Buchhandlung

A visit I paid to the house of a newly-married friend the other day set me thinking. My friend is a man of great wealth and vulgarity. When he had set about buying bedsteads, tables, chairs and what-not, it occurred to him to buy also a library. Whether he can read or not, I do not know, but some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their house. So he bought several book-cases and paid some rascally middleman to stuff them with all manner of new books, some of them very costly volumes on the subject of French landscape painting.

I noticed on my visit that not one of them had ever been opened or touched, and remarked the fact.

'When I get settled down properly,' said the fool, 'I'll have to catch up on my reading.'

This is what set me thinking. Why should a wealthy person like this be put to the trouble of pretending to read at all? Why not a professional book-handler to go in and suitably maul his library for so-much per shelf? Such a person, if properly qualified, could make a fortune.

Dog ears four-a-penny

Let me explain exactly what I mean. The wares in a bookshop look completely unread. On the other hand, a school-boy's Latin dictionary looks read to the point of tatters. You know that the dictionary has been opened and scanned perhaps a million times, and if you did not know that there was such a thing as a box on the ear, you would conclude that the boy is crazy about Latin and cannot bear to be away from his dictionary. Similarly with our non-brow who wants his friends to infer from a glancing around his house that he is a high-brow. He buys an enormous book on the Russian ballet, written possibly in the language of that distant but beautiful land. Our problem is to alter the book in a reasonably short time so that anybody looking at it will conclude that its owner has practically lived, supped and slept with it for many months. You can, if you like, talk about designing a machine driven by a small but efficient petrol motor that would 'read' any book in five minutes, the equivalent of five years or ten years' 'reading' being obtained merely by turning a knob. This, however, is the cheap soulless approach of the times we live in. No machine can do the same work as the soft human fingers. The trained and experienced book-handler is the only real solution of this contemporary social problem. What does he do? How does he work? What would he charge? How many types of handling would there be?

These questions and many more I will answer the day after tomorrow.

* * *

The World of Books

Yes, this question of book-handling. The other day I had a word to say about the necessity of the professional book-handler, a person who will maul the books of illiterate, but wealthy, upstarts so that the books will look as if they have been read and re-read by their owners. How many uses of mauling would there be? Without giving the matter much thought, I should say four. Supposing an experienced handler is asked to quote for the handling of one shelf of books four feet in length. He would quote thus under four heads: --

'Popular Handling -- each volume to be well and truly handled, four leaves in each to be dog-eared, and a tram ticket, cloak-room docket or other comparable article inserted in each as a forgotten book-mark. Say £1 7s 6d. Five per cent discount for civil servants.'

'Premier Handling -- Each volume to be thoroughly handled, eight leaves in each to be dog-eared, a suitable passage in not less than 25 volumes to be underlined in red pencil, and a leaflet in French on the works of Victor Hugo to be inserted as a forgotten book-mark in each. Say, £2 17s 6d. Five per cent discount for literary university students, civil servants and lady social workers.'

A Rate to Suit all Purses

The great thing about this graduated scale is that no person need appear ignorant or unlettered merely because he or she is poor. Not every vulgar person, remember, is wealthy, although I could name...

But no matter. Let us get on to the more expensive grades of handling> The next is well worth the extra money.

'De Luxe Handling -- each volume to be mauled savagely, the spines of the smaller volumes to be damaged in a manner that will give the impression that they have been carried around in pockets, a passage in every volume to be underlined in red pencil with an exclamation or interrogation mark inserted in the margin opposite, an old Gate Theatre programme to be inserted in each volume as a forgotten book-mark (3 per cent discount if old Abbey programmes are accepted), not less than 30 volumes to be treated with old coffee, tea, porter or whiskey stains, and not less than five volumes to be inscribed with forged signatures of the authors. Five per cent discount for bank managers, country surveyors and the heads of business houses employing not less than 35 hands. Dog-ears extra and inserted accrding to instructions, twopence per half dozen per volume. Quotations for alternative old Paris theatre programmes on demand. This service available for a limited time only, nett, £7 18s 3d.'

Order Your Copy Now

The fourth class is the Handling Superb, although it is not called that -- Le Traitement Superbe being the more usual title. It is so superb that I have no space for it today. It will appear here on Monday next, and, in honour of the occasion, the Irish Times on that day will be printed on hand-scutched antique interwoven demidevilled superfine Dutch paper, each copy to be signed by myself and to be accompanied by an exquisite picture in tri-colour lithograph of the Old House in College Green. The least you can do is to order your copy in advance.

And one more word. It is not sufficient just to order your copy. Order it in advance.

* * *

It will be remembered (how, in Heaven's name, could it be forgotten) that I was discoursing on Friday last on the subject of book-handling, my new service, which enables ignorant people who want to be suspected of reading books to have their books handled and mauled in a manner that will give the impression that their owner is very devoted to them. I described three grades of handling and promised to explain what you get under Class Four -- the Superb Handling, or the Traitement Superbe, as we lads who spent our honeymoon in Paris prefer to call it. It is the dearest of them all, of course, but far cheaper than dirt when you consider the amount of prestige you will gain in the eyes of your ridiculous friends. Here are the details:

'Le Traitement Superbe'. Every volume to be well and truly handled, first by a qualified handler and subsequently be a master-handler who shall have to his credit not less than 550 handling hours; suitable passages in not less than fifty per cent of the books to be underlined in good-quality red ink and an appropriate phrase from the following list inserted in the margin, viz:

Rubbish!
Yes, indeed!
How true, how true!
I don't agree at all.
Why?
Yes, but cf. Homer, Od. iii, 151.
Well, well, well.
Quite, but Boussuet in his Discours sur l'histoire Universellehas already established the same point and given much more forceful explanations.
Nonsense, nonsense!
A point well taken!
But why in heaven's name?
I remember poor Joyce saying the very same thing to me.

Need I say that a special quotation may be obtained at any time for the supply of Special and Exclusive Phrases? The extra charge is not very much, really.

Furthermore

That, of course, is not all. Listen to this:

'Not less than six volumes to be inscribed with forged messages of affection and gratitude from the author of each work, e.g.,

'To my old friend and fellow-writer, A.B., in affectionate remembrance, from George Moore.'

'In grateful recognition of your great kindness to me, dear A.B., I send you this copy of The Crock of Gold. Your old friend, James Stephens.'

'Well, A.B., both of us are getting on. I am supposed to be a good writer now, but i am not old enough to forget the infinite patience you displayed in the old days when guiding my young feet on the path of literature. Accept this further book, poor as it may be, and please believe that I remain, as ever, your friend and admirer, G. Bernard Shaw.'

'From your devoted friend and follower, K. Marx.;

'Dear A.B., -- Your invaulable suggestions and assistance, not to mention yoyr kindness, in entirely re-writing chapter 3, entitles you, surely, to this first copy of "Tess". From your old friend T. Hardy.'

'Short of the great pleasure of seeing you personally, I can only send you, A.B., this copy of "The Nigger". I miss your company more than I can say . . . (signature indecipherable).'

Under the last inscription, the moron who owns the book will be asked to write (and shown how if necessary) the phrase 'Poor old Conrad was not the worst.'

All this has taken me longer to say than I thought. there is far more than this to be had for the paltry £32 7s 6d that the Superb Handling will cost you. In a day or two I hope to explain about the old letters which are inserted in some of the books by way of forgotten book-marks, every one of them an exquisite piece of forgery. Order your copy now!

* * *

Book Handling

I promised to say a little more about the fourth, or Superb, grade of book handling.

The price I quoted includes the insertion in not less than ten volumes of certain old letters, apparently used at one time as bookmarks, and forgotten. Each letter will bear the purported signature of some well-known humbug who is associated with ballet, verse-mouthing, folk-dancing, wood-cutting, or some other such activity that is sufficiently free from rules to attract the non-brows in their swarms. Each of the letters will be a flawless forgery and will thank A.B., the owner of the book, for his 'very kind interest in our work', refer to his 'invaluable advice and guidance', his unrivalled knowledge' ofthe lep-as-lep-can game, his 'patient and skilful direction of the corps on Monday night', thank him for his very generous - too geneorous - subscription of two hundred guineas, 'which is appreciated more than I can say'. As an up-to-the-minute inducement, an extra letter will be included free of charge. it will be signed (or purport to be signed) by one or other of the noisier young non-nationals who are honouring our beautiful land with their presence. This will satisfy the half-ambition of the majority of respectable vulgarians to maintain a second establishment in that somewhat congested thoroughfare, Queer Street.

The gentlemen who are associated with me in the Dublin WAAMA League have realised that this is the off-season for harvesting the cash of simple people through the medium of the art-infected begging letter, and have turned their attention to fresh fields and impostures new. The latest racket we have on hands is the Myles na gCopaleen Book Club. You join this and are spared the nerve-racking bother of choosing your own books. We do the choosing for you, and when you get the book, it is ready-rubbed, ie, subjected free of charge to our expert handlers. You are spared the trouble of soiling and mauling it to give your friends the impression that you can read. An odd banned book will be slipped in for those who like conversation such as: --

'I say, did you read this, old man?'
'I'm not terribly certain that i did, really.'
'It's banned, you know, old boy.'
'Ow.'

There is no nonsense about completing a form, asking for a brochure, or any other such irritation. You just send in your guinea and you immediately partipate in this great cultural uprising of the Irish people.


- Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles, 17-23.

A Painful Case

MR. JAMES DUFFY lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious. He lived in an old sombre house and from his windows he could look into the disused distillery or upwards along the shallow river on which Dublin is built. The lofty walls of his uncarpeted room were free from pictures. He had himself bought every article of furniture in the room: a black iron bedstead, an iron washstand, four cane chairs, a clothes- rack, a coal-scuttle, a fender and irons and a square table on which lay a double desk. A bookcase had been made in an alcove by means of shelves of white wood. The bed was clothed with white bedclothes and a black and scarlet rug covered the foot. A little hand-mirror hung above the washstand and during the day a white-shaded lamp stood as the sole ornament of the mantelpiece. The books on the white wooden shelves were arranged from below upwards according to bulk. A complete Wordsworth stood at one end of the lowest shelf and a copy of the Maynooth Catechism, sewn into the cloth cover of a notebook, stood at one end of the top shelf. Writing materials were always on the desk. In the desk lay a manuscript translation of Hauptmann's Michael Kramer, the stage directions of which were written in purple ink, and a little sheaf of papers held together by a brass pin. In these sheets a sentence was inscribed from time to time and, in an ironical moment, the headline of an advertisement for Bile Beans had been pasted on to the first sheet. On lifting the lid of the desk a faint fragrance escaped -- the fragrance of new cedarwood pencils or of a bottle of gum or of an overripe apple which might have been left there and forgotten.

