The Second Mister (4 page)

O
ne
evening, shortly after his novel
Borstal Boy
attracted the attention of The Censorship Board, Brendan Behan jumped up on a Dublin stage andentertained the audience with a lively song that began:

“
O My name is Brendan Behan!
I’m the leader of the banned...”

It may seem odd that such an event should cause him to burst into song but it must be remembered that in the Nineteen – Fifties and, for a long time after, no Irish writer could be said to have properly come of age until some work of his had been banned. Going to gaol, murdering your mother in law, or even becoming a Protestant did not count at all ! My own such coming of age occurred many years later and in a most peculiar way, but of that
more anon.

A long time ago a veteran broadcaster advised me that if you can get the first sentence of a radio talk right, the rest is as easy as chewing ice cream. The listener’s mind must be strokehauled by your first words, otherwise it will drift away like a dead mackerel in a lazy sea. If you successfully leave the starting line, then there is virtually no
limit to the blackguarding you can inflict on your unfortunate audience.

Shortly after getting this advice I was given an opportunity to present a half hour program on local radio. I decided to choose as my topic the poems of the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. This presented an immediate problem as Kerry, at the time, was not over-populated by people preoccupied with Spanish poetry. Indeed, such persons were like virgins in a certain nearby seaside resort: few in number if in fact they existed at all. So what was I to do ?

I tried an opening sentence which would display deep knowledge and high literary intent:

“ Pablo Neruda rarely troubled to tango with
trochaic tetrameter..”

Yes…but I had a nagging vision of thousands of listeners suddenly changing stations, so that they could hear the midday prices on the Dublin Stock Exchange.

I could have tried a literary quotation in a foreign language:

“Verde que te quiero verde…”

Very good, but too many people knew that I did not speak Spanish and Lorca’s famous line might well be mistaken for Church Latin. This in turn could cause my listeners to reach
for their Rosary beads and pray for a happy death.

Eventually I managed to come up with an opening sentence that was simple and direct, which contained a literary reference, and which would be interesting to all. My piece began:

“ I knew a man once who contracted the clap in Valparaiso.”

There was no stopping me after that ! The poetry of Neruda flowed from my lips like the waters of Torc falling out of the sky:

“
O let’s sing the rough wine of the earth,
Beat the board with the glasses of fall,
While either a guitar or the silence go on bringing us
Love lines, the language of nonexistent rivers
Or adorable stanzas with no sense at all.”

The mention of far off rivers with exotic names came to me as easily as cream lapping apple pie. I spoke of the
Biobio,
as if I had fallen into it at the age of two, and the
Urumbamba
as if I had poached salmon in it at the age of six.
Isla Negra, Sotavento, Wiracocha
, all the names in Neruda’s wonderful verse licked the airwaves like an angel’s kiss. The dazzling images in his great poem
The Heights of Macchu Picchugallop around my brain to this very day:

“ Through a confusion of splendor,
Through a night made stone let me plunge my hand
And move to beat in me a bird held in the hand for
a thousand years,
The old and umremembered human heart !”

Oddly enough, the program was well received and, of course, I lost the run of myself after that.

The program
Sunday Miscellany
has been running on R.T.E. for many years. Numerous persons from around Listowel have over the years made memorable contributions: Michael Mulvihill, Eamon Keane, Nora Relihan, Sean McCarthy ( I can still hear his deep and pleasantly accented voice as he described his wife’s preparations for a trip abroad: “
She had so many bags I thought she was going to invade Cambodia” ).
In recent times this tradition has been continued by my former classmate Cyril Kelly, perhaps the greatest Sunday Miscellanist of all.

I decided that the nation at large was ready to receive my mellifluent wisdom in the form of a piece called
Clan Rallies
. Clan rallies were a rather eccentric form of behavior that had developed at that time. It seems that large number of say Murphys or Kellys would come together
and reassure each other that wonderful beyond all measure were Murphyism and Kellyism.

I began my talk with a sentence that I knew would strike terror into the most fearless of hearts and cause those of milder disposition to reach for the smelling salts or the Baby Power bottle:

“ I have decided to consult a solicitor .”

I went on to relate how I intended to change my name by deed poll to Patrick FitzHerbert–Plantagenet as it was unlikely that the FitzHerbert-Plantagenets would hold a clan rally anywhere near Listowel. After further mindless meanderings I finished the piece by commenting on the surname Gillespie. There are various different accounts of the origins of the name and, to add to the confusion, I suggested that many people believed that it came from the Irish “
Mac an Aspaig”
meaning “
The bishop’s son”
. I went on to reassure the Gillespies that they should, on no account, be embarrassed by this as the word “
Mac”
^*
is in fact a corruption of the word
“ Muc”
^**
and they were accordingly not descended from the bishop’s son, but rather from the bishop’s pig.

I was duly summoned to the R.T.E. studio in Limerick and recorded my thoughts on a wet Monday afternoon. The producer told me I was wonderful, and I did not disagree with him ( out of consideration for his feelings ). The following
Wednesday morning I turned on the early news only to hear that the Bishop of Galway was possessed of a sturdy son. This was soon followed by a phone call from R.T.E. to tell me that my talk would not be broadcast as it would be in extremely poor taste.