The Joys of Flann O'Brien
2005-10-13There is scarcely a single word in the Irish…that is simple and explicit… Here is an example copied from Dinneen and from more authentic sources known only to my little self:
Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m. – act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting…the act of inflating hare’s offal with a bicycle pump…a hawk’s vertigo…a wooden coat, a custard mincer…a stoat’s stomach-pump…
In Donegal there are native speakers who know so many million words that it is a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a life-time.
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‘What would you say a bulbul is?’ ‘Not one of those ladies who takes money?’ I said. ‘No.’ ‘Not the brass knobs on a German steam organ?’ ‘Not the knobs.’ ‘Nothing to do with the independence of
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You have to remember the man in the street. I may understand you, Mr Lamont may understand you, Mr Furriskey may understand you – but the man in the street? Oh, by God you have to go very very slow if you want him to follow you.
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Death by fire, you know, by God it’s no joke.
They tell me drowning is worse, Lamont said.
Do you know what it is, said Furriskey, you can drown me three times before you roast me. Yes, by God and six. Put your finger in a basin of water. What do you feel? Next to nothing. But put your finger in the fire!
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‘Ah, yes, [says the
Observe the unique
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I thought to myself, the chap said, that it was a right place to see wild angimals. I put meself on a 10 bus last Thursda. We got held up on the way and do you know be what?
I do not.
Be wild angimals.
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Flann O'Brien/Myles na gCopaleen/Brian O'Nolan De Selby
From Chapter 8 of The Third Policeman
Not excepting even the credulous Kraus (see his Do Selby's Leben), all the commentators have treated de Selby's disquisitions on night and sleep with considerable reserve. This is hardly to be wondered at since he held (a) that darkness was simply an accretion of 'black air', i.e., a staining of the atmosphere due to volcanic eruptions too fine to be seen with the naked eye and also to certain 'regrettable' industrial activities involving coal-tar by-products and vegetable dyes; and (b) that sleep was simply a succession of fainting-fits brought on by semi-asphyxiation due to (a). Hatchjaw brings forward his rather facile and ever-ready theory of forgery, pointing to certain unfamiliar syntactical constructions in the first part of the third so called 'prosecanto' in Golden Hours. He does not, however, suggest that there is anything spurious in de Selby's equally damaging rhodomontade in the Layman's Atlas where he inveighs savagely against 'the insanitary conditions prevailing everywhere after
(Leben, pp. 17-37.)
As in many other of de Selby's concepts, it is difficult to get to grips with his process of reasoning or to refute his curious conclusions. The 'volcanic eruptions', which we may for convenience compare to the infra-visual activity of such substances as radium, take place usually in the 'evening' are stimulated by the smoke and industrial combustions of the 'day' and are intensified in certain places which may, for the want of a better term, be called 'dark places'. One difficulty is precisely this question of terms. A 'dark place' is dark merely because it is a place where darkness 'germinates' and 'evening' is a time of twilight merely because the 'day' deteriorates owing to the stimulating effect of smuts on the volcanic processes. De Selby makes no attempt to explain why a 'dark place' such as a cellar need be dark and does not define the atmospheric, physical or mineral conditions which must prevail uniformly in all such places if the theory is to stand. The 'only straw offered', to use Bassett's wry phrase, is the statement that 'black air' is highly combustible, enormous masses of it being instantly consumed by the smallest flame, even an electrical luminance isolated in a vacuum. 'This,' Bassett observes, 'seems to be an attempt to protect the theory from the shock it can be dealt by simply striking matches and may be taken as the final proof that the great brain was out of gear.'
A significant feature of the matter is the absence of any authoritative record of those experiments with which de Selby always sought to support his ideas. It is true that Kraus (ace below) gives a forty-page account of certain experiments, mostly concerned with attempts to bottle quantities of 'night' and endless sessions in locked and shuttered bedrooms from which bursts of loud hammering could be heard. He explains that the bottling operations were carried out with bottles which were, 'for obvious reasons', made of black glass. Opaque porcelain jars are also stated to have been used ,with some success'. To use the frigid words of Bassett, such information, it is to be feared, makes little contribution to serious deselbiana (sic).' Very little is known of Kraus or his life. A brief biographical note appears in the obsolete Bibliographie de de Selby. He is stated to have been born in Ahrensburg, near
Recent research has not thrown much light on Kraus's identity or his ultimate fate. Bassett's posthumous Recollections contains the interesting suggestion that Kraus did not exist at all, the name being one of the pseudonyms adopted by the egregious du Garbandier to further his 'campaign of calumny'. The Leben, however, seems too friendly In tone to encourage such a speculation.
Du Garbandier himself, possibly pretending to confuse the characteristics of the English and French languages, persistently uses 'black hair' for 'black air', and makes extremely elaborate fun of the raven-headed lady of the skies who deluged the world with her tresses every night when retiring. The wisest course on this question is probably that taken by the little known Swiss writer, Le Clerque. 'This matter,' he says, 'is outside the true province of the conscientious commentator inasmuch as being unable to say aught that is charitable or useful, he must preserve silence.'
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Excerpt from The Third Policeman, Chapter 4
'Is it about a bicycle?' he asked.
'Not that' said the Sergeant. 'This is a private visitor who says he did not arrive in the townland upon a bicycle. He has no personal name at all. His dadda is in far Amurikey.'
'Which of the two Amurikeys?' asked MacCruiskeen.
'The Unified Stations,' said the Sergeant.
'Likely he is rich by now if he is in that quarter,' said MacCruiskeen, 'because there's dollars there, dollars and bucks and nuggets in the ground and any amount of rackets and golf games and musical instruments. It is a free country too by all accounts.'
'Free for all,' said the Sergeant. 'Tell me this,' he said to the policeman, 'Did you take any readings today?'
'I did,' said MacCruiskeen.
'Take out your black book and tell me what it was like a good man,' said the Sergeant. Give me the gist of it till I see what I see,' he added.
MacCruiskeen fished a small black book from his breast pocket. 'Ten point six,' he said.
'Ten point six,' said the Sergeant. 'And what reading did you notice on the beam?'
'Seven point four.'
'How much on the lever?'
'One point five'
There was a pause here. The Sergeant put on an expression of great intricacy as if he were doing far-from-simple sums and calculations in his head. After a time his face cleared and he spoke again to his companion.
'Was there a fall?'
'A heavy fall at half-past three.'
'Very Understandable and commendably satisfactory,' said the Sergeant. 'Your supper is on the hob inside and be sure to stir the milk before you take any of it, the way the rest of us after you will have our share of the fats of it, the health of it.
Policeman MacCruiskeen smiled at the mention of food and went into the back room loosening his belt as he went; after a moment we heard the sounds of coarse slobbering as if he was eating porridge without the assistance of spoon or hand. The Sergeant invited me to sit at the fire in his company and gave me a wrinkled cigarette from his pocket.
'It is a lucky thing for your pop that is situated in Amurikey,' he remarked, 'if it is a thing that he is having trouble with the old teeth. It is very few sicknesses that are not from the teeth.' 'Yes,' I said. I was determined to say as little as possible and these unusual policeman first show their hand. Then I would know how to deal with them.
