Myles Away From Dublin Read online

  Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O’Brien)

  MYLES AWAY

  FROM DUBLIN

  being a selection from the column written for The Nationalist and Leinster Times, Carlow, under the name of George Knowall

  Selected and introduced by

  Martin Green

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  The fiercest of them all

  Some notes on playing the game

  The bridge at Athlone

  Uprooting, upheaval, a coming havoc?

  That business about moving house

  The forgetting of eaten bread

  Some big blunders in literature

  Oh, dear me! more holidays!

  Manners also maketh the boy

  Bringing back the Gaelic tongue

  Men and women of the roads

  The great perils of being nursed

  The ancient game of name-calling

  Questions, their pleasures and perils

  The great danger of newspapers

  Let’s talk of influenza

  Dr Livingstone and the Dark Continent

  The question of black

  Consequences of having a cigarette

  A very strange case indeed

  Waiting for the imprimatur

  Let’s talk about water

  Contemplate the spud!

  The written word

  Those decent folk – my friends

  Thoughts on the yoke

  The Model T man

  Talking of Dr Diesel

  The folly of the answer game

  One more Guinness

  As noble as our newspapers

  The world is right-handed

  What’s funny?

  Electors treated as half-wits

  Don’t take leave of your senses!

  Ah, this eve!

  A converted try

  A dreadful day

  Bad language

  Does tax hurt?

  Mowers to movies

  From Clongowes to Martello tower

  My sympathies to the Carlovians

  Some British delusions about the Irish

  How would you define the word Celt?

  All about golfing

  Man in the street

  Knowall on the weather

  The power of darkness

  No work past fifty

  To hang or not to hang

  Firmness about farms

  Don’t say yes – say maybe!

  Where’s the nigger in this woodpile?

  Old troubles of a newspaper

  There’s something fishy here

  Taking too much for granted

  Do you like doing it yourself?

  Moore of the Melodies

  The comers and goers

  Time for the holliers again!

  Spending has problems

  The night that I nearly died

  Getting well is plenty of trouble

  Risks we take on Sunday morning

  Hospitals offer poor fare

  Mind your language!

  Upbringing, uplift, uproar

  Talking turkey

  Enough is too much

  Looking back a little

  Those forty days

  O’Casey ploughs again

  An oldtimer’s thoughts

  Our national feast-day

  Buy home products’

  What’s our address?

  Marching schoolboys

  Some are ‘out of line’

  Ah, barefoot days!

  The butt of my gut

  Our own troubles

  My own policy

  How do you rate?

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Nothing is easy to pin down about the author of this book, particularly his various personae, or the names he adopted for them when appearing in print. For my purpose it is simplest to call him Myles, as Myles na Gopaleen was the name he is best remembered by for his excursions into the columns of newspapers. However, this is not simply a supplementary volume to The Best of Myles, which was a selection from ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, the column he wrote for the Irish Times over a period of twenty-five years, because in writing an entirely new column, ‘Bones of Contention’, for the Nationalist and Leinster Times he adopted not only a new name, that of George Knowall, he also took on a new persona, that of a quizzical and enquiring humorist who might be found in a respectable public house in Carlow. It had been my intention originally to make a selection from both the Nationalist and the Southern Star, Skibbereen, but the John James Doe of ‘A Weekly Look Around’ never managed to become a person in his own right, and the column was patchy and tailed off after the first year and barely saw out a second, albeit there were one or two typical Mylesian pieces. To have included them here would have been a disservice to the man who addressed himself faithfully to his Carlovian readers.

  One of Myles’s remarkable achievements as a columnist was that of consistency supported by a spring of imaginative energy; for whatsoever the vicissitudes of life generally, and those attaching to people in and around newspapers in particular, he maintained an extraordinary output right up to and including the year of his death in 1966. Another remarkable strength was the quality of his writing. Homer nods, but Myles’s delight in language never leaves him and whether he is writing on the seasonal and annual events, the weather or the Dublin Horse Show, he is always able to make something fresh. To write well is not easy, nor is it a gift like perfect pitch; it is difficult and demanding. No one could pick his way round the hazards of journalistic clichés with such deftness as Myles, nor turn them to such good use when it suited his need, as in the ‘Myles na Gopaleen Catechism of Cliché’, with which he rewarded the devoted followers of ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’.

  The persona he presented to the people of Carlow, under the name of George Knowall, was different from the one who addressed the plain people of Ireland in the Irish Times, yet his felicitous use of language, his delight in words, and his uncanny ability to see through humbug and cant were employed to the same end.

