Bradbury, Ray - SSC 10 (17 page)

A
CLEAR VIEW OF AN IRISH MIST can best be ap
proached
thiswise
:

If
Tintoretto
, Michelangelo, Titian and others invented
the
wide-screen frozen cinema of the
Renaissance, it was the Irish
first
came full-blown with the Hi-
Fi
and the Long-Play
Stereo.

Just
open the doors of any
pub,
stand out of the blast, and
you'll know what I mean.

I
woke one night in Dublin, half-panicked by something,
shook my wife and cried, I think, "The
Troubles! They're on
again!" or perhaps
"There's a riot downstairs!"

"No
such thing," my wife murmured, rolling over. "There
was a dance up the street. It's just letting
out." Or perhaps
she protested,
falling into a snooze, "They've just shut the
pubs . . ."

No
matter. A great river of Irish swept by below, all "tweeter,"
all "woofer," and playing on forever.

The
flood took the better part of an hour to die away and
empty into the
Liffey
;
for little side-flurries swept into store
fronts or
whirlpooled
at
streetcorners
with fearful arguments and
ardent
proclamations. Poets were striking blows for
freedom,
actors were pounding Yeats into the earth just to yank him out
again. If women or girls were present they were
stormed to
silence by the concussions.

In
sum, if Guinness is the national stout, conversation is the
royal republican wine, liberally manufactured and
sold every
where men so much as bump
elbows in passing.

Irishmen
inhale but never exhale: they
talk.

And
they surely regret the lost time it takes to draw breath, for
during that split second some idiot with full lungs
might dart in
to seize the arguments
and not give
them
back save by main
force.

Given
this overall and inescapable truth, I have fancied forth
A CLEAR VIEW OF AN IRISH MIST to show what might
happen to the National LP and the dear Hi-
Fi
should
an irra
tional beast dare them to
THINK.

Which leaves us at last with the Anthem Sprinters
themselves.

Squashed
betwixt wet sky and damp earth, sex has little place
to lie down in anywhere from Dublin to Galway.
Women,
strange creatures that they be,
hesitate but a moment when
offered a
choice between a sodden tromp for love in the flooded
fields or the dry cinema where one can squeeze out
one's pas
sions as well as can be
under the circumstances by knocking
knees,
clubbing feet and squirming elbows. If the girl did not
make this choice, the Church would make it for her.
The growing
and tumescent lad then has
but two ports to put in at, the pub
and
the cinema. Both places overflow in all towns any night.

But
the Church and State, synonymous, lurk everywhere.

The
pubs close too early for Reason to have been completely
defeated.

The
American "
fillums
," which make clerical
collars to jump
up and down in
apprehension, are censored.

And,
Worst, at the end of each show, the damn Anthem is
played.

It
was while in Dublin, nightly attending old Wally Beery movies to get in out of
the cold, I first noticed that my wife and
I, like the rest, were on our feet and half up the aisle before
FINIS hit the screen.

This
observation put me within a hair of forming teams and
scoring champs for their ability to make the MEN'S
split seconds
ahead of the infernal
national ditty.

These
plays have taught me much, but mostly about myself.
I hope never, as a result, to doubt my
subconscious again. I
hope always to
stay alert, to educate myself. But lacking this, in
future I will turn back to my secret mind to see
what it has observed at a time when I thought I was sitting this one out.

These
then are a blind man's plays, suddenly seen. I am
grateful that part of me paid attention and saved
coins when
I could have sworn I was
poverty-stricken.

In
addition, one can only hope that these plays have been
taken in small doses, one at a time. One-act plays,
short stories,
shots of the best Irish
whiskey, all should be savored separate
and apart. Too, if one should sit down to read all these plays in
one night, one would discover certain encounters or
facts in one play not connecting up with encounters or facts in another. This
results from all the plays being written separately,
with no
thought being given to plays
future or plays past. The result is
a
series of one-acts meant to be done separately and read in the same fashion.
Though, of course, with a few deletions and additions, the entirety could be
staged of an evening. I have chosen,
however,
to let the plays stand as they are, separate and apart, for they are more
enjoyable as creative units, and I insist you
must look on them as such; that is my prerogative.

Call
all of what you have read in this book mere frivolous
calligraphy if you wish. But here, I believe, we
find ways of
making do with squalls of
weather, melancholy drizzles of church rhetoric, the improbability if not the
impossibility of
sex, the
inevitability of death, and the boring ritual of the
same old pomp-and-drum
corp
washing, hanging out, and taking
in
the same tired old national linen.

The
church has put her on her knees, the weather drowned,
and politics all but buried her, but Ireland, dear
God, with
vim and gusto, still sprints
for that far EXIT.

And,
do you know? I think she'll make it.

Ray Bradbury
July 31st,
1962

The Anthem Sprinters

and
Other Antics
by Ray Bradbury

While
engaged in writing a screenplay in Ire
land,
Ray Bradbury fell in, around and under the
quick sprinting spirit and
feet of Erin's men, and
learned all there is
to know of Anthem Sprinting —the curious Irish race which the reader learns
about in the title play.

The Anthem Sprinters
and Other Antics
includes
the hilarious adventures and misadventures of an
innocent American in the grasp of the
imaginative
rural Irish. In these four plays, Mr.
Bradbury
discloses the effect of Deanna Durbin on an important local contest and the
comic re
sults of an attempt to
introduce modern commer
cial slogans
into a tradition-bound community.
Not
only that, but he tells the fearful consequences of great Bicycle Collisions on
the boggy roads of back-country Eire, as well as advising all who may
wish to know what it is best to give up for Lent.
These and other antics are the
charming, always
amusing, displays of
wit and wisdom in these first
plays by the well-known American writer.

Jacket Design by Joan Berg

 
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