Flann O'Brien 1911-1966: As he is remembered at a conference today, the 40th anniversary of his death, Carol Taaffe looks at a neglected aspect of Flann O'Brien's career - the column he wrote for The Irish Times
The latest surreal chapter in the afterlife of Brian O'Nolan is the current renaissance in the fortunes of his alter ego, Flann O'Brien, which is coinciding with the 40th anniversary of his death, on April Fool's Day, 1966. Having recently featured in the ABC drama, Lost, his second novel, The Third Policeman, finally entered Amazon.com's bestseller list nearly 40 years after its publication in 1967. Its posthumous life began when O'Nolan's widow, Evelyn, discovered the "lost" manuscript in a drawer - a fact worth noting by those who are still busy unravelling the labyrinthine TV plot he inspired. But the truly neglected aspect of his intriguing career is the Cruiskeen Lawn column he wrote in this paper for 26 years.
The Third Policeman, a murder mystery to outwit anything produced by an army of confused screenwriters, was written in the first months of the second World War and rejected by publishers as being too "fantastic". This run of luck continued when stocks of O'Nolan's previous novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, were destroyed by bombing in 1940. As a novelist, Flann O'Brien did not make another appearance until the 1960s, and in October 1940 O'Nolan began writing the column which would run until his death.
Though Myles na gCopaleen dominated the literary life of Brian O'Nolan, it is Flann O'Brien who has won the most posthumous accolades, maintaining academic attention alongside a cultish popularity. But while critics have repeatedly blamed Cruiskeen Lawn for distracting O'Nolan from the proper business of writing novels - as if the garrulous showmanship of Myles na gCopaleen were responsible for the demise of the more discriminating Flann O'Brien - the column itself is a literary achievement as startling and distinctive as his experimental novels.
Over those 26 years, O'Nolan developed an unholy crossbreed of the shaggy-dog novel and the satiric newspaper column. At Swim-Two-Birds gave a foretaste of Myles's ingenuity, being a novel in which characters turn on their author and rewrite the plot. Written in a Joycean medley of styles, it reels with the intoxication of turning fiction loose on fiction.
But the daily column gave O'Nolan license to stretch his uncanny inventiveness to its limits, unrestrained by the niceties of character and plot. In doing so, he subverted the conventional forms of the newspaper as thoroughly as he had those of the novel.
The pattern was set by his first appearance in The Irish Times in 1938, when he disrupted a gentlemanly correspondence between Seán O'Faoláin and Frank O'Connor on the Abbey theatre. Over the following year, O'Nolan and his friends infested the letters page under a variety of eccentric pseudonyms, whipping up spurious debates on art, criticism and Ibsen's wigs. Cruiskeen Lawn grew out of these anarchic performances, with the legendary editor, Bertie Smyllie, finally deciding to exploit their popularity and recover the integrity of his letters page by employing their motivating genius.
CRUISKEEN LAWN WAS commissioned as a humorous column in Irish but, true to form, O'Nolan defied his editor's expectations by gradually reverting to English (when not digressing to Latin or German). By 1943, its stalwarts were already established: among them Keats and Chapman, the Plain People of Ireland, the Brother, and the Catechism of Cliche. The column's surreal and nonsensical humour - at its peak during the war years - has undoubtedly contributed to its lasting appeal, but perhaps obscured the extent to which it was a product of its time. Already by 1945, Myles was acquiring the satirical and sometimes hectoring tone which would become synonymous with the column in later years, directing his scorn at all aspects of Irish public life. But, tellingly, Cruiskeen Lawn was initially welcomed by readers as a relief from the more serious business of war.
At a time when the pro-Allied Irish Times' editorials were the subject of unwanted attention from press censors, Myles's wartime commentary was largely restricted to the inventions of the Myles na gCopaleen Research Bureau and the adventures of the distinguished Russian general and Corkman, Tim O'Shenko ("Tom was the brother, of course"). With little topical news filtering through to the column, O'Nolan exploited the more bizarre end of his comic talents, and he did so with the intellectual dignity that was as important to the Mylesian comic persona as the tailcoat and cigar were to Groucho Marx.
But there was also more critical substance to the column than has been recognised, and collections such as The Best of Myles give little sense of its changing character over the war years. Beginning in the spirit of the letter controversies, the early Cruiskeen Lawn playfully subverted the tools of its trade - parodying modern journalese in the Catechism of Cliche, or the literary jargon of O'Faoláin's journal, The Bell. But once given a permanent home on the leader page, Myles also directed his satire at the sober editorials across the way.
He increasingly presented himself as a bemused (and grandly anglicised) visitor to these shores, a benign dispenser of advice to "you Irish". The grandiose tone had shades of Bertie Smyllie, as many recognised. But it was not until press censorship was lifted in May 1945 that a serious clash arose. While Myles took his fortnight's holiday that August, the atomic bomb was launched on Japan. Smyllie observed that probably "the immolation of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has prevented, in the end, a greater slaughter".
The immolation of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the first subject in Myles's thoughts on his return: "Why should this outsize barbarity be visited on the Japanese? It cannot be because Japan was at war with America, since human rights remain intact even in war . . . No, it must be because the Japanese are considered unpleasant folk; few of them are Knights of Columbanus, Elks or Rotarians."
On September 14th, Myles ended a week-long denunciation of his editor: "Western civilisation starts with man, his body and his foolish mind, and ends there . . . I must say to the Editor of The Irish Times (a brave albeit foolish man) - go east, young man, learn the value of contemplation, the glory of the spirit, the grandeur of nature . . . The East, by the way, is slightly larger than Ireland." The new tone of saevo indignatio was perhaps not to Smyllie's taste; Cruiskeen Lawn disappeared for a week.
Carol Taaffe, who teaches at Trinity College, Dublin, is among the speakers at a conference on the fiction and journalism of Brian O'Nolan at UCD today in the Newman Building, Room A109. Sessions are open to the public; conference fee is €10. Taaffe, who will speak on Cruiskeen Lawn and The Irish Times in wartime, is currently completing a book on O'Nolan's fiction and journalism, entitled Ireland Through the Looking-Glass: Flann O'Brien and Irish Cultural Debate