Ian Thomson

Was Flann O’Brien at his best when writing about drink? (Answers on a damp stressed envelope, please)

The Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien is, not surprisingly, full of beerswillers and liquorslobbers

Flann O'Brien (on right) in the Palace Bar in Dublin (Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty) 
issue 01 February 2014

On his deathbed in Dublin in the spring of 1966, Flann O’Brien must have been squiffy from tots of Paddy. A bottle of the amber distillate was smuggled in to the hospital on April Fool’s Day by a couple of well-wishers. O’Brien rang the bell to summon a nurse. ‘Sister,’ he told her solemnly, ‘I have two friends who are constipated and need a dose. Would you bring two glasses?’ Within a matter of hours the poker-faced Count O’Blather (O’Brien’s preferred authorial pseudonym) was dead. Flanneurs everywhere had reason to lament the passing of a notable Dublin wit and a writer of comic genius. But all was not lost. O’Brien’s masterpiece, The Third Policeman, was published the following year, in 1967; a novel from the grave, begob.

Flann O’Brien (real name, Brian O’Nolan) was born in 1911 as one of 12 children. His death at the age of 54 was from alcoholic complications and for much of his brief life he was indeed rotten fluthery-eyed drunk on Bass No.

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