Mr. Duffy abhorred anything which betokened physical or mental disorder. A medival doctor would have called him saturnine. His face, which carried the entire tale of his years, was of the brown tint of Dublin streets. On his long and rather large head grew dry black hair and a tawny moustache did not quite cover an unamiable mouth. His cheekbones also gave his face a harsh character; but there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glasses. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. He never gave alms to beggars and walked firmly, carrying a stout hazel.

He had been for many years cashier of a private bank in Baggot Street. Every morning he came in from Chapelizod by tram. At midday he went to Dan Burke's and took his lunch -- a bottle of lager beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits. At four o'clock he was set free. He dined in an eating-house in George's Street where he felt himself safe from the society o Dublin's gilded youth and where there was a certain plain honesty in the bill of fare. His evenings were spent either before his landlady's piano or roaming about the outskirts of the city. His liking for Mozart's music brought him sometimes to an opera or a concert: these were the only dissipations of his life.

He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his spiritual life without any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and escorting them to the cemetery when they died. He performed these two social duties for old dignity's sake but conceded nothing further to the conventions which regulate the civic life. He allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his hank but, as these circumstances never arose, his life rolled out evenly -- an adventureless tale.

One evening he found himself sitting beside two ladies in the Rotunda. The house, thinly peopled and silent, gave distressing prophecy of failure. The lady who sat next him looked round at the deserted house once or twice and then said:

"What a pity there is such a poor house tonight! It's so hard on people to have to sing to empty benches."

He took the remark as an invitation to talk. He was surprised that she seemed so little awkward. While they talked he tried to fix her permanently in his memory. When he learned that the young girl beside her was her daughter he judged her to be a year or so younger than himself. Her face, which must have been handsome, had remained intelligent. It was an oval face with strongly marked features. The eyes were very dark blue and steady. Their gaze began with a defiant note but was confused by what seemed a deliberate swoon of the pupil into the iris, revealing for an instant a temperament of great sensibility. The pupil reasserted itself quickly, this half- disclosed nature fell again under the reign of prudence, and her astrakhan jacket, moulding a bosom of a certain fullness, struck the note of defiance more definitely.

He met her again a few weeks afterwards at a concert in Earlsfort Terrace and seized the moments when her daughter's attention was diverted to become intimate. She alluded once or twice to her husband but her tone was not such as to make the allusion a warning. Her name was Mrs. Sinico. Her husband's great-great-grandfather had come from Leghorn. Her husband was captain of a mercantile boat plying between Dublin and Holland; and they had one child.

Meeting her a third time by accident he found courage to make an appointment. She came. This was the first of many meetings; they met always in the evening and chose the most quiet quarters for their walks together. Mr. Duffy, however, had a distaste for underhand ways and, finding that they were compelled to meet stealthily, he forced her to ask him to her house. Captain Sinico encouraged his visits, thinking that his daughter's hand was in question. He had dismissed his wife so sincerely from his gallery of pleasures that he did not suspect that anyone else would take an interest in her. As the husband was often away and the daughter out giving music lessons Mr. Duffy had many opportunities of enjoying the lady's society. Neither he nor she had had any such adventure before and neither was conscious of any incongruity. Little by little he entangled his thoughts with hers. He lent her books, provided her with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. She listened to all.

Sometimes in return for his theories she gave out some fact of her own life. With almost maternal solicitude she urged him to let his nature open to the full: she became his confessor. He told her that for some time he had assisted at the meetings of an Irish Socialist Party where he had felt himself a unique figure amidst a score of sober workmen in a garret lit by an inefficient oil-lamp. When the party had divided into three sections, each under its own leader and in its own garret, he had discontinued his attendances. The workmen's discussions, he said, were too timorous; the interest they took in the question of wages was inordinate. He felt that they were hard-featured realists and that they resented an exactitude which was the produce of a leisure not within their reach. No social revolution, he told her, would be likely to strike Dublin for some centuries.

She asked him why did he not write out his thoughts. For what, he asked her, with careful scorn. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty seconds? To submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impresarios?

He went often to her little cottage outside Dublin; often they spent their evenings alone. Little by little, as their thoughts entangled, they spoke of subjects less remote. Her companionship was like a warm soil about an exotic. Many times she allowed the dark to fall upon them, refraining from lighting the lamp. The dark discreet room, their isolation, the music that still vibrated in their ears united them. This union exalted him, wore away the rough edges of his character, emotionalised his mental life. Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own. The end of these discourses was that one night during which she had shown every sign of unusual excitement, Mrs. Sinico caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek.

Mr. Duffy was very much surprised. Her interpretation of his words disillusioned him. He did not visit her for a week, then he wrote to her asking her to meet him. As he did not wish their last interview to be troubled by the influence of their ruined confessional they meet in a little cakeshop near the Parkgate. It was cold autumn weather but in spite of the cold they wandered up and down the roads of the Park for nearly three hours. They agreed to break off their intercourse: every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow. When they came out of the Park they walked in silence towards the tram; but here she began to tremble so violently that, fearing another collapse on her part, he bade her good-bye quickly and left her. A few days later he received a parcel containing his books and music.

Four years passed. Mr. Duffy returned to his even way of life. His room still bore witness of the orderliness of his mind. Some new pieces of music encumbered the music-stand in the lower room and on his shelves stood two volumes by Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science. He wrote seldom in the sheaf of papers which lay in his desk. One of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs. Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse. He kept away from concerts lest he should meet her. His father died; the junior partner of the bank retired. And still every morning he went into the city by tram and every evening walked home from the city after having dined moderately in George's Street and read the evening paper for dessert.

One evening as he was about to put a morsel of corned beef and cabbage into his mouth his hand stopped. His eyes fixed themselves on a paragraph in the evening paper which he had propped against the water-carafe. He replaced the morsel of food on his plate and read the paragraph attentively. Then he drank a glass of water, pushed his plate to one side, doubled the paper down before him between his elbows and read the paragraph over and over again. The cabbage began to deposit a cold white grease on his plate. The girl came over to him to ask was his dinner not properly cooked. He said it was very good and ate a few mouthfuls of it with difficulty. Then he paid his bill and went out.

He walked along quickly through the November twilight, his stout hazel stick striking the ground regularly, the fringe of the buff Mail peeping out of a side-pocket of his tight reefer overcoat. On the lonely road which leads from the Parkgate to Chapelizod he slackened his pace. His stick struck the ground less emphatically and his breath, issuing irregularly, almost with a sighing sound, condensed in the wintry air. When he reached his house he went up at once to his bedroom and, taking the paper from his pocket, read the paragraph again by the failing light of the window. He read it not aloud, but moving his lips as a priest does when he reads the prayers Secreto. This was the paragraph:

DEATH OF A LADY AT SYDNEY PARADE
A PAINFUL CASE
Today at the City of Dublin Hospital the Deputy Coroner (in the absence of Mr. Leverett) held an inquest on the body of Mrs. Emily Sinico, aged forty-three years, who was killed at Sydney Parade Station yesterday evening. The evidence showed that the deceased lady, while attempting to cross the line, was knocked down by the engine of the ten o'clock slow train from Kingstown, thereby sustaining injuries of the head and right side which led to her death.

James Lennon, driver of the engine, stated that he had been in the employment of the railway company for fifteen years. On hearing the guard's whistle he set the train in motion and a second or two afterwards brought it to rest in response to loud cries. The train was going slowly.

P. Dunne, railway porter, stated that as the train was about to start he observed a woman attempting to cross the lines. He ran towards her and shouted, but, before he could reach her, she was caught by the buffer of the engine and fell to the ground.

A juror. "You saw the lady fall?"

Witness. "Yes."

Police Sergeant Croly deposed that when he arrived he found the deceased lying on the platform apparently dead. He had the body taken to the waiting-room pending the arrival of the ambulance.

Constable 57 corroborated.

Dr. Halpin, assistant house surgeon of the City of Dublin Hospital, stated that the deceased had two lower ribs fractured and had sustained severe contusions of the right shoulder. The right side of the head had been injured in the fall. The injuries were not sufficient to have caused death in a normal person. Death, in his opinion, had been probably due to shock and sudden failure of the heart's action.

Mr. H. B. Patterson Finlay, on behalf of the railway company, expressed his deep regret at the accident. The company had always taken every precaution to prevent people crossing the lines except by the bridges, both by placing notices in every station and by the use of patent spring gates at level crossings. The deceased had been in the habit of crossing the lines late at night from platform to platform and, in view of certain other circumstances of the case, he did not think the railway officials were to blame.

Captain Sinico, of Leoville, Sydney Parade, husband of the deceased, also gave evidence. He stated that the deceased was his wife. He was not in Dublin at the time of the accident as he had arrived only that morning from Rotterdam. They had been married for twenty-two years and had lived happily until about two years ago when his wife began to be rather intemperate in her habits.

Miss Mary Sinico said that of late her mother had been in the habit of going out at night to buy spirits. She, witness, had often tried to reason with her mother and had induced her to join a League. She was not at home until an hour after the accident. The jury returned a verdict in accordance with the medical evidence and exonerated Lennon from all blame.

The Deputy Coroner said it was a most painful case, and expressed great sympathy with Captain Sinico and his daughter. He urged on the railway company to take strong measures to prevent the possibility of similar accidents in the future. No blame attached to anyone.



Mr. Duffy raised his eyes from the paper and gazed out of his window on the cheerless evening landscape. The river lay quiet beside the empty distillery and from time to time a light appeared in some house on the Lucan road. What an end! The whole narrative of her death revolted him and it revolted him to think that he had ever spoken to her of what he held sacred. The threadbare phrases, the inane expressions of sympathy, the cautious words of a reporter won over to conceal the details of a commonplace vulgar death attacked his stomach. Not merely had she degraded herself; she had degraded him. He saw the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous. His soul's companion! He thought of the hobbling wretches whom he had seen carrying cans and bottles to be filled by the barman. Just God, what an end! Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilisation has been reared. But that she could have sunk so low! Was it possible he had deceived himself so utterly about her? He remembered her outburst of that night and interpreted it in a harsher sense than he had ever done. He had no difficulty now in approving of the course he had taken.

As the light failed and his memory began to wander he thought her hand touched his. The shock which had first attacked his stomach was now attacking his nerves. He put on his overcoat and hat quickly and went out. The cold air met him on the threshold; it crept into the sleeves of his coat. When he came to the public-house at Chapelizod Bridge he went in and ordered a hot punch.

