Perhaps the worst lines I learned at school were from A PSALM OF LIFE by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow –
“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime
And departing leave behind us
Footprints in the sands of time”
and it wouldn’t surprise me if Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Ernest” was intended to take Longfellow’s urine.
I’m a sucker for biographies and autobiographies which allow me to laze in an armchair and experience vicariously the lives of more energetic men and women, enjoy the sins of the more scandalous ones and to despise the venality of the worst.
Tipp O’Neill, Garrett Fitzgerald and Denis Healey I rate amongst the best memoirs and amongst the worst those of Brian Faulkner, Captain Terence O’Neill and Gemma Hussey.
Faulkner, modestly called his “Memoirs of a Statesman.” He was in the habit of calling the Six Counties “This Country” whereas others of his party called it “This Province.”
As the counties did not constitute either a Country or a Province, sticklers for accuracy called the area “a Statelet.” Though Faulkner professed Christianity, the ancient pagans who remarked on “how these Christians love one another” would have been perplexed. For the “Statesman” did not have a good word for anybody, unless that word was an expletive.
Captain O’Neill’s memoir didn’t have a good word for Faulkner either. Someone ignorant of the set up in the Six Counties might have thought the Eton-schooled ex-junior Guards officer was “nice but dim.” He appeared to know little of the history of his statelet, province and country of birth and Sweet Fanny Adams of the Wider World. Which was probably the reason he was titled Captain O’Neill, when politicians in Westminster, who had been Majors, Colonels and Brigadiers in their time were known by their civilian titles. It should be noted that the celebrated Captain Boycott of the Land League days was no more a Captain than “Cap’n Boyle” the “Paycock” in O’Casey’s play. Nor was Boycott a regular soldier, but a part-time Militia Ensign, a sort of Lance-Lieutenant. The assumed rank was calculated to overawe the peasantry in Mayo and I suppose O’Neill thought he could overawe Unionist proletarians and Fenian untermenschen alike.
The strangest and most offensive memoir is that of Gemma Hussey called “At the Cutting Edge.” Within ten months of her election to Dail Eireann she was appointed Minister for Education, a post held from 1922-1925 by Eoin MacNeill, co-founder of the Gaelic League. When introduced to her senior civil servants “they seemed” to her “to be a group of rather elderly men, all with impenetrable Irish names.” Well, fetch the smelling salts! She “had come into politics from a background of business (founding and directing a large language school for foreign students)”.
She was particularly proud that a cousin of her husband edited “Cosmopolitan” which in my opinion is a slag-mag for hick chicks posing as slick. I heard its founder, Helen Gurley-Brown, interviewed on BBC’s Radio 4 and she was so full of herself, charmless and devoid of humour that I’m not surprised she was a single girl. About as Cosmopolitan as Hugh Hefner is Philosophical. But like Hefner, she knew how to hustle.
Hussey’s command of language was laughable. On the death of the American feminist Betty Friedan she recalled how Friedan had impressed 500 women gathered to meet her in Dublin –
“She held us in the palms of her hands – It was a SEMINAL moment.”
Less blatant hussies than BALLSY LADIES?
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