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Later, when analysts wrote about Talbot, some did it with reverence, others with joking contempt. The two camps agree on the basic facts, but differ utterly on the explanation.
For those facts, and a few extras, consult Edward O'Connor's 1977 book, Spotlight on the Venerable Matt Talbot. O'Connor begins with the statement: "It's no ordinary man about whom a Pope, three Trade Union Leaders and the Yugoslav government have been concerned in the course of recent years." He finishes, 45 pages later, with a two-paragraph "Prayer for the Canonisation of Venerable Matt Talbot" and a mention that "Matt Talbot's tomb is in our Lady of Lourdes Church, Sean McDermott Street, Dublin."
Talbot alive was a loner's loner, a hard-drinking youth who became a pious, teetotalling, essentially friendless adult. On June 7, 1925, at age 71, he dropped dead on Granby Lane, Dublin, a few steps away from a church. Edward O'Connor describes the ensuing moment of surprise: "But in Jervis Street Hospital, two astonished attendants found on the remains (scrupulously clean) a chain around the body, two others around an arm and leg and a cord tightly drawn about the other arm. Thus did God begin to unmask the hidden holiness of his life."
That holiness may have been absent during Talbot's early years. O'Connor says the neighborhood sentiment at that time was simply, "Poor Matt! Oh, he's going to the Devil!" Matt Talbot took the pledge at 28. His remaining years were spent almost exclusively in, or shuttling between, church, home and his job at a timber yard.
Then came death. News of the chains and cords spread rapidly. A group called the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association vigorously disseminated the story, inspiring others to do the like. The Archbishop of Dublin began a campaign to have Talbot declared a saint. In 1975, the Pope certified him to be the Venerable Matt Talbot, just two steps away from sainthood.
Other scholars had their own take. For them, Matt Talbot - and especially his celebrants - demanded ridicule. The mockers were also, many of them, Irish literary giants. James Joyce, Sean O'Casey and others made Talbot into a fictional or half-fictional character. In Joyce's Finnegans Wake, his name is Tummy Tullbert. O'Casey's autobiography calls him Mutt Talbot.
A 1960 documentary film called "We Knew Matt Talbot" shows pretty much every living person who had any connection to Talbot. Their recollections are spare. "He was independent," says one man, "he was independent, don't you know." Talbot's niece, by then an old woman with a now-startling resemblance to the comedian John Cleese, evidently does not remember her uncle. But she says that her mother knew him.
The only known photo of Talbot, enlarged from a group photo of the timber yard labourers, is just a collection of dots. With Matt Talbot research currently at a lull, it symbolises how far we are from a clear consensus about the man.
· Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel Prize.
Source: http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/improbable/story/0,,2209831,00.html