THAT STRANGE rustling noise you heard in the background of the Guinness celebrations, in case you were wondering, was the sound of Jem Casey turning in his grave.
“The poet of the people,” as Flann O’Brien called him, has endured a fresh spell in purgatory of late while the global conspiracy to misrepresent his best-known work ran amok. For contrary to what thousands of PR people and journalists – some of whom should have known better – would have us believe, there were no pints of plain drunk in St James’s Gate last weekend.
The real pint of plain has been defunct for half a century. So far as I can ascertain, it died a lingering death around the time of TK Whitaker's first economic plan. The precise moment of demise is unrecorded in The Irish Timesarchive. But one of the product's last mentions – as a drink, rather than a literary footnote – is from another of FOB's personae, Myles Na Gopaleen, in September 1958.
Here’s what he wrote then: “A pint of plain now costs 1s 2d or
1s 3d and has been so depreciated in strength that hardly any publican stocks it.” There was the rub for plain porter. Weaker than its latter-day, in-house rival – stout – it was the red squirrel of the porter world, fighting a doomed battle against the grey (albeit that they were both black, if you follow me). Stout had already run it out of town by the 1960s. And apart from the microbreweries that have reintroduced it in protected habitats, it hasn’t been seen since.
A KEY TOits former popularity was that, being lower in alcohol, it was also cheaper. This is implicit in Casey's epic "pome", where he writes: "When money's tight and is hard to get/And your horse has also ran/When all you have is a heap of debt/A pint of plain is your only man." The differential varied from year to year and budget to budget. But in 1916, for instance, a pint of stout cost sixpence: a full 50 per cent morethan plain.
When both went up by a penny the following year, incidentally, this newspaper – perhaps unhinged by the revolutionary events in Dublin and Petrograd – predicted the overthrow of the old order.
Foreseeing a fall in porter consumption generally, it particularly prophesied the “abolition” of the round system: “Men who will have their beer at any cost will be chary of extending to their friends the hospitality which was characteristic of former times and the cheery suggestion of ‘the same again’ will seldom or never be heard.” As we know, this danger was greatly exaggerated. The dearer drink went from strength to strength, in fact, while the cheaper one withered on the vine, if you’ll excuse the mixed-drink metaphor.
As late as 1942, when the government fixed their prices at 11d and 8d respectively, plain was maintaining its economic edge. But price wasn't everything, as the pub-owning protagonists of The Third Policemanfound, when forced to replace Coleraine blackjack – "the cheapest porter in the world" – with a more powerful brew nicknamed "The Wrastler" ("If you drank three or four pints of it, it was nearly bound to win.") By the end of the war, stout was bound to win too. Plain was definitely not your only man any more.
AS ANY DOCTORcan tell you, Guinness is high in irony. Having first squeezed nearly all its independent rivals out of the market, the brewing empire has spent fortunes in more recent times trying to give the consumer "more choice", often against the consumer's will. Remember Guinness Light – a kind-of modern version of plain – which sank with all hands? Then there's the brewery's role, unwitting or otherwise, in ensuring that the best-remembered part of Flann O'Brien's masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds, is also the part – all due respect to Casey fans – with no literary merit.
It's bad enough that his brilliant debut should have simultaneously launched and sank FOB's career as a novelist. But in a cruel twist, the only bit most people can quote verbatim is the aforementioned doggerel by the "poet of the pick". Little can the real-life genius have realised the truth of his line when he had Mr Lamont say: "There's one thing in that pome, permanence." But the crowing irony of the past quarter-millennium is that, with its monopoly of the Irish porter market now complete, Guinness's extra stout enjoys a your-only-man status that its pint of plain failed miserably to achieve.
I’m reminded of Myles’s gothic fantasy in which he outlined the plot of a murder mystery involving a taxidermist and his assistant. The latter, a Mr White, eliminates the former, a Mr Black, in a heated argument. As he disposes of the body, in calmer mood, he realises that his professional skills now allow him to complete the perfect crime.
In short, he can skin Mr Black and “wear” him. He does this so successfully that he manages to pass himself off as the dead man: a pose that becomes irreversible when chemical processes cause their hides to fuse.
Then the inevitable happens. Somebody belatedly notices that Mr White is missing. Thus “Mr Black” is arrested, convicted of his own murder, and hanged. There in a nutshell you have the relationship between what we now know as the pint of plain and the original. It only remains for the DPP to bring charges.