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- Herausgeber: Dedalus Ireland
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Dedalus Ireland
- Sprache: Englisch
Imagine if Flann O'Brien, with a little help from James Joyce, had rewritten Alice in Wonderland or Laurence Sterne had sent Don Quixote on a voyage alongside Lemuel Gulliver, then you have entered the world of Jabberwock - an anarchic novel full of delights and fromulous pleasures. It tells the story of Ignatius Hackett, who rises in 1920s Dubilin to the top of the journalist tree before he is undone by words and has a spell in Dean Swift's Mental Asylum. With Europe on the brink of war, his life takes a turn for the better when his journalistic skills are remembered and he is dispatched across the water to investigate a spate of verbal outrages in a topsy-turvy world in which fonts and footnotes flourish while puns and paradoxes proliferate at an alarming rate. Spurred on, he travels to France and into the dark heart of Germany, and gets caught up in a sinister chess-game of police and informers, of spies and revolutionaries behind which moves the shadowy Ouroboros Brotherhood. Who can be trusted, when words themselves are no longer content to be bound in dictionaries, but are in danger of being pressganged as wonder-weapons in the new World War? 'JABBERWOCK fizzes with wit and ingenuity - a linguistic riot of hiberno-anarchy.' Ronan Hession, author of 'Leonard and Hungry Paul'.
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Dedalus Ireland
Dara Kavanagh is a writer, academic, translator and poet. A native of Dublin, he spent more than a decade working in Africa, Australia and Latin America before returning to settle in Ireland. He has written several books and poetry collections.
He is the author of two novels published by Dedalus: Prague 1938 (2021) and Jabberwock (2023).
Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited
24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE
www.dedalusbooks.com
ISBN printed book 978 1 915568 41 0
ISBN ebook 978 1 915568 45 8
Dedalus is distributed in the USA & Canada by SCB Distributors
15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248
[email protected] www.scbdistributors.com
Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd.
58, Beaumont Road, Mount Kuring-gai, N.S.W. 2080
[email protected] www.peribo.com.au
First published by Dedalus in 2023
Jabberwock copyright © Dara Kavanagh 2023
The right of Dara Kavanagh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Elcograf S.p.A.
Typeset by Marie Lane
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Bletchley, Æthelred 2nd Lord — Home Secretary (1935–38), son of Æthelred 1st Lord Bletchley who founded the Semantics branch of CID.
Bracken, Brendan — Wartime Minister of Information and First Lord of the Admiralty.
Chandler, Charlie — Hackett’s ‘Handler’ in the Eirish Department of Foreign Affairs.
Chapman, Seumas — Eirish Cultural Attaché to the Court of St James.
Clarke, William — Member of the notorious ‘G’ Division of the Dubilin Metropolitan Police. One of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocryphal’.
Doolittle, Seymour — Professor of Applied Linguistics at Keys College Oxenford who oversaw the publication of the Oxenford Engelish Dictionary.
Fleming, Aloysius — Army veteran, inmate of Swift’s Institution for the Insane at the same time as Ignatius Hackett. Another of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocryphal’.
Fraiser, Duncan — Deputy Chief Inspector of the Semantics branch of the CID.
Hastings, Harold — The Royal Academy of Letters’ Decommissioner of the Otiose.
McCann, Malachi, Mc — Student at University College Dubilin at the same time as Ignatius Hackett, member of both the Dubilin Cervantes Society and Ouroboros Society.
McTurcaill, Turlough — Royal Academy of Letters’ Commissioner of Words.
Mulcahy, Edmond — Printer, and member of both the Eirish Citizen Army and the Ouroboros Brotherhood. One of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocryphal’.
O’Brien — Hereditary Title of the Director of the Royal Academy of Letters.
Quibble, Cecil — Chief Inspector of the Semantics branch of the CID.
Sangster, Agatha — Double agent. One of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocryphal’.
Smyllie, Robert Maire — RM or “Bertie”, legendary editor of The Eirish Times.
Von Beruf, Graf Ernst — Prussian Count instrumental in the programmes to develop both the and its feared successor, the .
Contents
Preface
Volume One The Gathering Storm
Chapter The First
Chapter The Second
Chapter The Third
Chapter The Fourth
Chapter The Fifth
Chapter The Sixth
Chapter The Seventh
Chapter The Eighth
Chapter The Ninth
Volume Two The Empire Strikes Back
Chapter The First
Chapter The Second
Chapter The Third
Chapter The Fourth
Chapter The Fifth
Chapter The Sixth
Chapter The Seventh
Chapter The Eighth
Chapter The Ninth
Chapter The Tenth
Chapter The Eleventh
Chapter The Twelfth
Chapter The Thirteenth
Chapter The Fourteenth
Chapter The Fifteenth
Volume Three The Dark Continent
Chapter The First
Chapter The Second
Chapter The Third
Chapter The Fourth
Chapter The Fifth
Chapter The Sixth
Chapter The Seventh
Chapter The Eighth
Appendix
In the darkest hour of the Emergency,1 at a time when U-boats moved like predatory fish beneath the grey Atlantic and the skies over Dover’s chalk cliffs were daily scored with the vapour trails of dogfights, a trawler was bobbling some twenty nautical miles off Penzaunce. She was gaily deckedout; her provenance, the port of Waterfjord in the Eirish Free State. A huge tricolour painted on either flank proclaimed her neutrality. All the same, were a periscope to draw close enough, and there’s more than a suggestion that one did, it might have picked out a flippant Jolly Roger frabbling above the cabin.
