Friday, June the 10th, 2005

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Clot

Ferenc Puskas, who shared his name with the legendary Hungarian footballer, was a beefy clot of a man. Unlike his namesake, he never played for Honved. He never played football at all. Gas was what fascinated him, to the point of ruin. Gas and eels.

In his lecture What Philately Teaches, John N Luff reminds us that “the connection between cows and postage stamps is not obvious” and the same may be said of eels and gas, of gas and eels. Within Ferenc's teeming skull, however, the two could not be disentangled. Beefy clot he may have been, but he had an extraordinary ability to see linkages between things of which most of us are oblivious.

There is a story about him, that he once gassed an eel, but it has been proved to be untrue. And how could it be true? We are dealing with a man who spoke to eels, communed with them, in a way little understood even now, half a century after his death. Because he salivated at four times the normal rate, Puskas' speaking voice was difficult to decipher, and he did not help matters by forever sucking on gobstoppers, even in his sleep. That is why the transcript of his one radio interview, conducted in his harbour hut in 1931, is so patchy. Acute and erudite questions pour forth, but of his replies only a few words are intelligible, punctuated by infuriating ellipses, hundreds of them, more ellipses than one is ever likely to find in any other single text since the invention of the alphabet. (That may sound like hyperbole, and maybe it is, but I know what I am talking about. See my Compendium Of Elliptical Phrases In World Literature From The Dawn Of Time To The Present Day if you doubt me.)

So, for example, we get this:

Interviewer : Mr Puskas, it has been said that you communicate with eels, and that the subject of most of your discussions with them is gas. You claim that most of your knowledge of gas comes from what eels tell you. As a beefy clot, you have an air of saintly innocence which makes it unlikely that you are lying. Could it be that you are deluded?

Puskas : … stoop … bag … hat … fop … glue … pot … gunk …

Inarticulate lump he may have been, but we cannot simply dismiss Ferenc Puskas. As long as there are men and women on this planet who care about gas and eels, his name will live on, a beacon in the darkness, shining brightly, then sputtering, fading, until it is finally extinguished, and all is ruin.