The proprietor served him obsequiously but did not venture to talk. There were five or six workingmen in the shop discussing the value of a gentleman's estate in County Kildare They drank at intervals from their huge pint tumblers and smoked, spitting often on the floor and sometimes dragging the sawdust over their spits with their heavy boots. Mr. Duffy sat on his stool and gazed at them, without seeing or hearing them. After a while they went out and he called for another punch. He sat a long time over it. The shop was very quiet. The proprietor sprawled on the counter reading the Herald and yawning. Now and again a tram was heard swishing along the lonely road outside.

As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two images in which he now conceived her, he realised that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease. He asked himself what else could he have done. He could not have carried on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have lived with her openly. He had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory -- if anyone remembered him.

It was after nine o'clock when he left the shop. The night was cold and gloomy. He entered the Park by the first gate and walked along under the gaunt trees. He walked through the bleak alleys where they had walked four years before. She seemed to be near him in the darkness. At moments he seemed to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his. He stood still to listen. Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces.

When he gained the crest of the Magazine Hill he halted and looked along the river towards Dublin, the lights of which burned redly and hospitably in the cold night. He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life's feast. One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame. He knew that the prostrate creatures down by the wall were watching him and wished him gone. No one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast. He turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river, winding along towards Dublin. Beyond the river he saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he heard in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name.

He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears. He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.


- James Joyce, 'A Painful Case', Dubliners, 1914.

Bookshop Memories

When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don't work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants a book for an invalid' (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn't remember the title or the author's name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. But apart from these there are two well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order them if necessary, for people who arranged to fetch them away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered books from us ever came back. It used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise over and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to return. But many of them, of course, were unmistakable paranoiacs. They used to talk in a grandiose manner about themselves and tell the most ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to come out of doors without any money — stories which, in many cases, I am sure they themselves believed. In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a glance. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside the books he asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment he had gone. None of them, I noticed, ever attempted to take books away without paying for them; merely to order them was enough — it gave them, I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real money.

Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also stamps — used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors are a strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. We also sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of them myself, but the people who bought them often came back and told us how ‘true’ their horoscopes had been. (Doubtless any horoscope seems ‘true’ if it tells you that you are highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.) We did a good deal of business in children's books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petrenius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we spent a feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It used to interest me to see the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: ‘2 doz. Infant Jesus with rabbits’.

But our principal sideline was a lending library — the usual ‘twopenny no-deposit’ library of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the book thieves must love those libraries! It is the easiest crime in the world to borrow a book at one shop for twopence, remove the label and sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless booksellers generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books stolen (we used to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers away by demanding a deposit.

Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors. Probably our library subscribers were a fair cross-section of London's reading public. It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was — Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel — the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel — seems to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our subscribers to my knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of trash (the pages read every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three quarters of an acre) was stored for ever in his memory. He took no notice of titles or author's names, but he could tell by merely glancing into a book whether be had ‘had it already’.

In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the ‘classical’ English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century novel people say, ‘Oh, but that's old!’ and shy away immediately. Yet it is always fairly easy to sell Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens is one of those authors whom people are ‘always meaning to’ read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand. People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar and that Mr Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the ‘back parts’ of the Lord. Another thing that is very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books. And another — the publishers get into a stew about this every two or three years — is the unpopularity of short stories. The kind of person who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly always starts by saying ‘I don't want short stories’, or ‘I do not desire little stories’, as a German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they sometimes explain that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of characters with every story; they like to ‘get into’ a novel which demands no further thought after the first chapter. I believe, though, that the writers are more to blame here than the readers. Most modern short stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and worthless, far more so than most novels. The short stories which are stories are popular enough, vide D. H. Lawrence, whose short stories are as popular as his novels.

Would I like to be a bookseller de métier? On the whole — in spite of my employer's kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop — no.

Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless one goes in for ‘rare’ books it is not a difficult trade to learn, and you start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides of books. (Most booksellers don't. You can get their measure by having a look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don't see an ad. for Boswell's Decline and Fall you are pretty sure to see one for The Mill on the Floss by T. S. Eliot.) Also it is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours of work are very long — I was only a part-time employee, but my employer put in a seventy-hour week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours to buy books — and it is an unhealthy life. As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too warm the windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books give off more and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading — in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl's Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.

- George Orwell, 'Bookshop Memories', 1936

How to Justify a Private Library

Generally speaking, from my childhood on, I have been always subjected to two (and only two) kinds of joke. "You're the one who always answers" and "You resound in valleys." All through my early years I believed that, by some strange chance, all the people I met were stupid. Then, having reached maturity, I was forced to conclude that there are two laws no human being can escape: the first idea that comes into a person's mind will be the most obvious one; and, having had an obvious idea, nobody ever thinks that others may have had the same idea before.

I possess a collection of review headlines, in all the languages of the Indo-European family, going all the way from "The Echo of Eco" to "A Book with Echoes." In the latter case I suspect the printed headline wasn't the first idea that came into the subeditor's mind. What probably happened was this: the editorial staff met, debated some twenty possible titles, and finally the managing editor's face lighted up and he said, "Hey, guys, I've had a fantastic idea!" And the others responded, "Boss, you're a devil! Where do you get them?" "It's a gift," he must have replied.

I'm not saying people are banal. Taking as divine inspiration, as a flash of originality, something that is obvious reveals a certain freshness of spirit, an enthusiasm for life and its unpredictability, a love of ideas -- small as they may be. I will always remember my first meeting with that great man Erving Goffman, whom I admired and loved for the genius and penetration with which he could identify infinitismal aspects of behaviour that had previously eluded everyone else. We were sitting at an outdoor cafe when, looking at the street for a while, he said, "You know something? I believe there are too many automobiles in circulation in our cities." Maybe he had never thought this before because he had far more important things to think about; he had just had a sudden epiphany and still had the mental freshness to express it. I, a little snob infected by the Unzeitgemaesse Betrachtungen of Nietzsche, would have hesitated to say it, even if I thought it.

A second shock of banality occurs to many people in my condition -- that is, people who possess a fairly sizeable library (large enough in my case that someone entering our house can't help but notice itl actually it takes up the whole place). The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" At first I thought that the question characterized only people who had scant familiarity with books, people accustomed to seeing a couple of shelves with five paperback mysteries and a children's encyclopedia, bought in installments. But experience has taught me that the same words can be uttered also by people above suspicion. It could be said that they are still people who consider a bookshelf as a mere storage space for already-read objects and do not think of the library as a working tool. But there is more to it than that. I believe that, confronted by a vast array of books, anyone will be seized by the anguish of learning, and will inevitably lapse into asking the question that expresses his torment and his remorse.

The problem is that when someone says, "Eco? You're the one who always answers," you can reply with a little laugh and, at most, if you want to be polite, with "That's a good one!" But the question about your books has to be answered, while your jaw stiffens and rivulets of cold sweat trickle down your spine. In the past I adopted a tone of contemptuous sarcasm. "I haven't read any of them; otherwise, why would I keep them here?" But this is a dangerous answer because it invites the obvious follow-up. "And where do you put them after you've read them?" The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office," a reply that on the one hand suggests a sublime ergonomic strategy, and on the other leads the visitor to hasten the moment of his departure.


- Umberto Eco, 1990

A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas'

The books that we re-read the oftenest are not always those that we admire the most; we choose and we re-visit them for many and various reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends. One or two of Scott's novels, Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, The Egoist, and the Vicomte de Bragelonne, form the inner circle of my intimates. Behind these comes a good troop of dear acquaintances; The Pilgrim's Progress in the front rank, The Bible in Spain not far behind. There are besides a certain number that look at me with reproach as I pass them by on my shelves: books that I once thumbed and studied: houses which were once like home to me, but where I now rarely visit. I am on these sad terms (and blush to confess it) with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns and Hazlitt. Last of all, there is the class of book that has its hour of brilliancy - glows, sings, charms, and then fades again into insignificance until the fit return. Chief of those who thus smile and frown on me by turns, I must name Virgil and Herrick, who, were they but

"Their sometime selves the same throughout the year,"

must have stood in the first company with the six names of my continual literary intimates. To these six, incongruous as they seem, I have long been faithful, and hope to be faithful to the day of death. I have never read the whole of Montaigne, but I do not like to be long without reading some of him, and my delight in what I do read never lessens. Of Shakespeare I have read all but Richard III, Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, and All's Well That Ends Well; and these, having already made all suitable endeavour, I now know that I shall never read - to make up for which unfaithfulness I could read much of the rest for ever. Of Moliere - surely the next greatest name of Christendom - I could tell a very similar story; but in a little corner of a little essay these princes are too much out of place, and I prefer to pay my fealty and pass on. How often I have read Guy Mannering, Rob Roy, or Redgauntlet, I have no means of guessing, having begun young. But it is either four or five times that I have read The Egoist, and either five or six that I have read the Vicomte de Bragelonne.

Some, who would accept the others, may wonder that I should have spent so much of this brief life of ours over a work so little famous as the last. And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my own devotion, but the coldness of the world. My acquaintance with the Vicomte began, somewhat indirectly, in the year of grace 1863, when I had the advantage of studying certain illustrated dessert plates in a hotel at Nice. The name of d'Artagnan in the legends I already saluted like an old friend, for I had met it the year before in a work of Miss Yonge's. My first perusal was in one of those pirated editions that swarmed at that time out of Brussels, and ran to such a troop of neat and dwarfish volumes. I understood but little of the merits of the book; my strongest memory is of the execution of d'Eymeric and Lyodot - a strange testimony to the dulness of a boy, who could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place de Greve, and forget d'Artagnan's visits to the two financiers. My next reading was in winter-time, when I lived alone upon the Pentlands. I would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the shepherd; a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly retriever scurry upstairs to fetch my slippers; and I would sit down with the Vicomte for a long, silent, solitary lamp-light evening by the fire. And yet I know not why I call it silent, when it was enlivened with such a clatter of horse-shoes, and such a rattle of musketry, and such a stir of talk; or why I call those evenings solitary in which I gained so many friends. I would rise from my book and pull the blind aside, and see the snow and the glittering hollies chequer a Scotch garden, and the winter moonlight brighten the white hills. Thence I would turn again to that crowded and sunny field of life in which it was so easy to forget myself, my cares, and my surroundings: a place busy as a city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and sounding with delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic into my slumbers, I woke with it unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge into the book again at breakfast, it was with a pang that I must lay it down and turn to my own labours; for no part of the world has ever seemed to me so charming as these pages, and not even my friends are quite so real, perhaps quite so dear, as d'Artagnan.