If a clandestine rendezvous did occur it was short-lived. Already, from North-Northeast and East-Southeast, two of His Majesty’s corvettes were bearing down on her. For the was no innocent fishing-boat. What happened next has been a matter of debate ever since, but this much is beyond dispute. Had her nefarious cargo been landed and distributed as planned, the might have proved every bit as fromulous to His Majesty’s Empire as all the bombs of all the Dorniers and Heinkels then being mustered throughout Occupied Europe. That she wasn’t, and that her story is so little known, shall be the subject of these pages.
1 A period of shortages and travel restrictions occasioned by Neville Chamberlain’s infamous declaration of war on Germany on the morning of September 3rd 1939.
in which our hero endeavours to evade his landlord, fails in this, and is handed an official summons
To begin with, Hackett may not have been Hackett. He may have been Rooney. But that’s another story. Our story begins in the year of the Abdication Crisis.2 It is a pivotal year in the history of the European continent, and one moreover that finds our hero at a low ebb, shundling out of a dive off Lower Dorset St in order to give the landlord, Needles Nugent, the slip. A native of Cavan, Manus Nugent was scant of height, scanter of breath, and scantest of all of respect for his tenants — oh, a nice collection of scapegraces and ne’er-do-wells. That one of them had once enjoyed a reputation as a newspaper columnist was a matter of the utmost indifference to his calculus. Mr Ignatius Hackett was thirteen pounds ten and six behind in his rent, so he was, and pounds, shillings and pence were the Holy Trinity of the Nugent creed.
Hackett shundled out the door, gazed myopically up and down the street, then gravitated down a side-alley in the general direction of the river Liffey. From his shambling gait, which like his politics was left-leaning, it was apparent that he had no particular destination in mind, or if he had, no particular hour at which he was appointed to arrive there. He was as short of prospects as he was long in the tooth, that was the long and the short of it. The one concession to directing his perambulation was to periodically correct the innate tendency to drift to the left occasioned by having, since birth, a slightly shorter left leg, or slightly longer right one, depending on how you looked at it. The effect of this effort was to impart onto the rhythm of his movement a secondary motion comparable to the epicycles with which Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery, had modified the circular motion of the planets.
That morning, Hackett had nothing on his mind. It is a phrase that needs to be clarified. Now as is well documented, during an idle patch in the Thirty Years War, a notorious cardsharp named René “” had tried to demonstrate the correlation between being and thinking by plotting modes of being (‘’) on a horizontal axis and of thinking (‘’) on a vertical axis — as for instance ‘’ vs ‘’, and then joining the dots. By extrapolating backwards, he came to the startling conclusion that it was impossible to think of nothing. Although the corresponding graph has arguably had a more far-reaching effect on coordinate geometry than on either philosophy or psychology, in the field of affective psychotherapy the maxim ‘’ is to this day referred to as the Cartesian Proposition. Be that as it may, what Ignatius Hackett was engaged upon was not thinking of nothing, but rather thinking about nothing.
In particular, he was considering whether the nothing that poetry makes happen is the same nothing as the nothing that philosophy makes happen. For each had its own claims. He was distracted momentarily by the old story of the bishop in the brothel who, when asked whether he’d like his ‘lady companion’ to appear in lace lingerie, replied ‘Nothing would please me better.’ Now, was that an example of a poetic nothing, or a philosophical? Or both? Or neither? Were there other kinds of nothing? Were there, in fact, as many categories of nothing as there were categories of thing? Hackett was getting nowhere, but if he was, at least he was getting nowhere fast. By the time he’d reached the Ne Plus Ultra of Parnell’s monument,3 nothing could have been farther from his mind.
From his earliest childhood, Ignatius Hackett was possessed of what is termed a mentality:4 one that, rather than sticking to the task or text in hand, is perpetually racing down a labyrinth of bye-ways and footnotes in pursuit of imaginary mice. If it wasn’t the problem of nothing that his thoughts were stalking, it was the old chestnut of the chicken and the egg; and if not that, the conundrum of the tortoise and the hare; or of the polygamist from St Ives; or of the Copenhagen Interpretation; or of Zeno’s Paradox; or that of the Cretan Liars; or the poser of the Prussian philosopher’s attempt to navigate the bridges of Königsburg. This last was a childhood favourite his father, Walter, had framed thus: “Can you cross all seven bridges without crossing any bridge twice? — I Kant.” Before his breakdown words themselves had been the favourite quarry of his errant thoughts. But these days he was nervous of words.
Like many a man of letters — and in his heyday Hackett could’ve walked into the office of any editor in the country and commanded nine column inches — the parlous proximity to words had been his downfall. Some seven years before, around the time when panic shook the financial world, the intrepid columnist began to display many of the symptoms of early-onset dysphasia. When he first heard the diagnosis, he was at a loss for words. A psychoanalyst specialising in the condition warned him, ‘If the condition develops into anacoulothon … well, you see what I mean.’ He did, and it didn’t. Not immediately. But before another year was out, the dysphasia was complicated by secondary aporia, side by side with peritaxis. One morning, a colleague was dumbfounded to discover Hackett sitting at his desk entirely unable to speak or type. Not long after that, our hero spent an unspecified number of undignified months in the incomparable care of Swift’s Institution for the Insane.5
Long months had passed since that dark time. Still, no more did the journalist risk inventing anagrams or constructing etymologies, no more did he assay the maze of the cryptic crossword, and if he invariably scanned the headlines of the newspaper vendors as he passed them by, it was merely to stay abreast of current affairs in this most fromulous of times. The one verbal weakness to which he was still prone was involuntary inappropriate wordplay. For Hackett had inherited from his beloved father that debilitating condition known as ,6 a verbal manifestation of the gag-reflex. However, these days he generally succeeded in internalising the incessant procession of puns that cavorted before his eyes.
