The atomic theory in Kilburn
This place (on Kilburn High Road) has been morphing steadily from dry cleaner’s to bike shop over the last few years. I remember being surprised one morning to see a few kids’ bikes lined up for sale outside but I’d say the shop is now approaching 50% bike shop. You can still see the dry cleaning hanging in the shop, though, so the old function is obviously clinging on. I imagine a bitter conflict in there, between the older sibling who wants to keep the dry cleaner’s going and a more entrepreurial younger one who wants to get into bikes, the coming thing (something about athleisure too – who gets anything dry-cleaned these days?).
In The Third Policeman, an absurdist classic from weird Irish civil servant, journalist and fantasist Flann O’Brien1, set in an unnamed rural community in Ireland before the war, one of his characters meditates on ‘the atomic theory’, which was still pretty new at this point: the surprising idea that matter is actually made of tiny particles called atoms and that, at their boundaries, objects might actually give up some of their atoms in a kind of exchange, blurring their edges a bit.
Sergeant Pluck, senior officer at the police barracks in this community, who keeps up with the latest ideas, has convinced himself that he sees evidence of the atomic theory at work in some locals who spend a little too much time on their bikes2 and are thus taking on something of their nature:
“Michael Gilhaney,” said the sergeant, “is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the atomic theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?”
If I had time I’d expand on this: I’d try to give you something of the awkward status of science after Einstein in post-independence Ireland, dominated by an atavistic Catholic church. Like other small European Catholic nations in this period, Ireland was self-consciously backward, priggishly anti-modern. It took the State decades to overcome its self-satisfied stance on, well, everything.
O’Brien was different: a modernist but also a devout Catholic, deeply sceptical about the actual modern. He often took the church’s side in his columns for the Irish Times3 (which he wrote pseudonymously because he retained his full-time job in the Irish civil service, an institution that retained essentially its colonial form for decades after independence). In 1942, for instance, he somehow managed to attend a lecture by Professor Erwin Schrödinger at the new Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin4 in which the Austrian Nobel Prize-winner, in passing, threw some shade on the idea of causality. Your man was not impressed and wrote, in his column:
“I understand also that Professor Schrodinger has been proving lately that you cannot establish a first cause. The first fruit of this Institute, therefore, has been to show that there are two Saint Patricks and no God.
O’Brien was a brilliant writer, a self-conscious European modernist and an unembarrased advocate for new modes. I hoovered this stuff up when I was an adolescent: he had the oddness and the sly, disorienting humour kids like me were all looking for then. It was Kafka, Burroughs, B.S. Johnson, Vonnegut, Angela Carter and all the other weirdos. But O’Brien was different, more than an oddball: he was a conservative Catholic from the outer fringes. A lot of his stuff was buried and not published until decades later when rediscovered by publishers from the metropole who urgently needed more of this kind of borderline psychedelic stuff in their lists. His rhythms, his alienating settings and his humour could have come from Joyce or Beckett but he’d have run a mile if you’d tried to connect them or to recruit him to a scene or a movement.
His Catholicism meant that O’Brien couldn’t entertain or play with the new, scientific ideas in the way these atheist artists did. He would never have claimed that freedom. The atomic theory was just the kind of idea you can see animating a passage from Joyce but in O’Brien it can only be mocked. This idea, that objects might exchange matter, even at a tiny scale, is, to state the obvious, a profoundly anti-Catholic idea: a kind of blasphemous, material transubstantiation and a denial of the distinctness of God’s creations. It must have upset him profoundly.
Meanwhile, in Kilburn – still the centre of the Irish community in London – I might add that I only know about Sparkling Laundry and Cleaning myself because I cycle past it several times a week on my epic commute5. I had a conversation with my doctor only this morning about the possibility I might be taking on something of the bicycle myself.
- I’ve called him Flann O’Brien here but he was born Brian O’Nolan (Brian Ó Nualláin), wrote under several names and his Irish Times byline was Myles na gCopaleen. Wikipedia says he wrote science fiction under other names and some more recent collections have included stories by John Shamus O’Donnell, an Amazing Stories contributor who may or may not have been the same man. ↩︎
- Don’t forget, in this period the bicycle was also a symbol of the modern: a weapon, a hyper-efficient transportation device, a liberatory technology. ↩︎
- O’Brien’s Cruiskeen Lawn columns were a cult read with the Irish Times’ elite readers. They’re often about something of immediate interest in Ireland at the time of publication but they’re some of the smartest and funniest newspaper writing you’ll ever read – and they have become a model for much of this kind of stuff since. Try the collection Best of Myles. ↩︎
- Ironically Prof Schrödinger had been brought to Dublin in 1939 by Éamon de Valera as part of an effort to modernise the country’s creaking university system. ↩︎
- I might also, self-indulgently, tell you that I’ve occasionally taken as a subject for some poems Quex Road, a stub of a road that links Kilburn High Road with West End Lane a bit South of here.
↩︎