Since then I have been going to and fro at very brief intervals in my favourite book; and I have now just risen from my last (let me call it my fifth) perusal, having liked it better and admired it more seriously than ever. Perhaps I have a sense of ownership, being so well known in these six volumes. Perhaps I think that d'Artagnan delights to have me read of him, and Louis Quatorze is gratified, and Fouquet throws me a look, and Aramis, although he knows I do not love him, yet plays to me with his best graces, as to an old patron of the show. Perhaps, if I am not careful, something may befall me like what befell George IV. about the battle of Waterloo, and I may come to fancy the Vicomte one of the first, and Heaven knows the best, of my own works. At least, I avow myself a partisan; and when I compare the popularity of the Vicomte with that of Monte Cristo, or its own elder brother, the Trois Mousquetaires, I confess I am both pained and puzzled.

To those who have already made acquaintance with the titular hero in the pages of Vingt ans après, perhaps the name may act as a deterrent. A man might, well stand back if he supposed he were to follow, for six volumes, so well-conducted, so fine-spoken, and withal so dreary a cavalier as Bragelonne. But the fear is idle. I may be said to have passed the best years of my life in these six volumes, and my acquaintance with Raoul has never gone beyond a bow; and when he, who has so long pretended to be alive, is at last suffered to pretend to be dead, I am sometimes reminded of a saying in an earlier volume: "Enfin, dit Miss Stewart," - and it was of Bragelonne she spoke - "Enfin il a fait quelquechose: c'est, ma foi! bien hereux." I am reminded of it, as I say; and the next moment, when Athos dies of his death, and my dear d'Artagnan bursts into his storm of sobbing, I can but deplore my flippancy.

Or perhaps it is La Valliere that the reader of Vingt ans après is inclined to flee. Well, he is right there too, though not so right. Louise is no success. Her creator has spared no pains; she is well-meant, not ill-designed, sometimes has a word that rings out true; sometimes, if only for a breath, she may even engage our sympathies. But I have never envied the King his triumph. And so far from pitying Bragelonne for his defeat, I could wish him no worse (not for lack of malice, but imagination) than to be wedded to that lady. Madame enchants me; I can forgive that royal minx her most serious offences; I can thrill and soften with the King on that memorable occasion when he goes to upbraid and remains to flirt; and when it comes to the "Allons, aimez-moi donc," it is my heart that melts in the bosom of de Guiche. Not so with Louise. Readers cannot fail to have remarked that what an author tells us of the beauty or the charm of his creatures goes for nought; that we know instantly better; that the heroine cannot open her mouth but what, all in a moment, the fine phrases of preparation fall from round her like the robes from Cinderella, and she stands before us, self-betrayed, as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps a strapping market-woman. Authors, at least, know it well; a heroine will too often start the trick of "getting ugly;" and no disease is more difficult to cure. I said authors; but indeed I had a side eye to one author in particular, with whose works I am very well acquainted, though I cannot read them, and who has spent many vigils in this cause, sitting beside his ailing puppets and (like a magician) wearying his art to restore them to youth and beauty. There are others who ride too high for these misfortunes. Who doubts the loveliness of Rosalind? Arden itself was not more lovely. Who ever questioned the perennial charm of Rose Jocelyn, Lucy Desborough, or Clara Middleton? fair women with fair names, the daughters of George Meredith. Elizabeth Bennet has but to speak, and I am at her knees. Ah! these are the creators of desirable women. They would never have fallen in the mud with Dumas and poor La Valliere. It is my only consolation that not one of all of them, except the first, could have plucked at the moustache of d'Artagnan.

Or perhaps, again, a proportion of readers stumble at the threshold. In so vast a mansion there were sure to be back stairs and kitchen offices where no one would delight to linger; but it was at least unhappy that the vestibule should be so badly lighted; and until, in the seventeenth chapter, d'Artagnan sets off to seek his friends, I must confess, the book goes heavily enough. But, from thenceforward, what a feast is spread! Monk kidnapped; d'Artagnan enriched; Mazarin's death; the ever delectable adventure of Belle Isle, wherein Aramis outwits d'Artagnan, with its epilogue (vol. v. chap. xxviii.), where d'Artagnan regains the moral superiority; the love adventures at Fontainebleau, with St. Aignan's story of the dryad and the business of de Guiche, de Wardes, and Manicamp; Aramis made general of the Jesuits; Aramis at the bastille; the night talk in the forest of Senart; Belle Isle again, with the death of Porthos; and last, but not least, the taming of d'Artagnan the untamable, under the lash of the young King. What other novel has such epic variety and nobility of incident? often, if you will, impossible; often of the order of an Arabian story; and yet all based in human nature. For if you come to that, what novel has more human nature? not studied with the microscope, but seen largely, in plain daylight, with the natural eye? What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and wit, and unflagging, admirable literary skill? Good souls, I suppose, must sometimes read it in the blackguard travesty of a translation. But there is no style so untranslatable; light as a whipped trifle, strong as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general's despatch; with every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet inimitably right. And, once more, to make an end of commendations, what novel is inspired with a more unstained or a more wholesome morality?

Yes; in spite of Miss Yonge, who introduced me to the name of d'Artagnan only to dissuade me from a nearer knowledge of the man, I have to add morality. There is no quite good book without a good morality; but the world is wide, and so are morals. Out of two people who have dipped into Sir Richard Burton's Thousand and One Nights, one shall have been offended by the animal details; another to whom these were harmless, perhaps even pleasing, shall yet have been shocked in his turn by the rascality and cruelty of all the characters. Of two readers, again, one shall have been pained by the morality of a religious memoir, one by that of the Vicomte de Bragelonne. And the point is that neither need be wrong. We shall always shock each other both in life and art; we cannot get the sun into our pictures, nor the abstract right (if there be such a thing) into our books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer some hint of the great light that blinds us from heaven; enough if, in the other, there shine, even upon foul details, a spirit of magnanimity. I would scarce send to the Vicomte a reader who was in quest of what we may call puritan morality. The ventripotent mulatto, the great cater, worker, earner and waster, the man of much and witty laughter, the man of the great heart and alas! of the doubtful honesty, is a figure not yet clearly set before the world; he still awaits a sober and yet genial portrait; but with whatever art that may be touched, and whatever indulgence, it will not be the portrait of a precision. Dumas was certainly not thinking of himself, but of Planchet, when he put into the mouth of d'Artagnan's old servant this excellent profession: "Monsieur, j'étais une de ces bonnes pâtes d'hommes que dieu a fait pour s'animer pendant un certain temps et pour trouver bonnes toutes choses qui accompagnent leur sejour sur la terre." He was thinking, as I say, of Planchet, to whom the words are aptly fitted; but they were fitted also to Planchet's creator; and perhaps this struck him as he wrote, for observe what follows: "d'Artagnan s'assit alors près de la fenêtre, et, cette philosophie de Planchet lui ayant paru solide, il y rêva." In a man who finds all things good, you will scarce expect much zeal for negative virtues: the active alone will have a charm for him; abstinence, however wise, however kind, will always seem to such a judge entirely mean and partly impious. So with Dumas. Chastity is not near his heart; nor yet, to his own sore cost, that virtue of frugality which is the armour of the artist. Now, in the Vicomte, he had much to do with the contest of Fouquet and Colbert. Historic justice should be all upon the side of Colbert, of official honesty, and fiscal competence.

And Dumas knew it well: three times at least he shows his knowledge; once it is but flashed upon us and received with the laughter of Fouquet himself, in the jesting controversy in the gardens of Saint Mande; once it is touched on by Aramis in the forest of Senart; in the end, it is set before us clearly in one dignified speech of the triumphant Colbert. But in Fouquet, the waster, the lover of good cheer and wit and art, the swift transactor of much business, "l'homme de bruit, l'homme de plaisir, l'homme qui n'est que parceque les autres sont," Dumas saw something of himself and drew the figure the more tenderly. It is to me even touching to see how he insists on Fouquet's honour; not seeing, you might think, that unflawed honour is impossible to spendthrifts; but rather, perhaps, in the light of his own life, seeing it too well, and clinging the more to what was left. Honour can survive a wound; it can live and thrive without a member. The man rebounds from his disgrace; he begins fresh foundations on the ruins of the old; and when his sword is broken, he will do valiantly with his dagger. So it is with Fouquet in the book; so it was with Dumas on the battlefield of life.

To cling to what is left of any damaged quality is virtue in the man; but perhaps to sing its praises is scarcely to be called morality in the writer. And it is elsewhere, it is in the character of d'Artagnan, that we must look for that spirit of morality, which is one of the chief merits of the book, makes one of the main joys of its perusal, and sets it high above more popular rivals. Athos, with the coming of years, has declined too much into the preacher, and the preacher of a sapless creed; but d'Artagnan has mellowed into a man so witty, rough, kind and upright, that he takes the heart by storm. There is nothing of the copy-book about his virtues, nothing of the drawing-room in his fine, natural civility; he will sail near the wind; he is no district visitor - no Wesley or Robespierre; his conscience is void of all refinement whether for good or evil; but the whole man rings true like a good sovereign. Readers who have approached the Vicomte, not across country, but by the legitimate, five-volumed avenue of the Mousquetaires and Vingt ans après, will not have forgotten d'Artagnan's ungentlemanly and perfectly improbable trick upon Milady. What a pleasure it is, then, what a reward, and how agreeable a lesson, to see the old captain humble himself to the son of the man whom he had personated! Here, and throughout, if I am to choose virtues for myself or my friends, let me choose the virtues of d'Artagnan. I do not say there is no character as well drawn in Shakespeare; I do say there is none that I love so wholly. There are many spiritual eyes that seem to spy upon our actions - eyes of the dead and the absent, whom we imagine to behold us in our most private hours, and whom we fear and scruple to offend: our witnesses and judges. And among these, even if you should think me childish, I must count my d'Artagnan - not d'Artagnan of the memoirs whom Thackeray pretended to prefer - a preference, I take the freedom of saying, in which he stands alone; not the d'Artagnan of flesh and blood, but him of the ink and paper; not Nature's, but Dumas's. And this is the particular crown and triumph of the artist - not to be true merely, but to be lovable; not simply to convince, but to enchant.

There is yet another point in the Vicomte which I find incomparable. I can recall no other work of the imagination in which the end of life is represented with so nice a tact. I was asked the other day if Dumas made me laugh or cry. Well in this my late fifth reading of the Vicomte, I did laugh once at the small Coquelin de Voliere business, and was perhaps a thought surprised at having done so: to make up for it, I smiled continually. But for tears, I do not know. If you put a pistol to my throat, I must own the tale trips upon a very airy foot - within a measurable distance of unreality; and for those who like the big guns to be discharged and the great passions to appear authentically, it may even seem inadequate from first to last. Not so to me; I cannot count that a poor dinner, or a poor book, where I meet with those I love; and, above all, in this last volume, I find a singular charm of spirit. It breathes a pleasant and a tonic sadness, always brave, never hysterical. Upon the crowded, noisy life of this long tale, evening gradually falls; and the lights are extinguished, and the heroes pass away one by one. One by one they go, and not a regret embitters their departure; the young succeed them in their places, Louis Quatorze is swelling larger and shining broader, another generation and another France dawn on the horizon; but for us and these old men whom we have loved so long, the inevitable end draws near and is welcome. To read this well is to anticipate experience. Ah, if only when these hours of the long shadows fall for us in reality and not in figure, we may hope to face them with a mind as quiet!