By this juncture, Hackett was in the shadow of the monument to the Admirable Nelson known to generations of Dubiliners as ‘the Pillar’. His father had oft remarked how all along O’Connell St, every one of the statues gazes wistfully toward the Southside, and it was to the Southside that the former columnist was, as though by one of Mr Newton’s universal laws, gravitating. The point was, Nugent was too tight-fisted a tyke to venture much onto the more salubrious bank of the Liffey for fear of spending a farthing more on any item than could be got for less in the vicinity of Dorset St, Lower. With Needles Nugent, no quarter was asked and none given.
For a while Hackett dawdled, listening to the clang and clamour, the music of cow-bell and slow glissando of the electric trams as they glided their heft through the heart of the Hibernian Metropolis. He gazed myopically at the portico of the General Post Office and, as is natural, he thought briefly of his glory days. For it was at this very spot that, two decades since, his journalistic career had had its unlikely baptism. If there was one thing that Hackett had been celebrated for down the years, it was for his uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time. As though prompted by muscle-memory, his fingers remembered fondly the keys of his Underwood typewriter, and it was not unnatural that from there his reverie moved to the three brass balls hanging over the pawnshop on nearby Marlboro St.7In hock signo.
It was too painful to think of the typewriter gathering dust on a pawnshop shelf, and futile to think of the shop itself as a possible palliative to his present penury. For pretty much the entirety of Hackett’s earthly estate was residing in one pawnshop or another. This inventory extended as far as his spectacles, which explained the myopia blurring the august pillars of the GPO. Could he chance redeeming them so he could spend the day in the reading room of the National Library on Kildare St? His fingers made an inventory of his pockets. He had, by this blind reckoning, seven pence ha’penny, scarcely the wherewithal to keep body and soul together for that day much less redeem his glasses.
As was his wont in passing the newspaper vendors that adorn the capital’s busy thoroughfare, Hackett pushed index fingers and thumbs together to fashion a pinhole, and through this tremulous lens of air he perused the headlines. Swimming into focus were the words “MAYHEM IN MEDWAY” and “ANOTHER VERBAL OUTRAGE ROCKS UK ESTABLISHMENT.” Though he’d been avoiding the living room where, of an evening, Needles Nugent would treat his paying tenants to a quarter-hour of the Marconi wireless, he was aware of the rash of counterfeit terms that were lately being passed off in the Home Counties — so-called, he mused, because these were the counties identified in the Tudor Walters report as suitable for the building of homes.
As his thoughts wandered, his perception became aware that a figure had been watching him. Or not watching him. For it was a casualty of the Great War, dark glasses and white cane, a tray of sundry items dangling from the neck. Beret and greatcoat, and across his chest the rainbow ribbons of campaign medals, a language beyond Hackett’s ken, even if his myopia could bring them to focus. Now, there was nothing at all unusual in seeing a war cripple begging. Mustard gas alone had resulted in a veritable legion of seasoned veterans. What made Hackett uneasy was that the previous day but one, he’d bumped into one outside the doss-house off Dorset St., upsetting the tray of lucifers. That was unlucky. And as Hackett was of a superstitious bent, a bad feeling had dogged him all that day. He shivered at the memory. Nothing for it, then. Hackett resumed his slow perambulation southward.
He was rounding the railings of Trinity College when a felicitous thought struck him. The last time he’d spent the day in the National Library’s reading room, hadn’t the Chief Librarian told him that Trinity College had plans out to tender to build a Berkeley Library. Which is to say, a class of library named for Bishop Berkeley of Cloyne, who posited the principle ‘esse est percipi’, viz., to be is to be perceived.8 It made perfect sense. The college was surrounded on all sides by a teeming capital. Space was at a premium. To conceive and construct a library which only took up space when it was being perceived was a capital idea. The word from America was they’d gone for broke and constructed an entire University on the Berkeley principle. The problem of course was how to measure the amount of space that one had saved. Because it was plain as the nose on your face that any attempt to measure the absence of the library would ipso facto cancel out that absence. Hadn’t the old song about the arrival of a mere nightingale re-conjuring Berkeley Square suggested as much? The Bursar of Trinity College had offered a reward of a hundred guineas to anyone who could crack that particular chestnut.
Hackett would have been gripped by the conundrum had the Bursar offered the meanest reward. That said, the prospect of recovering his goods and chattels, not least the precious Underwood, from out of hock and of being shot of Needles Nugent for time eternal had his thoughts chasing in a dozen directions at once. For hours, he’d discussed the problem with the Chief Librarian of the National Library, a Mr Best whom everyone referred to as Second Best to distinguish him from his younger brother, the Mr Best who’d ‘walked in’ during the celebrated debate on whether Hamlet was the ghost of his own father at a time when Lyster was Chief Librarian. Now, Second Best was celebrated for his dry sense of humour, as evidenced in his retort, ‘I can tell you one thing, we already have some class of a Berkeley Library operating here, for if any of your University College students are in, the minute you take your eye off of a book, it’s gone’. The felicitous comment came back to Hackett now as he dawdled by the main gate at College Green.
Like many a precocious child, Hackett had been fascinated by Bishop Berkeley’s proposition. In those long gone days, the most direct way to test the hypothesis seemed to the boy to be to turn around really fast to see if he could momentarily catch the absence of what would almost instantaneously be there. Almost instantaneously, the child considered, since light had a finite speed. He’d never succeeded, but then absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, that too was an axiom. Perhaps it was worth a go now? Hackett pivorted in the general direction of Grafton St, clamped his eyes shut by way of preparation, then spun round and snapped them open. There was the city before his eyes, there the great halfround of the old Parliament, and there, under the portico and bobbling toward him, the unmistakable bowler atop the figure of Needles Nugent.