'Because a man can have more disease and germination in his gob than you'll find in a rat's coat and Amurikey is a country where the population do have grand teeth like shaving lather or like bits of delph when you break a plate.'
'Quite true,' I said.
'Or like eggs under a black crow.'
'Like eggs,' I said.
'Did you ever happen to visit the cinematograph in your travels?'
'Never' I answered humbly, but I believe it is a dark quarter and little can be seen at all except the photographs on the wall'.
'Well it is there you see the fine teeth they do have in Amurikey,' said the Sergeant.
'Policeman MacCruiskeen put the lamp on the table, shook hands with me and gave me the time of day with great gravity. His voice was high, almost feminine, and he spoke with delicate careful intonation. Then he put the lamp on the counter and surveyed the two of us.
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Finn MacCool
by Flann O'Brien [Excerpt of extract...I guess....you decide....if you dare....]
Extract from my typescript descriptive of Finn Mac Cool and his people, being humorous or quasihumorous incursion into ancient mythology:
Of the musics you have ever got, asked Conan, which have you found the sweetest?
I will relate, said Finn.
When the seven companies of my warriors are gathered together on the one plain and the truant cleancold loudvoiced wind goes through them, too sweet to me is that. Echoblow of a gobletbase against the tables of the palace, sweet to me is that. I like gullcries and the twittering together of fine cranes. I like the surfroar at
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Three Beginnings
Excerpt from Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds © 1939 by Brian O'Nolan
HAVING placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One Beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimiliar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.
Examples of three separate openings - the first:
The Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class, sat in his hut in the middle of a firwood meditating on the nature of numerals and segregating in his mind the odd ones from the even. He was seated at his diptych or ancient two-leaved writing-table with inner sides waxed. His rough long-nailed fingers toyed with a snuff-box of perfect rotundity and through a gap in his teeth he whistled a civil cavatina. He was a courtly man and received honour by reason of the generous treatment he gave his wife, one of the Corrigans of Carlow.
The second opening:
There was nothing unusual in the appearance of Mr John Furriskey but actually he has one distinction that is rarely encountered - he was born at the age of twenty-five and entered the world with a memory but without personal experience to account for it. His teeth were well formed but stained by tabacco, with two molars filled and a cavity threatened in the left canine. His knowledge of physics was moderate and extended to Boyle's Law and the Parallelogram of Forces.
The third opening:
Finn Mac Cool was a legendary hero of old
Conclusion of Excerpt
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The Gaelic Excerpt from 'Irish and Related Matters'- 'The Best of Myles'
Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m. - act of putting, sending, sowing, raining discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling,addressing, the crown of cast iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff faces, the stench of congealing badgers suet, the luminence of glue-lice, a noise made in a house by an unauthorised person, a heron's boil, a leprachauns denture, a sheep biscuit, the act of inflating hare's offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrakes clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustmans dumpling, a beetles faggot, the act of loading ever rift with ore, a dumb man's curse, a blasket, a 'kur', a fiddlers occupational disease, a fairy godmothers father, a hawks vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottles 'farm', a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge mill, a fair day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoats stomach-pump, a broken-
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Memoir on the Pooka's father, the Crack Mac Phellimey
Irish Poplin
The Birth of Fergus
Fergus ('The Pooka') MacPhellimey, a species of rural demon, was born of respectable but poor parents in the county Cork, in 1876, a year memorable for the ravages of potato scale and shepherd's scurvy. His father, known far and wide as The Crack MacPhellimey, was a hard working devil-tinker who attended fairs for the purpose of seducing farmers' boys from righteousness by offering them spurious coins of his own manufacture which (by means of a secret chemical process) had the effect of rotting the pocket or mattress which contained them and imparting a contagious dry tetter to the human body-the object of the traffic being to make the afflicted boys utter curses and ungodly maledictions.
He also retailed a line of magic shoddy of grey herringbone pattern with a faint red check, the peculiar quality of the fabric being that it dissolved into an evil smelling grey slime on coming into contact with water. This material he sold chiefly to the farming class in the west of
Irish Poplin
The Crack was a familiar figure in his green coat of Irish poplin reaching from his neck to his heels and was welcome at any gathering on account of his sober and industrious habits, his skill as a fiddler, and his inexhaustable stock of anecdotes, rebuses and topographical poems, not a few of the latter being in the Gaelic language, an idiom he commanded with sweet charm.
What brought him to his greatest fame, however, was his skill as a dancer. His long poplin coat (was) worn chiefly to hide his slightly clubbed foot and consequently his feet were not to be seen when he danced, but their clump on the flags of a kitchen floor (was) so true and rhythmic that it was an unfailing delight to all present, and his easy accomplishment of the most intricate steps gave rise on more than one occasion to the opinion that he had three feet at least beneath the coat or maybe four.
Even his spurious coins, distributed unobtrusively when the night was far advanced, did little to reduce his welcome when he appeared on his travels at the end of the year, for the full course of the tetter (provided the rashes were not treated with brown-bread poultices), was only six months and ten days. He also received honour by reason of the generous treatment he gave his wife, one of the Brannigans of Rush.
The Birth of Fergus
It happened that Fergus was born in a deserted piggery early in the morning. A country gentleman, passing by on horse-back, chanced to look into the piggery and noticed a hoof and a hair-tail protruding from a heap of soiled straw. Dismounting, he approached and woke the Crack MacPhellimey, who was asleep in an upright posture at a nearby wall, the back of his head being towards the east. The gentleman, who was one of a far-seeing and provident disposition, produced his costly wash-leather purse and offered two and fourpence for the foal, explaining at the same time that his wife was with child and that he would require a horse for his son in about six or seven years time.
Perceiving that the offer was a generous one inasmuch as he did not own a foal, the Crack accepted it courteously. It was only when he withdrew the straw that he discovered that his wife had given him a son: a creature of human form covered with a soft yellowish down similar to that worn by chickens of the Rhode Island breed. The Crack then became subject to the pangs and pride of parenthood.
Conclusion of memoir.
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The Workman's Friend
When things go wrong and will not come right, Though you do the best you can, When life looks black as the hour of night- A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOU ONLY MAN.
When Money's tight and is hard to get And your horse has also ran, When all you have is a heap of debt-- A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
When health is bad and your heart feels strange, And your face is pale and wan, When doctors say that you need a change, A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN
When food is scarce and your larder bare And no rashers grease your pan, When hunger grows as your meals are rare-- A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
In time of trouble and lousy strife, You have still got a darlint plan, You still can turn to a brighter life- A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
From: At Swim Two Birds,cited in: A Flan O' Brien Reader ed., Stephen Jones, The Viking Press,New York,1978,p.250.
SIGNAL BOX SCENE:Jimmy is sitting down, engrossed in a newspaper. Ignatius is lolling on another chair, smoking. Jimmy shakes head and gestures at paper. He looks up, frowning.
JIMMY: Yiss. Saint Patrick's Day. Dya know, we might all be makin a mistake, a HIDYUS mistake. The brother says there was never anny such man as Saint Patrick.
IGNATIUS:Ah come here now,Jimmy, the national Apostle. That's no sort of talk to be givin out of you.
