Myles Away From Dublin (9 page)

In this season of thought and recollection I think I will write about writing. It may seem a silly subject but it is far from that. In fact writing is very important. As they say in Latin, the written word remains. Generally this is not true of the spoken word. But if the spoken word is repeated often enough, it is eventually written and thus made permanent – or in the photographer’s sense, ‘fixed’ for good. Many a decent man who has written a bad cheque knows the truth of that.

A great many people who perhaps have not given the subject much thought are quite mistaken on this subject of literacy, or the ability to read and write. Nowadays nearly everybody can do that, yet this universal competence is scarcely a century old. And indeed I must withdraw that word ‘universal’. The last competent estimate made said that 60 per cent of the world’s population (or 820,000,000 persons) were illiterate. A side-detail is that in any illiterate community, far more females than males have that bookless failing. There are still enormous tracts of this earth to which what we call democracy has not penetrated, and where ‘equality of the sexes’ would be regarded as a painful joke.

Yet that situation is not uniformly glum. Writing, typing, mechanical dictation or even printing does not necessarily confer wisdom on that character who calls himself
homo
sapiens.
Sometimes one or other of those arts merely proves that he is an ass. I am sure our venerable Censorship Board will bear me out there. Their point is that it is a pity he never learnt the other art of shutting up.

This subject is recondite, even mysterious. Before people who can claim to be reasonably civilised learnt to read and write, and certainly long before they had been suborned into taking notice of that chatterbox, the radio set, they had other resources now long fallen into disuse. They had impeccable memories. They could buy or sell a beast at a fair with absolutely nothing in writing. It may be that they could not read or understand a word on the bank notes which changed hands, but anybody who tried to speak decorously and decently, knew their prayers, and had always an acute political sense. Even if they are so backward as to be able to make nothing of the figures on the calendar on the wall, too well they know the day of the week it is, the year and even the century. The
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
is not too far ahead of them at all.

A handy example of this phenomenon is still to be found in Ireland, though the sinister National Schools tend to erode it. I mean the Gaeltacht areas which still tenuously survive here. Far from being an insult, it is a compliment to say that the really older people are illiterate; yet they can speak accurately, frequently with a strange felicity, which is probably the most highly inflected language still spoken in Europe (or anywhere else for that matter) and can recite tales which take a week of nights in the telling. They do not appear to the stranger to be under any disability. Even when they catch some sickness – which they rarely do – usually they do not have to send for a doctor. They know the cure, too, horrified though the doctor might be if he heard what it was. These utterly self-sufficient mammals are gradually disappearing, even from the ruder and braver parts of our country. Thanks be to goodness, we have still a good way to go before we are in the same shape as the good people of Britain, where it was discovered, on the introduction of socialised medicine, that nearly everybody was sick.

It would be an interesting task for some indefatigable researcher (not me, not today) to try to investigate the effect of the printed word on any given country’s political and social norm. In Germany Hitler’s initial impact on the people was not with revolvers,
machine-guns
or nooses but with fountain pen and typewriter. He knew that the mind was a more important target than the body at the beginning, though, as one who at the start, and equipped with doubtful German, gingerly made my way through
Mein
Kampf
, I kept wondering whether he was trying to bulldoze the nation or reform it. He was by no means the first demagogue, however, to be incoherent.

This subject of writing has recently been otherwise in the news. A group of Protestant divines in Britain have issued a ‘modern’ re-write of the New Testament. I confess I have not read it but have seen several extracts from the text in responsible London papers denouncing it. One witty commentator recalled that Hamlet had not been written by any committee. This remark is more apt than may at first appear, for if the English of the Bible as heretofore accepted is archaic, how about Shakespeare himself? Should Robert Graves, the new Professor of English at Oxford, re-write Hamlet or, as the Americans might say, louse it up? Or why not put Homer’s work into the broken-up jargon that is modern Greek?

The foregoing is a rather elaborate way of revealing that I have just written a book myself. That may give the reader some notion of how disoccupied I am. I did this job, on top of sundry other chores, in exactly eight weeks, and I claim that that alone is evidence of considerable industry.

Will it be published? Yes indeed, possibly this year. What is it about? That question is foolish. We modern writers have moved away from the ancient idea that a book must be
about
something. What do you expect to
get for your fifteen bob anyway? A scheme for growing tomatoes in window boxes? How to make your own TV set? Heavens – a plot?

Are your friends as good as MY friends? I can discern the nod of assent but doubt it. My own friends are far better, they are famous people and they are all dead.

Who, you may ask, are those friends of mine, and why are they dead?

It is a fair question. They are dead because, had they lived, they would have been very old and would have died anyway from extreme old age and decrepitude.

One of my friends is Shakespeare.

Is that enough? Do I have to add that another is Homer? Horace I claim as an acquaintance. Father Peter O’Leary was a cousin on the mother’s side, and Rabelais was supposed to have been a great-great-
great-great
uncle.

My science of friendship is capable of unlimited expansion. Any second-hand bookshop is all I need to make still another new friend. Even my wife
occasionally
brings home a new pal in her handbag, though her associates are not necessarily mine. Indeed, I find it hard to get on with some of them, being uneasy in their presence and not understanding wholly the English that they talk. I cannot make head or tail of Edgar Wallace, for example, and Ethel M. Dell is to me an utter mystery. Trollope? Yes, he lives nearby and we exchange coldish nods. Believe it or not, one of my choicest butties is Alexander Pope. The only man I cannot stick at all is Oliver Goldsmith. I cannot quite understand my dislike here. Goldsmith was a decent man and did his best to write good English but I have absolutely failed to get fond of him. Plain hatred is what
I entertain for Sir Samuel Ferguson. His
Lays
of
the
Gael
and
Gall
is a disgusting anthology, a monument of home-made decay. A terrible rage boils up within me if anybody within my hearing mentions Wordsworth. I cannot comprehend why that man was ever called into existence. I take the easy course of assuming he is an absurdity and possibly never lived at all, being invented by some person with an imagination on the macabre side. It is inconceivable that he had a mother, for all women are intrinsically virtuous.

