A loan, all a loan – An Irishman’s Diary about long-term book borrowing

That story about the Tralee library book returned after 67 years reminds me of another loan of similar vintage, but involving a more celebrated borrower, that continues to this day.

I saw it some time ago in the home of a family that had been friends with Brian O’Nolan, aka Flann and Myles. They had all his books, including some early editions.

But as I was thrilled to hear, they also had his copy of Patrick Dinneen's Irish-English Dictionary, which he had left behind once, on the grounds that he visited their house so often, he could consult it just as well there.

In his Cruiskeen Lawn columns of the 1940s, especially, Myles na gCopaleen derived great entertainment from Dinneen’s ability to find obscure and hitherto-unsuspected meanings for innocuous Irish words.

Reverence

By his own account, this had persuaded Myles to give up writing in the first language : “Libel, you know. [...] If I write in Irish what I conceive to be ‘Last Tuesday was very wet’, I like to feel reasonably sure that what I’ve written does not in fact mean ‘Mr So-and-So is a thief and a drunkard’.”

So it was with some reverence that I opened the great humorist’s personal copy of Dinneen.

And imagine my surprise when the fly-leaf informed me that the book was in fact the property of “Roads Section. Department of Local Government and Public Health. Custom House. Dublin.”

Oh well. O’Nolan did have to leave the department in a hurry.

After reading one too many wisecracks about himself in a 1953 Cruiskeen Lawn, his Minister declared: “I want him out now.”

Besides, I suspect Myles made better use of the dictionary that the Roads Section ever would.

Anatole France would not have been surprised by the dictionary's fate. "Never lend books," he once said, "for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have left me."

Shakespeare’s Polonius was of similar opinion. Hence his warning for Laertes, en route to France (the country, that is, not the novelist): “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

Polonius is not talking just about books, clearly, but library theft was a plague in Shakespeare’s time and earlier. Medieval owners often took out insurance in the form of admonitions or even curses, appended to the books and threatening retribution on thieves.

Compare the reported fines for overdue items in Tralee Library (five cents a day), for example, with this, the “Yarington Hex”: “For him or her that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not this book to its owner, let it change into a serpent in his or her hand & rend him or her sterile. Let him or her be struck with palsy and all members blasted. Let him or her anguish in pain, crying aloud for mercy & let there be no surcease to his or her agony till he or she sink to dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw at his or her entrails in token of the harm that dieth not, & when at last he or she goeth to his or her final punishment, let the flames of hell consume him or her forever!”

Phew. I think that might be a bit harsh in the case of whoever neglected to return Roland Daniel's Ruby of a Thousand Dreams ("Another adventure of Wu Fang") in Tralee in 1949; although, had that now-forgotten author heard of the Yarington Hex, it might have inspired him to write yet another book.

According to one authority, Daniel’s output was “not of high literary quality but extremely popular”. It was also extremely large. Between 1928 and 1966, he wrote 136 books, in two genders (he was “Sonia Anderson” for romantic fiction).

And pulpy as the work may have been, it earned at least one badge of honour that escaped Flann O’Brien.

Among the results when you googled Daniel's name is a breezy diary piece from a June 1947 issue of Variety, the Hollywood newspaper. This records a "big day" for Ireland's state censor, who had just banned "a record 24 novels [...] for being 'in their general tendency indecent'."  Sure enough, the line-up included Daniel.

O’Brien had embarked on a long sabbatical from novel-writing by then. When he returned to the game in 1960, it was with a cunning plan to get in on the being-banned-for-indecency racket. It would be overturned on appeal, he calculated, amid much sales-boosting publicity.

Alas, the State’s dread of evil literature was no longer what it had been. The censor did not play ball.