An Irishman's Diary

THERE MUST have been great excitement in certain literary circles about a news item in Tuesday’s newspaper.

No, I don’t mean the reported sale at auction of a rare James Joyce manuscript for €22,000. I’m referring to a detail elsewhere in that story: “A collection of letters between the writer Brian O’Nolan (who also wrote under the pseudonym Flann O’Brien) also made €22,000.” It had been well known that O’Nolan wrote letters to other people during his career. But it was a revelation even to aficionados that he had also conducted a correspondence – apparently extensive – with himself. This would have been a welcome discovery at any time. Coming on the eve of the great man’s centenary year, however, it was doubly serendipitous.

Of course, such reflexive communication would not be unique in literature. Flaubert famously wrote letters to himself, apparently on the advice of a family friend, Dr Cloquet, who early in the writer’s career suggested he commit his ideas to paper, put them away somewhere, and then wait 15 years to read them again, whereupon: “You’ll find another man”.

Flaubert’s niece later recalled his habit, during emotional crises, “of writing out his most profound impressions for himself alone, at the moment of experiencing them, then placing them in sealed envelopes”. And in at least some cases, he never reopened them. Thus, the beneficiaries of Dr Cloquet’s promised insights were not the novelist himself, but Flaubert’s grateful critics and biographers.

An O’Nolan-O’Nolan correspondence would have been at least equally welcome to his growing body of students. In fact, it had the potential to be more exciting, given the multiple personae that were such a feature of his career. Even in real-life, his identity was complicated: he was variously known as Nolan, O’Nolan, and Ó Nualláin, and some critics have suggested that the O in the English version was an affectation, implying aristocratic ancestry.

Then there were his many literary aliases: Myles na gCopaleen/na Gopaleen, Flann O’Brien, Brother Barnabas, George Knowall, etc. To some extent, these names represented compartmentalised aspects of his personality. So even a letter from Myles na gCopaleen to Myles na Gopaleen (as which he wrote his Irish Times column from 1942 onwards), perhaps accusing him of dropping the eclipsis in a shameless bid to increase book sales in England, could be educational.

But the most exciting possibility was that the auto-correspondence arose as a development of the techniques used in his early masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds, in which the characters acquire lives of their own and take over the novel.

Perhaps O’Nolan was not writing to himself, so much as that his various selves were writing to each other. And an even more intriguing possibility was that he had, at some point, lost editorial control over the process. In which case the letters promised to be the most exciting development in literary criticism since Woody Allen’s essay: “Metterling: the Complete Laundry Lists.”

UNFORTUNATELY, to cut a long story short, I rang the auction house on Tuesday, trembling with excitement, to get more details about the O’Nolan-O’Nolan letters. And you can imagine my disappointment to learn that the whole thing was a misunderstanding.

They were not written to himself at all, it turned out. There was a gremlin in the works somewhere and the fact that the correspondence was with “his agents and publishers” had been omitted from the printed news report.

Oh well. It was too good to be true, I suppose. And such as they are, the real letters do not lack entertainment value. One, for example, refers to a feud O’Nolan was having with the taxman, as a result of which he claimed to have written with “unsurpassed violence” to the Revenue Commissioners demanding to know why he should be subjected to “penal double taxation” because of their “culpable delinquency . . . down the years”.

But outside the novels and the long-running column, critics looking for examples of O’Nolan arguing with himself may have to make do with the letters he wrote to this newspaper – under another barrage of false names – at the start of his literary career.

Some are well known. The Flann O’Brien pseudonym, for one, first appeared on this page, in October 1938, over a letter affecting to apologise for interrupting what it claimed was a “private” argument that two other writers, Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain, had been having there for some time.

After that, O’Nolan (and perhaps his drinking companions) were regular and irreverent contributors, posing variously as “Oscar Love”, “Lir O’Connor”, “Luna O’Connor”, and under other noms de plume, not all of which may yet have been rumbled.

The then editor, RM Smyllie, was in on the joke, at least some of the time. When O’Connor, unamused by another FOB letter, called on the paper to unmask the author and distance itself from the actions of such “literary gangsters and hooligans”, Smyllie admitted that, yes, he did know who it was, while keeping the secret to himself.

It may have been partly to protect the integrity of his letters page, however, as well as to exploit the letter writer’s obvious talent, that he soon gave O’Nolan a job.