Stephen King & Ron Burgundy

To humour someone long ago, I picked up a Stephen King book and read a bit of it. I don’t recall the title but the one thing I do remember is that the word “incredibly” appeared at least once on every page. On that score, King has, in recent days, with the supreme confidence of his culture, endorsed a war criminal.

It’s only now that the fictional Ron Burgundy can retire. King has corroborated in documentary fashion that egomania and any scrap of common sense are never seen in the same room, and that, like Ron, he will say anything in response to a cue and a prompt.

King took a call from someone pretending to be the Ukrainian president in what undoubtedly had to be a normal wartime diversion for Zelensky, i.e. shooting the breeze with an American celeb in a friendly hat.

When the caller turned the screw, he omitted any mention of the many Polish victims of the “national hero” for dramatic effect. He had introduced a historical character whose record, he conceded, contained some, eh, “not so big” crimes against Jews (“accidentally”), and it still never dawned on King that it might be wiser to confess to his unfortunate ignorance of the name Bandera.

But no, like a possessed ventriloquist’s dummy, he incredibly praised him as a great man.

Stay classy, Maine.

Woke in Constantinople

In these decadent days of plentiful pronouns and “pregnant persons” it’s important to grasp that, fad-wise, this is nothing new. In A Short History of Byzantium (1997) John Julius Norwich writes numerous passages that feel oddly familiar in the twenty-first century but, to illustrate the point, I’ve chosen just four.

These are comments (a) on the religious riots of 512 AD (twenty years before the more famous Nika riots, under Justinian); (b) on the advent of iconoclasm in the year 725; (c) on the first Constantinople mission of Bishop Liudprand of Cremona in 949; and (d) on the First Crusade passing through in 1096.

The Art of Edwin Edwards

A government of cynics is often tolerant and humane…

– H. L. Mencken

Laissez les bons temps rouler.

– Edwin Edwards

A French speaker, a four-time Governor, an eight-year Federal guest, a civil-rights champion – he never forgot his school bus sloshing past black children in bad weather – the all-round Louisiana legend Edwin Edwards (93) died last Monday. An artist of politics, he was the author of the (being caught with) “a dead girl or a live boy” quip that outlined the pair of unlikely scenarios in which he could be embarrassed into losing the 1983 election.

Other notable Edwards quotes of that race included a response to the GOP candidate, Gov. David Treen, who accused him of talking out of both sides of his mouth (“It’s so people like you with only half a brain can understand me”). To reinforce the point, he claimed his opponent took an hour and a half to watch the CBS show 60 Minutes.

In dire need of money to clear the debt accrued by that victorious campaign, Edwards filled two jumbo jets with donors, who paid ten grand each for a seat, and took them off to France. The climax of the trip was a banquet at Versailles, at which he crowned himself with a waiter’s powdered wig.

In the early Nineties he came up against the Grand Wizard David Duke. The ladies’ man claimed the only thing he and Duke had in common was that they were both wizards under the sheets. He also feigned concern for the health of the man from the Klan – over smoke inhalation from “so many burning crosses” – but his supporters’ bumper stickers were still more memorable, such as

Vote for the crook. It’s important.

Vote for the lizard, not the wizard.

They did. Edwards won the run-off by 400,000 votes. I had thought that Edwin’s most exciting electoral joust was versus Duke (1991) but I was wrong. During the 1983 campaign, one of his brothers was murdered by someone to whom he (Nolan Edwards) had stopped lending money. 

To say Louisiana life is merely colourful would be too black and white. Edwards’ career was marked by “events, dear boy, events” (Harold Macmillan), in which, typically, some clown or other, usually in a position of responsibility, left a financial and/or violent mess for Edwards to try to sort out, in an oil State with an unstable tax base.

On the unresolved matter of dodgy deals and donations, the Feds finally got a conviction in 2001. Back in the Eighties, when they couldn’t lay a glove on him, legally if not politically, the Governor had loftily proclaimed

It was illegal for them to give but not for me to receive.

