An Irishman's Diary

AN UNEXPECTED side-effect of the Brian O’Nolan centenary, in my experience, has been a new appreciation of James Joyce. I speak as a journalist. Because you can say what you like about Joyce, but at least he had a simple name.

Contrast this with the centenarian, about whom every newspaper report must note that, while he was born O’Nolan or Ó Nualláin, he was better known as Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen. Which means that – assuming you have to include some new facts about him, such as the unveiling of a commemorative plaque or stamp – any chance of a snappy intro is already doomed.

Further on, you probably also need to deal with the vexed issue of the eclipsis, if only in a note to the subeditors. Otherwise, questions will arise as to why he was “Na gCopaleen” early in his column writing career and why, after having his linguistic appendix removed, he became “Na Gopaleen” later on.

Maybe, to be on the safe side, you should also mention somewhere that, although there was no good reason for the English version of his real name to have that “O” in the middle, it usually did.

But having established the basic nomenclative facts and leaving aside his plethora of other pseudonyms (many of them attached to fake letters to The Irish Times), there still remains the problem of whether you can say, for example, that Flann O'Brien "wrote" The Third Policemanor that Myles na gCopaleen/Gopaleen "wrote" Cruiskeen Lawn.

No, is the answer. If you’re a self-respecting news reporter, you simply cannot accept the literary conceit that a person who didn’t exist wrote anything. So you have to say it was O’Nolan/Nolan/Ó Nualláin who wrote it, “as” or “under the name of”, etc, etc, until you’re blue in the face.

Nor can you even simplify the matter to the extent of saying that Flann O'Brien was the novel-writing wing of the O'Nolan movement, while Na gCopaleen/Gopaleen was the breakaway flying columnist. The problem there, of course, is that it was as Na gCopaleen (before the operation) that O'Nolan/Nolan/Ó Nualláin wrote An Béal Bocht. I won't bore readers with the logistical challenges of tracking facts about the writer through the archives or – God forbid – trying to Google him. Suffice to say it would put grey hairs on you.

CONSIDER, on the other hand, Mr Joyce. Yes, some critics might say that he was too clever for his own good, and that amid the ever-increasing complexity of his later work, he finally disappeared, artistically, up his own fundament.

But the fact is that when he wrote a collection of conventional short stories early in his career, he did so as James Joyce. When he wrote a sprawling, multilayered epic about a day in the life of Dublin, using the framework of Homer's Odysseyand basing each episode on a different organ of the human body, he was still writing as James Joyce.

And when he invented a whole new language in Finnegans Wake, a book the meaning of which remains as elusive as the Higgs boson particle, and the title of which causes every journalist who ever writes about it to have to put the words "stet – no apostrophe in Finnegans" in brackets afterwards, the author remained plain old James Joyce.

This is the sort of name that journalists would encourage all members of the public to have, especially if they’re thinking of appearing in newspaper headlines. It’s short. It’s monosyllabic in both parts. And, as a bonus, it’s even alliterative.

WHEREAS, getting back to the man with the multiple identities, it must be said that, despite being an associate member of the profession himself, O’Nolan/Nolan/Ó Nualláin had no consideration at all for his fellow hacks. Names were only part of it.

There are also such issues as his notorious 1943 interview with Timemagazine, in which he sold a gullible American reporter not just one pup, but a whole litter. The august journal later faithfully recorded that, on his only trip abroad (in reality, a short, uneventful holiday in Germany), he had fallen for and married the 18-year-old violin-playing daughter of a Cologne basket weaver, and that her tragic demise a month afterward blighted his life ever afterwards to the extent that he couldn't speak about it.

The interviewer may or may not have been spared later embellishments of the story, in which the couple had been married by the “captain of a Rhineland steamer” and the bride’s demise had been from “galloping consumption”. The point, in general, is that O’Nolan and the journalistic precept that “facts are sacred” were never on close terms.

For the names alone, however, he deserves a spell in literary purgatory. And interestingly, he has left us some ideas in this regard via his own end-of-career revenge against Joyce. Thus in The Dalkey Archive, he exhumes the great writer to live secretly in Skerries, working as a pious barman, repudiating the "dirty" Ulysses, and harbouring ambitions to pursue a late vocation with the Jesuits, by whom he is eventually hired to darn their underclothes.

There’s food for thought there. In the meantime, if he’s reading this, I wish Mr O’Nolan/Nolan/Ó Nualláin/Na gCopaleen/Gopaleen/George Knowall/Oscar Love/Lir O’Connor, etc, etc, well on his big anniversary. Congratulations, Brian, and thanks for all the laughs. But let me just add, on behalf of journalists everywhere, you’ll get yours yet.