‘I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.’
Order, order!
Opening the case
for the prosecution,
the Zoological Society
of London announced the return
of Mr Ern Malley’s paper
on his discovery of an oviparous
monotreme, ornithorhynchus
paradoxus, on the grounds
of non-existence: ‘If there are
mammary glands, where is the butter?
The “platypus” is the merest
imposture and you, sir,
are a damnable fraud.’
Representing himself
Ern Malley, Irish rebel
and author of a memoir, On
Another Man’s Wind, hailed
by avant-garde periodical
Fractious Echidnas as ‘pungent’
wished to denounce
in the strongest possible terms
the Scouse poet-mechanic
and disturber of the peace
Ernie O’Malley.
‘The use of the copula
I considered an indecency’,
testified Officer Vogelsang,
only the twitchings of whose
ever-vigilant groin stand
between Australia
and moral collapse.
‘In the strictly conscientious
prosecution of my
duties’, he added, ‘I have
sometimes found it
necessary to do away
with language altogether.’
Ethel Malley, housewife
and sister of the accused,
stated weeping that
the life and works of authors
James McAuley and Harold Stewart
had all been an immature
prank for which her brother
now wished to apologise.
The whole affair had been
a terrible strain on their father,
and she too had been against
this writing game from the start!
The defendant, Ern Malley,
in his closing remarks
ruled Dermot Trellis,
novelist-within-a-novel
in Flann O’Brien’s recently
published At Swim-Two-Birds
an inadmissible witness
before finding himself guilty.
‘I am denounced as a hoax,’
he protested as he did so,
‘but patently exist. I call
on myself to drop this trumped-
up case now before
I waste any more of my time.’
