These few minutes are from ‘A Portrait of the Artist As Four Men’, a TV drama set in 1940. Most of the words are by Myles.
Picture this.
Brian Ó Nualláin in bed with his wife Evelyn. She is asleep. He is awake.
The shot then widens to show that there are three other men in the bed. All of them are himself. The one nearest the wall is wearing a large black hat that covers his face.
At a signal from Brian, Evelyn gets out of bed. When Brian gets out, she gets in again. Then she and the two nearest Brians prop themselves on their elbows and watch as the real Brian writes these four words on a blackboard.
Now here is an astonishing thing that will please a certain type of reader.
Never mind what type.
Consider these four words, which convey between them the whole picture of the last war:
KAISER
SERBIA
JOFFRE
FRENCH
Now, if you read down each half you will get precisely the same words that you get across. Get it? Get it? Get it?
KAI SER
SER BIA
JOF FRE
FRE NCH
Imagine the mind that saw this pattern. Imagine the hell of it.
The Brian with the black hat doesn’t imagine, nor does he move – he’s the bad lad, you see. The rest of them are chaps, even the wife is a chap.
Does anyone under the age of 60 know what a chap is? The chap is what we used to call the hero in the days when we passed the time by telling each other the plots of films.
No, no one knows this who is young.
We who do know it are heroes living in a nightmare of forgetfulness, of plotlessness.
But there is this difference: we know what we know together, whereas Brian knew what he knew on his own.
Anyway, in the middle of lecturing himself about Serbia, Brian realises he is dreaming. The room is empty. Dreams are the curse of it.
Evelyn comes in with a cup of tea and a copy of The Irish Times. He asks his daily metaphysical question: Am I in today? He is. Are there any misprints? She shakes her head. Huh! Caesars will never wonder.
As she tidies the bed – why is there a black hat on the pillow? – he says:
Did you know that Chapman was much given to dreaming? (She shakes her head.) He often related to Keats the strange things he saw when in bed asleep. Once he dreamt he’d died and gone to heaven. Well, he was surprised and rather disappointed. Surroundings were most pleasant, but there seemed to be nobody there. ‘It was very strange,’ he told Keats when he woke up, ‘I looked everywhere but there wasn’t a soul to be seen.’ Keats nodded understandingly, ‘There wasn’t a sinner in the place,’ he said.
Evelyn says, No one was there. If you give up on sin, there’s nothing left for you but aesthetics, to be an aesthete, a lover of beauty.
Brian says: Aestethics? Aesthetiquette? Appreciation, discrimination, good taste. These matters do not concern me or any adult. They are the things of childhood and together with the Meccano jersey in purest jaeger, the cogged ekkers, and the consumption of neat lemonade, I have cast them behind me.
Evelyn says, Someday no one will know what ekkers are.
She exits chortling silently. But the other Brians are not happy. One of them in particular doesn’t like being interrupted: he’s looking into Chapman’s Homer. And not for the first time either. He’s done it millions of times. And he will continue to do so for all eternity.
Another Brian wants to know who the gawm in the stripey pyjamas is. Myles na Gopaleen.
Myles, the newspaper funnyman?
It’s only a part-time occupation.
Give us a kiss.
Brian snaps open the newspaper and hides behind it.
I see an advertisement here. In the Accommodation Wanted section.
‘Sober working man will share room with same. Four and six pence weekly.’
Brian lowers the paper:
How sober are you if you insist on paying money to share a room with yourself?
The room, this room, is empty.
Evelyn comes in again to find her husband turned upside down, scrambling under the bed.
What in heaven are you doing now?
From under the bed he produces the Shorter Oxford Dictionary and contorts himself appropriately.
I am, he says, I am looking up a word. The word is Kiss. The Noun. Caress with lips. Mmmm. Impact between moving balls. Mmmm. In billiards. Mmmm. Kind of sugar plum.
Did you know a kiss is a kind of sugar plum?
No, she says.
Of course you didn’t.
To say this line accurately, an actor of great insight is called for – Of course you didn’t.
Evelyn exits. Hurt or unhurt? An actress of great expressive forbearance is called for here.
Goodbye to the bedroom. Cut to the kitchen. Evelyn is making breakfast. Glutinous porridge. A single thin fat rasher. Black bread. This is, after all, the last war. As the camera concentrates on her we hear Brian Voiceover.
Do you know, I have been harbouring a strange little animal in my house for years. It looks not unlike a monkey, but since it roosts at night, it must be something else. The ‘face’ is extraordinarily withered and old. The creature is covered with a coarse fur and has never uttered a sound. It feeds chiefly on books and newspapers, and sometimes takes a bath in the kitchen sink, cunningly turning on the taps with its ‘hand’. It rarely goes out and is in its own way courteous. I am ashamed to let anybody see it in case I am confronted with some dreadful explanation….
Is any animal anywhere quite silent? The most extraordinary instance of almost, if not complete, silence in any land is the giraffe. It has been heard, I believe, to utter a very slight bleat when teased with food.
All the Brians are sitting at the kitchen table eating Evelyn’s porridge noisily. They are staring at her as she toasts the black bread to Jaysus. One of them says:
Suppose it’s a man. Maybe it’s a little man cunningly disguised, some eccentric savant from the East Indies who is over here studying us.
How do we know he hasn’t it all written down in a little book?
Yerrah, man, you’ll find it’s an overgrown rake of a badger you have in the house.
Them lads would take the hand off you.
Better go aisy with them lads. Ate the face off you when you’re asleep in the bed.
Hump him out of the house before he has you destroyed, man.
Many’s the man had the neck clawed off him be a badger.
And badgers that doesn’t be barkin’ out of them is very dangerous.
(Close up on Evelyn.)
A good strong badger can break a man’s arm with one blow of his hind leg, don’t make any mistake about that. Show that badger the door. Chinaman or no chinaman.
Brian says, Thank you. I will draw his attention to that useful portal.
Wait. The other Brians are gone. We hear a strange sound. Has Evelyn heard it? No, she is buttering the black toast.
Brian scurries into the hall. Through the letterbox a large brown envelope is being forced. Just before it hits the floor, Brian catches it. The envelope contains the manuscript of ‘The Third Policeman’, returned to the author by the publishers Longmans. Thanks but no thanks. Brian doesn’t tell Evelyn he has been rejected. He doesn’t tell anyone.
That is the end of the beginning of ‘A Portrait of the Artist As Four Men’. When Val O’Donnell asked me to take part in this event I hadn’t seen the script for quarter of a century. Eventually I found the text in an old suitcase, but I also found there this photograph.
Taken in the mid-1940s, it shows Brian sitting on the grass with the novelist Brinsley McNamara, himself a fiction, real name John Weldon. In my script Brian is saved from the nightmare of his intelligence by the friendship of Brinsley and by Evelyn. It’s a romantic comedy, almost heavenly, but with one sinner in it, saved. As a tribute to Brian Ó Nualláin, a great soul, there’s one for everyone in the audience.