JIMMY: I'm oney tellin ya what the brother says. So far as I'm consairned, I have always been all FOR St. Patrick's Day. I think I've seen more Patrick's Dayu processions than anny man alive. What am I talkin about--didn't I walk in TWO of them. Th'oul fella was an Irish Forester with a green clawhammer on him and in nineteen and O twelve he med me step out in the brigade of the Glasnevin Branch of the Gaelic League with A KILT ON ME, man yiss, and a pipe band in front of us playing the Rakes of Malla.
IGN: That must have ben a great sight--yerself in kilts and a plaad over yer shoulder and the big knobbly knees on full display for all to see.
JIMMY: Oh now I looked damm well in them days. But th'oul fella would do yer heart good. There was no half measure there. He was a Forester, a Parnelite,a Votes-for Wimmin man, a Larkinite and a Gaelic Leaguer. Oh by gob yiss, guramahagut and beedahusht for further orders. Wan St. Patrick's Day when a gurrier of a parade sergeant barked out "Eyes Right Passin the
IGN:That was a proper choke off, and good enough for him. How much Irish did Wolfe Tone know?
JIMMY: In the St. Patrick's procession of nine teen aught six th'oul fella, clawhammer an'all, wheeled the oney Irish-made bike in the world, a grand machine with bars of solid iron mad be Pierce of Wexford. In them days, of course, there was none of this jazz that was to come later about all the boozers been shut and refreshments for man and baste totally prohibited.
IGN: Yiss. That's changed now. Here's what I want to know. What's going to happen the Dog Show at Balle's Bridge, the oney place where ya CUD get a drink. Shure there won't be a soul there now bar the boulers an' the judges.
JIMMY: You're right there, Ignatius. In th'oul days it wasn't a mortal sin to swally a glass of malt to keep the cold out on the seventeenth of March, nwa,nor a pint either. That was a new sin invented by the politicians when we got the
IGN: Shure in Brian Beru's time thre was no licensing laws of anny description AT ALL. JIMMY: But O're here till I tell ya. The brother was on to me a couple of weeks ago about all this St. Patrick's Day turn out. First of all he wass complainin about the shenanigans that goes on in
IGN: That's saintintly carryin things a bit far. Green libstick too, I'll go bail.
JIMMY: Suppose you go in somewhere for a cuppa tay. Ya get it O.K. but what about the milk? GREEN! If a cop writes you a ticket for parkin yer car in the wrong place on that day, you're supposed to be pleased about it because th'ink in his fountain pen is green. A grurrier out of Synapore might offer ya a black cigarette anny time but on St. Patrick's Day a fella from
IGN: The green eye of the little yalla god.
JIMMY: But to come back to the brother. He says there's a whole crowd of people goin, some of them clever wans that writes books that say there was never anny Saint Patrick that it's all a yarn and a cock and bull story. There's another crowd that says that St. Patrick was a Protestant and thought nuthin of atin' half a sheep for his dinner of a Frida. Hah? But listen here, Ignatius. There's a couple of fellas in th'university that says all the dates about St. Patrick is wrong and furthermore--FURTHRTMORE--that ther was TWO Saint Patricks. Can ya bate that? TWO of yer holy men from across the say!
IGN. Well, I suppose that means that we should havbe two St. Patrick's Days, two processions and two shell-outs of a tanner for a bit of shamrock. If y'ask me ya can have too much of a good thing.
JIMMY: And here's a good wan. The brother met an oul fella below in Wiekla town and yer man said straight out of that there was no Saint Patrick and that the whole yarn was invented be Strongbow or somebody. The brothe asked him, if that was true, how come thre was no snakes in
IGN: Is that a fact? Don't tell me there was a
JIMMY: Well the brother checked on that in the
IGN; Well, that seems to be a vote against a genuine Saint Patrick in
JIMMY: Now looks here, Ignatius. If there was no Saint Patrick, how do we know we're Christians at all? If there was no Saint Patrick we might be no different than the heathen Chinee.
IGN: Shure the rale oul Irish were eye-dolitors, with witch doctors and fellas with rings on their noses.
JIMMY: I don't think this is a situation we can afford to take lyin down. The Gov'ment will have to step in. There's nuthin for it but to set up a Commission embracin all Parties and churches and interests to find out (A) was there a Saint Patrick, (B) if there was how manny was there, and (C) recommend penalties against people who are caught sayin that there was no Saint Patrick or allegin that there was five or six or too manny. Dya folly me?
IGN: I think you 've put yer finger on the proper remed-yial measure, Jimmy,
JIMMY: So far as I'm concerned, Ignatius I take this thing dead serious. I'm not goin to have some damn tinker or a smart-alec of a bowsie from God-knows where tellin me to me face that I'm nuthin oney a pagan. ME A PAGAN? What's the world comin to atchall?
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Flann O'Brien takes a Humorous look at the process....
The Poor Mouth
Chapter 6
"After pondering the matter(marriage) for another year, I approached the Old-Fellow once more.
-Honest fellow! Said I, I'm two years waiting now without a wife and I don't think I'll ever do any good without one. I'm afraid the neighbors are mocking me. Do you think is there any help for the fix I'm in or will I be all alone until the day of my death and everlasting burial?
Boy! Said the Old-Fellow. 'Twould be necessary for you to know some girl.
If that's the way, I replied, where do you think the best girls are to be got?
In the Rosses without a doubt!
The Sea-cat entered my mind and I became a little worried. However, there is little use denying the truth and I trusted the Old-fellow.
If 'tis that way, said I in a bold voice. I'll go to the Rosses tomorrow to get a woman.
The Old-Fellow was dissatisfied with this kind of thing and endeavored for a while to coax me from the marriage-fever that had come upon me but, of course, I had no desire to break the resolution which was fixed for a year in my mind. He yielded finally and informed my mother of the news.
-Wisha! Said she, the poor creature!
If he manages to get a woman out of the Rosses, said the Old-Grey Fello, how do we know but that she'll have a dowry?
Wouldn't the likes of that be a great help to us at present in this house when the spuds are nearly finished and the last drop reached in the end of he bottle with us?
I wouldn't say that you haven't the truth of it! Said my mother.
They decided at last to yield completely to me. The Old Fellow said that he was acquainted with a man in Wweedore who had a nice curly-headed daughter who was as yet, unmarried although the young men from the two sandbanks were all about her, frenzied with eagerness to mary. Her father was name d Jams O'Donnell and Mabel was the maiden's name. I said that I would be satisfied to accept her.
The following day the Old-Fellow put a five noggin bottle in his pocket and both of us set out in the direction of Gweedore. IN the middle of the afternoon we reached that townland after a good walk while the daylight was still in the heavens. Suddenly the Old-fellow halted and sat down by the roadside.
Are we yet near the habitation and enduring home of the gentleman, Jams O'Donnell? Asked I softly and quietly, querying the Old-Fellow.
-We are! Said he. There is his house over yonder.
Fair enough, said I. Come on till we settle the deal and get our evening spuds. There's a sharp hunger on my hunger.
Little son! Said the Old-fellow sorrowfully, I'm afraid that you don't understand the world. T'is said in the good books that describe the affairs of the Gaelic paupers that its in the middle of the night that two men come visiting if they have a five-noggin bottle and are looking for a woman. Therefore we must sit here until the middle of the night comes.