Seeing the bowler bobbing through the meagre crowd and bearing down on him with determination, Hackett’s instinct was to make a bolt — in the figurative rather than metallurgic sense. He had neither the desire nor the wherewithal to deal with Needles Nugent. But where to make a bolt for? Hackett was tall enough of stature to look to the four points of the compass without his view being obstructed, but short enough of sight that the game was scarcely worth the candle. However, it did yield an immediate solution. The porter’s gate to Trinity College stood ajar, and so he darted through the passageway and out onto the cobbled quadrangle just as the first falsetto cry of ‘Hackett! Hackett!’ overtook him. Without looking rearwards he made for the campanile where he veered right (as you look at it, left from its perspective) and shundled down along the side of the Long Room.
Here, he was surprised to find a small crowd had gathered in a semi-circle about the great wooden doors of the ancient library. Taking advantage of his height to peer over the heads as he passed, he found the centre of interest was a garmungling carpenter in a cloth cap, elbows poking from ill-fitting overalls. Sundry tools lay idle on the cobbles before him: awl, saw, plane, riddle, but without a clew. The tools of the trade, then, though the riddle was a puzzle. He was whistling a lively tune while marking off yard-lengths by eye on a wimbling plank with a flat blue pencil he kept betimes behind one protuberant ear, betimes behind the other. A dusting of sawdust over the cobbles suggested he had at an earlier time been engaged in more strumulous work. Hackett listened. ‘,’ chirped the chippy.
Recognising the tune to be Lilliburlero, a jingle popular with both sides during the Williamite War, Hackett started and stopped. That a tradesman should be whistling Lilliburlero was not in itself surprising. It had become a signature tune with Alexandra Palace, always provided you could find the World Service on your wireless. The jingle intrigued Hackett as it seemed to simultaneously invite and evade interpretation: There was an old prophecy found in a bog / Lilliburlero bullen a la / The country’d be ruled by an ass and a dog /Lilliburlero bullen a la … though why it fascinated the British Broadcasting Corporation was anyone’s guess. What arrested him now was that Lilliburlero, a great favourite of his sometime acquaintance Malachi McCann who would whistle it between a gap in his incisors, was inexorably associated in his mind with that red-letter day at the GPO when his journalistic career had unexpectedly taken wing.
Distracted by the tune and the memory, Hackett forgot what it was that had impelled him to enter the interior quads of the Protestant bastion, and was rudely reminded when he felt his elbow peremptorily clamped. ‘Hackett,’ rasped a voice, sharp as a needle, ‘I’ve been searching high and low for you so I have.’
‘Do you tell me so,’ said Hackett, attempting vainly to extract his elbow from the vicelike grip.
‘Aye. I do,’ Nugent wheezed. Hackett’s swallow was dry as the sawdust sprinkled over the cobbles. Never mind the magnitude of the sum he was in arrears, the more immediate prospect of losing the meagre pile of coppers in his pocket, and with it any chance of slaking his thirst, had quite dried his saliva.
‘I do tell you so. All morning I’ve been trying to find you, sir.’ Nugent’s ‘you, sir’ had the knack of negating such respect as the appellation should have occasioned. It did not bode well for what was to follow. ‘And do you know why I’ve wasted my morning thus, sir? Will I tell you?’
‘I feel sure, Mr Nugent, you’re about to.’
‘Is that so? Is it now? Well, I’ll tell you, Masther Hackett. It’s because a summons arrived for you, sir, so it did. By messenger boy. And I had to give that wee gasoon 3d, so I did. A sum I may add to what you already owe.’ At these words, the addressee felt an envelope thrust into his hand. ‘I’ve served it now so I have,’ continued the little man, ‘there’s no-one can accuse Manus Nugent of shirking his duty.’ And with that he marched peremptorily onward, his now contented bowler bobbing across the bowling green until it had swum out of the blurred field of Hackett’s vision.
Alone once more, Hackett chanced a glance in the direction of the item that had been thrust into his fist. At once his heart sank. The manila envelope was stamped with the official blazon of the Eirish Free State. Even through his myopia, he could see it was the backward harp of officialdom and not the fabled Guinness harp of which, following a protracted copyright lawsuit which Hackett himself as a young journalist had covered, it is the mirror image. For one in Hackett’s straightened circumstances, the reversed harp was ever the harbinger of bad news.
From the figurative sawdust he’d swallowed, Hackett’s throat had acquired the parched consistency of sandpaper. The one consolation to which he clung was that the meagre coppers in his pocket remained untouched. Following the promptings of Casey, the people’s poet, for there could be little doubt that this was a time of trouble and lousy strife, he ran quickly through the picture-book of his imagination the colourful signage of some half-dozen public houses that were within emergency walking distance of where he now stood. By old habit, without, as it were, making any conscious decision either way, he made for .9
The choice of bar was a curious one, and is a good indication of the state of consternation into which the summons had cast our hero. Ever since his breakdown, which is to say over a period of seven years, he had been giving any establishment frequented by the demimonde of journalists and literati — — a wide berth. To imagine this was a matter of hurt pride, for the former columnist was evidently not half the figure he’d once cut, is to misunderstand the man. Put simply, words and their parlous proximity had been the root cause of his illness. Formerly, he’d been addicted to words. And so, like any recovering addict, hard though it was, Hackett avoided any company and locale that would be the occasion of tickling his addiction. Why then, was he an occasional visitor to the National Library? Partly, this was to stay warm, to have an interior seat that cost not a farthing; partly in order to have congress with the knowledgeable Second Best; partly to play out with said Best the chess-games of the incontestable Capablanca, who had been unexpectedly beaten by the unassailable Alekhine, who in turn had been surprisingly outplayed by the matchless Euwe; and partly to consult such publications as dealt with conundrums of a mathematical nature. He made an allowance for articles on Physics which, with Rutherford, he considered the king of the sciences; Rutherford, whose observation upon receiving the Nobel Prize that “all science is either physics or stamp collecting” endeared him neither to chemists nor philatelists.
