Better than green beer

Flann O'Brien was a curmudgeonly alcoholic failure, Ireland's best kept literary secret, and the perfect way to celebrate the luck o' the Irish.

By Allen Barra

Mar 17, 2005 | How many names can a cult favorite have? Let us count them: Brian Ua Nuallain (who was born in County Tyrone in either 1911 or 1912, depending on your source) was called Brian O'Nolan, named himself Myles na gCopaleen (pronounced "nagopaleen," which is translated by some as "Myles of the Little Horses" but which was rendered as "Myles of the Ponies" by the author, who insisted that the "autonomy of the pony must not be subjugated by the imperialism of the horse"), and became known as Flann O'Brien.

But, alas, he was not known by any name to very many. No 20th century Irish writer has had a classier set of groupies: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Graham Greene, Dylan Thomas, William Saroyan, John Updike and William H. Gass, to name just a few who offered him enthusiastic cover blurbs. Yet he remains Ireland's best kept literary secret, and probably always will. Myself, I divide all the people I have ever met into two broad categories -- my friends, and those who don't fall off their chair laughing heartily while reading O'Brien. On my soul, if she did not laugh at my favorite passages, I'd dump Angelina Jolie.

And yet, it's hard to argue with those who would count him as perhaps the greatest failure of Irish letters. Here's Hugh Kenner in "A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers": "Was it the drink was his ruin, or was it the column? For ruin is the word. So much promise has seldom accomplished so little." By the end of his life, said Kenner, "a great future lay behind him."

There's no question that the drink didn't help. (Denis Donoghue described him as "a natural alcoholic.") Apparently every Irish writer from the mid-1930s to O'Brien's death in 1966 -- on April Fool's Day, no less! -- saw him drunk. (One of the last to testify was Nuala O'Faolain who, in her 1996 memoir, "Are You Somebody?" wrote, "I saw Myles na Gopaleen urinate against the counter in Neary's one night.")

"The column" was another matter altogether. For 25 years, he wrote one for the Irish Times, under the pen name Myles na gCopaleen, the content of which was accurately described by Richard Watts in a 1943 story for the New York Herald Tribune as "devoted to magnificently laborious literary puns, remarkable parodies of De Quincey and others, fanciful literary anecdotes, and erudite study of clichés, scornful dissection of the literal meaning of high-flown literary phraseology and a general air of shameless irony and high spirits." Watts neglected to mention that many of the columns were maddeningly strewn with Latin and Gaelic, which can cause a modern reader -- and for that matter, probably many in O'Brien's own time -- to alternate between fits of laughter and total frustration.

The column was a daily dose of vitriol, satire and just plain nonsense. In one, which can be found in the collection "The Best of Myles," he advertises a service to "maul the books of illiterate, but wealthy, upstarts so that the books will look as if they have been read and re-read by their owners. How many uses of 'mauling' would there be? Without giving the matter much thought, I should say four, including DeLuxe Handling. Each volume to be mauled savagely, the spines of the smaller volumes to be damaged in a manner that will give the impression that they have been carried around in pockets ... not less than 30 volumes to be treated with old coffee, tea, porter or whiskey stains, and not less than five volumes to be inscribed with forged signatures of the author." (Some of the remarks to be penned on the pages include "Rubbish!" "I remember poor Joyce saying the very same thing to me," and "From your devoted friend and follower, K. Marx.") There were mind-bogglingly elaborate shaggy dog stories featuring the comic duo "Keats and Chapman," ending in such puns as "dogging a fled horse," "she stupes to conquer," and "foals rush in where Engels fear to tread."

Then there was the "Myles na gCopaleen Catechism of Clichi," in which newspapers were combed for dead language. ("What inexpensive unrationed commodity is often said to exceed the man possessing it in value?" Answer: "His salt.") There were dialogues on topical matters with "The Plain People of Ireland" and diatribes against just about any subject unfortunate enough to walk into his sights. Poetry, for instance: "Having considered the matter in -- of course -- all its aspects, I have decided that there is no excuse for poetry. Poetry gives no adequate return in money, it is expensive to print by reason of the waste of space occasioned by its form, and nearly always promulgates illusory concepts of life. But a better case for the banning of all poetry is the simple fact that most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable." How true.

O'Brien's newspaper columns were irreverent, acerbic and outrageously self-indulgent, and much the same thing can be said of his works of fiction, particularly his first novel, in 1939, "At Swim-Two-Birds" (which sounds Joycean but is actually a literal translation of an Irish place name). Dylan Thomas praised it as "Just the book to give your sister, if she is a dirty, boozey girl." The book flopped, at least in part, legend has it, because damage from German planes destroyed some of the publisher's printing materials. Then again, that story may have been spread by O'Brien himself, who suggested that Hitler had started the second World War to prevent the circulation of "At Swim-Two-Birds." "In a grim irony that is not without charm," he wrote, "the book survived the war while Hitler did not." Actually, "At Swim-Two-Birds" didn't do a great deal better than Hitler; within six months of its initial printing, it had sold fewer than 250 copies and wasn't reprinted until 1960.

Next Page: A prolonged college joke, a phantasmagorical crime story, and a violent eruption of paddyism

• View blog reactions