But 'twill be wet tonight. The skies above are full.
Never mind! There's no use for us trying to escape from fate, oh, bosom friend!
We did not succeed in escaping that night either from fate or the rain. We were drenched into the skin and to the bones. When we reached Jams O'Donnell's floor finally, we were completely saturated, water running from us freely, wetting both Jams and his house as well as everything and living creature present. We quenched the fire and it had to be rekindled nine times.
Mabel was in bed(or had gone to her bed) but there is no necessity for me to describe the stupid conversation carried on by the Old-Fellow and Jams when they were discussing the question of the match. All the talk is available in the books which I have mentioned previously. When we left Jams at the bright dawn of day, the girl was betrothed to me and the Old Fellow was drunk. We reached Corkadoragha at the midhour of the day and were well satisfied with the night's business....."
---From:The Poor Mouth.Flann O'Brien,Trans Patrck Power,Viking,New York,1973.pp.79-84
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From: A Flan O' Brien Reader.,Stephen Jones,ed.,Viking Press,New York,1978,pp.302-305
Yes,More of It
What happens to blows at a council meeting? It looks as if they might be exchanged! What does pandemonium do? It breaks loose, Describe its subsequent dominion, It reigns, How are allegations dealt with? Hotly, What is the mean temperature of an altercation,therefore? Heated, What is the behaviour of a heated altercation? It follows. What happens to order? It is restored, Alternatively, in what does the meeting break up? Disorder. What does the meeting do in disorder? Breaks up, In the what direction does the meeting break in disorder? Up! In what direction should I shut? Up!
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You've got in Flann O'Brien himself some nice material to avoid long explanations about Irish pronunciation, for example :
SEAM ÓLD DEÓC
Loc : Bothán ar Bhán-chnuic Éireann ó. Am : An t-am go raibh Gaoidhil i nÉirinn beo. Pearsain i láthair : Sur Tharbhaigh Baiginal, an óifisear obh de Cbhín, in ful réidiméinteals; Tadhg agus Thadhgín; Éamon a'Chnuic; Seán Ó Duibhir a' Ghleanna; Séadna; agus Bran. - Sur Tharbhaigh : Aigh airéist iú, Éadbhart Hill, in de néam obh de Cbhín ! Aigh bhas reidhding baigh - - Bran : Bhuf, bhuf ! - Sur Tharbhaigh : Damhn, iú réibeal cur ! Aigh bhas reidhding baigh ond théard iú méic fbhait samhndad leidhc a seidisius spíts. Thú ios dios péarson iú méintiond Shawn Brogue ? - Seán Ó Duibhir : Cad é seo atá á rádh aige inonimadeel ? - Éamon a'Chnuic : Is follus gur chualaidh an phiast mise ag aithris mo chuid filíochta. "Sasanaigh do réabfainn mar do réabfainn sean-bhróg." - Taidhgín : Thí bhas tócuing abamht boots,
Said a Sassenach back in
There was an old man of the Isles Who suffered severely from pisles. He couldn't sit down Without a deep frown, So he had to row standing for misles.
* * * * *
An insoluble question
by Flann O'Brien
Once upon a time there was an old fellow, who was honest, charitable, wide-girdled and even-tempered - in short, an exceedingly good person. He was so ancient that he was well able to remember the great historical events which came to pass in Ireland a hundred years before, and he spoke Irish of a strange and awkward sort - the amount of it that he had - whose like is not to be encountered outside the Book of the Dun Cow, and often not in that book either. He had a stoop in his back and he always used to carry a blackthorn stick in his claw; he was stout, well-nourished, with two eyes twinkling lively beneath his white brows, and he wore neither collar nor tie but had a monstrous long white beard flowing down from his two ears on to his breast - enough fine fur to stuff a pair of pillows! The person who would understand the nobility of the elderly and the respect to which they are entitled would take a second look at this specimen. He was too good.
The old fellow lived with his son in a house, and (since we are telling a story in Irish), it was a small whitewashed house in the corner of the glen. Not far from his house was another in which a growing young lad lived with this family. The youngster was increasing in wisdom every day, and becoming astute and inquisitive.
One day he took his father aside and asked him a question - a great question that had been lying heavily on his mind for a long time.
'When this old fellow is in bed,' said the lad, 'does his beard be under the bedclothes, or does it be out in the open with the blankets tucked in underneath it?'
'That's a big question,' said the father, 'and I haven't got its solution. But go and ask your mother.'
This the lad did.
'I couldn't tell you that,' said the mother, 'but I have an idea that his son will know. Go over and put the question to him.'
This was done. The son was an affable fellow, who hadn't any guile in him, no more than his father. He reflected.
'I have slept in the same bed as him,' said he, 'from the time I was as small as yourself, and if I were to be flayed alive on this spot I couldn't answer that question - but here he is coming in now. Ask him yourself.'
The question was put. The Oldfellow contemplated deep and hard. He scourged his sluggish languid mind, and twisted and shook his memory. He closed his eyes and visualised himself lying in his bed. He tried his utmost, but, alas, it was no use.
'I don't know,' he said simply. He felt sad and ashamed that he could solve such an easy question, after all he had seen of the world.
'Come back tomorrow, little man,' said he, 'and I'll have the answer to your question.'
'Thank you,' said the youngster.
The day departed and the night arrived. The Oldfellow headed for bed. He put on his nightshirt and his sleeping bonnet, he snuggled himself down cosily, put his head on the pillow, arranged the bedclothes compactly and carefully under his beard, and lay there trying to sleep. But he did not lie there for long. His chinbone began to itch, with a a firm fiery itch. His neck began to get sore and his ears warm; the bedclothes were irritating his beard. Isn't it foolish my old head is tonight, he thought, and me without my beard under the blankets as it has been for forty years. Angrily he put the clothes over the beard and again tried to sleep. Within a minute, however, he was again at a loss; he was truly wretched, in pain and torment. Had twenty crows been attempting to build nests in that beard, they wouldn't have caused him more distress.
'Damn!' said the Oldfellow.
He controlled the fit of anger that was coming over him, and made an attempt to remedy the situation. He placed half the beard inside and half the beard outside; he lay on his face; he lay on the hair itself; and he put his head completely under the bedclothes. But each solution was worse than the previous one...
The Oldfellow sat up and pondered gloomily to himself. Then he decided that it would be a good idea to get up and make a strong cup of tea, and to put the boy's question completely out of his mind; afterwards he would go back to bed, and only just when he had almost fallen asleep, would recall the question.
'I will make a cup of dark, mysterious, uncharted tea,' said the Oldfellow.
He rose and located the dark stairway leading down to the kitchen. Thus it happened that he continued walking the floor without the floor being there: the beginning of the stairs and the conclusion of the floor was in that place. He descended like a sack of flour. He broke his neck and split open his skull, and his soul sundered from his body.
That youngster is still living. He goes to school, acquiring education, and that question still remains in his heart, unsolved. He will presently understand that all knowledge is not to be found in the books, and he will put the question to some other old fellow; and if the worst comes to the worst he can wait until the arrival of his own beard (if such is destined to him) and banish the deadly doubt from him for ever.
