August is a wicked month: Edna O'Brien was right, writes Kevin Myers. It is a strange and disconcerting time, this eighth month of the year, for we feel that the season known as summer is slipping away, and on this dismal meridian, it leaves behind it the melancholy sensation of meteorologically never having arrived.
Children start gazing at the calender, knowing that the bell-regimented tyrannies of school draw ever closer. Nights lengthen and grow chillier, and autumn's strange vapours loiter in the morning air, as, baffled, one wonders: what happened to the expected glories of May, June and July?
Oh yes, August is a wicked month. The first World War broke out in August 1914, and the second World War effectively began in August 1939. That war ended with the atom bomb attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945.
At a more parochial level, the Northern troubles broke out on August 15th, 1969, starting years of bloodshed. And the British introduced internment without trial on August 9th, 1971. But these dates mirror earlier events. For the British had earlier introduced internment without trial on August 9th - in India, in 1942, hauling Gandhi from his bath. And the British left India on August 15th, 1947, heralding widespread communal violence across the sub-continent.
Lord Mountbatten
And as it happens, the last Viceroy to India, Lord Mountbatten, was murdered in Ireland in August 1979, on the same day that the IRA conducted its worst atrocity of the troubles, massacring 17 soldiers at Warrenpoint, almost 10 years to the day after British troops had first been deployed in the North. Thirty-three years later, they're still there. So it certainly does seem as if August has a lot to answer for.
To be sure, some of this is to do with the imminent end of summer. Wars are fought with an eye on the harvest, of the availability of rural reservists and the food they bring in from the fields. August is an ideal time to go to war. Not merely are your harvests in, but so are your enemies', which means that with a swift victory you can seize his granaries. The timing of the two World Wars is a simple matter.
The Northern troubles owe their date to the Apprentice Boys' march in Derry; and I confess I don't know why the Apprentice Boys march on August 12th, because the siege of Derry was lifted on July 28th. But August 15th, Lady Day in August, has long been a religious feast day in Ireland, probably harvest-related; for Catholics it is the date on which the assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven is celebrated. And 17th-century wars had to be fought in the summer months, with campaigns reaching their height as the summer drew to a close.
So in a province obsessed with commemorating battles, and often in an argumentative way, it's hardly surprising that August features as a problem time. But that aside, August remains a cursed month which no-one welcomes; and maybe it works its depressive malevolence in largely unregarded ways.
Popular icons
Take death and its random selections. You have, give or take a few decimal points here and there, a one in 12 chance of dying in one particular month. So is it not strange that the two greatest icons of popular culture of the 20th century, instantly identifiable in almost all civilisations by the merest visual hint, both died in August?
Elvis Presley died on August 16th, 1977, and Marilyn Monroe died 15 years earlier, on August 5th, 1962. It is impossible to imagine what the culture of the second half of the 20th century would have been like without either or both.
Indeed, it is impossible to imagine popular culture without them now. No single Sunday has passed since the days of their deaths, 40 years ago in the case of Monroe, and 25 in the case of Presley, without some newspaper offering fresh revelations about their lives and their deaths. The industries dedicated to them both are vast and self-perpetuating: and it is the utter personal failure of each life amid so much professional success which makes those industries so fruitful.
Each was a desperately sad person whose success in public was more than matched by private failure. Both remain irreplaceable giants in popular culture, whose work is as ageless and as vibrant now as it was when they first produced it.
Both were pathological insomniacs, and both suffered chronic bowel problems. Monroe farted non-stop, and towards the end, seemed utterly unconcerned about it. And because of his diet of fried bacon, banana and peanut sandwiches Presley was horrifically constipated. The post-mortem analysis of his rectum revealed that it was completely blocked with an unyielding concrete-like substance which mere muscles could never have moved.
Human pharmacopeia
Drugs were associated with each death. Presley had become a human pharmacopoeia, and some 10 different narcotics were coursing around his body as he perched on the lavatory, vainly trying to move his bowels. Unable to take the stress of trying to shift the unshiftable below, his heart popped and he died. And poor naked Marilyn, mysteriously or otherwise, overdosed on Nembutal.
By the time they died, their lives had been made wretched by the appalling leeches who had so ruthlessly exploited them. Each story is in itself a morality tale of the purposelessness of wealth and fame unaccompanied by love; and like good morality tales, each came to a suitable terrible end, in a suitably wicked and depressing month: August.