Rock ‘n Roll is rife with riffs.
Everything from such stirring guitar solos in Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison, in Sumertime Blues by Eddie Cochran, in Paperback Writer by The Beatles, in That’ll be the Day by Buddy Holly, in Wake up, Little Susie by the Everly Brothers, in Blue Suede Shoes by Carl Perkins (a relation, distant) to a veritable raft of rifts from Chuck Berry, including You Never Can Tell, Motorvatin’ and Johnny B. Goode to Maybeline sheself.
Trend-bucking books are no different. As one once famously found out while reading a biography by a paperback writer:
-No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O Brien by Anthony Cronin.
Curious thing but it is the rock ‘n roll riff from Motorvatin’ which came to mind when one first encountered this boyo of a biographical book which for whatever reason failed to win the, erm, Trend-Bucker Prize. For one’s encounters with both (virtual in the case of the biographee and real where the biographer was concerned) involved a mechanically propelled v.
On the first occasion, one had been motorvatin’ around Norneverland and found oneself searching for a parking spot in sweet Strabane on the banks of the River Mourne (of the less than mountainous waves).
Anytime one crossed the Black Sow’s Dyke (heading north mainly, but south if approaching from the famously big Head of Malin) one always made a conscious decision to be as inconspicuous as possible, in the interests of cross-community harmony. And so one was driving one’s vintage Lamborghini in subdued scarlet while wearing one’s low-key rainbow-coloured Rastahat.
Eventually, one found a spot outside 15, Bowling Green, Sweet Stabane. The shock came when one looked up to read the plaque on the wall: it identified the three-storey house as the birthplace of quads: Brian O Nualláin/Brian O Nolan/ Myles na Gopaleen/ Flann O’Brien. Though it was The Brother (who enigmatically doubled as his eldest and second eldest bro) what came to mind. And wondered how one small house could accommodate all it could.
On the second occasion, to do with encountering the biographer, one was descending the steps of Government Buildings in Upper Merrion Street, Dublin 2. It was eight o clock, dark and the taxi was purring at the foot of the steps. As an AP at the time (Apprentice Porter) one was always the first to volunteer for late duty, for two reasons. First, not much happened (or at least even less than normal) after darkness fell and second, one was entitled to call a cab at departure time.
And just as a fellow reached out to open the taxi door, one was ambushed from behind by the heavy sound of hurrying footsteps and this stentorian bellow:
-Hold your horses – that’s my taxi !
For a moment or two the merry spangled music of a mariachi band was virtually heard as a Mexican standoff almost ensured, between The Perkin and Anthony Cronin (for it was also he!).
The issue was summarily resolved by the taxi driver called, in all probabiltiy, Whacker:
-I’m here to collect a Mist-er Warb-eck. Will youse make your up minds which one of youse is Mist-er Warbleedinb-eck and which of youse is not. I haven’t got all night, youse know. I’ve got more arses to put on my seats and more mouths to feed.
The ever accommodating Perkin thougthfully invited the Artistic Guru of the Free Southern Stateen to share the back seat with him, even though the latter’s destination involved an awkward detour relative to one’s own distant destination, Warbeck Towers.
Thus, for the first leg (unforseen) of that particular taxi trip the back seat was suffused with a seething silence which emanated from the party of the second part, the golden conversationalist of his porter and puke-flecked era in the Literary Pubs of Dublin. Indeed, one could have cut the silence with a chainsaw, possibly even one of a Texan ancestry.
It might be pointed out Mr. A. Cronin seemed peculiarly attracted to colourful folk who wore coats of many names. (See also Myles na Gopaleen etc above). His function in Governement Buildings at the time was as a crafty Art-catcher for the then Prime Minister, C.J. Jockey. At any given time in said edifice opinion was divided re the heavy-lidded PM between those who called him Charlie Pride and those who preferred to know him as Charlie Rich.
A musical choice, as it were, between The Crystal Chandeliers and Behind Closed Doors.
A toss up where the tossers were concerned between the open, expansive, showy C. J. Jockey and the one more darkly inclined to the hugger mugger of smoke filled rooms; the psychological dichotomy of the Extrovert and the Introvert, that kinda thingy. Between the Golden Teapots of the Sun and the Silver Teapots of the Moon, to be both Yeatsian and Thatcherite about it, both simulataneously and concurrently, going backwards.
Mais revenons a nos moutons: to get back to the trend-bucking book.
The riff first anounces itself on any page of the biography that the reader chooses to open at random:
Take Page 33, f’rinstance:
‘In Blackrock College, Irish was kept pretty firmly in its place, being taught as a subject in the class room along with Frnch, Latin and Greek, but no more; and you could not opt, as you could in the Christian Borthes, to study certain other subjects through the medium of the Irish language (sic)’.
This sentence is writen with lip-smacking approval by the Loan Arranger of Literary Dubln for it marked the beginning of the enlightenment of Myles na Gopaleen who had had, before his enrollment in Blackrock College, the Twin Towers of a Tortuous Teanga fall upon his head: he had been reared in a Leprechaun-speaking family and he had also been snared in the CBS of Synge Street.
This blessed switch was facilitated by the family’s move to 4 Avoca Terrace, Blackrock, County Dublin. Yes, indeed, Avoca. Which of course is, ironically, an anagram for:
-A victim of child abuse.