After he was acquitted in a 1986 corruption trial, the jury’s hotel complained to the press that half the jurors had made off with their hotel towels. The Governor’s reaction?

A man is entitled to be judged by a jury of his peers.

Eoghan Harris : Remembering a Scoundrel

The Eoghan Harris Wiki page supplies all the background and context to this Irish character and the ignominious end of his career. This is just a personal, youthful recollection of him in action…

In late 1982 I was a mere first-term fresher in Maynooth when Harris showed up with a small posse of Stickies (incl. the then RTÉ current affairs reporter Barry O’Halloran). He was to give an evening lecture in Theatre 1 in the Arts Block. The lecture wasn’t about the North. It was some broad-ranging Stalinist raving. This was when Forty Coats was still (somehow secretly, in RTÉ terms) in the Workers’ Party.

Perhaps it was my tactical error to sit at the front but, anyway, after Harris had got on to the topic of agriculture, I asked him a mild-mannered question about low food production in the USSR. He almost spat on me as he suddenly leaned forward and exploded with a sneer, “I know what you are! You and your petty bourgeois mentality…”

He may well have called me a “sleeveen” too but I’m not entirely sure if that was the exact word he used. I was eighteen and thinking ‘This ignorant bx is worse than school’ but anyway here he was in what everyone in Ireland long since knows as his classic mode, carrying on like a card-carrying Kapo of a teacher. All that was missing was the swinging leather.

When I asked for the right of response he went, “No, go away, I’m not listening to you anymore!” Apart from his few comrades, though, the rest of the audience didn’t take him lying down. The general Q&A degenerated into shouting at/with other members of the audience. Two of the Stickie posse were however of my acquaintance and they told me at the door afterwards that they thought he had answered me perfectly well. In other words, he was a great fella.

To see him now finally disgraced as an unscrupulous, hypocritical guttersnipe is inevitably rather sweet. It’s a good day for Ireland when some such poison is finally drawn… and quartered.

American Icons

The swelling has yet to go down in America but the fatal looting and vandalism of the Capitol in a way recall events described in John Julius Norwich’s A Short History of Byzantium. It’s not so much the Nika riots, which weren’t deliberately incited by Justinian, but the era of iconoclasm in the eighth and ninth centuries.

Kicked off in the year 726 by Leo III ordering the destruction of a huge golden icon of Christ over a palace gate facing Hagia Sophia, the long wrecking crusade was, in large part, a reaction against an idolatry that went so far as to include the gender-bending practice of making godparents out of holy pictures.

… several thousand… monks and nuns… suffered ridicule, mutilation or death in defence of the icons. The strategos [military governor] of Thracesion [in western Asia Minor] commanded every monk and nun to marry… He is also said to have set fire to the beards of intractable monks and committed whole libraries to the flames.

The monasteries in the Empire had indeed multiplied to a dangerous degree. Huge areas of Asia Minor were still desperately underpopulated, particularly after the bubonic plague of 745-47 removed a third of the inhabitants. Manpower was urgently needed… Instead, more and more of the population, male and female, were opting for a life utterly useless to the State.

… the edict of 815 unleashed a new wave of destruction. Any holy image could be smashed by anyone at any time, without fear of punishment. Vestments… were torn to shreds… painted panels were smeared with ordure, attacked with axes or burnt in the public squares.

In America, in society as in Congress, the stand-out unproductive yet over-represented way of life is not that of monasteries but of law firms. The Byzantines were much more literate than Western Europe but that literacy rarely extended down from the middle class and the foot-soldiering enthusiasm for smashing sacred symbols did not often rise into it.

Photo (c) Tom Brandt via REUTERS

Prefect Kundera

When Milan Kundera was fashionable in the Eighties, two things stood out from the books even then:

(a) the taste (and talent) for philosophic abstraction;

(b) the dick-measuring (more commonly termed misogyny).