Hackett soon found himself in the mahogulous interior of the , and as the fella said, no-one as surprised as himself to find himself there. Instinctively, he made for the stool that had once been synonymous with the columnist of yore. But for the fact that the curate was a young gasún of scarcely one-and-twenty, he’d surely have remarked upon the remarkable return.
Hackett was in such a somnambulistic state that he failed entirely to clock the round glasses on the round face that was broadly beaming in his direction until the words boomed out, with just a trace of Glaswegian colouring the Sligo accent.
‘Cometh the hour and cometh the man!’
At that instant Hackett was startled out of a seven year trance. He looked myopically at the Cheshire grin floating atop a poncho and said, simply, ‘Smyllie.’
2 From the Latin ab-dicare, to ‘declare with a parting gesture’. In December 1936 Edward VIII abdicated the throne in favour of his brother Albert, Duke of Yorvik, so as to marry an American heiress. There is considerable debate as to why he did so. Sikorski’s proposition that Bishop Blunt of Bradford may have threatened to expose his identity as a German mole has been generally discredited.
3 The Latin legend is a reminder the obelisk was originally intended as a traffic bollard to mark the apex of Sackville St., which it was said would thereby become Europe’s widest cul de sac.
4 Named for a fabled white cat who stalked the marginalia of Eirish medieval manuscripts.
5 The madhouse was a legacy to the Eirish people from the author of Gulliver’s Travels. A dedicatory plaque above the main entrance reads: ‘He gave the little Wealth he had / To build a House for Fools and Mad. / And shew’d by one Satyric Touch, / No Nation needed it so much.’ Though no Hibernophile, Swift won lasting renown in his native land for his contention that held the Engelish “to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth”. So distraught was the Dean to have been posted to Eirland that, to take his mind off the exile, he designed a mechanical device for dressing the bishop. It was a coping mechanism.
6 A condition first identified by the Austrian neurosurgeon Otfried Förster, who coined the term in a dig at his colleague Franz Witzel. Förster had suggested for one of Witzel’s patients that trepanation might relieve the pressure on her frontal lobes contributory to the pathological condition, to which Witzel had replied: ‘, she needs trepanation like she needs a hole in ze head!’
7 Named for the Duke of Marlboro (1650–1722), the illustrious ancestor of Winston Churchill (q.v.) who made his vast fortune importing tobacco.
8 Walter Hackett had told young Ignatius that, when asked by a sceptical Dr Johnson if he could thereby explain his own existence, the Bishop replied ‘As God is my witness.’
9 A bar on Dubilin’s Fleet St perennially popular among journalists, poets and delusionals. In the Roque map (1777) the bar’s title is placed in inverted commas, suggesting an ironic appellation.
pertaining to a famous parley in the , and a most curious chess-game
The round man in the poncho presiding over the inner parlour of the was, of course, R. M. Smyllie, a figure who, as he needs no introduction, shall receive none. Asked for a job description, the legendary editor liked to reply “To cut a long story short.” Hackett’s attention was called back to the young curate, who had set a pint of plain porter before him and was waiting for something to happen in consequence of the action. With a start, three things came to him: that he had absentmindedly ordered the beverage; that a pint of plain cost 10d; and that his portable goods came to the derisory sum of seven pence ha’penny. It was not the first time his absentmindedness had landed him in a pickle. While his thoughts scattered in chase of imaginary mice to find a phrase adequate to the situation, his fingers counted and recounted the grubby coppers in his pocket. The problem was, even had he recognised the former journalist, the curate could scarcely have allowed him the missing tuppence ha’penny on tick, his credit was so shot by this juncture.
The hiatus at the counter had begun to attract the attention of the sundry customers scattered about the bar at the periphery of Hackett’s myopia. With a magisterial nod toward the curate, R. M. Smyllie dispelled any possibility of monetary embarrassment. He allowed the impecunious customer to nod his gratitude and take the edge off his thirst, then, ‘I take it, Mr Hackett,’ his voice boomed out, and it was unclear whether it was the once celebrated name that had captured the attention of the bar or the decibel volume, ‘that you’re abreast of the spate of lexical crimes currently assailing the hereditary foe?’
Now, as Hackett’s old college friend McCann would have put it, he was and he wasn’t. In the course of his daily peregrinations about the capital, one eye, albeit blurred by myopia, always alighted hungrily upon the headlines hawked by the newspaper vendors. There were also the bulletins gleaned, albeit muffled through the floorboards of his room, from the Marconi wireless in the living room of the dosshouse, though Needles Nugent was too tight-fisted to allow the set to be switched on for more than a paltry quarter hour of an evening. So that Hackett was only dimly aware of the series of verbal outrages that had begun to discombobulate the Home Counties. So he made an equivocal gesture to intimate the degree to which he was and he wasn’t.
‘I see,’ nodded the editor, ‘I see.’ So seeing and so saying, he drew from a stack of newspapers beside him the nethermost and, frabbling it in such a way that a single article was foremost, he passed it along the counter to Hackett. The latter, who had as the attentive reader knows pawned his glasses, made a show of pattling the full array of his pockets before, irrigating the sentence with a watery smile, he declared, ‘I appear to have left my digs without my spectacles.’
‘No matter,’ said the Sligo Scotsman, ‘no matter.’ He proffered his hand to a bespectacled acolyte sitting nearby. ‘Mr Wood. If you would?’ Mr Wood would, and his glasses were passed along to the down-at-heel columnist. They were not of perfect focal length, nevertheless, as Hackett held them before his eyes, the typeface, the article, indeed the entire counter swam into view. So too the barman and the mirror behind him. And that was crucial for what was to follow.
