Myles Away From Dublin (13 page)

The title of this week’s discourse need not alarm anybody, for the language throughout will be seemly. But bad language as a subject of discussion is worth while. While our dander is well down and we are at peace with the world, let us debate this question of abuse.

Every week this newspaper (like all others) has a small report about some decent, simple farmer. He has been hauled before the court for using vile and abusive language, and sometimes this is linked with the assertion that at the same time he was drunk and disorderly. Usually he is fined ten bob. And what about it? It could happen to a bishop.

Language (of any kind) is a fairly recent invention. I mean, it didn’t start until about 100,000 years ago, roughly. Before that, communication – and here I include beasts as well as men – was by gesture. A hungry creature pointed to the mouth to indicate hunger.

Elephants did just the same as
homo
sapiens
,
except that they used the trunk instead of a finger. Hunger is one thing that precludes ambiguity. If you are hungry, you know you are suffering from hunger, irrespective of whether you are a mouse or an ostrich.

Having established the antiquity of language, the next question is – how old is bad language?

It is not an easy question. The oldest documents accessible to the western world, those of Homer and Vergil, do not contain any bad language. The Book of Ardagh, edited by Dr John O’Donovan and placed as to age about AD 900, contains no obscenities or crude
talk. In fact, it is mostly a biblical transcript, with wonderful and elaborate lettering. When then did man first begin to soil his mouth?

Certain pre-Christian Latinists, not the ones we were beaten up about at school, did not hesitate to be a bit dirty. Ovid was one of the bad boys and occasionally the elegant Horace could go a bit too near the edge.

Long their predecessor, Sophocles wrote a
questionable
play dealing with incest. A certain Dr Bowdler had to expurgate the works of Shakespeare and incidentally gave a new word to the English language. All those people seem remote, long-dead, old-fashioned.

How do we manage today, 1962, for bad language and immoral literary behaviour? I think we can boast that we are doing as well as our ancestors, but it is also true that the general public attitude for such wares has seriously declined. A dirty book is no longer an easy way of making quick money.

I haven’t tried myself, but some friends of mine who know nothing about any other sort of book say that publishers have become stupid and just refuse to publish ‘modern novels’. I usually offer them a cigarette and change the subject.

About 40 years ago a Dublin man astonished the world (and also made it very angry) by publishing a book named
Ulysses.
His inner attitude was that there was no such thing as bad language; there was only language. It is not so much that this book was censored; my own copy bears this entry in its printing history:

‘Third printing – January 1923. 500 numbered copies of which 499 seized by Customs Authorities,
Folkestone
.’

This statistic has always fascinated me. What
happened
to the 500th copy? Who has it?

It is true that
Ulysses
contains those four-letter words
but it is indeed far from being a bad book. The author was human enough to produce patches of poor and arid writing, and one large gallop of it shows that he was capable of giving himself airs by reproducing (as he thought) the styles of many writers who went before him. For all that, I believe
Ulysses
is a great book.

Its many distinctions have been imitated often enough to prove that.

Maybe that’s enough to say for one week. The book is not banned in Ireland but is very hard to get. Joyce is dead and the sort of people who originally felt outraged now think the book is tame stuff. May both RIP!

Once a year we, like our fellow-serfs on the sister-isle, are presented with a thing called the Budget. It pretends to be an annual review of the national housekeeping, looking at the economic facts of the year gone by and purporting to peer cunningly into the year that is to come. After a smug sermon lasting about an hour scolding us for our profligate and reckless habits, the elderly uncle (otherwise the Minister for Finance, whoever he may be) announces the new taxes. And that’s that.

Not many people give the matter much cold, objective thought. They accept taxation and State interference with their private lives as inevitable, like death. If on the day following the day of the Budget, you ask some reasonable man what he thought of it, the response you will get is almost certain to be a sullen grunt. As a subject of conversation, the Budget is as sterile, perfunctory as the weather. All the talk in the world won’t prevent the descent of a heavy shower of rain.

It is commonly and silently accepted that the main function of a government is to tax the citizens and make them as poor and insignificant as possible. To complain amounts almost to treason but most of the victims do not do this, because they realise it is a fearful waste of time. The only people who talk of taxation (and they do so with glee) are those who think they are not taxed at all. Such people do not realise that there is practically nobody in any modern community who is not taxed.