  To those admirers of Myles who know a little about his life, he drops various autobiographical hints that can be picked up and enjoyed. Since what happens to him is as much grist to his mill as are the absurdities recorded in the daily papers, we nearly always get a bulletin about his health when upset, and a gentle swipe at the medical profession and the undignified absurdity of being in hospital when the misfortune arises, as it does periodically in the following pages. We are treated variously to a broken leg, influenza (with a note about a lady who survived an operation when young and spent the rest of her life talking about and embellishing the event), vaccination, a phantom heart-attack wrongly diagnosed, convalescence, hospital treatment, and the operation that probably concerned his last illness. Doubtless he would have agreed that there is only one fatal illness, the one that kills you, and would have used this unfashionable medical apophthegm as a text. Certainly his absence from the pages of the Nationalist was of long duration preceding the appearance of the operation piece, but nowhere is the sharpness blunted or his verbal enthusiasm dampened in any of the pieces he wrote after his return.

  The Myles of the Nationalist is eminently sensible and proclaims himself born into a lower middle class family, something that ‘connotes, of course, ultra respectability, carefulness amounting to perhaps contempt of the real poor …’. And it is from this position that he writes in these pages, though he personally was never victim to the hypocrisies inherent in that positi
on. He delights in curious and arcane knowledge, though he has no time for ‘facts’ as purveyed say in radio quiz programmes or in the Guinness Book of Records, a ‘book full of extraordinary allegations, for the veracity of which no source or proof is given.’ When he himself takes an interest in something, such as the word ‘dowse’, and follows it through all its meanings and implications, we get a truly adventurous and delightful journey with a courteous and attentive guide.

  The Myles of the Nationalist is erudite, urbane and informative and on the whole a country cousin to his metropolitan self. I have seen no reason to arrange the material here under subject headings, since he treated his readers with such attentiveness that the pieces are better read chronologically, as they were published, one subject written about once being taken up again at a later date. The provincial Myles was always mindful that his readership was a loyal and local one and he goes out of his way to address Carlovians as such, taking the trouble as often as not to allude to recently published matter in a previous edition, whether an article or an editorial comment. One such, a feature on agriculture, encourages – and this against the tide that took Ireland into the Common Market – a gentle attack on agriculture as being ‘alien and un-Irish’, claiming that in a study of Irish poetry from 1500 to 1750 there is no mention of the subject, save allusions to pasturage, hunting and the keeping of domestic livestock, including deer. Normally, the supplementary matter in a newspaper which devotes a special feature to a subject supports the burden, its central aim being to attract advertising, and it would appear that Myles was as much a licensed jester in the Nationalist as he was in the Irish Times. Indeed, the delight we take in a humorous columnist, from Beachcomber to Peter Simple, is that he can take the mind away from the ponderous absurdities of the editorial and the obsessional attention to the topicalities of the day, and enable us to see things in a truer perspective, for comedy is as much at the heart of the matter as is tragedy, and likewise as durable. Not many columnists can justify publication in book form.

  As the George Knowall of the Nationalist is a country relation of the Myles of Dublin, so they are both part of a composite human being who wrote those extraordinary works The Third Policeman, At Swim-Two-Birds and the play Faustus Kelly. For the two former he chose the name of Flann O’Brien and it is difficult sometimes to reconcile even two different Flann O’Briens as one and the same author. There are tides in the affairs of men, surmount them as we may, that do have a profound influence on the direction a man’s life takes.

  James Joyce didn’t let World War I interfere with his single-minded literary endeavour, while it involved the whole of Europe in carnage and massacre and dominated the lives or fortunes of many other writers, both Irish and English; but World War II forestalled the appearance of The Third Policeman by over twenty-five years and made it a posthumous publication. There are various ironies in the life of the author that are almost as mysterious and other-worldly as the events in At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman and who knows what might have happened had the latter book been published rightfully as it was written, immediately after At Swim-Two-Birds. I myself have unearthed two characters in At Swim who originally appeared in the pages of a French writer, Alphonse Allais, whose work was only translated into English and published here a couple of years ago.

  In bringing this selection together from the columns of the Nationalist the intention has not been to search out and garner more of Myles for the sake of it, but to show again that as one more facet of this many-sided writer appears, there is the certain knowledge that no one will ever be able to see the whole at any one given moment. He was a man who disappeared from his own photographs, knowing that a photograph is not a prophecy, but a moment, an expression frozen in time. His future is in his writing, and this volume is part of that future.

  Martin Green

  Newlyn, March 1984

  Note

  The pieces collected here were first published in the Nationalist and Leinster Times, Car low, between 1960 and 1966, under the heading of ‘Bones of Contention’.

  The fiercest of them all

  For a reason not clear at all, humans impute to animals motives and behaviours quite alien to them; it is not easy to work out the inter-relation of the man-animal kingdom. Notionally, man is the ascendant and dominant class. Is he in fact, though?

  The red setter lying at the fire knows every word I say. And if you were to lay a finger on me, without even going to the trouble of pretending you are going to hit me, he would spring up and tear you asunder.

