SOME weeks ago, you may recall, I inaugurated the Penny Perrick Paddwhackery Award for services above and beyond the call of duty to Irish culture. Until this week, Ms Perrick's own contribution (a Sunday Times piece on the magic of Irish literature) seemed destined to win the award, but now she has two serious contenders for this prestigious prize.
In the Observer last Sunday, Denis Staunton's profile of Edna O'Brien made its strenuous bid. Certainly all the stereotypes and cliche's were securely in place. We learned that Dublin's "army of literary gossips" mustered at a summer school in Tralee "breathless for confirmation" that Edna O'Brien had once again fulfilled "their darkest prophecies" and "dragged her country's reputation into the mud".
The cause of all this? Edna was reading from her forthcoming novel, Down by the River ("inspired by the notorious X case"), and apparently it is "certain to raise a storm in Ireland". Good to be forewarned, I suppose.
As for the writer herself, let Mr Staunton describe her: "Her role as a literary goddess of love owes as much to her own physical beauty and to the grace with which she has aged, retaining her beguiling sexual charm well into middle age. Flame haired with fine, handsome features and a complexion like powdered alabaster, lit up by dark green eyes ... (her) public image is that of a scarlet woman, somewhere between Maud Gonne and Mata Hari."
Sure, dat's right, Denis, and, you know, de country never stops tinkin' of Edna's beauty and talkin' about her scandalous books from one end of de day to d'other.
DENIS, however, would want to get up very early in the morning to outdo J.P. Donleavy, who is a past master at Oirishry. And J.P. has outdone even himself in a paean of praise to Mullingar which appeared in the London Independent a few days ago.
You may regard Mullingar as a midland town not noticeably different from other midland towns. Well, you're wrong: "Hasn't the place become, along with its spanking newly remodelled train station, the setting for a lifestyle that leaves little to be desired? Forget your St John's Wood and Beverly Hills. Mullingar has a burgeoning suburban sumptuosity to leave you stunned."
I'm stunned already, but J.P. is only getting into his stride. "With nearly 1,000 houses a building, and no preservationists up in arms, it's all grow and go. BMWs and Daimlers race the country lanes. And a mere few miles away, its largest factory, Mergon International, in its sylvan setting of rural beauty, magically makes shapes and forms of plastic that go to every corner of the industrialised world."
Apart from the beautiful factories there's the beauty of natural life: "If it's pike in all their voraciousness you're after, you'd find them not only in profusion under the lake water but in the pubs roundabout." Not actually in the lake water, mind you, but under it. Magical fish, indeed.
"Ah," J.P. says, "but there is more of wonderment." There's Tullynastle Castle: "And wasn't it built over the centuries to adapt to the best of enchantments." And that's not all: "Wouldn't a celebrity or two in our midst make for an item of extra interest?" To be sure it would, so here's Marianne Faithfull, "fabled songstress" in her "jewel of a cottage".
Not to mention a visit from Martin Clunes, actor in a British sitcom: "And didn't a local observer say, as Mr Clunes stepped down from his carriage and passed through the station, `Sure, don't excite yourself unduly, that was nothing but a Martin Clunes lookalike, what would a big star the likes of him be doing in the flesh down here in Mullingar?'"
And J.P. ends: "In Ireland you can have a nice life. A nation from which so many fled, now crawling with its human race. Where ancient friends awake out of their deaths to shake a hand. And the brooding heavens carry their, veils of rain to hide all her sins and keep her safe in her graces.
Begorrah, it's a grand country surely. And isn't J.P. the grand man to be describin' it in such poetic words. Mullingar, you can now take your place among the nations of the world.
DAN FRANKLIN of Cape is protesting that the figure isn't if correct, but the word in London is that, on the strength of a 20 page outline, Salman Rushdie has received an advance of £750,000 for his next novel. And it's also rumoured that New York publishers Henry Holt have paid $2.5 million for it.
Due for publication early in 1999, the embryonic book is titled The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and is being described as a "rock'n'roll novel, a story of love, death and music, the tale of an Indian Orpheus in the western underworld of rock'n'roll." Sounds a bit jollier than The Satanic Verses, anyway.
I learn from the organ of the book trade, The Bookseller, that Jeffrey Archer wrote thirteen drafts of his new novel, The Fourth Estate. Thirteen drafts! And the prose is still execrable. I'd hate to see the original manuscript.