And will your heart fail, good reader, if I mention Sir Walter Scott? I read his autobiography once upon a time and am not yet the better of that experience. He explained to me in quite unnecessary detail that he had once accidentally managed to owe another person £100,000, and then proceeded to pay this sum off. He succeeded but did not eat much food for many years. In this interval he wrote the terrifying Waverley Novels, causing several persons who never hurt him to incur the disease known as dementia.

Recently I passed by a book-shop in Nassau Street Dublin, except I didn’t pass by. Unhappily, I paused. The damned sixpenny barrow lured me. I am fatally fond of big thick, fat books. They seem great value, irrespective of content.

At this sixpenny barrow I bought the autobiography, in two volumes, of Henry Taylor. When I got the books home, I weighed them on my wife’s balance in the kitchen and they weigh four and a quarter pounds. I have never heard of Henry Taylor but the books were published in 1885 by Longmans, Green and Co. I have not read Mr Taylor’s account of himself but a furtive glance at one volume gives me the suspicion that this man was a poet, or thought he was. A frontispiece portrait shows him looking very old and sporting an
enormous white wig. Why did he waste so much valuable time growing so very old and writing that poetry that nobody nowadays reads and probably never read?

The subtitle of the first volume intrigues me. Just this modest phrase – ‘Vol. I: 1800–1844’. Forty-four years of abject futility, squeezed into one volume, weighing over two pounds avoirdupois.

A question the reader may ask is ‘What do you mean by “the yoke”?’ Let us go to the dictionary for the answer.

‘YOKE – from a root (Latin
jungo
, I join) meaning to join. A part of the gear or tackle of draught animals, particularly oxen, passing across their necks; a pair of draught animals yoked together; something resembling a yoke in form or use; a frame to fit the neck and shoulders of a person for carrying pails or the like; fig. servitude, slavery.’

The early motor car was known as ‘the horseless carriage’ and that is why the car came to be known, at least in Ireland, as the yoke. My thoughts on the yoke this week arose from a conversation I had with an intelligent and educated man, himself a yoke-owner, who flabbergasted me by saying that the motor car had been invented by Henry Ford. It is an astonishing fact that most car-owners are nearly totally ignorant about their cars – a fact, alas, which some ruffianly garage owners turn to good account. I have heard of one such man who sold a charming lady who drove up in a Volkswagen (which is air-cooled) a tin of anti-freeze fluid. One other new VW owner, asked by a friend how the car was going, said it was going very well. ‘Don’t mention this to a soul,’ he added, ‘but I have made a discovery.
There
is
no
engine
in
it!
’

The first ‘horseless carriage’ was not the motor car as we know it. A Frenchman named Cugot built about 1771 road carriages operated by steam. In the years which followed, many others throughout the world made their own steam cars. But from 1831 the English parliament
decided that those vehicles were unpleasant and
dangerous
and enacted the notorious Red Flag laws which compelled anybody driving a steam road carriage to be preceded by a man carrying a red flag by day or a red lantern by night. Other crippling disabilities such as penal tolls exacted by highway authorities practically killed the steam car in Britain, and the law establishing the spectre with the red flag was not repealed until 1896.

But in Germany and France the possibilities of the internal combustion engine were under study. About 1885 Gottlieb Daimler in Germany patented his
high-speed
internal combustion engine, and is commonly credited with being the inventor of the motor car, fundamentally as we know it. But there is some dispute here. Karl Benz and Siegfried Marcus are credited with having built comparable vehicles about the same time. The truth is that the motor car was not invented by any individual but was the result of the talent of many men over a long space of time.

Ford’s first car appeared in 1893; by 1940 the company had produced more than 28,000,000 cars. His great achievement was to invent mass production on the assembly-line system, and he deserves a special article to himself; he was a crank who made crankshafts.

The motor car, in its extreme youth, was commonly regarded with naked hostility; it frightened horses and even frightened people because in its early days its gear system was such that when it encountered a steep hill, it had to ascend it backwards. At best, enlightened people regarded it as an ingenious toy. It is curious that the primitive cars were regarded by many as a means of sport and racing, not until much later to be accepted as a means of fast, everyday transport for man and goods.

Its coming entailed, at least in what are called
civilised communities, a real and spectacular revolution, the more so when one remembers that the aeroplane was the son of the motor car. And it was not merely a mechanical revolution. The car had a formidable social impact. One of the early objections to it was that it raised blinding clouds of dust in dry weather. The thoroughfares of long ago were not roads at all in the present sense. The car created the modern road. It enabled people to live away from slums and city congestion and brought into being whole new
communities
.

A social change? Some people think that the motor car is, possibly next to gunpowder, the greatest curse which has ever descended on mankind. They hold that a yoke is as directly related to strong liquor as is a glass and that all car drivers are nearly always stotious. That is great exaggeration but it is true that death and injury attributable to the yoke, while reducible with care on everybody’s part, is inevitable. Danger is implicit in any sort of movement. In London resides a valuable body known as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. Where has it been statistically established that most accidents, fatal and otherwise, happen?

In the home. The sad fact is that we are mortal and are safe nowhere. Even if the extreme step of bringing back the man with the red flag were taken, I’m sure there would be a fatal accident. The yoke following him would run him down and kill him.