  Although cats are not strictly speaking domesticated at all, preserving a private life of their own (particularly its nocturnal side) they are faultless time-keepers inasmuch as they show up on the dot at meal times and in cold weather they take the fullest advantage of fires. In matters of cleanliness indoors they are most fastidious and it is fallacy that they are afraid of dogs. A cat on the war-path will terrify any dog, though a chase is often conceded as a matter of exercise and fresh air.

  We attribute almost limitless intelligence to monkeys, no doubt because of their anthropoid appearance and the human skill with which they drink tea and smoke cigarettes. Elephants we consider very wise and admire the gentleness with which they behave, notwithstanding that they weigh several tons.

  What of the rat? He is not a very personable fellow and often carries a selection of typhus and bubonic germs in his fur coat. All the same, I confess I cannot withhold from him a certain measure of approval. His cunning is proverbial and must be highly commended, if only expressed in his feat of remaining alive at all. Probably no creature in this part of the world has so many mortal enemies. Not only are dogs, cats and humans after him but he has special enemies such as the hedgehog. I have read that it is estimated that there are 8,000,000 rats in Ireland alone, a great number of them natives of Dublin.

  The Major Fauna

  Few of us have soldiered in the Far East and for that reason have only the most perfunctory acquaintance with the great beasts such as the lion, tiger and leopard. The snake family we hardly know at all, thanks no doubt to St Patrick. Our nearest bears are probably in Siberia, crocodiles infest the foetid swamps of India and the Abominable Snowman is still tramping around the slopes of the Himalayas. Apart from indigenous minor fauna – the rabbit, the hare, the goat and the deer – that seems to be about the limit of our knowledge of the Wild, a compound of snooping, hearsay and Walt Disney. I keep away deliberately from the subject of salmon for therein we have a mishmash of poaching, gunplay and perjury. In a way, we can claim to be innocent enough.

  We live with Nature, hoping that modest benefit may accrue to us without undue exertion; we give thanks when a fat grouse dies from heart failure at our feet, and with resignation we accept the fact that pheasants cannot expect to live forever.

  But these notes of mine today are directed to asking the reader to name the most ferocious animal in this part of the world. The badger or the bull? Neither. The dog whose fangs drip with hydrophobia? No. Man himself? Hardly. Quoting from two books I have read, let me name the brute.

  It is the shrew. The shrew is a little thing weighing about half an ounce, in appearance very like a small mouse except that he has a long pointed snout and a shorter tail.

  Mind This Fellow

  Naturalists are agreed that, considering his size and needs, nothing in the whole animal kingdom can compare with the common shrew in savagery and voracity. Tigers are clumsy messers in comparison and they always pick a smaller animal when in search of prey.

  The shrew is permanently in a towering rage and, notwithstanding the fact that in his last meal of a few hours ago he ate three times his own weight, he is perpetually a martyr to hunger. If nothing better can be found, he will kill and eat another shrew – murder and repast taking merely a matter of seconds. But he has no hesitation in attacking, killing and trying to eat the whole of a rat, who must look mammoth in proportion to himself. Part of his armoury is that, apart from the ability to unleash
a filthy smell, his tiny biting apparatus contains a glandular poison which can paralyse victims almost no matter what their size. His appetite is quite insatiable, his unending rage is quite startling and by the time he is 15 months old he has eaten himself to death. He is afraid of absolutely nothing except the possibility of doing without his dinner.

  Should the Irish farmer beware of the shrew and even set shrew-traps? He should not be, for the shrew eats snails, slugs and every manner of insect while awaiting some larger and more succulent dish. But the question does not arise, for there are no shrews at all in Ireland. St Patrick again!

  Some notes on playing the game

  I was startled to read recently in the giant Sunday issue of a San Francisco paper the casual statement that handball is the national game of Ireland. It made me think generally about games. What is a national game or, for that matter, what is a game?

  The dictionaries are a bit vague here. A game is said to be any amusement or sport, or a contest played for recreation or as an exhibition of skill. It seems also that the word ‘game’ meaning creatures other than what is meat, fish or poultry and which you go after with a gun is really the same word, as also is gaming in the sense of gambling.

  It is not so easy to decide within those meanings what a national game is. In western continental Europe it is probably true to say that the national game of most countries is soccer. But would it be true to say that the national game of Spain is bull-fighting, or is bull-fighting a game at all? Is boxing a game? The Swiss spend a lot of their time skiing and otherwise cavorting on snow and ice. Could that be called their national game? And if one were to get into an acrimonious argument with a member of the Japanese nation, one might suddenly find oneself in mid-air and then slammed to the floor with a shattering crash – merely as a result of participating in the national game of ju-ju. Deciding on the US national game would take some thought. Baseball comes to mind but there is also great emphasis on basket-ball, ice hockey, football and … handball.