But my paper is running out; the siege guns are firing on the Dutch frontier; and I must say adieu for the fifth time to my old comrade fallen on the field of glory. Adieu - rather au revoir! Yet a sixth time, dearest d'Artagnan, we shall kidnap Monk and take horse together for Belle Isle.


- R.L. Stevenson, 'A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas'', Memories and Portraits, 1887

60 SECONDS: Will Schwalbe

Will Schwalbe is a business journalist turned author who is the co-writer of new tome Send: The How, Why, When And When Not Of E-Mail. In it, Schwalbe aims to help people use e-mail more efficiently and gives a guide to the pitfalls of when a rogue one can get you sacked or land you in jail. Send is out now published by Canongate.

What are the most common mistakes with e-mails?
People are too vague so you don’t understand what they want, they ask for information they might not need and tend to be too emotional.

What are your tips for improving e-mails?
Be specific, use the subject line well, don’t just put ‘a question’ or ‘hello’. Put your request at the top of the e-mail, don’t bury it. Mirror the other person’s formality; if you receive a casual e-mail, send them an informal one and vice versa.

Do people e-mail too much?
Yes. When an e-mail exchange enters its sixth round, you need to give them a call. Informing and confirming are the two best uses for e-mail; it’s best not to use it for negotiating. If ten people are choosing between four venues for a meeting, you can have a million e-mails before a decision is made.

Why are people too emotional on e-mail?
We’re more sensitive to the pain that’s inflicted on us than the pain we inflict, so when we get something mildly hostile and think we’re replying in a mildly hostile manner the person on the receiving end is likely to think we’ve gone way over the top. With an e-mail we’re under the illusion we’re in a conversation but it has a disinhibiting effect. Without a person there we get carried away.

Is being sarcastic on e-mail ever a good idea?
No, people are very paranoid when it comes to e-mail. If anything can be read sarcastically, it will be. Avoid rhetorical questions, too. Saying ‘I didn’t like the work you did on this project’ is probably acceptable but saying ‘Did you really think I’d like the work you did on this project?’ will just cause offence. Whenever you start writing a series of rhetorical questions you’re going to be irritating someone.

Do all companies monitor their employees’ e-mails?
We surveyed major companies and found they all had increasingly sophisticated monitoring . It’s not just searching for key phrases such as ‘insider trading’ or ‘al-Qaeda’ but they can look for changes to your normal e-mail pattern. If you e-mail outside your regular work hours they may be looked at, or if you always write short e-mails and suddenly write long ones they may be looked at. When people misuse their e-mail they often write ‘delete this e-mail’ so companies just check for ‘delete this e-mail’. People also try to cover up using swear words by using asterisks, which isn’t effective as companies can just search for that.

What are bosses looking for?
One of the most common reasons is to check for hostile work environments, people being racist or sexist. In the US, if someone leaves their job, then sues, saying it was a hostile work environment, and it turns out people were sending dirty or racist jokes around the office every day, the company gets in trouble. Even forwarding those jokes can get the individual reprimanded.

When can misusing your e-mail get you sacked?
I had a friend who was fired because he’d send vicious things about his boss to his friend who had the same surname as the boss. One day he hit the wrong key and e-mailed the abuse direct to his boss – that was that, he was fired. Aside from that there are things like ‘inappropriate sharing’. You may think you’re just chatting about your day to your friend at another company but that e-mail could look like you’re funnelling your company’s secrets to their competitors. There have also been examples of corporate executives being sacked for making unwanted sexual advances to employees via e-mail. Something else to watch out for is asking questions that could come back to haunt you. Things like: ‘Do you think our new product damages people’s health?’. Raise it if it’s a serious concern; if you’re just idly musing at your desk, avoid writing anything down.

- Andrew Williams, The Metro, 15 May 2007.

In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse

WHEN the Germans made their rapid advance through Belgium in the early summer of 1940, they captured, among other things, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, who had been living throughout the early part of the war in his villa at Le Touquet, and seems not to have realised until the last moment that he was in any danger. As he was led away into captivity, he is said to have remarked, "Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book." He was placed for the time being under house arrest, and from his subsequent statements it appears that he was treated in a fairly friendly way, German officers in the neighbourhood frequently "dropping in for a bath or a party."

Over a year later, on 25th June 1941, the news came that Wodehouse had been released from internment and was living at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. On the following day the public was astonished to learn that he had agreed to do some broadcasts of a "non-political" nature over the German radio. The full texts of these broadcasts are not easy to obtain at this date, but Wodehouse seems to have done five of them between 26th June and 2nd July, when the Germans took him off the air again. The first broadcast, on 26th June, was not made on the Nazi radio but took the form of an interview with Harry Flannery, the representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System, which still had its correspondents in Berlin. Wodehouse also published in the Saturday Evening Post an article which he had written while still in the internment camp.

The article and the broadcasts dealt mainly with Wodehouse's experiences in internment, but they did include a very few comments on the war. The following are fair samples:

"I never was interested in politics. I'm quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I'm about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings."

"A short time ago they had a look at me on parade and got the right idea; at least they sent us to the local lunatic asylum. And I have been there forty-two weeks. There is a good deal to be said for internment. It keeps you out of the saloon and helps you to keep up with your reading. The chief trouble is that it means you are away from home for a long time. When I join my wife I had better take along a letter of introduction to be on the safe side."

"In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of being an Englishman, but now that I have been some months resident in this bin or repository of Englishmen I am not so sure. ... The only concession I want from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of bread, tells the gentlemen with muskets at the main gate to look the other way, and leaves the rest to me. In return I am prepared to hand over India, an autographed set of my books, and to reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator. This offer holds good till Wednesday week."

The first extract quoted above caused great offence. Wodehouse was also censured for using (in the interview with Flannery) the phrase "whether Britain wins the war or not," and he did not make things better by describing in another broadcast the filthy habits of some Belgian prisoners among whom he was interned. The Germans recorded this broadcast and repeated it a number of times. They seem to have supervised his talks very lightly, and they allowed him not only to be funny about the discomforts of internment but to remark that "the internees at Trost camp all fervently believe that Britain will eventually win." The general upshot of the talks, however, was that he had not been ill treated and bore no malice.

These broadcasts caused an immediate uproar in England. There were questions in Parliament, angry editorial comments in the press, and a stream of letters from fellow-authors, nearly all of them disapproving, though one or two suggested that it would be better to suspend judgment, and several pleaded that Wodehouse probably did not realise what he was doing. On 15th July, the Home Service of the B.B.C. carried an extremely violent Postscript by "Cassandra" of the Daily Mirror, accusing Wodehouse of "selling his country." This postscript made free use of such expressions as "Quisling" and "worshipping the Führer." The main charge was that Wodehouse had agreed to do German propaganda as a way of buying himself out of the internment camp.

"Cassandra's" Postscript caused a certain amount of protest, but on the whole it seems to have intensified popular feeling against Wodehouse. One result of it was that numerous lending libraries withdrew Wodehouse's books from circulation. Here is a typical news item:

"Within twenty-four hours of listening to the broadcast of Cassandra, the Daily Mirror columnist, Portadown (North Ireland) Urban District Council banned P. G. Wodehouse's books from their public library. Mr. Edward McCann said that Cassandra's broadcast had clinched the matter. Wodehouse was funny no longer." (Daily Mirror.)

In addition the B.B.C. banned Wodehouse's lyrics from the air and was still doing so a couple of years later. As late as December 1944 there were demands in Parliament that Wodehouse should be put on trial as a traitor.

There is an old saying that if you throw enough mud some of it will stick, and the mud has stuck to Wodehouse in a rather peculiar way. An impression has been left behind that Wodehouse's talks (not that anyone remembers what he said in them) showed him up not merely as a traitor but as an ideological sympathiser with Fascism. Even at the time several letters to the press claimed that "Fascist tendencies" could be detected in his books, and the charge has been repeated since. I shall try to analyse the mental atmosphere of those books in a moment, but it is important to realise that the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity. The really interesting question is how and why he could be so stupid. When Flannery met Wodehouse (released, but still under guard) at the Adlon Hotel in June 1941, he saw at once that he was dealing with a political innocent, and when preparing him for their broadcast interview he had to warn him against making some exceedingly unfortunate remarks, one of which was by implication slightly anti-Russian. As it was, the phrase "whether England wins or not" did get through. Soon after the interview Wodehouse told him that he was also going to broadcast on the Nazi radio, apparently not realising that this action had any special significance. Flannery comments:

"By this time the Wodehouse plot was evident. It was one of the best Nazi publicity stunts of the war, the first with a human angle. ... Plack (Goebbels's assistant) had gone to the camp near Gleiwitz to see Wodehouse, found that the author was completely without political sense, and had an idea. He suggested to Wodehouse that in return for being released from the prison camp he write a series of broadcasts about his experiences; there would be no censorship and he would put them on the air himself. In making that proposal Plack showed that he knew his man. He knew that Wodehouse made fun of the English in all his stories and that he seldom wrote in any other way, that he was still living in the period about which he wrote and had no conception of Nazism and all it meant. Wodehouse was his own Bertie Wooster."

The striking of an actual bargain between Wodehouse and Plack seems to be merely Flannery's own interpretation. The arrangement may have been of a much less definite kind, and to judge from the broadcasts themselves, Wodehouse's main idea in making them was to keep in touch with his public and -- the comedian's ruling passion -- to get a laugh. Obviously they are not the utterances of a Quisling of the type of Ezra Pound or John Amery, nor, probably, of a person capable of understanding the nature of Quislingism. Flannery seems to have warned Wodehouse that it would be unwise to broadcast, but not very forcibly. He adds that Wodehouse (though in one broadcast he refers to himself as an Englishman) seemed to regard himself as an American citizen. He had contemplated naturalisation, but had never filled in the necessary papers. He even used, to Flannery, the phrase, "We're not at war with Germany."