Hackett unfrabbled the newspaper — it was a copy of the Logdon Gravitas already two days old — and perused the article that had been circumscribed in red ink. ‘BEDLAM IN BOTOLPH’S’ ran the headline. A cursory glance told him it dealt with another of the spate of lexical outrages then afflicting the south-eastern corner of the neighbouring isle. Such snippets as he’d gleaned from the communal Marconi had tended to be anecdotal, not to say comical, and gave no intimation there may have been a manxome counterfeit cell at work bent on the disarticulation of the United Kingdom. But if no lesser a figure than R. M. Smyllie was taking an interest …
Now, it chanced that in a corner of the there was a chess-game proceeding, and Hackett being an aficionado of the game and ever afflicted with a mentality, his concentration flitted between the article in his hands, the chess-game in the mirror, the commentary of the Sligo Scotsman to his side and the unopened summons in his pocket. This wasn’t merely whimsy. The fact was, ever since his time as an asylum inmate, Hackett had become more than circumspect when it came to printed matter. However, for convenience, the article is presented in its entirety, without diversion, distraction or interpolation, herewith:
BEDLAM IN BOTOLPH’S
The congregation of St Botolph’s in Chat’em was in for something of a surprise last Sunday when Dr Martin Coyne, Bisharp of Rockchester, took to the pulpit. No sooner had his Grace begun to deliver a sermon on the evils of calumny than heads began to turn, one to another, in bemusement. For the learned Bisharp kept returning to the notion of ‘segnum’. What could he mean? Was it perhaps a Latin tag? It was only when he stressed the difference between ‘segnumi of omission’ and ‘segnumi of commission’ that the more alert began to suspect the Doctor was spraking of good old-fashioned sin. In much the same fashion, ‘grodlum’ was after some time understood to refer to original guilt, for are we not all born ‘grodlumous’? But what ‘lali perpengi’ might be remains anybody’s guess!
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the misfortunate Dr Coyne, who is celebrated in Lambert Palace for his eloquence, consistently tripped over the very calumny he was there to preach against, giving the word an extra syllable, not by virtue of a stutter, but, as it were, in full consciousness of the addition. It is with regret that we must tell the reader that his Grace’s repeated references to ‘cacalumny’ occasioned a coconsiderable degree of merriment among the more uncocouth elements in the cocongregation.
All the time, however, the Bisharp remained oblivious to the cause of this gaiety. Worse was to come, for to round off the ordeal, a general sniggering was to be heard when ‘bgrrgl’ found its way unexpectedly into the final paragraphs of the sermon! Following on the farce of the Major of Gillingham’s sprake last Wednesday, and the brace of near incomprehensible pamphlets put out by the Rockchester Hysterical (sic) Society the previous month, one wonders if there isn’t something contagious in the Medway region that is reducing its public figures to mere stammerers and malapropists!
While one train of Hackett’s thoughts was assimilating the gist of the printed matter and a second was ferrying away the ominous image of the reversed harp, a third was distracted by the matter of the chess-game tendered in the virtual bar, itself tendered within the mirror behind the curate. And that runaway train ran loosely as follows.
To the rear of the looking-glass bar, which he supposed corresponded to the front of the pub, there was a game of chess taking place. Now, the player of the black pieces had his back to the bar, and to the mirror. But Hackett was more interested in the white player. He was of similar build, and was wearing an identical beret to his opponent. Indeed, they could almost have been reflections one of the other. Perhaps they were brothers. But what was far more curious was the white stick that was folded up on the white player’s lap, and the dark glasses which obscured his eyes. Indeed, but for the absence of a greatcoat and campaign medals, this could have been the very veteran he’d encountered at the GPO. But then, did all the blind not resemble one another? After all, what import could appearance hold in their dark world. And his companion? Hackett wondered if the black player, whose back was to the mirror and therefore, he supposed, to the counter, might be just as blind.
The game was in the early stages, at least insofar as the capture of pieces was concerned. It was difficult to tell who had the advantage from the opening, the asymmetry of which Hackett recognised as the dragon variation of the Sicilian defence. And yet there was something altogether curious about the set-up, altogether not . It took Hackett several minutes to nail it. There was an incorrect quality about black’s fianchettoed bishop, even taking into account that in the looking-glass world the kingside had become the queenside and the queenside the kingside. He knucked his fingers. The black piece was white! Which is to say, its colour was black, as you might expect. But it stood on a white square. Now, Hackett could have sworn that black’s king’s bishop should be black. It was the black queen’s bishop that was white, and the white queen’s bishop, black. He ribbled his chin. Unless it was another effect of watching the game in the mirror?
But of course that made not the blindest bit of sense. You might just as well say that the double clocks which sat beside the players ran counter-clockwise. Though now he thought about it, they might, depending on whether the Coriolis effect was reversed in mirrors. But in the looking-glass world, that would still correspond to time moving forwards. Non-plussed, he watched a couple of moves, and noticed that while the black player used the arm on the kingside to move his queen’s knight and tap the black clock, the white player, he of the white stick, used the queenside hand to capture the black piece and tap the white clock. Now, normally, that would make the white player left-handed. But then the black player too would have to be a south-paw, since he was facing him. Perhaps if they were brothers it wasn’t so unlikely. But in a mirror? It took all of Hackett’s willpower not to pivort around and sneak a look.
Wait just a minute. Wait now. Even in a mirror, black’s king’s knight’s second square should be black. That was only common sense. Now, in the looking-glass game, it was white. Small wonder the king’s castle was so oddly defended. And yet it appeared to be correctly positioned, viz., to the black player’s left, and the white player’s right, as they looked at it. Hackett closed his eyes, placed a finger on either side of the bridge of his nose, and squeezed. Mentally, he conjured a board. His eye ran along its front rank. Black white black white black. His eyes opened and checked the reflected board. White black white black white. Was that because the lookingglass board had been laterally reversed, an example of the inverse-square law?
