Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
Nevertheless, it is a fact. Every Englishman is painfully conscious of his appearance, his accent, his clothes, his vocabulary and even his own existence. He yearns to be invisible and inaudible in any strange circumstances and sur- roundings. Embarrassment is the English ailment. No Irishman is ever embarrassed (except finan- cially). He casually, but firmly, assumes that he has a speaking part in the day's one-act play and that the audience have been impatiently awaiting his debut. He confidently reels oil the lines which roll up on his internal teleprompter without bothering to check them for sense or grammar. While the Englishman is still proof-reading the second, or even the third, thing which has come
into his head before okaying it for public release, the Irishman has already launched a flotilla of anecdotes down the slips.
The Irishman is a public figure even at home— no bar or party, taxi or drawing-room, is private
once he has made his entrance. Instinctively, he is a kind of primitive communist who cannot believe in any personal possessions. He is generous with his bile as well as his bounty and distributes his joys equally with his sorrows. To him, all property is common property. He will share everything you possess with you and take offence if you do not raid his store in re-
turn. The future barely• exists in Ireland, so its inhabitants are long-range pessimists but short- range optimists. The Englishman operates in the reverse. He expects everything to go wrong this
week but to sort itself out next year. He prides himself on losing battles but winning wars. He puts up with frustration now to save his grand- children's ulcers. Today's indigestion is some- how made more bearable by the thought that it will occur every morning into a ripe old age.
And so the free-loading, free-wheeling Irish- man, cutting his capers on the slopes of the volcano, appears in English minds to be a relic of the golden age before the years were num- bered. All Englishmen automatically expect to get the seat behind the pillar at the theatre, to arrive at the station as the train steams out, to be given the one bad oyster and be left with the girl with the glasses.
No wonder they watch with hopeless envy as the Irishman demonstrates daily the miracle of telekinesis—the power of the mind to move matter. No Irishman can ever be convinced that there is not room for one more inside, not another -glass in the bottle or another bottle under the bed, not an extra ticket in the manager's wallet, not an even better party on the next floor. Such is the strength of his faith that the material world often turns elastic and stretches its rules and laws to accommodate him. The Irish do grow angry with each other; tug each other's lapels and push each other's paunches, in stagy rough-and-tumbles which occasionally bruise the dignity but rarely scratch the skin. But even these never spring from any sordid squabble over fleshy things. They almost always erupt from a disagreement about intellectual matters—such as the age of Pius XII at his death, the position of Kernan's sweet shop before it was pulled down, or the precise degree of squalor and ignorance in which some famous man lived, when those present knew him as a boy, before he became.a rich renegade and moved to England.
What Englishman can resist wishing he could melt the solder on the armour of his inhibitions and escape to live the life of Riley? Charm to the English is a weapon; to the Irish it is an ornament. Talk to the English is drudgery; to the Irish it is an intoxicant. Alcohol to the English is a medicine; to the Irish it is a food. Every stranger to an Englishman is a potential bore and a pos- sible competitor; to the Irishman he is a potential audience and a probable companion. When they meet, it is the contact of the closed fist and the open hand.
The Irishman rarely wishes to.be in the English- man's shoes—though recent correspondence in our two literary weeklies suggests that he envies us in our bedroom slippers. 'Come to Britain for a Full Sex Life' seems to be a slogan which is attracting visitors from all over the world. London has replaced Paris as the city of dreadful joy. And nowhere does the image of the insatiable British typist, the fun-loving British waitress and the nymphomaniac British bus conductress glow with such a lurid nimbus as in the day dreams of the middle-aged Dubliner. Such at least, is the evidence of these letters.
The correspondence was provoked by a highly unprovocative essay by J. B. Priestley in the New Statesman called 'Random Reflections on Sex.'
Mr. Priestley said that sex involved a relationship, that lust was more complicated than was generally imagined, and that too much fuss was being made over the subject anyway. The next week' there appeared an agonised, sweating protest from a Socialist Irish poet in his sixties, Sex had meant to him, he said. 'suffering identical with the pangs of Tantalus, a mental and physical, a desperate longing for that which I can see, which is all around, but which I cannot touch.' Catholicism had made all the ydung girls chaste, he com- plained, and it was youthful flesh that tempted him so unbearably. Society was damnably cruel to ageing virility and his poetry was suffering.
A juicier topic for left-wing correspondents could hardly be imagined and I longed to join in —especially when a young British playwright the next week pointed out that this problem did not torture only the old and the unmarried in Ireland. Paul Ableman himself had made love to his wife enjoyably for ten years but still 'I long and long and long to touch and caress and possess other women! Is this wrong?' I cannot digest all the comments stirred up by such a ell de couilles but, fortunately, the Irish poet, Ewart Milne, extended his range of publications and contributed a letter to the Spectator a fortnight ago. Ireland, he wrote, was 'a loveless desert' and Irish girls 'never smile at any man in the street today ... sexually, they are switched off'.
Reluctantly, as a passionate Eirophile. I have to agree that there is something in what Mr. Milne says. The Irishman marries at thirty-three and the Irishwoman at twenty-eight while a quarter of the population remain single all their lives. But I cannot help feeling that he is projecting his own frustrations on to far too large a canvas. Mr. Ableman, after all, suffers the same deprivations even in pagan England. The question none of their critics have asked is—what do they think we can do about it? Significantly, Mr. Milne writes that his objection is that he cannot 'touch at will ... but only, if at all, by permission'. Was there ever a free society where every female was at the mercy of any male? Ought we to pass a law making it illegal for sexual intimacies to be refused to strangers? There can be very few men who have not dreamed of being an Oriental pasha, a Southern slave-owner or an international heart-throb. But growing up is a process of accepting limitations and eliminating unrealisable ambitions. If Mr. Milne and Mr. Ableman really want more than anything else in the world to be stud stallions, they must devote all their energies at that right, true end. They must make them- selves richer, more' powerful or more attractive than their rivals. It is their problem and I'm damned if I'm going to pass on to them any secrets I have learned at such cost of time, energy and dignity. The truth is there is no secret to being a successful Don Juan—you simply have to want to sleep with women to the exclusion of all other achievements. It is a formula which works in Ireland as well as anywhere else—and judging by some of the public necking, nuzzling, pawing and rubbing I saw in the Dublin Festival Club last week quite a number of apprentices are already learning the business with diligence.
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