An Irishman's Diary

IN A self-deprecating photograph for this newspaper, Brian O'Nolan once posed alongside a road sign that read "Dublin Diversion" and apparently pointed to him. This was a common enough opinion of his status during 26 years as an Irish Timescolumnist. Brilliant as "Cruiskeen Lawn" could be, its fame (and the fame of the novels that book-ended it) did not, in their time, reach far beyond Dalkey or Skerries, never mind Ireland.

If modern Irish literature is a three-pin plug (and why not?) Joyce and Beckett were the live and neutral prongs, whereas O’Nolan was the earth – staying at home, working a day job while writing neglected masterpieces by night, and frequently mocking the pretensions of Ireland’s famous exiles (especially Joyce), who suffered for their art in Paris.

Even so, somehow, the word about Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen got out eventually. And although O’Nolan’s Dublin haunts are taking it in turns to celebrate his centenary – the Palace Bar and Dalkey have already paid tribute, while UCD and Trinity plan conferences in the autumn – the occasion is also being marked overseas. In fact, arguably the most extensive event of the year will happen next week in, of all places, Vienna.

Yes, having escaped until now the sort of analysis that Joyce has invited for decades, O’Nolan appears finally to have run out of luck.

Starting this Sunday, he will undergo four days of intense examination in the city of Freud, where academics and students from all over the world will gather to study his writings, under such headings as “Narrative Automism and Menippean Satire” and “Cosmic Obsessive Compulsive Disorder under the Fire of Derision”.

The event sounds like a weird mix-up of The Third Policemanand The Third Man, with a plot intertwining the search for Harry Lime and O'Nolan's long-missing novel, set in the Viennese sewers and scripted by the makers of the TV series Lost. But as the organisers of "100 Myles" point out, the meeting of O'Nolan and Vienna is not all that strange. On the contrary, the Austrian capital has perhaps the best claim outside Dublin to host such a conference.

For one thing, it can boast the first and still – pending Brendan Gleeson's plans – only full-length feature film of a Flann O'Brien novel, At Swim-Two-Birds. This was the work of Kurt Palm, one of the keynote speakers at next week's event.

Thanks partly to the same Palm, Vienna has also staged many theatrical productions of O’Nolan’s work. And then there is the particular setting for “100 Myles”, the University of Vienna’s Centre for Irish Studies, set up two years ago under Prof Werner Huber.

STRETCHING Apoint, a central-European venue might even be justified by the author's own foreign adventures. O'Nolan was of course widely travelled, but only in his head. In real life, he seems to have been averse to tourism. He did, however, study German at UCD. Following which course, his sole known trip abroad, circa 1933/4, was to Germany.

He was probably not there long enough to marry Clara Ungerland, the 18-year-old daughter of a Cologne basket-weaver, as a credulous Timemagazine profiler would later report he had done. Poor Clara may indeed have been entirely fictional. In which case, her death from "galloping consumption" only a month after the wedding – other details supplied by O'Nolan himself – may have been less of a tragedy than it appears.

But he did at least spend some time in a German-speaking part of Europe, whereas he never seems to have visited London or Paris. And in any case, one final point in Vienna’s favour – the crucial one – is the presence there of PhD student Paul Fagan, whose work on the Irish comic tradition places O’Nolan alongside not just Joyce and Beckett, but also Swift and Sterne.

It was Fagan who first suggested the Myles conference. Since when, he, Dr Huber and the other organisers have assembled contributors from as far away as the US, Singapore, Israel, Turkey and from most corners of Europe. It's a measure of just how exhaustive they have been in putting the line-up together that participants will include, on behalf of The Irish Times, yours truly.

Happily, there will also be better-qualified speakers, chief among them O’Nolan’s friend and biographer, Anthony Cronin. And as well as the programme of talks and panel discussions, there will be a series of “Fringe Flann” events, including film-screenings, readings, dramatisations and an art exhibition. That great interpreter of things Mylesian, actor Eamon Morrissey, will also appear, via a live satellite link from New York.

Back with the academic events, meanwhile, the author himself may help ensure that proceedings do not become overly Joycean. Conference speakers also include TCD’s Carol Taaffe, whose title borrows from one of Myles’s regular bursts of invective: “A streptococcus-ridden gang of natural gobdaws”. He was talking at the time about “the Plain People of Ireland”, with whom he had temporarily fallen out (or was pretending to have). But as the contributors to next week’s event will know, it could have been anyone.

“100 Myles” begins on Sunday night and continues until Wednesday. More details are at univie.ac.at/flannobrien2011