I have before me a bibliography of P. G. Wodehouse's works. It names round about fifty books, but is certainly incomplete. It is as well to be honest, and I ought to start by admitting that there are many books by Wodehouse perhaps a quarter or a third of the total -- which I have not read. It is not, indeed, easy to read the whole output of a popular writer who is normally published in cheap editions. But I have followed his work fairly closely since 1911, when I was eight years old, and am well acquainted with its peculiar mental atmosphere -- an atmosphere which has not, of course, remained completely unchanged, but shows little alteration since about 1925. In the passage from Flannery's book which I quoted above there are two remarks which would immediately strike any attentive reader of Wodehouse. One is to the effect that Wodehouse "was still living in the period about which he wrote," and the other that the Nazi Propaganda Ministry made use of him because he "made fun of the English." The second statement is based on a misconception to which I will return presently. But Flannery's other comment is quite true and contains in it part of the clue to Wodehouse's behaviour.

A thing that people often forget about P. G. Wodehouse's novels is how long ago the better-known of them were written. We think of him as in some sense typifying the silliness of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, but in fact the scenes and characters by which he is best remembered had all made their appearance before 1925. [...] When one looks through the list of Wodehouse's books from 1902 onwards, one can observe three fairly well-marked periods. The first is the school-story period. [...] The next is the American period. Wodehouse seems to have lived in the United States from about 1913 to 1920, and for a while showed signs of becoming Americanised in idiom and outlook. [...] The third period might fitly be called the country-house period. By the early nineteen-twenties Wodehouse must have been making a very large income, and the social status of his characters moved upwards accordingly [...]. The typical setting is now a country mansion, a luxurious bachelor flat or an expensive golf club. The schoolboy athleticism of the earlier books fades out, cricket and football giving way to golf, and the element of farce and burlesque becomes more marked. [...] Mike Jackson has turned into Bertie Wooster. That, however, is not a very startling metamorphosis, and one of the most noticeable things about Wodehouse is his lack of development. [...] How much of a formula the writing of his later books had become one can see from the fact that he continued to write stories of English life although throughout the sixteen years before his internment he was living at Hollywood and Le Touquet.

[...]

In Something Fresh Wodehouse had discovered the comic possibilities of the English aristocracy, and a succession of ridiculous but, save in a very few instances, not actually contemptible barons, earls and what-not followed accordingly. This had the rather curious effect of causing Wodehouse to be regarded, outside England, as a penetrating satirist of English society. Hence Flannery's statement that Wodehouse "made fun of the English," which is the impression he would probably make on a German or even an American reader. Some time after the broadcasts from Berlin I was discussing them with a young Indian Nationalist who defended Wodehouse warmly. He took it for granted that Wodehouse had gone over to the enemy, which from his own point of view was the right thing to do. But what interested me was to find that he regarded Wodehouse as an anti-British writer who had done useful work by showing up the British aristocracy in their true colours. This is a mistake that it would be very difficult for an English person to make, and is a good instance of the way in which books, especially humorous books, lose their finer nuances when they reach a foreign audience. For it is clear enough that Wodehouse is not anti-British, and not anti-upper class either. On the contrary, a harmless old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all through his work. Just as an intelligent Catholic is able to see that the blasphemies of Baudelaire or James Joyce are not seriously damaging to the Catholic faith, so an English reader can see that in creating such characters as Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever, Wodehouse is not really attacking the social hierarchy. Indeed, no one who genuinely despised titles would write of them so much. Wodehouse's attitude towards the English social system is the same as his attitude towards the public-school moral code -- a mild facetiousness covering an unthinking acceptance. The Earl of Emsworth is funny because an earl ought to have more dignity, and Bertie Wooster's helpless dependence on Jeeves is funny partly because the servant ought not to be superior to the master. An American reader can mistake these two, and others like them, for hostile caricatures, because he is inclined to be Anglophobe already and they correspond to his preconceived ideas about a decadent aristocracy. Bertie Wooster, with his spats and his cane, is the traditional stage Englishman. But, as any English reader would see, Wodehouse intends him as a sympathetic figure, and Wodehouse's real sin has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are. All through his books certain problems are constantly avoided. Almost without exception his moneyed young men are unassuming, good mixers, not avaricious: their tone is set for them by Psmith, who retains his own upper-class exterior but bridges the social gap by addressing everyone as "Comrade."

But there is another important point about Bertie Wooster: his out-of-dateness. Conceived in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie really belongs to an epoch earlier than that. [...] A humorous writer is not obliged to keep up to date, and having struck one or two good veins, Wodehouse continued to exploit them with a regularity that was no doubt all the easier because he did not set foot in England during the sixteen years that preceded his internment. His picture of English society had been formed before 1914, and it was a naïve, traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture. [...] His books are aimed, not, obviously, at a highbrow audience, but at an audience educated along traditional lines. [...] In his radio interview with Flannery, Wodehouse wondered whether "the kind of people and the kind of England I write about will live after the war," not realising that they were ghosts already. "He was still living in the period about which he wrote," says Flannery, meaning, probably, the nineteen-twenties. But the period was really the Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed round about 1915.

If my analysis of Wodehouse's mentality is accepted, the idea that in 1941 he consciously aided the Nazi propaganda machine becomes untenable and even ridiculous. He may have been induced to broadcast by the promise of an earlier release (he was due for release a few months later, on reaching his sixtieth birthday), but he cannot have realised that what he did would be damaging to British interests. As I have tried to show, his moral outlook has remained that of a public-school boy, and according to the public-school code, treachery in time of war is the most unforgivable of all the sins. But how could he fail to grasp that what he did would be a big propaganda score for the Germans and would bring down a torrent of disapproval on his own head? To answer this one must take two things into consideration. First, Wodehouse's complete lack -- so far as one can judge from his printed works -- of political awareness. It is nonsense to talk of "Fascist tendencies" in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all. Throughout his work there is a certain uneasy awareness of the problem of class distinctions, and scattered through it at various dates there are ignorant though not unfriendly references to Socialism. In The Heart of a Goof (1926) there is a rather silly story about a Russian novelist, which seems to have been inspired by the factional struggle then raging in the U.S.S.R. But the references in it to the Soviet system are entirely frivolous and, considering the date, not markedly hostile. That is about the extent of Wodehouse's political consciousness, so far as it is discoverable from his writings. Nowhere, so far as I know, does he so much as use the word "Fascism" or "Nazism." In left-wing circles, indeed in "enlightened" circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi radio, to have any truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just as shocking an action before the war as during it. But that is a habit of mind that had been developed during nearly a decade of ideological struggle against Fascism. The bulk of the British people, one ought to remember, remained anæsthetic to that struggle until late into 1940. Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia -- the long series of crimes and aggressions had simply slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners and "not our business." One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the ordinary Englishman thought of "Fascism" as an exclusively Italian thing and was bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany. And there is nothing in Wodehouse's writings to suggest that he was better informed, or more interested in politics, than the general run of his readers.

The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse happened to be taken prisoner at just the moment when the war reached its desperate phase. We forget these things now, but until that time feelings about the war had been noticeably tepid. There was hardly any fighting, the Chamberlain Government was unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting that we should make a compromise peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour Party branches all over the country were passing anti-war resolutions. Afterwards, of course, things changed. The Army was with difficulty extricated from Dunkirk, France collapsed, Britain was alone, the bombs rained on London, Goebbels announced that Britain was to be "reduced to degradation and poverty." By the middle of 1941 the British people knew what they were up against and feelings against the enemy were far fiercer than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in internment, and his captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had missed the turning-point of the war, and in 1941 he was still reacting in terms of 1939. He was not alone in this. On several occasions about this time the Germans brought captured British soldiers to the microphone, and some of them made remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse's. They attracted no attention, however. And even an outright Quisling like John Amery was afterwards to arouse much less indignation than Wodehouse had done.

But why? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks by an elderly novelist have provoked such an outcry? One has to look for the probable answer amid the dirty requirements of propaganda warfare.

There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is almost certainly significant -- the date. Wodehouse was released two or three days before the invasion of the U.S.S.R., and at a time when the higher ranks of the Nazi party must have known that the invasion was imminent. It was vitally necessary to keep America out of the war as long as possible, and in fact, about this time, the German attitude towards the U.S.A. did become more conciliatory than it had been before. The Germans could hardly hope to defeat Russia, Britain and the U.S.A. in combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly -- and presumably they expected to do so -- the Americans might never intervene. The release of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw to the American isolationists. He was well known in the United States, and he was -- or so the Germans calculated -- popular with the Anglophobe public as a caricaturist who made fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his monocle. At the microphone he could be trusted to damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release would demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat their enemies chivalrously. That presumably was the calculation, though the fact that Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about a week suggests that he did not come up to expectations.

But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were at work. For the two years following Dunkirk, British morale depended largely upon the feeling that this was not only a war for democracy but a war which the common people had to win by their own efforts. The upper classes were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the disasters of 1940, and a social levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind, and numerous able journalists were at work to tie the association tighter. Priestley's 1940 broadcasts, and "Cassandra's" articles in the Daily Mirror, were good examples of the demagogic propaganda flourishing at that time. In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal whipping-boy. For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse -- as "Cassandra" vigorously pointed out in his broadcast -- was a rich man. But he was the kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to the structure of society. To denounce Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say, Beaverbrook. A mere novelist, however large his earnings may happen to be, is not of the possessing class. Even if his income touches £350,000 a year he has only the outward semblance of a millionaire. He is a lucky outsider who has fluked into a fortune -- usually a very temporary fortune -- like the winner of the Calcutta Derby Sweep. Consequently, Wodehouse's indiscretion gave a good propaganda opening. It was a chance to "expose" a wealthy parasite without drawing attention to any of the parasites who really mattered.

In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years later -- and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery -- is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In France, all kinds of petty rats -- police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with German soldiers -- are hunted down while almost without exception the big rats escape. In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940. I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse -- just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age -- became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot by the American authorities, it will have the effect of establishing his reputation as a poet for hundreds of years; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves. Meanwhile, if we really want to punish the people who weakened national morale at critical moments, there are other culprits who are nearer home and better worth chasing.

George Orwell, 'In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse', 1945

A Letter to Rome

One morning the priest's housekeeper mentioned as she gathered up
the breakfast things, that Mike Mulhare had refused to let his
daughter Catherine marry James Murdoch until he had earned the
price of a pig.

"This is bad news," said the priest, and he laid down the
newspaper.

"And he waited for her all the summer! Wasn't it in February last
that he came out of the poor-house? And the fine cabin he has
built for her! He'll be that lonesome, he'll be going to America."

"To America!" said the priest.

"Maybe it will be going back to the poor-house he'll be, for he'll
never earn the price of his passage at the relief works."

The priest looked at her for a moment as if he did not catch her
meaning, and then a knock came at the door, and he said:--

"The inspector is here, and there are people waiting for me."

And while he was distributing the clothes he had received from
Manchester, he argued with the inspector as to the direction the
new road should take; and when he came back from the relief works,
there was his dinner. He was busy writing letters all the
afternoon; it was not until he had handed them to the post-
mistress that his mind was free to think of poor James Murdoch,
who had built a cabin at the end of one of the famine roads in a
hollow out of the way of the wind. From a long way off the priest
could see him digging his patch of bog.

