Brian, Myles and Flann - your only man in Vienna

This week's 100 Myles conference in Vienna celebrating Brian O'Nolan's work may be the start of a new literary tradition, writes FRANK McNALLY

THAT BRIAN O’Nolan is enjoying some of the scholarly attention long lavished on certain other Irish writers is not a cause for unmixed joy.

You have to wonder what the man himself might have made of 100 Myles, the conference that brought academics and students from all corners of Europe and beyond to Vienna this week, to mark the centenary of his birth.

If nothing else, he would surely have been nervous at the proximity of the venue and the former home of Sigmund Freud, a man whose books include The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious.There was half a kilometre or so between them.

The Freud apartment is now a museum complete with replica of the famous couch, which this week seemed to beckon the subject of the nearby symposium: “So tell me, Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen, when did you start thinking you were three different people?”

Happily, however, all the analysis was confined to Vienna University’s English department, where, also happily, most of those presenting papers on O’Nolan did not forget to laugh at his writings, or at least to recall that they had done when they first read them.

The keynote speakers, including me, all stressed that his funniness was the first and last thing to be said about him, whatever else was noted in between. Lest the point be lost in translation, given that participating universities ranged from those in Bucharest to Buffalo and Nice to Nanyang, the social programme drove it home. The balance of the conference was summed up in a two-man show presented by Dermot Diamond and Fergus Cronin: The Science of Flann O'Brien.

Diamond, a scientist from Belfast, contributed the educational part of the evening, while Cronin did the funny voices.

Between them, they suggested convincingly that O’Nolan had an impressive grasp of physics: whether it was with Sir Myles na gCopaleen appropriating William Rowan Hamilton’s epiphany on the banks of the Royal Canal and running to the nearest bridge to write down his formula on quaternions, or Sergeant Pluck and his colleagues demonstrating Pauli’s exclusion principle and anticipating such developments as nanotechnology and laser beams.

Diamond even argued that The Third Policeman's pivotal event echoes the famous thought experiment by Erwin Schrödinger in which, according to certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, a cat could be simultaneously dead and alive.

That great Austrian physicist, as it happens, provides partial justification for having the conference in Vienna. When O’Nolan was starting out on his literary career, Schrödinger came to live in Ireland, to head up Eamon de Valera’s vanity project, The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, with its strange combination of Celtic history and cosmic physics.

During his time there, he inspired half of Myles na gCopaleen’s celebrated joke about the institute trying to prove there were “two St Patricks and no God”.

The insititute, or perhaps its political founder, didn't get the joke and The Irish Timeshad pay £100 (€127) to settle a libel writ.

In that context, the 100 Myles conference sounded a bit like payback. But this was not, apparently, part of the organisers’ motivation.

Like many such events, the conference began as the idea of one man, Vienna-based PhD student Paul Fagan, who found an accomplice in another O’Nolan fan, Dr Ruben Borg from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

With the support of Professor Werner Huber’s Center of Irish Studies, based in the University of Vienna, they then embarked on the “gamble” or trying to prove that there was what Fagan called an “international Flann O’Brien community”.

The success of that gamble meant that by the end of the week, talk had moved on to the possibility of an annual event and the founding of a journal.

In the meantime, this symposium appeared finally to have disposed of critic Hugh Kenner’s damning verdict that had long threatened to be the last judgment on O’Nolan: “Was it the drink was his ruin, or was it the column? For ruin is the word.”

Another keynote speaker Keith Hopper dismissed that as "stupid". The literary value of Cruiskeen Lawnis taken as read these days, he said. And as for the drinking, that was O'Nolan's own business. It may even have contributed to the "hallucinatory" effect of some of his work.

In fact, the full title of the symposium – 100 Myles: The International Flann O'Brien Centenary Conference – inverted the once-traditional hierarchy of his pseudonyms, whereby the nominal author of four slim novels, two of them flawed, was given precedence over the writer of An Béal Bochtand 26 years of often-brilliant newspaper columns.

As his friend and biographer Anthony Cronin reminded us, when the writer was alive everybody called him Myles. In a story that might have interested Freud, Cronin remembered O'Nolan writing a humour piece in 1954 that he planned to offer to The Bell, or another similar journal, but under his newspaper identity of Myles na gCopaleen.

Cronin suggested he publish it as Flann O'Brien instead, a name that by then had featured only on the forgotten debut novel At Swim-Two-Birdsand its unpublished follow-up, The Third Policeman."I thought it was important for it to get another outing," Cronin recalled. But O'Nolan would have none of it. He was already beginning to dismiss At Swim-Two-Birdsas "juvenalia".

And as for its author, he told Cronin: “I don’t know that man any more.”