Culture

In a Word...

...myth. Patsy McGarry

Patsy McGarry's face
Patsy McGarry
Sat Sep 19 2020 - 00:30

While strolling in Dublin city centre on a recent summer evening, minding my business (unusually) and massaging the chill from my arms (an Irish summer experience), I saw it. A sign with the word `Pyg’.

And I thought of Audrey Hepburn, that incarnation of elegance, grace, and the way she might look at you. A little further along I noticed how this Pyg wasn’t a trendy spelling of`pig’ but an abbreviation for ‘Pygmalion’, a restaurant.

It compounded the Audrey Hepburn reminder. She, who starred luminously in the 1964 film version of ‘My Fair Lady’ as Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle who Professor Henry Higgins teaches to speak proper English and passes off as a lady. He wouldn’t get away with it now.

Or that song `Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man?’ (“Eternally noble, historically fair”. Bless my timid soul but I wouldn’t dare quote further!).

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‘My Fair Lady’ was based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play ‘Pygmalion’. It in turn was based on a character in Greek mythology who fell in love with a statue he created. Inevitably, and long before there were Hollywood endings, the statue came to life and they lived happily ever after.

In 1938 Shaw won an Oscar for his screen version of ‘Pygmalion’, having already won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. He was the only person to win both awards until 2016. Then along came Bob Dylan.

Just weeks before my encounter with ‘Pyg’ I had a call from fellow Rossie Eamon Curley who informed me of another `Pygmalion’. This one was seen in our own county by Patrick Kavanagh, and the way he might have looked at her.

I saw her in a field, a stone-proud woman

Hugging the monster Passion’s granite child,

Engirdled by the ditches of Roscommon,

Stone ditches round her waist like serpents coiled.

Her lips were frozen in the signature

Of Lust, her hair was set eternally,

No Grecian goddess, for her face was poor,

A twisted face, like Hardship’s face, to me.

And who she was I queried every man

From Ballaghaderreen to grassy Boyle,

And all replied: a stone Pygmalion

Once lifted to a grey terrific smile.

I said: At dawn tomorrow she will be

Clay-sensuous. But they only smiled at me.

Myth, from Latin mythus, Greek mythos for `story, saga, tale'.

inaword@irishtimes.com