Not at all man, he considered on reflection! Because a mirror fools us with its backwards alphabets and universe of lefties precisely because we expect it to laterally invert, and it obdurately refuses. That being the case, they had the damned thing set up arse-ways from the start! It was side-on! Even taking into account the reversals of the looking-glass pub, the damned thing was set up wrong from the outset. There’s lateral thinking for you! But, he mentally asked his reflection, would that make the blindest bit of difference, if both players were blind? And if they were both blind, retorted the reflection, how would they know how much time remained on their counterclockwise clocks?
‘So you’ll agree, the time is propitious.’
Hackett met the RM’s glasses first in the mirror then in the real world. During his sojourn at the Christian Brothers, he’d cultivated the happy knack, on being snapped out of a daydream, of being able to accurately repeat the final few words of whichever Brother was lifting him out of reverie and desk by the ear. Is there a term for that knack, he now wondered. There certainly should be. Autoretort, say. Autoretort [, ɔ:tərı’tort] v., intr., to echo back the final clause or phrase to an interlocutor without having paid it or him the least heed. Would the verb also serve for a noun, the way retort itself did? He’d half a mind to submit the word and its definition to that PO Box in Ealing Broadleaf (was it?) to see if he could earn a few bob from it.
In the bar and in the mirror, the Scot and his reflection were looking at him minutely.
‘Propitious,’ nodded Hackett. ‘I see that.’
He didn’t. In fact, all the time that he’d been watching the looking-glass game, he’d been employing the camouflage of autoretort. Which is not to say that a fourth train of thought had not been heeding the Sligo Scotsman’s interventions, for Hackett had a multitrack mind. Only the fearful summons, and the concomitant possibility of eviction from the doss-house, had by this juncture been sidelined. Because, if Hackett had been famous among his colleagues for his prodigious memory, his capacity to forget was equally astonishing, as though the one facility were the necessary corollary of the other.
‘You accept the challenge, then?’
Hackett was on his guard. What this fourth train had gleaned was that the great R. M. Smyllie was making him some class of an offer. Autoretort now dragged from immediate memory the suggestion that his once popular ‘Aplestos Pithus’ column be revived. What precisely this offer consisted in was less clear, because as soon as a cash advance was mentioned, the in his head set off in chase of imaginary mice whose fantastic attractions involved the redeeming of his name, his reputation, his glasses, and above all, his beloved Underwood. A thirty quid advance — wasn’t that the sum the man had intimated? — would go a long way toward such redemption. He owed Needles Nugent thirteen quid or thereabouts, the same again would redeem both typewriter and specs, even his grandfather’s fobwatch was all but within reach. It was as though Smyllie had fathomed the precise depth of his pecuniary embarrassment. Suppose he pressed for guineas — an additional thirty pieces of silver? The door to a garden of possibility would be unlocked.
Why then was he so circumspect in his reply? Why had his parallel trains not at once dropped their respective cargos to accept the editor’s generosity? The answer may be it was precisely the tantalising aspect, and the unlikelihood of it all, that held him, like the black player in the mirror, in check. More than this, it was that the former inmate of Swift’s Institution was vitiated by doubt. Where the younger man might have leapt at the offer to resuscitate the corpse of a career, the present Hackett had been through the figurative wringer. Thirty pounds down plus three per article. It was more than generous. But was he up to it? Could he dare re-engage with words on a daily basis, and on a professional level? Would it not trigger a relapse? A dark figure out of Swift’s Asylum swam before his eyes, a hare-eyed demobbed soldier with a mortal fear of being bowdlerised, what’s this his name was …?
‘Why me?’ he asked, eyes narrowing.
‘It’s the old dog for the hard road.’
‘That’s as may be,’ said Hackett, fighting down a flush equal parts pleasure and terror. ‘But even in my heyday, I may have worn many different hats: a correspondent’s hat; a columnist’s; a writer of opinion pieces. But I was never any class of investigative journalist. And it seems to me that an investigative journalist would be the man for this particular assignment.’
‘With respect, Mr Hackett, you’ll allow me to be the best judge of what class of beast it is I’m after for this particular assignment.’
Hackett demurred. Briefly. ‘Ok. But we both know, as often as not the ‘Aplestos Pithus’ column was tossed off on a Friday in the reading room of Kildare St. Why send me overseas?’
‘I imagined you’d be raring to go,’ said the Scot, ‘the minute you laid eyes on that wee article.’ Now, in truth the article itself had merely wobbled in Wood’s spectacles before his eyes, but by a process akin to autoretort, he pulled a word from his perusal of it. ‘Bisharp?’ offered Hackett.
‘Indeed.’
‘It’s not a typesetter’s error?’
Supercilious eyebrows suggested it was not. A silence followed. ‘What I mean, Mr Hackett, did you mind who penned that article?’
Hackett had not minded, and so, without much thought, he unfrabbled the Logdon Gravitas and examined the attribution. Three lines, vertical, scored by a line across their middle, horizontal. Vertigo seized him. It was his own monograph!
Momentarily his vision clouded, and he teetered at the edge of that abyss klept, in the decorative language of heraldry, .10 It was a debilitating form of vertigo from which he’d suffered ever since, on his seventh birthday, his father Walter had presented him with his first Oxenford Engelish Dictionary. That night in bed, when he had exhausted the customary scatological fare that has forever been the delight of schoolboys, it took young Hackett’s fancy to look up the word ‘word’. Instantaneously, even before he had got as far as the letter W, the book crashed to the floor. It was as if the bed had collapsed beneath him. If words could only be defined in terms of other words, which in turn depended upon more words, or worse again, upon the original word you were looking up in the first place, then the whole ghost of language could float off into thin air! Any time he came across a picture-book which contained a plate with a picture of the picture-book, he teetered at the brink of . When, in the Quixote, the characters were said to have read the Quixote, the world of La Mancha span crazily. And now, seeing his own monograph at the foot of the article he was reading, he was seized by a comparable vertigo. Hackett attempted to stand. The real bar began to reel about. Too many contradictions were cavorting about the floor. ‘You’ll have to give me leave to think about it,’ he managed, as he finally regained the upright and staggered in the direction of the door.
