Flushed with the success of the book-handling scheme, Myles and his colleagues in WAAMA (The Writers, Actors, Artists, Musicians Association) expanded into ghost-writing works of literature for club members and arranging the necessary critical acclaim. This too was a success, although as he explains here, the rapid expansion of such activities was not without problems. Charlie the Chimpanzee, by the way, was a celebrity inmate of Dublin Zoo during the 1930s and '40s. – FRANK McNALLY
OCCASIONALLY WE print and circulate works written specially for the Club by members of the WAAMA League. Copies are sent out in advance to well-known critics, accompanied by whatever fee is usually required to buy them.
We sent one man ten bob with a new book and asked him to say that once one takes the book up one cannot leave it down. The self-opinionated gobdaw returned the parcel with an impudent note saying that his price was twelve and sixpence. Our reply was immediate. Back went the parcel with twelve and sixpence and a curt note saying that we were accepting the gentleman’s terms. In due course we printed the favourable comment I have quoted.
But for once we took steps to see that our critic spoke the truth. The cover of the volume was treated with a special brand of invisible glue that acts only when subjected to the heat of the hands. When our friend had concluded his cursory glance through the work and was about to throw it away, it had become practically part of his physical personality. Not only did the covers stick to his fingers, but the whole volume began to disintegrate into a viscous mess of treacly slime. Short of having his two arms amputated, putting the book down was an impossibility. He had to go round with the book for a week and submit to being fed like a baby by his maid. He got rid of the masterpiece only by taking a course of scalding hot baths that left him as weak as a kitten.
That’s the sort of customers we of the WAAMA League are.
Letters have been pouring in in shoals (please notice that when it is a question of shoals of letters they always pour) regarding the book-handling service inaugurated by my Dublin WAAMA League. It has been a great success. Our trained handlers have been despatched to the homes of some of the wealthiest and most ignorant in the land to maul, bend, bash, and gnaw whole casefuls of virgin books. Our printing presses have been turning out fake Gate Theatre and Abbey programmes by the hundred thousand, not to mention pamphlets in French, holograph letters signed by George Moore, medieval playing cards, and the whole paraphernalia of humbug and pretence.
There will be black sheep in every fold, of course. Some of our handlers have been caught using their boots, and others have been found thrashing inoffensive volumes of poetry with horsewhips, flails, and wooden clubs. Books have been savagely attacked with knives, daggers, knuckle-dusters, hatchets, rubber-piping, razor-blade-potatoes, and every device of assault ever heard of in the underworld. Novice handlers, not realising that tooth-marks on the cover of a book are not accepted as evidence that its owner has read it, have been known to train terriers to worry a book as they would a rat.
One man (he is no longer with us) was sent to a house in Kilmainham, and was later discovered in the Zoo handing in his employer’s valuable books to Charlie the chimpanzee. A country-born handler “read” his books beyond all recognition by spreading them out on his employer’s lawn and using a horse and harrow on them, subsequently ploughing them in when he realised that he had gone a little bit too far. Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country.
To celebrate the work of Myles na gCopaleen, The Irish Times will print one of his Cruiskeen Lawn columns each day during October