At the time he was outed as an informer (2008) he of course got the backing of several Nobel Prize winners who foolishly claimed Kundera had “refuted” the accusation. Others more subtly tried to shield him in the jargon of technicalities but Kundera himself did not explain beyond stating he could not remember. Neither did he sue.

On that same list of prominent backers we can also see a couple of his fellow Jerusalem Prize grabbers. Kundera’s 1985 acceptance speech for his share of the cash is remarkable for its brown-nosing of Israel but nowadays that can be seen as part of a pattern.

When the scandal broke in 2008, no one for or against him seems to have asked one basic question: wtf was he doing as prefect of the dormitory in the first place? In other words, what kind of student, what breed of person, would have landed that job in the Czechoslovakia of 1950?

Anyway, he was then let continue with the fantasy of his dotage – that he was a French writer – and the very next year he took his turn at the depraved mutual back-scratching of arts celebs, when he publicly backed Polanski.

The Case of Leni Riefenstahl

Die Macht der Bilder (1993) is known in English as The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. When watching this film, it is hard to ignore even the sparkling eyes of a razor-sharp old lady often condemned as a witch of Nazi propaganda, especially for what she filmed at Nuremberg.

In this documentary, she insisted that Triumph of the Will had to be seen in the context of the time, which was 1934, not 1945. At that time in the Thirties, Robert Musil was living in Berlin. His diaries show that not quite everybody was blind to what was happening. It is seen as a spell of bad weather… a police car with swastika flags and singing officers, speeding down the Kurfürstendamm. It is alarming that Germans today possess so little sense of reality… the streets are full of people – “Life goes on” – even though, each day, hundreds are killed, imprisoned, beaten up…

Riefenstahl nonetheless pointed out too that her film contained nothing about anti-Semitism or racial theory. Instead, she argued that in it she conveyed (through Hitler, you may splutter) the themes of work and peace. Her avowed goal had been artistic, once she had accepted the task on the condition that she would never have to make another film for the Nazi Party.

Riefenstahl was more than able for the unseen interviewer who asked her about the responsibility of the artist concerning those who will be affected by the work. On the issue of filming for Hitler, she pointed out that Sergei Eisenstein had worked for Stalin but her more general point was that artists cannot tell the future and that the likes of Michelangelo and Rodin had shown no grasp of politics.

The more she spoke, the harder it was not to feel a certain amount of sympathy for her position. She ridiculed Susan Sontag’s assertion that she had been attracted to photograph the Nuba people in Africa because their black skin reminded her of the SS. She pointed out that a Nazi wouldn’t think black people were even worth photographing.

In a fit of enthusiasm they later regretted, the French had given Triumph of the Will the gold medal at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937 – a decision they vindictively balanced out after the war when they imprisoned its maker. This was after the Americans had decided that she had no case to answer, beyond being a fellow traveller (Mitläufer). This imprisonment also happened despite the fact that neither she nor any close family member had been a member of the Nazi Party.

Her true crime? Perhaps it was to be perceived to have done the impossible and actually produced a ‘fascist’ work of art. The Wagnerian comparisons commonly made in this case tie in with Louis Halle’s observation on Germany and Italy in The Ideological Imagination.

“What the fascist movements lacked in philosophy they made up for in theatre. It is surely no accident that the extreme of fascism was realized in the two countries most notable for their contributions to grand opera.”

– The Ideological Imagination, 1972, p.99

Though she denied she was proud of Triumph of the Will, given the trouble it had caused her, and she did not think fondly of the extended hard work, editing it and so on, there was evident glee on her part as she showed off certain camera effects she had achieved. She could even remember the geographical origins of specific contingents where they took part in particular shots.

Riefenstahl’s outlook was apolitical at the very least and the future was all there to see in Mein Kampf and so on, but the vast majority of Germans – of human beings – are not lights in the darkness like Sophie Scholl or Willy Brandt. As a boy, Leon Trotsky was suspended from school for a year for inciting his classmates to howl at a teacher who was tormenting a fellow pupil simply because he was of German descent. Trotsky saw that once the protest began the class was henceforth divided into three groups – the frank and courageous boys on the one side, the envious and the talebearers on the other and the neutral, vacillating mass in the middle. Writing about the incident from the perspective of suitably chastened adulthood, he added that these three groups never quite disappeared, even in later years.

