out naked, to be grasped possibly by a total stranger? Our faces, too – is there not something to be said for carefully hiding some of them, as some eastern women do under their system of purdah?

  It is too much to hope, I suppose, for the liberation of human feet and the passage of a statute declaring the wearing of footwear illegal. But it would be a great day for Ireland, and maybe an example to the world, if such a measure were passed by Dáil Éireann, with every man-jack of a TD sitting there with his bare spawgs outstretched, for all to see and admire.

  The butt of my gut

  All readers of this newspaper (well, some of them) will be delighted to see me back here and at action stations, a bigger divil than I was before.

  The cause of my absence was illness, which befell me through no fault of my own.

  A person who insists on telling you at great length and with enormity of repetition all about his operation is regarded the world over as a bore, but I insist on doing that because, one, my account may be of great value and warning to the reader and, two, I had TWO operations.

  Grapes and Paperbacks

  Think what that means. It means two sessions of preoperative scrutiny, two trips to the table, two prolonged sessions of convalescence punctuated with presents of unripe grapes, detestable marzipan sweets, cigarettes (for me, a non-smoker!), tattered paperback books I had already read – these were all unwelcome presents from friends – plus, for 12 hours a day, the roars from two radios in my small ward, each going full blast on different stations.

  I don’t suppose I need add anything about being pulled out of my drugged sleep at 6 in the morning and being invited by the sweet nurse to try and wash in a basin of tepid water.

  I don’t think Purgatory could be worse than a term in certain hospitals, though wild horses would not drag from me the name of this particular hospital nor the names of the distinguished doctors and surgeons. But I may say it did not happen in the Counties Carlow, Kildare, Laois or Wicklow, where the people seem to be very self-conscious about hospitals.

  How It Began

  For some weeks I hadn’t been feeling too well in myself and one night got a frightful pain in the pit of my stomach, a bit to the right-hand side. I called in the nearest local doctor, and after humming and hawing, taking my temperature and tapping me here and there, he said I was a very bad case of appendicitis, and would have to go to hospital immediately and have the appendix out.

  Well, what could I say or do? Nothing but comply.

  In I went and, after a day or so, the job was done. There was hardly any pain until I found myself back in bed again and woefully awake. Pain is hardly the word for that feeling in my side, and it was just awful when I happened to cough or sneeze.

  The other pain (I mean the two-radio one) was almost unendurable. But in the evening time they gave me the needle – morphine, I suppose.

  A Naggin

  I was there ‘recovering’ for over a week, but, in truth, I was fading away. As the days passed I was being given more and more build-up food but continuing to look more and more like a scarecrow. Moreover, I would get terrible pains after a meal. A friend smuggled in a naggin of whiskey, but this was the price of me, for I nearly passed out.

  Eventually, against the doctor’s advice, I decided to get up and crawl home. If I was going to die, surely home was the proper place for that?

  Last Throw

  Eventually friends advised me to see a specialist, a practitioner so-called because he specialises in high fees. This man examined me and sent me into another hospital to be X-rayed. He told me afterwards that the lower part of my main gut was in a terrible state because ‘some ass had cut out a perfectly healthy appendix.’ Well, what could be done, I asked. He walked up and down beside the bed, pondering this.

  ‘You see,’ he said at last, ‘you should have that appendix.

  ‘Grafting on an appendix is almost unknown as a feat of surgery. It is almost certain that your body would reject somebody else’s appendix. Still, if somebody very like you turned up genuinely requiring to have his appendix removed, we might risk the transplant.’

  ‘Somebody very like me?’ I queried. ‘Well, I am youngish, dark, with lovely wavy hair, clean-cut features, strong, athletic figure, perfect teeth.’

  Butt of My Gut

  He went away at this, frowning a bit, but rushed in two days later saying that the very man had arrived, and that the operation – or rather the two operations – would be performed that evening. And so it was done. The newly severed appendix of my unknown benefactor was sewn on to the butt of my gut … and the transplant worked! I began to eat every bit of food I got as well as apples, plums, sticks of raw rhubarb, chickory and celery I sent out for, and was never with less than half a dozen bottles of stout under the bed. I told the two radio maniacs that if they did not close down their stations for 7 hours a day, I would get up and thrash the life out of them

  So there you are – I’m all right again. It’s easy to sleep, Ernie O’Malley used to say, on another man’s wound. It’s even easier on another man’s appendix.

  Our own troubles

  Well, well, well – things get tougher. Here we are in the second half of March, most of us perished with the cold or soaked to the skin (or both, maybe) and we already have the privilege of finding ourselves in Summer Time. But can we ignore watches, newspapers, schedules of TV shows and go quietly into hibernation? No, indeed! We also have a General Election on our hands. In a way, that laborious procedure could be regarded as one for the election of a General. But if now-unarmed political Generals are nowadays not so numerous as they used to be, here is a question: apart from outgoing deputies who have, or think they have, cast-iron safe seats, is there any large body of citizens in the country who actually welcome and enjoy a General Election? (I know that the question sounds like asking anybody in the hall at the large overflow meeting who is fond of whiskey, purple hearts or goof balls to raise one hand … but the question is serious. And the answer is YES.) Those citizens are schoolchildren of both sexes, mostly those attending national schools. It may be very cynical but on the appointed day those lyceums of lower learning are turned into polling stations; the homes of innocence temporarily become part of the grim apparatus of politics and the scheming of sundry chancers.

  Open Secrets

  One could write a lot about the oddities and anomalies of the Irish election. Bribery is illegal, for instance – but only in the sense of giving a voter money or an expensive ‘present’. But if a candidate swears that, if elected, he will get a job with the civil service or the local authority for the voter’s son, that is just harmless electioneering blather and not seriously regarded by the law. The voter’s choice on the ballot paper is strictly secret, with a special little caboose within which to mark the paper, but voters are whisked to the polling station free in cars plastered with party banners. True, such voters could cheat in the sense of voting for the other party, but in fact how many do … and how many feel conscience-bou
nd to repay the transportation kindness with a vote? Nobody knows the answer to that. And if the ballot is secret by law, why do so many people afflict and bore all others around them saying and emphasising for whom they are going to vote, a procedure which in some situations could lead to blows?

  Consider this other thing known as canvassing. A total stranger knocks at your door and straightway begins to explain to you the nature of your public duty, and for whom you must vote. The implication is that you are a feeble-minded, pitiable person, and that you know nothing of politics. I confess that this has never happened to myself but maybe the possibility of it is one of the reasons why I keep a good dog. Election literature, as it is called, is no problem. Put it aside to help light the fire.

  Does standing strong liquor to strangers in a pub constitute bribery? I can’t say, but the practice is quite common with candidates, their agents, relations and chief supporters.

  Would It Help?

  In some ballot arrangements (e.g. the universities and professional bodies) there is postal voting. Every person on the register receives by post a ballot paper, brief memo of instruction and a reply-paid envelope for the return of the paper, duly marked. Could a General Election be managed this way? It is very doubtful, I’m afraid. In a multi-vote household, old or blank-minded persons could be intimidated, or one rogue in the family could secretly snaffle all the papers and mark them to his own way of thinking. And even to this day there must be some illiterate voters.