‘By all means,’ smiled Smyllie. ‘By all means think about it.’ Hackett was by now pushing on the door, which was refusing to give. ‘One other thing,’ the voice boomed magniloquently, ‘you’ve not had a wee look at that summons in your pocket?’
This was too much. Double vertigo all but floored the journalist. At that moment muscle-memory kicked in and pulled the door, which was inward opening, and by an application of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, Hackett was propelled by the door outward into the weak sunshine, bearing away on his nose the spectacles of the unfortunate Mr Wood.
10 In heraldry, occurs when the top sinister quarter of a shield itself contains a .10
in which an account is given of Hackett’s birth and upbringing
While our hero is teetering dizzily in the watery sunshine, the time has come to give an account of the illustrious career that had brought him to the attention of so great a figure as R. M. Smyllie. In order to do that, it will first be necessary to give an account of his upbringing, for as the popular saw has it, the child is father of the man. In Hackett’s case this was doubly the case, for as his mother Henrietta Gowing wryly pronounced, what was Walter Hackett but a child in the guise of an adult?
Walter had been a posthumous child. His father, a traindriver, perished in the infamous 1867 Bray Head Rail Disaster, fully six months before the son saw light of day. Much as his own son would be, Walter was an only child, the only child of one Maisy Hackett. Maisy was a timid seamstress who nevertheless single-handedly raised the boy against the greatest of odds. For the woman suffered from aichmophobia, a dread of all things sharp, and lived in mortal fear of shears and scissors, so that to make ends meet as a seamstress she had her work cut out for her. But as Walter, who from the very first was of a philosophical bent would tell his son, you cut your cloth.
The only two remembrances that came down to young Walter from his late father were a half-hunter fob-watch with escapement, and a daguerreotype of the engineer, William Dargan. Despite this paucity, the boy grew up with a fascination for clocks and for steam-engines, and to his mother’s dismay was determined to follow in his missing father’s footsteps. Despite tears and injunctions, he took a position as a fireman on the Atmospheric Railway that ran from Amiens St Station out to Kingstown. Daily, the widow lived in mortal fear that her only son would go the way of his father. For the unfortunate seamstress, for whom an innocent tailor’s shears was a source of dread, those roaring engines that hurtled along rails and rattled over bridges in dreadful haste were insatiable mechanical monsters bent on havoc.
Her one hope was to enlist the Widow Gowing, whose husband was late of of Burgh Quay, as an ally. Now Mrs Gowing was her oldest customer, a huckster who ran a notions shop in Benburb St,11 and she had a daughter of marriageable age named Henrietta, a perky, headstrong little thing for whom Walter had a soft spot. She also had a roving eye, which was a matter of growing concern to the Widow Gowing. It was clear to both mothers who’d wear the trousers in any future household. Despite her many suitors, the girl tolerated Walter’s shy and clumsy advances. But marry a stoker? Miss Henrietta wasn’t the type to brook a husband whose aspirations were so low and so dirty.
So the Stoneybatter widows put their heads together and a plot was hatched. Appearances were everything. Before Walter pressed his suit, the seamstress pressed his suit. And the result was that the ledger of St Joseph’s Church of the Discalced Carmelites on Berkeley Rd records the marriage of Walter Hackett to Henrietta Gowing on September 1st, 1895. She had no intention, she declared from the outset, of altering her name, and when within a bare twelvemonth she flew the Hackett family home on Prussia St, she bore away her original surname. As Walter would say to his son in years to come, ‘your mother was always Gowing.’ In fact, the flighty woman’s flight had a visibly greater impact on her motherin-law. Her scheme to wean her son off the railway in tatters, and having broken irreparably with Mrs Gowing — a huckster with notions — the unfortunate seamstress took to her bed.
Thus it was that Ignatius grew up with no actual memory of his mother. There was one bogus memory. All his life, Walter kept on his bedroom dresser a bottle of Lily of the Valley toilet water which had been a Christmas gift from Maisy Hackett to her daughter-in-law. It had been opened, sniffed at. Evidently, Henrietta had not cared for the scent, for it was the one toiletry she’d conspicuously neglected to take with her. There were hundreds of aromas the flighty creature might have favoured, Lily of the Valley was the only one of which one might say with certainty it had not been. Yet for the boy, who would sneak into Walter Hackett’s room when his father was working to sniff the bottle, this very scent became indelibly his mother’s. Her absence lent the kind of poignancy to the fragrance that perfumers could only dream of.
It has been noted previously that Ignatius Hackett had a slight limp. The cause of this impediment was not, as most assumed, childhood polio, but was down to the fact that Walter Hackett was an inveterate autodidact and self-improver. Having apprised himself during his wife’s pregnancy of the very latest medical journals on the science of parturition, the stoker decided that his primogenitor’s arrival in the world should be a home-birth, with himself assuming the role of mid-wife. Contractions began on a blusterly evening at the tail end of a blusterly March. For a man given to the scientific outlook, Walter Hackett was remarkably superstitious. It was a desire to have his first-born born before April the first that led to his rather enthusiastic yanking of the child, just as the house burst into midnight chime. Unfortunately, in the course of the delivery, which in no time at all became a botched breechbirth, Hackett Sr managed to disarticulate the ankle and hip of the infant’s left leg, with the result that it remained always about five per cent shorter than the right.