In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi expresses anger and revulsion when evaluating a statement made by Liliana Cavani, director of The Night Porter, who said that we are all victims of murderers and that we accept these roles voluntarily. Levi says that to confuse murderers with their victims is a sign of moral disease or artistic affectation, or a sinister sign of complicity rendering a precious service to the negators of truth.

Today the cinematic glorification of serial killers earns vast amounts of money but, in that context, an important distinction can be made between The Silence of the Lambs and Seven, to take two key examples of the genre. In the former, Hannibal Lecter is a satanic figure in the artistic sense of the term, as a snaky embodiment of temptation. He gets all the best lines, his feats are superhuman and, at the end of his satirical quest, he ends up like a guardian angel.

In Seven, the Kevin Spacey character is a grudge-filled little vigilante who trots out his banal motives behind gruesome tortures and murders which have been carefully and cleverly rendered by those behind the camera. Which of these films is a sign of moral disease, a form of sinister complicity?

In the same real world where a gangster like John Gotti gets life without parole, despite never having ordered the carpet-bombing of a Third World country, which of the following pair of even more famous cinema examples answers the same question? Is it Apocalypse Now with its ending that echoes the way Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War makes Pericles sound like Hitler (“It is because your resolution is weak that my policy appears to be mistaken”)?

Contrast that now with a scene from one of the Rambo films, of all things, where Richard Crenna tells it like it is to a Russian in Afghanistan. You can’t defeat a people like that. We tried. We already had our Vietnam. Now you’re gonna have yours. In other words, get out. Does the latter example not express the true moral of colonial war?

The application of Leni Riefenstahl’s technical brilliance was ill-advised but one could say too that she was unlucky. Too many artists to mention have buried their heads in the sand or even joined in the madness prevalent at any given time and there was no honest reason for preventing her from ever making a film again. Few others whom we think should have known better actually grasped the destination. They were often simply content to admire the parade.

PS an insider’s account of a 1939 encounter between Riefenstahl and Hitler is hysterical in more ways than one.

The Stamp

Photo (c) Paris Match

A parable of Irish unity, with apologies to Félicien Marceau…

After spending two years behind a bank counter in Drogheda, his home town, Victor had just been transferred to Belfast for further training at head office. This meant he could be initiated into the secrets and all the other ins and outs of high finance. To all appearances he was a serious lad with a future and perfectly capable of one day becoming at least an assistant manager.

We don’t need to dwell on describing his happiness. Although he was, as we have said, a serious worker, capable and appreciated by his superiors, and therefore a person of some standing at just twenty-three, he had until now lived with his parents and, in some way, lived in their shadow. It wasn’t that he’d suffered from this arrangement. Besides, he loved his parents. As we’ve said more than once, he was a serious boy.

The cinema every Saturday and a café bar every Sunday afternoon, these were enough for him, socially. For the rest of his free time he spent all his evenings between his father and mother. In summer, he’d be on the doorstep chatting with the neighbours or looking at the cars that were going down to Dublin. In winter, he’d either be reading or arranging his stamp collection that was supplemented with the help of his uncle who was a driver on a bus that regularly crossed the border.

But in the end, of course, freedom is another thing altogether. On leaving Drogheda, Victor was still only a lad, overwhelmed with advice, woolly socks and vests. On his arrival in Belfast, under the big roof of Central Station, he was no longer a boy. Something of the adventurous soul of his uncle had just awoken in him. Proudly, he took a taxi, the first such trip on his own in his life. This taxi was the wave goodbye to his childhood.

The same day he busied himself with finding a studio. The first place he viewed didn’t please him. The owner clearly had a big mouth. The second didn’t tickle his fancy either. At three in the afternoon the owner was still in her bathrobe and, from Victor’s point of view, she looked like she wasn’t into keeping the building clean. He chose the third place he saw because there he was met only with indifference. Victor had already figured out that the indifference of others is linked to freedom.