But maybe God will give him sense.
* * * * *
LITERALLY FROM THE IRISH
M
I was a day in Dingle and Paddy James, my sister's man, in company with me and us in the direction of each other in the running of the day.
A man he was that would not have a glass of whiskey long between the hands, or a pint of black porter either, without shooting them backwards; but he got no sweet taste ever on the one he would buy himself, and great would be the pleasure with him that another man should nudge him in the back to ask him to have one with him.
* * * * *
Story of an octopus
A deep-sea diver, exploring the situation of a torpedoed man-of-war, was about to come to the surface when he noticed a young octopus in trouble. This not unhandy citizen -denizen of what but the deep ?- had managed to get one of his 'feet' caught in the wreck, and was writhing in great agony. The diver, a kind-hearted man - albeit one crossed in love - decided to go to the succour of his fellow sub-acquate. Seizing a piece of steel wreckage, he prized away one of the baulks imprisoning the octopus's tentacle and thus released the unhappy sufferer.
The diver then, rejoicing in a good deed well done, turned to the ladder and gave his mate on the surface the signal to hoist. To his surprise, however, the young octopus began to accompany him upwards, paddling with great respect beside him. The look of gratitude on the large face of the octopus much moved the diver. Nevertheless, he made a deprecatory gesture and pushed the octopus away. "Please go home, " he said. "But sir," the octopus cried, "you have been so kind, so considerate, so helpful - I crave from you only the boon of accompanying you to your home, there to dwell with you for aye...!" "Don't be a sucker," the diver growled, "where I live I haven't room for myself. You'll have to stay here in the sea. Anyway, I don't like that fancy inflated talk." "Kind sir, " the octopus implored, I will gladly live in your garden, or up a tree, or sit at night on the roof of your house. I will take up no room at all, sir. In the morning I will clean your boots. I will take the sea-weed out of your diving boots. As well as that I will polish the floors. I have eight hands, you might say, sir, and would be very useful about the house and the yard."
"Oh, don't be trying to plámás me, " the diver muttered. "And I can go down into the sea with you," the octopus besought . "And get yourself caught in wreckage ?" "No sir, never again will I suffer that to occur. I will be most careful, sir. I will do anything you say if you permit me to live with you and repay your kindness." "Oh... very well," the diver snapped. "Swim over to that ship where you won't be seen coming out of the sea and I'll collect you in my van in an hour's time."
"Oh, thank you, sir," the octopus said, making what seemed to be a smile. In due course the diver collected the octopus in his van, brought him home and lodged him in the dustbin until the following day, when he would have an opportunity of assigning him simple household tasks, so that his bona fides could be tested.
The octopus proved to be ever better than his word. He proved expert at scrubbing and polishing floors, cleaned windows, made beds, lit fires and even learned to make tea. He also managed to dig the garden after a fashion and never asked for a day off from his manifold duties.
After a year the diver had to admit that the octopus was a dear friend, and felt that some little token of esteem was called for. He therefore said to him one day :
"In another week it will be exactly a year since you came to this house. I feel I would like to give you a present to mark the occasion. Would you please tell me what you would like ?" The octopus blushed with pleasure. "It is so terribly handsome of you," he said, "it is more than kind. And to answer your question, there is only one thing I would really like." "And what is that ?" "A bagpipes, sir." "A bagpipes it shall be," the diver said, "and the best that money can buy." On the day appointed the octopus was presented with his bagpipes. With cries of delight, he ran up with it to the attic where he customarily lodged. And after an interval the diver was horrified to hear blood-curdling screams, squeaks, roars, wails and general din descending from the octopus's quarters. What... on earth ? Rushing up to investigate, he was startled to find the bagpipes playing the octopus !
* * * * *
Myles na gCopaleen
From His Newspaper writings... Most of you will know that Dinneen is held up as the ultimate dictionary ... "The Irish lexicographer Dinneen considered in vacuo is, heaven knows, funny enough. He just keeps on standing on his head, denying stoutly that pile/ar means bullet and asserting that it means 'an inert thing or person'. Nothing stumps him. He will promise the sun, moon and stars to anybody who will catch him out. And well he may. Just take the sun, moon and stars for a moment. Sun, you say, is grian. Not at all. Dinneen shouts that grian means 'the bottom (of a lake, well)'. You are a bit nettled and mutter that, anyway, gealach means moon. Wrong again. Gealach means 'the white circle in a slice of a half-boiled potato, turnip, etc'. In a bored voice he adds that re/alta (of course) means 'a mark on the forehead of a beast'. Most remarkable man. Eclectic I think is the word.
"That, of course, is why I no longer write Irish. No damn fear. I didn't come down in the last shower. Call me a bit fastidious if you like but I like to have some idea of what I'm writing. Libel, you know. One must be careful. If I write in Irish what I conceive to be 'Last Tuesday was very wet,' I like to feel reasonably sure that what I've written does not in fact mean 'Mr So-and-so is a thief and a drunkard.
-from:The Best of Myles,ed. Kevin O' Nolan,Hart-Davis,London,1975.
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Memoir on the Pooka's father, the Crack Mac Phellimey
· Fergus ('The Pooka') MacPhellimey, a species of rural demon, was born of respectable but poor parents in the county Cork, in 1876, a year memorable for the ravages of potato scale and shepherd's scurvy. His father, known far and wide as The Crack MacPhellimey, was a hard working devil-tinker who attended fairs for the purpose of seducing farmers' boys from righteousness by offering them spurious coins of his own manufacture which (by means of a secret chemical process) had the effect of rotting the pocket or mattress which contained them and imparting a contagious dry tetter to the human body-the object of the traffic being to make the afflicted boys utter curses and ungodly maledictions.
He also retailed a line of magic shoddy of grey herringbone pattern with a faint red check, the peculiar quality of the fabric being that it dissolved into an evil smelling grey slime on coming into contact with water. This material he sold chiefly to the farming class in the west of
Irish Poplin
The Crack was a familiar figure in his green coat of Irish poplin reaching from his neck to his heels and was welcome at any gathering on account of his sober and industrious habits, his skill as a fiddler, and his inexhaustable stock of anecdotes, rebuses and topographical poems, not a few of the latter being in the Gaelic language, an idiom he commanded with sweet charm.
What brought him to his greatest fame, however, was his skill as a dancer. His long poplin coat (was) worn chiefly to hide his slightly clubbed foot and consequently his feet were not to be seen when he danced, but their clump on the flags of a kitchen floor (was) so true and rhythmic that it was an unfailing delight to all present, and his easy accomplishment of the most intricate steps gave rise on more than one occasion to the opinion that he had three feet at least beneath the coat or maybe four.
Even his spurious coins, distributed unobtrusively when the night was far advanced, did little to reduce his welcome when he appeared on his travels at the end of the year, for the full course of the tetter (provided the rashes were not treated with brown-bread poultices), was only six months and ten days. He also received honour by reason of the generous treatment he gave his wife, one of the Brannigans of Rush.
