Bermudas
or Long Shorts
My Favorite Car-Driver
Notting
Hill, London, 1993
All
Saints Road, no saints in sight. A smoked-window limo cuts cross my bike.
‘A
low-ride nigga’ (Chester Himes) hollers through the sun-roof top, ‘Yer money’s
sticking out’ I shoot to my back pocket and a crumpled fiver flutters into my
hand.
The Great War
A marching song my sisters used to sing comes
back to me. ‘Je vais, je vais, je vais, je vais à la guerre. Je vais,
je vais, je vais, je vais à la guerre. Ou, va-tu, Mathilde, avec le grand
chien ?’ I go,
I go, I go, I go to war. But where are you off to Mathilde with that big dog. I
wonder if the ardent schoolgirls understood the import of the words? The wife’s
betrayal of a conscript. Gloire is for the pigeons, French for
suckers, the jobless who sign up to become cannon fodder.
Me and the ‘Little
Ease’
A hidden signature in
all my books is a reference somewhere to a ‘Little Ease’ (a prisoner’s cell so
small you could not move). My boyhood home had an extension with a guest room
and a cupboard sized room called the ‘Little Ease’. It was used for punishment
or isolation from infectious diseases.
I took to using it as a
student. It had a little window and as I was banned from smoking my pipe in the
house, in winter I used it to study and puff there. I had a long clay pipe and
the smoke disappeared outside. While the pipe was alight, I could concentrate
on my books. And on hearing Hemingway worked standing up I did likewise.
It was possible to
squeeze through the window and jump eight feet to the lawn below. I used it to
sneak out at night to do the town, hanging around the docks to observe the ships
and the low life. Sometimes I went to a small dance hall with a jazz band.
There the sailors danced with local girls and the music and the goings on were
educational for a growing boy. The problem was getting back into the house. It
was too dangerous to climb up the drainpipe, particularly if I had a pint and a
half of stout (my financial limit). However, my father worked on his papers
until dawn and I tapped on his window. He came out and we looked at the stars
together. He was too abstracted by his
work to notice the time or if I was tipsy.
My mother who didn’t miss much suspected my gallivanting and asked him
when did James come home. He was vague, only remembered us looking at the
stars. Still, she had a latch put on the window, but I learned to unscrew it if
I wanted to go out.
My ‘Little Ease’ was
both a confinement and a release. Not unlike working on and liberating a
manuscript into a book.
Soren’s Advice to an Unpopular King
Paraphrase from Kierkegaard’s Journals
(1849)
Kierkegaard told King Christian VII not to
worry about communism because it was a class war and when the basement is
flighting with the first floor and the second floor with the attic, the
landlord is not involved. All the different floors needed to have good
relations with him.
Permitted by the king to be frank, Kierkegaard
told Christian what an absolute king needs to be. He can be ugly, and deaf and
dumb (invaluable assets), possess some stock phrases for all occasions that
mean nothing. Above all he should be ill from time to time in order to arouse
sympathy. The king broke in ‘’Interesting! That’s why you excuse yourself from
visiting me claiming illness. You’re making yourself a king’.
Kierkegaard admired the sharpness of the aging
king. But when Chrstian extended his hand, knowing he is expected to kiss it, Soren
demurred. Despite an open invitation, he only returned once to give the king a
copy of his new book, Works of Love. The king had hitherto remarked
(like just about everybody in Denmark at the time). ‘We are impressed by your
books but don’t understand them’. Kierkegaard’s stock reply to that was
‘Naturally, you haven’t got the time to read them all’. The king reads out the
opening sentence. ‘’Thou shalt love, thou shalt love your neighbour,
thou shalt love thy neighbour’’. He smiled and said ‘Too true. The
subjective thou is love for a king’.
Coda
‘You made us free, not only to love others but
oneself’. Juliet Greco’s tribute to Sartre. He was her king.