Let us take the case of Mr Plain Man. He has a good job, is married and has four kids. His salary is not
enormous but it is comfortable, and with all his allowances he pays next to nothing in income tax. He hasn’t a car, of course, and doesn’t go in for any nonsense of that kind. A drink? He’s no TT but once a week for a few pints is enough for any man. He is sensible, shrewd, level-headed. On Budget day the Minister announces an extra duty of 3d a gallon on petrol. The PM (– stands for Plain Man, not Prime Minister) gives three cheers.

‘Good enough for them,’ he sniggers. ‘Flashing along the roads like streaks of lightning, killing people and with a lady in the front seat who is almost certainly somebody else’s wife. And plenty of drink on board, of course. Makes you sick.’

A little reflection would show that this is a narrow view. A rise in the cost of petrol means a rise in the cost of distribution of everything, including essential food. It means that the cost of all goods must go up. The cost of feeding the people in the County Home goes up, and up go the rates. The Ministers, here and in Britain, pretended to make a distinction as between essential and ‘luxury’ goods and services. Is a newspaper a luxury? If a man thinks he badly needs a haircut, is he therefore a vain and despicable little bantam? How luxurious is it to have a hot bath now and again?

Finance Ministers all over the world believe that taking a drink or smoking a cigarette are habits which are very bad for us, and underline this decision by imposing massive taxes on those commodities. The truth is that if everybody concerned suddenly decided
en
masse
to give up drinking and smoking for good, the financial foundations of the State would collapse, and new unprecedented taxes (e.g. on bread) would be necessary to enable the creaking government machine to shamble along. There is an excise tax on matches. That
hits the smoker again, but what about the little wife who has to light the fire every morning?

Selwyn Lloyd in Britain was attacked and jeered at for putting a tax on kiddies’ lollipops. The British taxpayer can well be angry at this petty impost, as with an infinity of other marginal fiscal irritations. Why? Because every now and again he is called on to pay for Britain’s share in a world war when all standards of financial wisdom and equilibrium are swept completely aside, money is no object, buy X, Y and Z no matter what it costs, freedom itself is priceless, we also serve and et cetera.

It could be argued, against this background of taxation, that world wars are intermittent intervals of sanity. In Britain, World War I is not yet paid for. Two or three generations yet unborn will have to spend their days paying for Word War II. How about World War III? By then, I hope to be a recluse in Rome. Anybody who wants to get in touch with me should ring me – I know it is an old joke – at Vat 69.

This week the reader must bear with me (after all, isn’t this a small bear garden we run here?) because two subjects I should like to mention have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

First of all, I got a catalogue (unsolicited) from a Dublin firm of purveyors for the needs of gardeners and small-time cultivators. The prices in it astonished me. No, not for the usual reason that they were
astronomically
high but because they were so low. A nice situation in 1962.

Take a lawn mower, for example. It is not a very complicated machine but it is an example of what we call precision engineering. The drum of cutting blades must have a delicately minute impact on the reactor blade against which they come. There are side effects, such as a shaft of seasoned oak, and a lubrication system which a decent half-wit could operate. What price for this small miracle? On average, a fiver!

But there was more than that in this small, illustrated book. There were other mowers on offer, mechanically propelled and of unearthly appearance. The driver could ride on them, and there seems to be no reason why he should stay on lawns. There seemed to me to be no obvious reason why the owner-driver should not surge out from his modest abode of a Saturday and go to the races in the Curragh on this mower.

Compared with a taxi, the cost of a mower would be negligible and I doubt if any Guard, or even a Taca, would have the nerve to stop a contraption that looks like a cross between a mobile thermological station
and a concrete mixer. The cost would be well under £40.

Completely different is a picture I saw. On my trips to Dublin I often find myself in an elderly but smallish cinema, of which there are many similar sorts in London. You are not confronted with an epic, or a reconstruction of the most spectacular parts of the Bible story by some Hollywood mogul. You get bits and pieces – travelogues, newsreels, sometimes ‘on the record’ spiffs by American politicians.

You can leave when you like without feeling
defrauded
. There is no climax to wait for. You can rest, and even sleep. Yet, inevitably, in such tame situations, you come across positively startling material. In my case last week it was the record of a wrestling event. It was incredible, mercifully silent but with a cynical American commentator on the sound-track.

The first bout showed two tough-looking men, superb physically, trying to get the better of each other with no holds barred. It was spectacular and deadly, but not unfamiliar. Stranger things were to come.

