It’s hard to stop quoting Flann O’Brien, once you start. The Irish man of letters was born a hundred years ago and to celebrate the centenary there are at least three conferences in his honour, the latest of which takes place this weekend at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, with another in the Irish club in Birmingham. For those of us who are obsessed by Flann O’Brien — otherwise known as Myles na Gcopaleen, or by his own name of Brian O’Nolan or assorted other pseudonyms — this is not an entirely welcome phenomenon.
You know what happens when the lit-crit community get hold of an author, don’t you? He’s discussed in terms that render him inaccessible to the reading public; he’s turned into the subject matter of PhDs and he becomes appropriated by the English departments of overseas universities. Even worse, his works can be turned into examination texts (George Bernard Shaw cursed anyone who made his works part of a syllabus; didn’t work). One critic, Carol Taaffe, remarks that “in the first years of the twenty-first century, Brian O’Nolan has been most commonly invented as a post-modernist, post-colonial Menippean satirist”. See what I mean?
That petrifaction through canonisation is what happened to the two near-contemporaries of Flann O’Brien, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Perhaps the only good thing to come out of the rash of scholarly interest is to confirm O Brien’s genius. As Carol Taaffe, observed, you can take your pick of which literary trinity he should belong to: as a novelist, with Beckett and Joyce, or as a newspaper columnist, with the less sober Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. He holds his own, drunk or sober, in either company.
For years, I had thought of Flann O’Brien as a private literary passion of my own, shared with a few other select enthusiasts. It’s disconcerting to find that word has got out. Indeed, there was a cult of Flann O’Brien in his lifetime — Graham Greene was an admirer — but for a few decades after his death in 1966, he lapsed into relative obscurity, while the juggernaut of the Joyce industry gathered ever greater momentum. But he was never really off the radar in Ireland. The other day I met Roddy Doyle, the novelist, and at the mention of O’Brien, he quoted his own favourite line from At Swim Two Birds, “a bad knee is worse than no knee at all”. That’s the thing about O’Brien; he operated at half a dozen levels at once, and one of them was to capture a particular timbre of Irish — specifically Dublin — common speech. As with Joyce, you can only really appreciate how well it’s done if you’re Irish yourself.
But as I say, O’Brien is being, once again, well and truly canonised by the pundits. His best known novel, At Swim Two Birds, is being made into a film with Colin Farrell and Gabriel Byrne; I’m told that it also inspired the television series, Lost. The novel that was unpublished in his lifetime thanks to an otiose reader at Longman’s, The Third Policeman, has been especially embraced by the lit-crit set. The author summed it up as follows: “When you get to the end of this book you realize that my hero or main character (he’s a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he earned for the killing … It is made clear that this sort of thing goes on for ever…When you are writing about the world of the dead ¬ and the damned ¬ where none of the rules and laws (not even the law of gravity) holds good, there is any amount of scope for back-chat and funny cracks.”
Personally, I have a soft spot too for The Dalkey Archive, a spirited skit involving the rediscovery of James Joyce in the backwater of Howth, where he is engaged in writing pamphlets for the Catholic Truth Society, and a scientist with ambitions to destroy the world who manages to engineer an extended conversation with St Augustine. Under water. (One of the few elements of Flann O’Brien the critics have left pretty well untouched is his thoroughgoing Catholicism, which many younger critics can’t engage with.)
But, for most ordinary readers, the most accessible part of O’Brien’s remains, as in his lifetime, his journalism as Myles na Gopaleen — which the critics are now, belatedly embracing, having been pretty snooty about it previously. His journalistic output was prodigious, but the best known was his Cruiskeen Lawn column for the Irish Times — which is now being replicated online, in its proper page format, which lets you see the way he occasionally subverts the other items on his page (it wouldn’t happen now). Here, pretty well chosen at random, is a piece which captures just a touch of his anarchic character:
“The other day I had a word to say about the necessity for the professional book-handler, a person who will maul the books of illiterate, but wealthy, upstarts so that the books will look as if they have been read and re-read by their owners. How many uses of mauling would there be? Without giving the matter much thought, I should say four. Supposing an experienced handler is asked to quote for the handling of one shelf of books, four feet in length. He would quote thus, under four heads:
‘Popular handling – Each volume to be well and truly handled, four leaves in each to be dog-eared, and a tram ticket, cloak-room docket or other comparable article inserted in each as a forgotten book mark. Say, £1 7s 6d. Five per cent discount for civil servants.’
‘Premier handling – Each volume to be thoroughly handled, eight leaves in each to be dog-eared, a suitable passage in not less than 25 volumes to be underlined in red pencil, and a leaflet in French on the works of Victor Hugo to be inserted as a forgotten book mark in each. Say, £2 17s 6d. Five per cent discount for literary university students, civil servants and lady social workers….”
You get the gist.
Like I say, it’s hard to stop quoting Flann O’Brien once you start.
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