His stuff put away, he went out, impatient to inspect the charms of Belfast. After a blip when he took the wrong bus that thankfully didn’t take him to any parts where his southern accent wouldn’t have been appreciated, he strolled along wide avenues, well built but otherwise undistinguished, and ate two sandwiches in a neutral city centre bar before returning to his new place.

His room was immersed in the night, in the silence. For a minute he missed the peaceful chit-chat of his mother and the outbursts of his father, a religious man who couldn’t read a newspaper without getting angry. This homesick feeling only lasted a moment, though. Lying on his narrow bed, he felt himself still lifted by the hubbub that had welcomed him when he left Central Station.

Eight days later, as soon as he had got to know his way around, he was in love. It’s a constant: free a man and he thinks of love. Until now, Victor had always shown himself shy around young women but the fluttering wings of freedom tend to lessen one’s timidity. At the bank he often joked with some of the female staff. They liked his southern accent and remarked on it. One of them told him she was going to a nightclub with some friends on Saturday.

There he made the acquaintance of a girl called Iris, a cousin of the fiancé of the lady who’d invited him along. Iris had dark hair and big dark eyes and her long lashes fluttered when she spoke in what he soon recognized as her sharp, assured manner. She spoke a lot but during their first dance, Victor complimented her eyes. Next it was her dress. By the third dance they were practically in love. She told him she didn’t drink but was learning the tango. In general, serious boys are made for the tango.

He suggested a visit to the cinema. “It’s an idea,” replied Iris, deliberately. Wednesday was fixed. Iris wore a lovely sandy coat with a wide belt; the film was funny; and she laughed. It relaxed the normal composure of her face. The next cinema visit took place on a Tuesday. Love is impatient.

Soon he was invited to meet her parents, out in Holywood. She said she’d told them about him and they wanted to meet him. He had almost a week to think about this visit. He loved Iris. They would get married. They would live happily ever after.

Both her parents were dressed in black on the day. The mother spoke more than the father, who was an accountant. It was a rainy afternoon and rather than go out anywhere they looked at photo albums. Mother and daughter talked about shared memories. The men said nothing. It would have been difficult for either to get a word in. By the end of the meeting, Victor had been invited back for dinner the next week.

When they got engaged, Iris’s father expressed a desire to get to know Victor’s parents. To that end, he requested that Victor ask his own father to write him a letter. To Victor it was just a tad formal, if not odd, but in a spirit of conciliation he said he’d take care of it. He sent a text about it to his father, adding, “These people are from the North, please humour them” and his father’s reply gave an immediate assurance on the matter.

The next time he called round, though, he was met with parental long faces. Iris herself was not to be seen.

“Your father wrote,” said Iris’s father.
“I know.”
“A very nice letter,” he continued.
“He’s very happy.”
“Mmm. So how is it, young man, that it came without a stamp?”

He held out the envelope, for which he’d evidently had to pay the postage.

“Oh. It’s a miracle it got here at all. Here, I’ll give you the price of it.”

The elder man lifted his hand to indicate stop.

“I’m not rich but nonetheless I can cover the postage.”

Embarrassed, Victor said “Of course” and then tried to explain that he only wanted to make up for the nuisance. The other man lifted his hand once more.

“It’s not about that. It’s more serious. I know the people of the South. When they don’t want something and they don’t want to say it, they write that they’re in agreement but they don’t bother with a stamp.”
“No stamp?”
“No stamp,” the other repeated gravely. “The way they look at it, a letter with no stamp doesn’t mean anything.”

The mother here interjected a quiet sob. Victor woke up.