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The Birth of Fergus
It happened that Fergus was born in a deserted piggery early in the morning. A country gentleman, passing by on horse-back, chanced to look into the piggery and noticed a hoof and a hair-tail protruding from a heap of soiled straw. Dismounting, he approached and woke the Crack MacPhellimey, who was asleep in an upright posture at a nearby wall, the back of his head being towards the east. The gentleman, who was one of a far-seeing and provident disposition, produced his costly wash-leather purse and offered two and fourpence for the foal, explaining at the same time that his wife was with child and that he would require a horse for his son in about six or seven years time.
Perceiving that the offer was a generous one inasmuch as he did not own a foal, the Crack accepted it courteously. It was only when he withdrew the straw that he discovered that his wife had given him a son: a creature of human form covered with a soft yellowish down similar to that worn by chickens of the Rhode Island breed. The Crack then became subject to the pangs and pride of parenthood.
Conclusion of memoir.
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Booze the Trade in
· In the last ten years there has been a marked change in the decor of boozing in
The old-time pub was something in the nature of an Augean stable (it is true that Pegasus was often tethered there) with liberal lashings of sawdust and mopping-rags to prevent the customers from perishing in their own spillings and spewings. No genuine Irishman could relax in comfort and feel at home in a pub unless he was sitting in deep gloom on a hard seat with a very sad expression on his face, listening to the drone of bluebottle squadrons carrying out a raid on the yellow sandwich cheese.
In those days a definite social stigma attached to drinking. It was exclusively a male occupation and on that account (and apart from anything temperence advocates had to say) it could not be regarded as respectable by any reasonable woman. Demon rum was a pal of the kind one is ashamed to be seen with. Even moderate drinkers accepted themselves as genteel degenerates and could slink into a pub with as much feline hug-the-wall as any cirrhotic whiskey-addict, there to hide even from each other in dim secret snugs. A pub without a side-door up a lane would have been as well off with no door at all
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Recent Times: Up to recent times the only improvement was the bar parlour, a dark privacy at the rear where any respectable bowler-hatted gentleman from the countinghouse of a large drapery concern could tinkle in peace at his hot mid-day whiskey.
Such places were clean and comfortable enough, though often equipped with forbidding furniture of the marble-topped and iron-legged variety usually found in morgues and fish-shops. Latterly, however, we have had the Lounge, the Oak Lounge, and the Octagonal Lounge, and still more refined booze shops called brasseries and butteries where obsequious servers in white coats will refuse point-blank to give you beer, even if your doctor has certified under his own hand that you will drop dead after one glass of spirits.
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Brother Barnabus
The numerous friends and admireres of Brother Barnabus will be glad to hear that he is still alive and well; though convulsions, teething, whooping-cough, mumps, rickets and a host of other infantile complaints which have assailed the great man in his old age tend to make his public appearance, which in print and in person become rarer and rarer with the passing years, a ludicrous farce.
He now lives in retirement in a rustic bog-farm in the
He is attended day and night by a buxom nurse, provided by the Board of Works, and the giggles and hoarse chuckling that can be heard at dusk from the density of the turf-trollops bespeak a waggish vitality that is reluctant to yield the palm to Father Time.
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Cavalcade
Mr Eamon de Valera arrived. Mr Eamon de Valera arrived, accompanied by his son, Vivion Mr Eamon de Valera arrived, accompanied by Mr Vivion de Valera.
Messrs Eamon and Vivion de Valera arrived. Messrs Vivion and Eamon de Valera arrived. Mr Vivion de Valera arrived, accompanied by Mr Eamon de Valera.
Mr Vivion de Valera arrived, accompanied by his father, Eamon.
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Sgíth mo chrob ón sgríbinn
My hand has a pain from writing, Not steady the sharp tool of my craft Its slender beak spews bright ink - A beetle-dark shining draught.
Streams of the wisdom of white God From my fair-brown, fine hand sally, On the page they splash their flood In ink of the green-skinned holly.
My little dribbly pen stretches Across the white paper plain, Insatiable for splendid riches - That is why my hand has a pain.
-translation of ancient irish poem
* * * * *
"A Bash in the Tunnel"
Flann O'Brien
In this astonishing commentary on James Joyce, Flann O'Brien reveals what it was that "stately plump Buck Mulligan" saw in the cracked looking glass of Irish art.
James Joyce was an artist. He has said so himself. His was a case of Ars gratia Artist. He declared that he would pursue his artistic mission even if the penalty was as long as eternity itself. This seems to be an affirmation of belief in Hell, therefore of belief in Heaven and God.
A better title of this piece might be: Was Joyce Mad? by Hamlet, Prince of
Some thinkers--all Irish, all Catholic, some unlay--have confessed to discerning a resemblance between Joyce and Satan. True, resemblances there are. Both had other names, the one Stephen Dedalus, the other Lucifer; the latter name, meaning 'Maker of Light,' was to attract later the ironical gloss 'Prince of Darkness'! Both started off very well under unfaultable teachers, both were very proud, both had a fall. But they differed on one big, critical issue. Satan never denied the existence of the Almighty; indeed he acknowledged it by challenging merely His primacy. Joyce said there was no God, proving this by uttering various blasphemies and obscenities and not being instantly struck dead.
A man once said to me that he hated blasphemy, but on purely rational grounds. If there is no God, he said, the thing is stupid and unnecessary. If there is, it's dangerous.
Anatole
You have been saying for years that there is no God. Why then should you be so frightened at somebody else insulting this God who doesn't exist?'
I still say there is no God. But that fellow thinks there is. Suppose a thunderbolt was sent down to strike him dead. How did I know I wouldn't get killed as well? Wasn't I standing beside him?'
Another blasphemy, perhaps--doubting the Almighty's aim. Yet it is still true that all true blasphemers must be believers.
What is the position of the artist in
Just after the editors had asked me to try to assemble material for this issue of Envoy, I went into the Scotch House in
My pub radar screen showed up the word 'TOUCHER.' I was instantly on my guard.
'And where do you think I should drink?' I asked. 'Pay fancy prices in a hotel?'
'Ah, no,' he said, 'I didn't mean that. But any time I feel like a good bash myself, I have it in the cars. What will you have?'
I said I would have a large one, knowing that his mysterious reply would entail lengthy elucidation.
'I needn't tell you that that crowd is a crowd of bastards,' was his prefatory exegesis.
Then he told me all. At one time his father had a pub and grocery business, situated near a large
The dining cars (hereinafter known as 'the cars') were customarily parked in remote sidings. It was the father's job to load them from time to time with costly victuals--eggs, rashers, cold turkey and whiskey. These cars, bulging in their lonely sidings, with such fabulous fare, had special locks. The father had the key, and nobody else in the world had authority to open the doors until the car was part of a train. But my informant had made it his business, he told me, to have a key, too.
'At that time,' he told me, 'I had a bash once a week in the cars.'
One must here record two peculiarities of Irish railway practice. The first is a chronic inability to 'make up' trains in advance, i.e., to estimate expected passenger traffic accurately. Week after week a long-distance train is scheduled to be five passenger coaches and a car. Perpetually, an extra 150 passengers arrive on the departure platform unexpectedly. This means that the car must be detached, a passenger coach substituted, and the train dispatched foodless and drinkless on its way.
