I HEARD THE first ice-cream van of spring during the week, while attending my son’s Under-10 football training in Drimnagh. You don’t get many cuckoos in Drimnagh. But the ice-cream van, with its snow-white plumage and distinctive call, is just as reliable a guide to the seasons. And suddenly there it was, circling the Good Counsel GAA pitch, and making it even harder than usual for the Under-10s to concentrate on the ball.
I say its call is distinctive; although in fact, the van wasn't playing O Sole Mio, or any of the classic ice-cream jingles. No, the tune was You Are My Sunshine. Which was certainly apt for the evening that was in it, and is maybe just as effective at shifting 99s as any other.
Even so, I have always thought that song has a vague pall of gloom about it.
For one thing it remains synonymous with its era: 1930s America, and the Great Depression. Furthermore, as the rest of the lyric makes plain, it’s a song about loss, or the fear of loss. The key line is: “Please don’t take my sunshine away”. Maybe this is why I didn’t feel much like buying a cone.
It has come to something when even ice-cream vans sound like George Lee. But I blame Joel and Ethan Coen. You Are My Sunshinewas given a new lease of life a few years ago with its inclusion in the soundtrack of Oh Brother Where Art Thou?– the Coens' wonderful movie about a group of escaped convicts in 1937 Mississippi and their role in the re-election of a cynical state governor called Pappy "Pass the Biscuits" O'Daniel.
In the film, O'Daniel is locked in a tight struggle against a broom-wielding reform candidate. But the popularity of "old timey" music such as Sunshinehelps him turn things around. When the convicts inadvertently become a recording sensation, he recruits them to his campaign and sweeps the broom candidate away.
In fact, the fictional Pappy O’Daniel was based on a real-life politician of the same era, from Texas. Wilbert Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel was a country music star and flour-miller who promoted his business on a weekly radio show. He also won the governorship of Texas twice – posing as the broom-wielder who would clean up politics – and he beat Lyndon Johnson in the 1941 senate election, apparently thanks to his superior skill at stealing
votes.
LIKE JOYCE'S ULYSSES, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?is based on Homer's Odyssey, with the convict George Clooney playing the lead role, as Leopold Bloom does in the book.
It’s a reflection of the aforementioned song’s suitability for selling ice cream that, as the van disappeared up Slievenamon Road the other day, I found myself wondering, not about 99s, but whether Bloom had ever been to Drimnagh.
Not as far as I can ascertain, short of reading Ulyssesagain. But I have since learned that, according to one version, he got very close. Aughavanagh Road, to be exact, a few hundred yards down the canal at Dolphin's barn: where, the story has it, he is buried. You might think that, as a fictional character who was still alive at the end of the book, Bloom is not buried anywhere. But in Ireland, those are minor impediments to a funeral.
The tale has a touch of Myles na gCopaleen about it; although in his book, Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland, Dermot Keogh attributes it to the late Asher Benson, founder of the Jewish Museum in Portobello, who in turn credited it to a man called "Sniffer" Cohen (no relation to Joel and Ethan). Benson met Cohen in the Bleeding Horse pub in Dublin's Camden Street, "some years ago": and after downing four pints, Sniffer told him the story.
“In 1942, Cohen was called to the dying Bloom’s bedside in a Bishop Street tenement. Wearing a faded prayer shawl (property of Greenville Road synagogue was written on it), he had a grease-stained skull-cap embroidered with the word “Jerusalem” on his head and a tattered Hebrew prayer book upside down on his lap.
“Promise me”, he urged Cohen, “to bury me in the Jewish cemetery in Dolphin’s Barn.” Bloom then took a jug of porter, blew off the froth, drank the contents in one uninterrupted swallow and expired cursing James Joyce and saying he would settle with “Jimmy” in hell.
“When Bloom was denied burial by the cemetery committee, Sniffer and his friends took the corpse on a barrow to Aughavanagh Road on the perimeter . . . There, Bloom was buried with his head and shoulders under the wall . . . and the rest of him in the undergrowth at the side of Aughavanagh Road. The unorthodox burial party had brought with them a piece of wood on which was written: ‘Leopold Bloom, 16th June 1942. His head was Jewish even if the rest of him wasn’t. May he rest in piece’.”
fmcnally@irishtimes.com