And when he caught sight of the priest he stuck his spade in the
ground and came to meet him. He wore a pair of torn corduroy
trousers out of which two long naked feet appeared; and there was
a shirt, but it was torn, the wind thrilled in a naked breast, and
the priest thought his housekeeper was right, that James must go
back to the poor-house. There was a wild look in his eyes, and he
seemed to the priest like some lonely animal just come out of its
burrow. His mud cabin was full of peat smoke, there were pools of
green water about it, but it had been dry, he said, all the
summer; and he had intended to make a drain.

"It's hard luck, your reverence, and after building this house for
her. There's a bit of smoke in the house now, but if I got
Catherine I wouldn't be long making a chimney. I told Mike he
should give Catherine a pig for her fortune, but he said he would
give her a calf when I bought the pig, and I said, 'Haven't I
built a fine house and wouldn't it be a fine one to rear him in.'"

And they walked through the bog, James talking to the priest all
the way, for it was seldom he had anyone to talk to.

"Now I must not take you any further from your digging."

"Sure there's time enough," said James, "amn't I there all day."

"I'll go and see Mike Mulhare myself," said the priest.

"Long life to your reverence."

"And I will try to get you the price of the pig."

"Ah,'tis your reverence that's good to us."

The priest stood looking after him, wondering if he would give up
life as a bad job and go back to the poor-house. But while
thinking of James Murdoch, he was conscious of an idea; it was
still dim and distant, but every moment it emerged, it was taking
shape.

Ireland was passing away. In five-and-twenty years, if some great
change did not take place, Ireland would be a Protestant country.
"There is no one in this parish except myself who has a decent
house to live in," he murmured; and then an idea broke suddenly in
his mind. The Greek priests were married. They had been allowed to
retain their wives in order to avoid a schism. Rome had always
known how to adapt herself to circumstances, and there was no
doubt that if Rome knew Ireland's need of children Rome would
consider the revocation of the decree--the clergy must marry.

He walked very slowly, and looking through the peat stacks he saw
St. Peter's rising above a rim of pearl-coloured mountains, and
before he was aware of it he had begun to consider how he might
write a letter to Rome. Was it not a fact that celibacy had only
been made obligatory in Ireland in the twelfth century?

When he returned home, his housekeeper was anxious to hear about
James Murdoch, but the priest sat possessed by the thought of
Ireland becoming a Protestant country; and he had not moved out of
his chair when the servant came in with his tea. He drank his tea
mechanically, and walked up and down the room, and it was a long
time before he took up his knitting. But that evening he could not
knit, and he laid the stocking aside so that he might think.

Of what good would his letter be? A letter from a poor parish
priest asking that one of the most ancient decrees should be
revoked! The Pope's secretary would pitch his letter into the
waste paper basket. The Pope would be only told of its contents!
The cardinals are men whose thoughts move up and down certain
narrow ways, clever men no doubt, but clever men are often the
dupes of conventions. All men who live in the world accept the
conventions as truths. And the idea of this change in
ecclesiastical law had come to him because he lived in a waste
bog.

But was he going to write the letter? He could not answer the
question! Yes, he knew that sooner or later he must write this
letter. "Instinct," he said, "is a surer guide than logic. My
letter to Rome was a sudden revelation." The idea had fallen as it
were out of the air, and now as he sat knitting by his own
fireside it seemed to come out of the corners of the room.

"When you were at Rathowen," his idea said, "you heard the clergy
lament that the people were leaving the country. You heard the
Bishop and many eloquent men speak on the subject, but their words
meant little, but on the bog road the remedy was revealed to you.

"The remedy lies with the priesthood. If each priest were to take
a wife about four thousand children would be born within the year,
forty thousand children would be added to the birth-rate in ten
years. Ireland would be saved by her priesthood!"

The truth of this estimate seemed beyond question, nevertheless,
Father MacTurnan found it difficult to reconcile himself to the
idea of a married clergy. One is always the dupe of prejudice. He
knew that and went on thinking. The priests live in the best
houses, eat the best food, wear the best clothes; they are indeed
the flower of the nation, and would produce magnificent sons and
daughters. And who could bring up their children according to the
teaching of our holy church as well as priests?

So did his idea speak to him, unfolding itself in rich variety
every evening. Very soon he realised that other advantages would
accrue, beyond the addition of forty thousand children to the
birth-rate, and one advantage that seemed to him to exceed the
original advantage would be the nationalisation of religion, the
formation of an Irish Catholicism suited to the ideas and needs of
the Irish people.

In the beginning of the century the Irish lost their language, in
the middle of the century the characteristic aspects of their
religion. He remembered that it was Cardinal Cuilen who had
denationalised religion in Ireland. But everyone recognised his
mistake, and how could a church be nationalised better than by the
rescission of the decree? Wives and the begetting of children
would attach the priests to the soil of Ireland. It could not be
said that anyone loved his country who did not contribute to its
maintenance. He remembered that the priests leave Ireland on
foreign missions, and he said: "Every Catholic who leaves Ireland
helps to bring about the very thing that Ireland has been
struggling against for centuries--Protestantism."

This idea talked to him, and, one evening, it said, "Religion,
like everything else, must be national," and it led him to
contrast cosmopolitanism with parochialism. "Religion, like art,
came out of parishes," he said. Some great force was behind him.
He must write! He must write... .

He dropped the ink over the table and over the paper, he jotted
down his ideas in the first words that came to him until midnight;
he could see his letter in all its different parts, and when he
slept it floated through his sleep.

"I must have a clear copy of it before I begin the Latin
translation."

He had written the English text thinking of the Latin that would
come after, and very conscious of the fact that he had written no
Latin since he had left Maynooth, and that a bad translation would
discredit his ideas in the eyes of the Pope's secretary, who was
doubtless a great Latin scholar. "The Irish priests have always
been good Latinists," he murmured as he hunted through the
dictionary.

The table was littered with books, for he had found it necessary
to create a Latin atmosphere before beginning his translation. He
worked principally at night, and one morning about three he
finished his translation, and getting up from his chair he walked
to the whitening window. His eyes pained him, and he decided he
would postpone reading over what he had written till morning.

His illusions regarding his Latin were broken. He had laid his
manuscript on a table by his bedside, and on awakening he had
reached out his hand for it, but he had not read a page when he
dropped it; and the manuscript lay on the floor while he dressed.
He went into his breakfast, and when he had eaten his breakfast
his nerve failed him. He could not bring himself to fetch the
manuscript, and it was his housekeeper who brought it to him.

"Ah," he said, "it is tasteless as the gruel that poor James
Murdoch is eating." And taking a volume from the table--"St.
Augustine's Confessions"--he said, "what diet there is here!"

He stood reading. There was no idiom, he had used Latin words
instead of English. At last he was interrupted by the wheels of a
car stopping at his door. Father Meehan! Meehan could revise his
Latin! None had written such good Latin at Maynooth as Meehan.

"My dear Meehan, this is indeed a pleasant surprise."

"I thought I'd like to see you. I drove over. But--I am not
disturbing you.... You've taken to reading again. St. Augustine!
And you're writing in Latin!"

Father James's face grew red, and he took the manuscript out of
his friend's hand.

"No, you mustn't look at that."

And then the temptation to ask him to overlook certain passages
made him change his mind.

"I was never much of a Latin scholar."

"And you want me to overlook your Latin for you. But why are you
writing Latin?"

"Because I am writing to the Pope. I was at first a little
doubtful, but the more I thought of this letter the more necessary
it seemed to me."

"And what are you writing to the Pope about?"

"You see Ireland is going to become a Protestant country."

"Is it?" said Father Meehan, and he listened a little while. Then,
interrupting his friend, he said:--

"I've heard enough. Now, I strongly advise you not to send this
letter. We have known each other all our lives. Now my dear
MacTurnan--"

Father Michael talked eagerly, and Father MacTurnan sat listening.
At last Father Meehan saw that his arguments were producing no
effect, and he said:--

"You don't agree with me."

"It isn't that I don't agree with you. You have spoken admirably
from your point of view, but our points of view are different."

"Take your papers away, burn them!"

Then, thinking his words were harsh, he laid his hand on his
friend's shoulder and said:--

"My dear MacTurnan, I beg of you not to send this letter."

Father James did not answer; the silence grew painful, and Father
Michael asked Father James to show him the relief works that the
Government had ordered.

They walked to where the poor people were working, but important
as these works were the letter to Rome seemed more important to
Father Michael, and he said:--

"My good friend, there isn't a girl that would marry us; now is
there? There isn't a girl in Ireland who would touch us with a
forty foot pole. Would you have the Pope release the nuns from
their vows?"

"I think exceptions should be made in favour of those in orders.
But I think it would be for the good of Ireland if the secular
clergy were married."

"That's not my point. My point is that even if the decree were
rescinded we should not be able to get wives. You've been looking
too long in the waste, my dear friend. You've lost yourself in a
dream. We shouldn't get a penny. Our parishioners would say, 'Why
should we support that fellow and his family?' That's what they'd
say."

"We should be poor, no doubt," said Father James. "But not so poor
as our parishioners. My parishioners eat yellow meal, and I eat
eggs and live in a good house."

"We are educated men, and should live in better houses."

"The greatest saints lived in deserts."

And so the argument went on until the time came to say good-bye,
and then Father James said:--

"I shall be glad if you will give me a lift on your car. I want to
go to the post-office."

"To post your letter?"

"The idea came to me--it came swiftly like a lightning flash, and
I can't believe that it was an accident. If it had fallen into
your mind with the suddenness that it fell into mine, you would
believe that it was an inspiration."

"It would take a great deal to make me believe I was inspired,"
said Father Michael, and he watched Father James go into the post-
office to register his letter.

As he went home Father James met a long string of peasants
returning from their work. The last was Norah Flynn, and the
priest blushed deeply. It was the first time he had looked on one
of his parishioners in the light of a possible spouse; he entered
his house frightened, and when he looked round his parlour he
asked himself if the day would come when he should see Norah Flynn
sitting opposite to him in his armchair. And his face flushed
deeper when he looked towards the bedroom door, and he fell on his
knees and prayed that God's will might be made known to him.

During the night he awoke many times, and the dream that had
awakened him continued when he had left his bed, and he wandered
round and round the room in the darkness, seeking a way. At last
he reached the window and drew the curtain, and saw the dim dawn
opening out over the bog.

"Thank God," he said, "it was only a dream--only a dream."

And lying down he fell asleep, but immediately another dream as
horrible as the first appeared, and his housekeeper heard him
beating on the walls.