The second peculiarity--not exclusively Irish--is the inability of personnel in charge of shunting engines to leave coaches, parked in far sidings, alone. At all costs they must be shifted.
That was the situation as my friend in the Scotch House described it. The loaded dining cars never went anywhere, in the long-distance sense. He approved of that. But they were subject to endless enshuntment. That, he said, was a bloody scandal and a waste of the taxpayers' money.
When the urge for a 'bash' came upon him his routine was simple. Using his secret key, he secretly got into a parked and laden car very early in the morning, penetrated to the pantry, grabbed a jug of water, a glass and a bottle of whiskey and, with this assortment of material and utensil, locked himself in the lavatory.
Reflect on that locking. So far as the whole world was concerned, the car was utterly empty. It was locked with special, unprecedented locks. Yet this man locked himself securely within those locks.
Came the dawn--and the shunters. They espied, as doth the greyhound the hare, the lonely dining car, mute, immobile, deserted. So they couple it up and drag it to another siding at Liffey Junction. It is there for five hours but it is discovered (by 'that crowd of bastards,' i.e. other shunters) and towed over to the yards behind Westland Row Station.
Many hours later it is shunted on to the tail of the Wexford Express but later angrily detached owing to the unexpected arrival of extra passengers.
'And are you sitting in the lavatory drinking whiskey all the time?' I asked.
'Certainly I am,' he answered. 'What the hell do you think lavatories in trains is for? And with the knees of me trousers wet with me own whiskey from the jerks of them shunter bastards!'
His resentment was enormous. Be it noted that the whiskey was not in fact his own whiskey, that he was that oddity, an unauthorised person.
'How long does a bash in the cars last?' I asked him.
'Ah, that depends on a lot of things,' he said. 'As you know, I never carry a watch.' (Exhibits cuffless, hairy wrist in proof.) 'Did I ever tell you about the time I had a bash in the tunnel?'
He has not--for the good reason that I had never met him before.
'I seen meself,' he said, 'once upon a time on a three-day bash. The bastards took me out of Liffey Junction down to Hazelhatch. Another crowd shifted me into
'I think I do.'
'Well, I was about on the third bottle when this other shunter crowd come along--it was dark, about eight in the evening--and nothing would do them only bring me into the Liffey Tunnel under the Phoenix Park and park me there. As you know I never use a watch. If it's bright, it's day. If it's dark, it's night. Here was meself parked in the tunnel, opening bottle after bottle in the dark, thinking the night was a very long one, stuck there, in the tunnel. I was three-quarters way into the jigs when they pulled me out of the tunnel into Kingsbridge. I was in bed for a week. Did you ever in your life hear of a greater crowd of bastards?'
'Never,'
'That was the first and last time I ever had a bash in the tunnel.'
Funny? But surely there you have the Irish artist? Sitting fully dressed, innerly locked in the toilet of a locked coach where he has no right to be, resentfully drinking somebody else's whiskey, being whisked hither and thither by anonymous shunters, keeping fastidiously the while on the outer face of his door the simple word, ENGAGED?
I think the image fits Joyce: but particularly in his manifestation of a most Irish characteristic--the transgressor's resentment with the nongressor.
A friend of mine found himself next door at dinner to a well-known savant who appears in Ulysses. (He shall be nameless, for he still lives.) My friend, making dutiful conversation, made mention of Joyce. The savant said that
'But you are a character in one of them,' my friend incautiously remarked.
The next two hours, to the neglect of wine and cigars, were occupied with a heated statement by the savant that he was by no means a character in fiction, he was a man, furthermore he was alive and he had published books of his own.
'How can I be a character in fiction,' he demanded, 'if I am here talking to you?'
That incident may be funny, too, but its curiosity is this: Joyce spent a lifetime establishing himself as a character in fiction. Joyce created, in narcissus fascination, the ageless Stephen. Beginning with importing real characters into his books, he achieves the magnificent inversion of making them legendary and fictional. It is quite preposterous. Thousands of people believe that there once lived a man named Sherlock Holmes.
Joyce went further than Satan in rebellion.
Two characters who confess themselves based on Aquinas: Joyce and Maritain.
In Finnegans Wake, Joyce appears to favour the Vico theory of inevitable human and recurring evolution--theocracy: aristocracy: democracy: chaos.
'A.E.' referred to the chaos of Joyce's mind.
That was wrong, for Joyce's mind was indeed very orderly. In composition he used coloured pencils to keep himself right. All his works, not excluding Finnegans Wake, have a rigid classic pattern. His personal moral and family behaviours were impossible. He seems to have deserved equally with George Moore the sneer about the latter--he never kissed, but told.
What was really abnormal about Joyce? At Clongowes he had his dose of Jesuit casuistry. Why did he substitute his home-made chaosistry?
It seems to me that Joyce emerges, through curtains of salacity and blasphemy, as a truly fear-shaken Irish Catholic, rebelling not so much against the Church but against its near-schism Irish eccentricities, its pretence that there is only one Commandment, the vulgarity of its edifices, the shallowness and stupidity of many of its ministers. His revolt, noble in itself, carried him away. He could not see the tree for the woods. But I think he meant well. We all do, anyway.
What is Finnegans Wake? A treatise on the incommunicable night-mind? Or merely an example of silence, and punning?
I doubt whether the contents of this issue will get many of us any forrarder.
A certain commentator seeks to establish that Joyce was at heart an Irish dawn-bursting romantic, an admirer of de Valera, and one who dearly wished to be recalled to Dublin as an aging man to be crowned with a D.Litt. from the National and priest-haunted University. This is at least possible, if only because it explains the preposterous 'esthetic' affectations of his youth, which included the necessity for being rude to his dying mother. The theme here is that a heart of gold was beating under the artificial waistcoat. Amen.
The number of people invited to contribute to this issue has necessarily been limited. Yet it is curious that none makes mention of Joyce's superber quality: his capacity for humour. Humour, the handmaid of sorrow and fear, creeps out endlessly in all Joyce's works. He uses the thing, in the same way as Shakespeare does but less formally, to attenuate the fear of those who have belief and who genuinely think that they will be in hell or in heaven shortly, and possibly very shortly. With laughs he palliates the sense of doom that is the heritage of the Irish Catholic. True humour needs this background urgency: Rabelais is funny, but his stuff cloys. His stuff lacks tragedy.
Perhaps the true fascination of Joyce lies in his secretiveness, his ambiguity (his polyguity, perhaps?), his leg-pulling, his dishonesties, his technical skill, his attraction for Americans. His works are a garden in which some of us may play. This issue of Envoy claims to be merely a small bit of that garden.
But at the end, Joyce will still be in his tunnel, unabashed.