“But that’s absurd. I’m from the South and I’ve never heard of that habit.”
“That does you credit, young man, but the habit is dishonest. When people disagree, it’s better to say it openly, like we do in the North.”
“That’s what my father would have done,” retorted Victor.
“Then why didn’t he put a stamp on this?”
“He must have forgotten.”
“Forgotten? For a letter of such importance?”
“Or else the stamp fell off.”
“Young man, I’m fifty-three. There are two things I no longer believe in. Letters that get lost and stamps that fall off.”
“But suppose he did forget the stamp. His letter remains the same.”
“No, that changes everything. He doesn’t want to be involved. The people of the South are like that.”
“What if he writes you another letter? With a stamp, of course.”
“The message remains the same,” came the solemn reply.

Then the mother intervened. Allowing for her husband’s feelings, she still suggested that a new letter just might make for a new start. In this way she talked her husband into agreeing with a few silent nods. Then Iris made an appearance and she and Victor went out for a walk. When Iris observed that a stamp cost very little, Victor got angry and so they parted on rather bad terms. When he got home, though, Victor immediately got in touch with his father.

Unfortunately Victor’s father was one of those men who are happiest when life gives them an excuse to get up on a high horse and wrap themselves in their pride. He wanted to know what right people in the North had to suspect the integrity of people in the South. Moreover he was sure he hadn’t forgotten the stamp and thought it must have fallen off. Anyway, he had written once and he wouldn’t give his honest opinion twice. His dignity forbade it.

Victor began to be worried. He pleaded with his father to write again and, in the meantime, assured his prospective father-in-law that the new letter was on its way. The latter remained quietly sceptical, while Iris just became sarcastic about the price of a stamp and how busy Victor’s father had to be, given the delay with this second letter.

Victor was beginning to be turned off. He thought of writing to the letters page of the Irish Times to ask if anyone knew of a tradition in the South of omitting a stamp to convey displeasure. There was no immediate feedback and still no second letter. The next time he visited his parents he found his father still put out over it.

“These people up North, I know them. He doesn’t want you to marry his daughter. He’s only looking for an excuse.”
“If he hadn’t wanted it, he’d have told me.”
“Is that what you believe? Anyway, I wonder if it wasn’t a sign. You’d be unhappy with people like that.”
“It’s not the father I’m marrying. It’s the daughter. And he only wants a letter.”
“He got his letter.”
“But without a stamp. He thinks it’s a slippery custom down here.”

Then Victor had a brainwave. He posed the hypothetical situation that the other father hadn’t received the letter. When his own protested that he had, Victor pointed out that he didn’t know that, as there had been no reply. In that light, it wouldn’t be undignified to send the same letter again, on the presumption of the loss of the first one. Grumbling at first, his father agreed, secretly pleased by the astuteness of his son. He wrote another letter and this time it got posted with two stamps affixed.

In Holywood, Iris opened the door to Victor without any obvious show of warmth or tenderness. Her father then appeared with a copy of the Irish Times in his hand. He was upset.

“You have me insulted in the press now.”

He showed Victor the letters page. Somebody had finally replied, basically urging Victor to tell his future father-in-law that he was an ass and insisting that there was no such custom in the South as had been proposed.

“But sir, if you’d read my letter, you’d have seen it was completely respectful.”
“And this reply? Who provoked this reply? I’m an ass. In the paper. Me.”
“Nobody will know it’s you.”
“I’ll know. Now you’d better leave, young man.”

Iris went to the window and looked out on the street.

“Iris…,” said Victor.

She didn’t even turn around. There would be no wedding. A year later, back in Drogheda, Victor married a local girl who was nice, voluptuous and not inclined to lay down the law. At the reception, his father leaned over to him at the top table.

“No need of a stamp here, eh?”

Victor smiled. For a moment he heard the sharp voice of Iris. No, he wouldn’t have been happy with them but that destiny wasn’t meant to be.

Major Hitchcock darns a sock

The photos are from the scene in I’m All Right Jack (1959) in which the personnel manager (Terry-Thomas) visits the shop steward (Peter Sellers) in order to reconcile capital and labour.

Major Hitchcock darns a sock – YouTube

Dublin

26 June 2002

M. called here at 9.30 and we went to the Employment Appeals Tribunal on Adelaide Road. There we trawled through five years of unfair dismissals cases. He’s doing some diploma in human resources to accredit his hatchet-man role with Dell. Some of the stuff was hilarious.