"Only a dream, only a dream," he said.

He lay awake, not daring to sleep lest he might dream. And it was
about seven o'clock when he heard his housekeeper telling him that
the inspector had come to tell him they must decide what direction
the new road should take. In the inspector's opinion it should run
parallel with the old road. To continue the old road two miles
further would involve extra labour; the people would have to go
further to their work, and the stones would have to be drawn
further. The priest held that the extra labour was of secondary
importance. He said that to make two roads running parallel with
each other would be a wanton humiliation to the people.

But the inspector could not appreciate the priest's arguments. He
held that the people were thinking only how they might earn enough
money to fill their bellies.

"I don't agree with you, I don't agree with you," said the priest.
"Better go in the opposite direction and make a road to the sea."

"Well, your reverence, the Government do not wish to engage upon
any work that will benefit any special class. These are my
instructions."

"A road to the sea will benefit no one.... I see you are thinking
of the landlord. But there is no harbour; no boat ever comes into
that flat, waste sea."

"Well, your reverence, one of these days a harbour may be made,
whereas an arch would look well in the middle of the bog, and the
people would not have to go far to their work."

"No, no. A road to the sea will be quite useless; but its futility
will not be apparent--at least, not so apparent--and the people's
hearts will not be broken."

The inspector seemed a little doubtful, but the priest assured him
that the futility of the road would satisfy English ministers.

"And yet these English ministers," the priest reflected, "are not
stupid men; they are merely men blinded by theory and prejudice,
as all men are who live in the world. Their folly will be apparent
to the next generation, and so on and so on for ever and ever,
world without end."

"And the worst of it is," the priest said, "while the people are
earning their living on these roads their fields will be lying
idle, and there will be no crops next year."

Father MacTurnan began to think of the cardinals and the
transaction of business in the Vatican; cardinals and ministers
alike are the dupes of convention. Only those who are estranged
from habits and customs can think straightforward.

"If, instead of insisting on these absurd roads, the Government
would give me the money, I should be able to feed the people at a
cost of about a penny a day, and they would be able to sow their
potatoes. And if only the cardinals would consider the rescission
of the decree on its merits Ireland would be saved from
Protestantism."

Some cardinal was preparing an answer--an answer might be even in
the post. Rome might not think his letter worthy of an answer.

A few days afterwards the inspector called to show him a letter he
had just received from the Board of Works, and Father James had to
write many letters and had to go to Dublin, and in the excitement
of these philanthropic activities the emigration question was
forgotten. He was talking to the inspector about the possibility
of obtaining a harbour when the postman handed him a letter.

"This is a letter from Father Moran. The Bishop wishes to see me.
We will continue the conversation to-morrow. It is eight miles to
Rathowen, and how much further is the Palace?"

"A good seven," said the inspector. "You're not going to walk it,
your reverence?"

"Why not? In four hours I shall be there." He looked at his boots
first, and hoped they would hold together; and then he looked at
the sky, and hoped it would not rain.

The sky was dim; all the light seemed to be upon the earth; a
soft, vague sunlight floated over the bog. Now and again a yellow-
hammer rose above the tufts of coarse grass and flew a little way.
A line of pearl-coloured mountains showed above the low horizon,
and he had walked eight miles before he saw a pine-wood. Some
hundred yards further on there was a green field, but under the
green sod there was peat, and a man and a boy were cutting it. The
heather appeared again, and he had walked ten miles before he was
clear of whins and heather.

He walked on, thinking of his interview with the Bishop, and was
nearly at the end of his journey when he noticed that one of his
shoes had come unsewn, and he stopped at a cabin; and while the
woman was looking for a needle and thread he mopped his face with
a great red handkerchief that he kept in the pocket of his
threadbare coat--a coat that had once been black, but had grown
green with age and weather. He had out-walked himself, and feeling
he would be tired, and not well able to answer the points that the
Bishop would raise, he decided to rest awhile. The woman had found
some beeswax, and he stopped half an hour stitching his shoe under
the hawthorn that grew beside the cabin.

He was still two miles from the Palace, and this last two miles
proved very long. He arrived footsore and covered with dust, and
he was so tired that he could hardly get up from his chair to
receive Father Moran when he came into the parlour.

"You seem to have walked a long way, Father MacTurnan."

"About fifteen miles. I shall be all right presently. I suppose
his Grace does not want to see me at once."

"Well, that's just it. His Grace sent me to say he would see you
at once. He expected you earlier."

"I started the moment I received his Grace's letter. I suppose his
Grace wishes to see me regarding my letter to Rome."

The secretary hesitated, coughed, and Father MacTurnan wondered
why Father Moran looked at him so intently. He returned in a few
minutes, saying that his Grace was sorry that Father MacTurnan had
had so long a walk. He hoped that he would rest awhile and partake
of some refreshment.... The servant brought in some wine and
sandwiches, and the secretary returned in half an hour. His Grace
was now ready to receive him. Father Moran opened the library
door, and Father MacTurnan saw the Bishop--a short, alert man,
about fifty-five, with a sharp nose and grey eyes and bushy
eyebrows. He popped about the room and gave his secretary many
orders. Father MacTurnan wondered if the Bishop would ever finish
talking to his secretary. He seemed to have finished, but a
thought suddenly struck him, and he followed his secretary to the
door, and Father MacTurnan began to fear that the Pope had not
decided to place the Irish clergy on the same footing as the Greek
clergy. If he had, the Bishop's interest in these many various
matters would have subsided; his mind would be engrossed by the
larger issue. On returning from the door his Grace passed Father
MacTurnan without speaking to him, and going to his writing table
he began to search amid his papers. At last Father MacTurnan
said:--

"Maybe your Grace is looking for my letter to Rome?"

"Yes," said his Grace, "do you see it?"

"It's under your Grace's hand, those blue papers."

"Ah, yes," and his Grace leaned back in his arm-chair, leaving
Father MacTurnan standing.

"Won't you sit down, Father MacTurnan?" he said casually. "You've
been writing to Rome, I see, advocating the revocation of the
decree of celibacy. There's no doubt the emigration of Catholics
is a very serious question. So far you have got the sympathy of
Rome, and, I may say of myself; but am I to understand that it was
your fear for the religious safety of Ireland that prompted you to
write this letter?"

"What other reason could there be?"

Nothing was said for a long while, and then the Bishop's meaning
began to break in his mind; his face flushed, and he grew
confused. "I hope your grace doesn't think for a moment that--"

"I only want to know if there is anyone--if your eyes ever went in
a certain direction, if your thoughts ever said, 'Well, if the
decree is revoked--'"

"No, your Grace, no. Celibacy has been no burden to me--far from
it. Sometimes I feared that it was celibacy that attracted me to
the priesthood. Celibacy was a gratification rather than a
sacrifice."

"I am glad," said the Bishop, and he spoke slowly and
emphatically, "that this letter was prompted by such impersonal
motives."

"Surely, your Grace, His Holiness did not suspect--"

The Bishop murmured an euphonious Italian name, and Father
MacTurnan understood that he was speaking of one of the Pope's
secretaries.

"More than once," said Father MacTurnan, "I feared that if the
decree were revoked, I should not have had sufficient courage to
comply with it."

And then he told the Bishop how he had met Norah Flynn on the
road. An amused expression stole into the Bishop's face, and his
voice changed.

"I presume you do not contemplate making marriage obligatory; you
do not contemplate the suspension of the faculties of those who do
not take wives?"

"It seems to me that exception should be made in favour of those
in orders, and, of course, in favour of those who have reached a
certain age like your Grace."

The Bishop coughed, and pretended to look for some paper which he
had mislaid.

"This was one of the many points that I discussed with Father
Michael Meehan."

"Oh, so you consulted Father Meehan," the Bishop said, looking up.

"He came in one day I was reading over my Latin translation before
posting it. I'm afraid the ideas that I submitted to the
consideration of His Holiness have been degraded by my very poor
Latin. I should have wished Father Meehan to overlook my Latin,
but he refused. He begged of me not to send the letter."

"Father Meehan," said his Grace, "is a great friend of yours. Yet
nothing he could say could shake your resolution to write to
Rome?"

"Nothing," said Father MacTurnan. "The call I received was too
distinct and too clear for me to hesitate."

"Tell me about this call."

Father MacTurnan told the Bishop that the poor man had come out of
the work-house because he wanted to be married, and that Mike
Mulhare would not give him his daughter until he had earned the
price of a pig. "And as I was talking to him I heard my conscience
say, 'No man can afford to marry in Ireland but the clergy.' We
all live better than our parishioners."

And then, forgetting the Bishop, and talking as if he were alone
with his God, he described how the conviction had taken possession
of him--that Ireland would become a Protestant country if the
Catholic emigration did not cease. And he told how this conviction
had left him little peace until he had written his letter.

The priest talked on until he was interrupted by Father Moran.

"I have some business to transact with Father Moran now," the
Bishop said, "but you must stay to dinner. You have walked a long
way, and you are tired and hungry."

"But, your Grace, if I don't start now, I shall not get home until
nightfall."

"A car will take you back, Father MacTurnan. I will see to that. I
must have some exact information about your poor people. We must
do something for them."

Father MacTurnan and the Bishop were talking together when the car
came to take Father MacTurnan home, and the Bishop said:--

"Father MacTurnan, you have borne the loneliness of your parish a
long while."

"Loneliness is only a matter of habit. I think, your Grace, I'm
better suited to the place than I am for any other. I don't wish
any change, if your Grace is satisfied with me."

"No one will look after the poor people better than yourself,
Father MacTurnan. But," he said, "it seems to me there is one
thing we have forgotten. You haven't told me if you succeeded in
getting the money to buy the pig."

Father MacTurnan grew very red.... "I had forgotten it. The
relief works--"

"It's not too late. Here's five pounds, and this will buy him a
pig."

"It will indeed," said the priest, "it will buy him two!"

He had left the Palace without having asked the Bishop how his
letter had been received at Rome, and he stopped the car, and was
about to tell the driver to go back. But no matter, he would hear
about his letter some other time. He was bringing happiness to two
poor people, and he could not persuade himself to delay their
happiness by one minute. He was not bringing one pig, but two
pigs, and now Mike Mulhare would have to give him Norah and a
calf; and the priest remembered that James Murdoch had said, "What
a fine house this will be to rear them in." There were many who
thought that human beings and animals should not live together;
but after all, what did it matter if they were happy? And the
priest forgot his letter to Rome in the thought of the happiness
he was bringing to two poor people. He could not see Norah Mulhare
that night; but he drove down to the famine road, and he and the
driver called till they awoke James Murdoch. The poor man came
stumbling across the bog, and the priest told him the news.


- George Moore, 'A letter to Rome', The Untilled Field, 1903