Honest
Rhyme, Right Reason and Marital Ruptures
Apollinaire
wasn’t one to sweat blood like Baudelaire to secure a rhyme. His most popular
poem ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’, bemoaning love’s short passage, says it’s like the
slowness of life. Lente (slow) rhymes with the next line’s vioente
(hopes). The reverse fugace (fleeting) would not only have half-rhymed with
the subsequent line-ending helas, but it would be truer to life. Baudelaire
would have torn himself apart to seal the right combination. But ‘Le Pont
Mirabeau’s line, ‘La joie venait toujours apres la peine’, would please
him, as a masochist (like Apollinaire). Still is it generally true that the
joys of love come after the pain of a break-up (rupture)? Regretfully
this is the only poem of Apollinaire that every French school-person knows.
Marriages in France have an average life of seven years. No joy.
Could
Joyce be Less Than Perfect?
Linguistic
morale is usually boosted at the expense of someone else, someone, preferably
dead. I chose James Joyce, and a passage from Ulysses
(1922) …
‘Il
est Irlandais. Hollandais ? Non fromage. Deux Irlandais, nous, Irlande, vous
savez ? Ah oui! She thought
you wanted a cheese hollandaise.’
In a Paris café Kevin Egan and his drinking companion are at
cross-purposes with the waitress. Like a good Fenian, Egan is proudly declaring
his nationality. But it is not hollandaise that would cause the mishearing,
but néerlandais. So near and yet so far! False linguistic premises spoils Joyce’s
joke.
Raining Bodies
The bishop of Marseille during the great plague
(1720) isolated himself in his palace. The people who hitherto idolised him
were shocked and angered, and took to throwing dead bodies over his high walls,
hundreds of them…
There is No such Thing as Society
In 2022 when I came to liver in France, Mayday
was optionally celebrated by working with the pay going to old people. It died
out during the second decade and now is a forgotten gest. Last year the yellow
jackets were out on Mayday protesting at petrol prices and their lack of
purchasing power. This year’s epidemic has mainly killed elderly people (over
85%) due to privatised care-homes with lowly paid staff, largely untrained.
Less than half of staff accepted vaccination until it became obligatory (too
late for so many).
Reality and
England
Being an outsider was a
choice. England wasn’t my country. It was my father’s enemy. So, mine by proxy.
But I had a socio-political agenda which couldn’t be pursued in Ireland or
America.
I had no sense of
inferiority as long as I didn’t join the ascent of the hierarchical ladder. I
was happy seeming to be on the bottom rung. But was aware I had the lability of
someone who wasn’t seen as competition, and who had a hot-air balloon that
could rise above the establishment order if necessary, and an escape clause if
it was pricked. I didn’t need it, except once when disappearing to Brazil was the
easy way out of going too far.
I had few complexes in
dealing with people. My father’s family had distinguished itself at home and
abroad for several centuries. My mother came from a landless peasant family
with nothing to lose. I treated
everybody the same from working class to royalty. Some English people suspected
me for this. Others were puzzled. I decided that, since my ideas were
challenging theirs, not being understood was a strategy.
I was lucky.
Thatcherism which I despised was confronting the establishment order’s
fecklessness with money. And my
specialty was cost-benefit analysis. Her civil servants were happy with
that. I had ideas that they could use.
All that is in Heavy
Years (Quartet, 2018) in a fictive form in order to be honest rather than
justifying myself by the letter.
Being difficult to
place proved useful even in my personal life. M, my life-partner, didn’t quite get
me, and I didn’t get quite her. We didn’t
quite get one another quite happily for four decades. We lived in a world which
seemed temporary. And it is.
Preventing TOPs
Biology
taught me that once the egg was fertilised it meant human life. At college medical
ethics was taught by a saintly Franciscan who once said we must believe in hell
but not that anyone is in it.
The issue with abortion was whether the mother or child should be let live if
they endangered one another's lives. The Church dictated that the child is
sacred being the future of humanity. But doctors had difficulty with allowing
women to die. Occasionally it happened. Not necessarily due to Church teaching.
Older women after a dozen births were vulnerable. The ethics lecturer when the
matter was raised admitted that since it was not strictly dogma it was a matter
of conscience. But advised us not to say that if the question came up in exams.
It never did. The professors had more sense.