If one turns to Page 50, f’instance one can detect the riff: in which the biographer of the boyo connects him to the broth of a boyo, one who had also managed to defect from the Undermensch of Paddy Stink and Mickey Muck. Achieved by escaping through the,erm, Transfer Window, from a Christian Brother School to an ovoid-accented S.J. College where the Ubermensch of Hooray Henry and Tickety boo Tristram were, naturally, nurtured:
-James Joyce had rebelled and escaped and through transforming hismelf into Leopold Bloom he had, as it were, become a member of the human rather than just the Irish race. They had confronted the same pastors and teachers, the same vulgarities, half-truths and nationalist distortions, rendered ever more objectionable by the victory of nationalism and the Sinn Fein philosophy, such as that victory was.
Peruse Page 69, for another desultory instance of the riff which, by this time had become as all pervasive as, say, the decidedly iffy sniff of perfume on the banks of the Liffey at low tide:
-But, as we shall see, Myles was against racism or doctrines of ethnic purity in all their forms and ever kept a lookout for their local manifestations in the guise of Gaelicism.
Truly is the Loan Arranger of Literary Dublin extracting maximum added value from the Tonto of the Teanga. A dutiful man-scout ever ready to decode the Smoke Signals from the Tokenshire of the Teaga Tribe on behalf of the annointed 9th Cavalry who had suffered the Calvary of Compulsion.
By Page 79, the riff had become so much of an ear worm that it glowed in the dark:
-Many people in Ireland adopted the Irish form of the name with which thay had been born in these years, some for good reasons, some for bad; and this was among the population genrally, since to be an enthusiastic Gaelgeoir (sic) or lover of the Irish language, was looked on with favour by officialdom and believed to expedite one’s chances of promotion.
Eh?
What precisely does the biographer mean by ‘for good reasons’: sadly, C.J. Jockey’s whipping boy does not elucidate. Ah, these Gaelgeoirs (sic) , these zombies in crombies, you just couldn’t be up to them.
An unpremeditated perusal of Page 112, finds a riff-ref to R.M. Smyllie, the legendary,erm, smily-faced (before his times) editor of The Irish Times (sic) who was to hire Tonto na Teanga as a columnist in the Leprechaun:
-Smyllie wanted to show that it (his organ) was not against the Irish language (sic) but only against the chauvinism and hyprocrisy that went with it.
The riff then of the, erm, pro-RAF?
-Kemo Sabe.
On Page 122 the riff is revived, almost as if it needed reviving that one could put it in a jiffey bag and mail it to, say, a friend in need, a friend indeed, such as one might have had a tiff with, or, indeed, even to your local DJ:
-Writing in the monthly review Ireland Today in 1938, O’Nolan’s friend Niall Sheridan had said that the language revival moement was characterized by a humourless bigotry that was completely un-Irish : ‘All those who cherish Irish for the culture it enshrined are being gradually antagonized by the methods of the revivalists.The intolerance and bigotry displayed by its leaders have alienated all those to whom the language is not a trade’. No doubt O’Nolan shared these views which were those of the intellctual coteries to which he belonged. Undoubtedly, O’Nolan despised as they did, the professinal Gaelgeoirs (sic) , a genus of which he met plenty of representatives in the Civil Service and elsewhere’..
The, erm, riff of the anti-riff raff ?
One may now effortlessly leap across the River Riff to the page one does not fear to speak of:
-Page 198.
For it is on this page that a line appears, a throwaway line that roars, in a throat-clearing MGM-way, not. Indeed, the crucial line of the biography, where the biographer is concerned, whatever about the biographee, a conviction which even the most shallow-minded of callow readers will arrive at, after he has taken a mo to devote even a dollop of fallow thought to it:
-We have, happily, come a long way since then.
Whatever could the Loan Arranger of Literary Dublin be essaying a thinking man’s wink at in this line? As the line is written in the context of Brian O Nolan’s failure to syphon some cash from the then Arts Council for to dash off a novel in the German Queen’s English. (As distinct from the lingo of the white trash, Irish versh.) the following appaling vista raises its egg-shaped head:
Is the biographer making a Homer-type nod in the direction of Aos Dána, the lasting legacy of the Loan Aranger of Literary Dublin ? Which of course is the Association of Irish Artists which he managed to set up by knocking the heads of both Charlie Pride and Charlie Rich (see above) together.
One of the prime reasons of Aos Dána of course, was to facilitate the writing of Writing. That this has been achieved is indubitable; one has only to take a gawk at the three-volume Micktorian novel of lush obituarised gush which sadly, though in a strange way joyously, followed the untimely passing of the Loan Arranger of Litarary Dublin in December, just gone.
Where the (gasp) appalling aspect of the vista comes into play must be seen – oh, irony!- in the context of, unfunnily enough, a novel by (gulp) Flann O’Brien:
-The Third Policeman.
Which, amongst other things, intoduces the reader to the assertion that policemen of the epoch (mid century) spent so much time on their bicycles they became prey to the atomic theory, which ordained they actually turned into bicycles, by means of a molecular transfer, so it did.
Apply, now, this atomic theory to the riff of the Loan Arranger. Could it be that he speant so much time riffing and peddling the same old guff, on the theme of ‘racist , bigoted, nest-fethering Gaelgeoiri (sic)’ that he –
No. Surely not, Shirley.
Otherwise, we could be discussing,erm, The Curious Incident of the anti-Bog-Oak Monolith in the Night Time.
Which, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, brings us back to the title:
-Mods ‘n Rockers.
For the elucidation of which the most masochistic of loyal readership must impatiently await (gulp) Part the Second.
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