The next bout was between two women, one dressed in what amounted to a white bathing costume, and the other in black. There was an attempt at the same brutality, but entirely of a different kind.

The Woman in White (never mind Wilkie Collins) took her opponent by a strangle grip and slammed her to the floor on her back. While there, she took her opponent by another complicated grip and did exactly the same thing. The referee stopped this bout when the possibility of murder was nigh.

The final presentation was really unbelievable. Each corner of the ring was occupied by a superbly-built wrestler, sworn to murder the other three.

The fundamental tactic was to throw the opponent (or maybe three of them) right out of the ring among the spectators. Bashes on the face with bare fists were a commonplace, and the feet were used as often as the fists.

One could write a lot about this exposition of brutality but I am afraid that the conclusion must be that we have all enjoyed very, very rough stuff so long as other people are involved.

Well, boys-ah-dear, there was the queer hosting at the Forty-Foot swimming hole, Sandycove, Dun Laoire, when a great number of people – perhaps 200 –
gathered
to honour James Joyce.

His great book
Ulysses
is very long (my own edition is in two volumes) but its events are confined to a single day and night, namely June 16, 1904; and its opening is located on the top of the Martello Tower at Sandycove where Joyce himself, Oliver St John Gogarty and an Englishman were in residence.

On display in the tower itself were various relics of the master, including letters, printers’ proofs and his
death-mask
, the last-mentioned an extremely successful cast, ironically a thing in death that was extremely life-like.

The location of Saturday’s ceremony (if drinking small ones and cups of tea can be called a ceremony) afforded a curious historical conspectus. Those towers are an echo of the Napoleonic wars when the British with three ships of the line and two frigates sought with artillery to subdue a tower commanding the Gulf of San Fiorenzo.

It was only through a sheer accident – the igniting of junk on the tower which should not have been there at all – that it was eventually taken. When it was found that the tower had only two 18-pounder guns, the military lesson was obvious and was quickly learned by the British. The fear of the French invasion of the home territory was immediately provided against by the wholesale erection of the so-called Martello towers around the whole coast of England and along the eastern
shores of Ireland. They are so solid and massive as to be virtually indestructible and many centuries hence will no doubt rank with our round towers as objects of speculation and wonder.

The wonder of Saturday’s event was that it happened at all. Even ten years ago it would have been unthinkable but in more recent years the austerity and beauty of Joyce’s work is finding acceptance in quarters where it had formerly won condemnation without any
investigation
of its worth. Even as an historical portrait not only of Dublin but of an age
Ulysses
is unique.

Joyce has left a full picture of his early self in his
Portrait
of
the
Artist
As
a
Young
Man
,
one of the finest autobiographies in the English language. To a large extent however all his writing concerns himself, his life and times. Many chance acquaintances, including people who wished him ill, have been immortalised.

Having at last shed the silly mantle of purveyor of erotica, Joyce emerges from contemporary accounts of him as a very shy man, punctilious in manner and very formal in modes of address. Sylvia Beach, an American in Paris who had the courage to publish
Ulysses
originally in 1922 and who was present on Saturday at Sandycove, an alert lady of 75, was never known or referred to by Joyce otherwise than Miss Beach.

Joyce went to school at Belvedere College and Clongowes, both institutions run by the Jesuit Fathers, and left Ireland for good at the age of 22. Left it physically, that is. His mind and memory never left Dublin. He died in 1941‚ during the war. Would it not be an idea to disinter the remains and rebury him at his own beloved city?

James Joyce, was born on February 2, 1882, at Rathgar and from Clongowes went to University College, Dublin, where he specialised in modern
languages. He went to Paris in 1904 and for the rest of his life lived variously in France, Italy and Switzerland.

His last work,
Finnegans
Wake,
is accepted as one of the most complicated and obscure pieces of writing ever to see print and if there is substance in the common belief that great mental stress and worry lead to ulcers, it is understandable that his death arose following collapse from duodenal ulcers amid the chaos of the German occupation of France.

Friends at this time urgently counselled him to go to the Irish Minister in Paris and get his British passport changed for an Irish one, for it was known that the German authorities regarded him as a British spy. He refused, saying ‘it would not be honourable’.

That was another manifestation of his stiffness and formality. He certainly owed the British nothing, for they were the first to burn
Ulysses:
of 500 copies landed at Folkestone in January, 1923, the Customs Authorities seized 499.

T.S. Eliot has remarked that Joyce was the greatest master of the English language since Milton. Let us leave it at that.