There were two cases of “very serious” fighting in the workplace. One chap had a broken collarbone after the unwise use of an unwanted nickname, while another comedian got chased through a factory by a colleague with an iron bar.

Then there was the young barman whose troubles began when in his wages he received a dud twenty with his name (“Carl”) written on it.

Overall, there was no empirical slant for the ideologies of right or left. In other words, there was probably an even split between injustices and employees simply taking the piss.

The company that figured more than any other in the cases was Dunnes Stores.*

*Irish chain of department stores

Being Michael McDowell

Graham Greene’s memoir Ways of Escape contains a final chapter called The Other. This title, from a poem by Edward Thomas, heads an epilogue that deals with the writer’s long and unfulfilled search for at least one conman who had passed himself off as Greene on several continents.

The current Senator Michael McDowell was first elected to the Irish parliament in 1987. Some years still had to pass, though, before people began to mistake a harmless nobody called John Flynn for him. That can be put down to the lookalike spending more time in Dublin and less time combing receding hair. It all began late in 1993 with a tap on the back from an old lady on a bus. She was echoed one night on Dorset Street during the noisy nearby convergence of an ambulance and some squad cars. It was then that another old dear approached him on a street corner.

“Sorry, love, I thought you were Michael McDowell and you’d know what was going on.”

By 1999, McDowell was Attorney General. That August, a pal and I were in a pub on Camden Street that is known to be popular with the police. A new barman went out of his way to be nice. He even brought the pints down, unbidden, to where we were sitting. He then set them down with an attitude of reverence. Later another barman did a background check, while I was in the toilet.

“Eh, what does your mate work at?”

McDowell had an even better result in 2002. During the election campaign a homeless man approached me at a bus stop but I didn’t have any spare change. As he walked away he looked back for a moment. You look like Michael McDowell. Following the election the great man was appointed to the Cabinet. This extra power was soon reflected in the same bar when another chap asked the lookalike to settle a bet.

“Are you the Minister for Justice?”

When people ask such questions often enough, you can get into character.

“Do you want to be thrown into prison?”

The man hung his head and said sorry. He was shrinking away when granted an exasperated reprieve.

“No, I’m not him. Would you ever cop on?”

In February 2005, as his crowning absurd achievement, McDowell ordered the payment of €30 million for a north Dublin farm at Thornton Hall, which was to be the site of a new super-jail. By the summer of 2010, more than €42 million had been spent there, including seven million on professional fees, three million on “site preparation” and half a million on landscaping. No brick was ever laid.

In 2018 a different Minister for Justice admitted there was no plan to do anything with the site. By then the project had cost well over €50 million, while securing and maintaining the property still required tens of thousands of euro every year. The only prisoners to come to the Thornton Hall site had been those on probation and community schemes. They planted fruit, flowers and vegetables on nine acres, with the food then donated to charity.

Shortly before Christmas 2007, it was a dark morning when I rose in a Waterford city hotel. There was no bottled water at reception (“But you can have all the drink you want”). The night porter then suggested asking at the nearby McDonald’s.

Two deaf guys in t-shirts had got to the locked door of the outlet first. They seemed to have had a long night and were indifferent to the frost. It then turned out that one of them could speak because he translated some giggles and sign language going on behind my back.

“I’m sorry, my friend thought you were Michael McDowell.”

As for Greene’s quest, he never came closer than a couple of photographs and a letter from an impostor who had got himself into some trouble in India. Greene himself was later accused of being the fraud by a newspaper during a visit to Chile. It was then that he was assailed by metaphysical doubt as to which was the real impostor all along. All he was left with was the Edward Thomas poem’s ending.

Even though the Baron of Thornton Hall had seemingly left the political scene, back in late 2007, these lines could ever only sound a bit sinister, given that I always knew he was out there, waiting.

He goes: I follow: no release
Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.