Although I found aborting the mother an abomination, I felt all human life
should be allowed to live. The only honourable solution to this Cornelian dilemma
was to prevent the birth. But
contraceptives in Ireland were illegal (though readily available across the Ulster
border). In the mid-sixties I was on the train to Belfast where feminists went
to bring back condoms for public demonstrates in Dublin. Actually, I was with
the rowing team. But we cheered them along. Contraception took thirty years to
become Irish law. By then the average three children per family was closer to
England than political priests liked to admit. Abortions, traditionally
transferred to England, had fallen in number and indeed were to become legal in
Ireland after two referendums. If they were banned as recently in America the
danger is that with the political outrage the cart of terminating pregnancies
(TOPs) is put before the horse of contraception. Preventing the need for
abortions and not banning them is surely the salient issue.
Augustus,
James Joyce and Frank Norris
“I
went to the same Jesuit school as James Joyce, for a truncated term. I wasn’t
expelled for secreting a copy of Ulysses under the floorboards. I did a
runner when supposed to be attend a violin lesson in Dublin. I heard JJ’s name
mentioned only once. My English teacher, Father Condon, gave him as an example
of a writer who exploited real people’s lives for art’s sake, and recommended
we read Frank Norris’s McTeague instead. (Advice which puzzled us. There
were two Teagues in the class. One subsequently became a dentist like Norris’s
main character). Fr Conlon’s scorning fell on deaf ears. Youthful readers like
nothing better than when the dirt is being dished. Nevertheless, a pity he
didn’t tell us about Erich von Stroheim’s silent film version of McTeague,
Greed (1925). It was shown in a cinema Joyce briefly managed”.
Father’s Day (3rd Sunday in
June)
In France Mother’s Day was introduced by the
Vichy regime. Father’s Day was started by a cigarette-lighter firm in 1949. Sam
Beckett would have been pleased, though was not known to be a father.
I
must be the only Irish writer of my generation who threw up a chance to
encounter Samuel Beckett in Paris. I had a letter of introduction from Brian
Coffey, an intimate, and threw it into the Seine on recalling the numerous
articles I read of such visits.
Beckett
would be reticent, but courteous. He’d take the acolyte out for a pint. If
you’re a drinker, keeping up with his consumption means you forget what he
said, if anything. Fellow smokers invariably remember intense conversations
about their lighters. Sam was a fan of pre-Zippo zippers, but had no time for
the new disposable type. Particularly the French-produced Cricket. ‘They know
nothing about the game’. However, as I only use matches to light my pipe, we’d
have nothing to talk about. I was glad to get back to reading From an
Abandoned Work.
P(l)ay it Safe
Mrs Thatcher
invented the security business. ‘Buy-your-own-house’ came with a company deal.
it expanded in every direction. The fanfares of my youth didn’t have accidents
in the chairoplanes or high dips. In the 90s, they became regular back page news.
the internet is security’s apotheosis.
In my paper today a
company was launched to provide plastic covers to protect drinks from GHB
(being spiked on innocents). Capitalism’s ultimate will be to reinvent the
elixir, at caviar prices. You can hear the opera Love Your Con online.
Technology was
intended to serve people. now we serve it.
And while the fat
cats of industry make themselves and their investors richer by replacing staff
with artificial intelligence, life for most of us is reduced to slaves who are
trained by the whip:
Losing out to robots
is now sadly my lot.
The password that I’ve got,
a gordian with knots,
won’t cut it. I am not
quick enough with the tot.
I’ve been blacklisted by Amazon because a robot advised
that I should change
my password (for an unspecified reason). But I
couldn’t complete the security requirement as my mobile phone hasn’t a devise
to tap in order to ‘confirm’ I’m me. Is it a ruse to get me to buy a smart
phone?
Mosquitoes are abroad and deterrent sprays are
advised. The latest security stupidity is making them only work at right
angles. It would require a second pair of hands to achieve this for back
protection. The declared reason for this is that it does not risk the bottle
exploding. Although tested in manufacturers laboratories, there have been no
known damage to clients using free-focus sprays. The real risk is for those who
do not have a ready companion is malaria or dengue fever.
Phone Smarting
As they walk blindly what are they looking for
in their i-pods? The young people frighten me with the whites of their eyes in
close focus, staring downwards and not knowing where they’re going, plunging
further into a miniscule screen. They never stop to take in their surroundings,
and clench the plastic thing cheek and jowl with an anxiety for fear of losing
contact. All around them the world rotates but their world is flat, and they
are walking towards the edge of an inner clifftop. I keep asking the same
question, what do they see?