Subscriber OnlyBooks

Flanndemic: Frank McNally on the appeal of Flann O’Brien

Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle and John Banville join a celebration of the real-life Brian O’Nolan

Flann O’Brien: a belligerent aspect, a savage and inky-black humour, and a default stance of blithe affront to the world

Frank McNally's face
Frank McNally
Tue Feb 9 2021 - 06:00

Fifty-five years after he died an apparent failure, or at best a niche literary figure, the cult of Flann O'Brien continues to grow. So, it seems, does his output. The latter may now even be growing, in the Covid cliche, exponentially. For no sooner had Dalkey Archive Press published a collection of all his known letters, in 2018, than a different kind of press – a rediscovered cupboard in his old drinking haunt, the Palace Bar in Dublin – has now yielded a new cache, published as The Lost Letters of Flann O'Brien.

It’s a one-sided correspondence, in which many famous contemporaries of the real-life Brian O’Nolan reply to variously eccentric letters he has sent them. And on closer inspection, the authors are just as spurious as the ones he himself often hid behind while making mischief on the Irish Times Letters page. But just to complicate things, some of the real writers of this collection are themselves celebrities, including the winners of three Booker Prizes and a Pulitzer, not to mention an Oscar nominee.

The letters' supposed writers become a who's who of Flann's life and times, from the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger (convincingly channelled by Anne Enright) to the widow of the pulp-western novelist Zane Grey (Roddy Doyle)

The elaborate, Flann-like hoax spans the author’s career, with one exception. Despite dying 90 years before O’Nolan was born, the poet John Keats is among those represented, thanks to his purgatorial afterlife as half of a comic act, Keats and Chapman, condemned by Myles na gCopaleen (O’Nolan’s newspaper persona) to years of improbable adventures, always ending in a pun. The honour of playing Keats here falls to John Banville. He delivers spectacularly, with a set-up and punchline of which Myles would have been proud.

After that the letters jump to 1931, when O’Nolan was a student at UCD, and their supposed writers become a who’s who of his life and times. They range widely, from the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger (convincingly channelled by Anne Enright) to the widow of the pulp-western novelist Zane Grey (Roddy Doyle), who writes, outraged, to inform O’Nolan that her husband has just died from heart failure while reading the Ringsend cowboy scenes in At Swim-Two-Birds.

READ MORE

On one level, the collection is an accidental education, including some now forgotten figures of the period who might well have influenced O’Nolan’s thinking. The philosopher JW Dunne, for example. Or Charles Minthorn “Mile-a-Minute” Murphy (1870-1950), of whom many readers of this book may be hearing for the first time.

Had he not been a real American, Mile-a-Minute Murphy would have risked being invented as a Flann O’Brien character. Like Sergeant Pluck, he was a policeman. Like the man Sergeant Pluck tries to hang, he ended up with only leg. In his earlier career, as a champion cyclist, he may have experienced the molecular interchange phenomenon, as described in The Third Policeman.

Other correspondents include Churchill, JFK, Judy Garland and Bob Dylan. On a romantic note, we also hear from Clara Ungerland, the Cologne 'basket-weaver's daughter' O'Nolan claimed to have married during a 1930s trip to Germany

Then there is the feat that earned his nickname, a cycling stunt involving the Long Island Rail Road Company, a modified track, and a hollowed-out carriage in which he cycled behind a locomotive, drag-free, at 60mph. He achieved his speed record amid flying track debris and other dangers. And when the locomotive had to brake more suddenly that he could, he nearly merged with the train.

Other correspondents include Churchill, JFK, Judy Garland and Bob Dylan. On a romantic note, we also hear from Clara Ungerland, the Cologne “basket-weaver’s daughter” O’Nolan claimed to have married during a 1930s trip to Germany. She has hitherto been thought imaginary, but in a letter dated 1947 signs herself “Clara Ungerland Bean Uí Nualláin” and announces the happy news that they have a 10-year-old son.

The "Lost Letters" were a lockdown distraction project for co-editor Prof Gerry Smyth of Liverpool University, an ardent Flannorak. Given the continued Covid crisis, unfortunately, the book must for now be ordered directly from source, via gerrygaroid@aol.com.

Meanwhile, over at the International Flann O’Brien Society (IFOBS), the scholars continue to probe O’Nolan’s official oeuvre and find ever-new angles. The society, established in 2011 to mark the centenary of his birth, has since blazed a trail of biennial conferences in Vienna, Rome, Prague, Salzburg and Dublin (of all places), while producing a small forest of new critical studies.

The latest collection of essays, Gallows Humour, is concerned not so much with the writer's body of work as his work of the body. Like Beckett, O'Nolan almost revelled in the physical frailties of mankind, and suffered enough of them himself to assist the research.

Even at his physical peak he was at odds with the cult of the athletic male, upon which the GAA (and to some extent Irish independence) was built. His tense relations with that sporting organisation is the subject of one of the pieces here, by Richard T Murphy.

Anticipating a subject we have all become experts in of late, Maebh Long (editor of the official letters collection) writes fascinatingly about “Brian O’Nolan and immunology”. Also gaining topicality from recent events is Alana Gillespie’s piece on the writer’s attitude to the Mother and Child Scheme row of 1950-51.

During one year-long sabbatical, in 1952, O'Nolan had his eclipsis removed and, to the regret of Irish grammarians, returned as Myles na 'Gopaleen'. On another comeback in 1959, he pondered the disappearance of the rest of him

Typically then, when he was still a full-time civil servant, O’Nolan (as Myles) revealed himself a “radical conservative” on the scheme. Beyond pointing out that opposition to it was fundamentally about money, he wrote little on the central issues, but engaged in a long and sometimes vicious skirmish with one Alfred O’Rahilly, a Cork academic who served as proxy commentator for the Catholic Church and who in turn accused Myles of being a ventriloquist for the “Protestant” Irish Times.

O’Nolan’s own body is the subtext of Catherine Ahearn’s “Where you bin, bud?”, an audit of the 4,198 Cruiskeen Lawn columns he wrote between 1940 and 1966. She also charts his many absences, which grew in frequency and duration. Some were due to legal or personal disputes, but his health was increasingly calamitous until the long “disappearing act” ended on April Fools’ Day in 1966.

During one year-long sabbatical, in 1952, he had his eclipsis removed and, to the regret of Irish grammarians, returned as Myles na “Gopaleen”. On another comeback in 1959, he pondered the disappearance of the rest of him, via the Roman poet Horace: “Not all of me will die, and a great part of me will escape the grave; continually I, newly arisen, may be strengthened with ensuing praise.”

Joking as he was, that looks more prophetic now than it did then. Between them, these two books reflect the balance of renewed interest in O’Nolan, both as someone to laugh at and someone to study. They also reflect the strangely global appeal of a man once considered a Dublin in-joke. The writers of the Lost Letters come from 25 countries, and that book is dedicated to the late German-born academic Prof Werner Huber who, alongside the essay editors Fagan and Borg, co-founded IFOBS.