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Bibliography
Novels, At Swim-Two-Birds (
Dramatic Works, Robert Tracy, ed., Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green: The Insect Play (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1994), 88pp. [one act prev. held at
Reprints & Collections, At Swim-Two-Bird (
Miscellaneous, three documentary articles for The Bell in 1940 [dog-tracks dancehalls, and pubs]; autobiographical notice, in Twentieth Century Authors (1934); ‘De Me’, an autobiographical piece, appeared in New Ireland [QUB student mag.] (March 1964); ‘Can a Saint Hit Back’, in The Guardian (19 Jan. 1966) [autobiographical and based on idea attributable to St Augustine]; Myles na Gopaleen writing on a Rouault painting in The Irish Times (1942; rep. in Fintan Cullen, Ed., Sources in Irish Art: A Reade, Cork UP 2000); ‘Editorial Note’, in Envoy: An Irish Review of Literature and Art [“James Joyce” Issue], 5, 7 (April 1951), pp.6-11 [rep. [with variations, as infra] as ‘A Bash in the Tunnel’ in John Ryan, ed., A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce by the Irish (Brighton: Clifton Books 1970), pp.15-20.] Note also: As Myles Na gCopaleen, ed., [sole] anthology of Irish Times “Cruiskeen Lawn” column (1943).
Contributions to Comhtrom Féinne [later The National Student, UCD] (May 1931-May 1935) [sel. in Myles before Myles, 1985]; Blather,
Contributions & reviews, ‘After Hours’, and review of Frank O’Connor, Book of Ireland [rep. edn.], Threshold, 21 (1967); also contribs. to Ireland Today (1938); Comthrom Féinne (Summer 1931-May 1935), incl. Brother Barnabas, ‘scenes from a novel’ (May 1934), rep. Journal of Irish Literature, III, 1 (Jan. 1974); Blather, Nov. 1934, rep. Journal of Irish Literature 1974; The Harp, 1960-65; Envoy, III, 12 (Nov. 1950), on ‘Baudelaire and Kavanagh’; The Irish Times; Nonplus (1959); New Ireland (1964); Irish Writing, 20-21 (Nov. 1952), ‘Donabate’, rep. Journal of Irish Literature (Jan. 1974); Kavanagh’s Weekly, I, 3 (26 April 1952), ‘I Don't You’; also 'Letter to the Editor', Kavanagh's Weekly, 1, 10 (14 June 1952), and ‘Motor Economics’, 1, 7 (24 March 1952); Irish Housewife’s Annual (1963/64); Hibernia (Sept. 1960); Irish Writing, 10 (Jan. 1950), review of L. A. G. Strong, The Sacred River; Irish Writing, 11 (May 1950), review of Patrick Campbell, ‘A Long Drink of Cold Water’ [?source]; ‘The New Phoenix’, Kavanagh’s Weekly, 1, 4 (3 May 1952); extract from The Poor Mouth, in Fiction, III, 1 (1974); journalism in Evening Mail (Oct. 1961); ‘Three Poems from the Irish’, Lace Curtain, 4 (Summer 1971); ‘Two in One’, The Bell XIX, 8 (July 1954), 30-34; rep. Journal of Irish Literature, III, 1 (Jan. 1974); as John James Doe, ‘A Weekly Look Around’, Southern Star [Skibbereen] (15 Jan. 1955-27 Oct. 1965); as George Knowall, ‘George Knowall’s Peepshow, in Nationalist and Leinster Times [Carlow] early/mid 1960); also Manchester Guardian, ‘The Cud of Memory,’ (1965); trans. Brinsley MacNamara, play, Margaret Gillan [as Mairead Gillan] (Dublin 1953);
Manuscripts & Criticism: The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin holds two boxes of the papers of Flann O’Brien. Details: Purchase and gift, 1965, 1970, and 1989 (R2707, R4815, and G8215); Open for research; processed by Bob Taylor, 1997; RLIN Record ID: TXRC97-A18.
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Myles na Gopaleen
Flann O'Brien was the best known pseudonym of Brian O'Nolan (1911-1966), who also published under the name Myles na gCopaleen. He was a twentieth century Irish humorous writer. Under the name Flann O'Brien, he published a series of novels that have attracted a wide following for their bizarre humour and Modernist metafiction. At Swim-Two-Birds works entirely with recycled characters from other fiction (and legend), on the grounds that there are already far too many fictional characters in circulation, while The Third Policeman has a superficial plot about an Irish country youth's vision of hell, played against a satire of academic debate on an eccentric philosopher, and finds time to introduce the atomic theory of the bicycle. The philosopher in question, De Selby, is based on Giambattista Vico, who had been a fascination of James Joyce's, and the importance of the bicycle recalls Samuel Beckett. The Dalkey Archive features a character who encounters a penitent, elderly James Joyce (who never wrote any of his books) working as a busboy in the resort of Dalkey and a scientist looking to suck all of the air out of the world. Other books by Flann O'Brien include The Hard Life (a fictional autobiography meant to be his "misterpiece"), and The Poor Mouth (originally written in Irish as An B�al Bocht). As a novelist, O'Nolan was powerfully influenced by James Joyce. Indeed, he was at pains to attend the same college as Joyce, and Joyce biographer Richard Ellman has established that O'Nolan, fully in keeping with his literary temperament, used a forged interview with John Joyce as part of his application. As Myles na gCopaleen, O'Nolan published a regular column entitled "The Cruiskeen Lawn" in the Irish Times, usually in English, but sometimes in Irish, and sometimes in Latin. The columns introduce a regular set of characters, such as the "PLAIN PEOPLE OF IRELAND," "the Brother," and "the Da," include a "catechism of cliche," and propose numerous schemes for the improvement of the Irish nation. These pieces have been collected into a number of books with titles such as The Best of Myles and Cuttings from the Cruiskeen Lawn (an example of bilingual humour, which O'Nolan often used, is both in the pen name, which means "Myles of the little ponies," and in the pun of a small bird, the Curiskeen Lawn). O'Nolan had been one of the first proponents of the study of Irish, and yet as a newspaper columnist he consistently satirized Irish nationalists for their zeal. Some of the characters introduced in the "Cruiskeen Lawn" column (in particular The Brother) are explained in The Hard Life. Flann O'Brien's writing is sufficiently creative that he counts as a major figure in twentieth century Irish literature. Like others whose primary output was periodical, his work has only recently been receiving wide attention from literary scholars.
and another...
All in all, as far as the circumstances of publication and reception are concerned—and let nobody who has not had to struggle with them sneer at their importance—[Brian O’Nolan aka Flann O’Brien aka Myles na Gopaleen’s] was not a happy literary history. Yet, through all poor Flann O’Brien’s tribulations, Myles na Gopaleen continued to be one of the most celebrated of Dubliners and his column, unfailingly brilliant and brilliantly adjusted to its
That Myles had an abundance of comic material at his disposal is evident; and yet after the early starts and false starts, he largely failed to get his Dublin into books; so that there is certainly truth in the remark [Patrick] Kavanaugh made one day to the effect that ‘poor Myles’—his usual locution—‘has utterly failed to find a myth that would carry all that stuff in his column, that would lift it into art.’ It was a question of finding a fictive or imaginative structure, and perhaps, after all, the nihilistic structure of At Swim-Two-Birds had been too brilliant.
The column gave pleasure to a great many people and occasionally perhaps authentic delight to a few, but it must have been a terrible burden, and as ruinous in the long run as the drink. The penalty of journalism, and kindred activities, is that it gives its author a certain amount of warranted creative satisfaction. Having done a nice, neat, expert job with a good joke or two in it, you are inclined to turn on your heel and walk away feeling pleased with yourself, and of course entitled to leave it at that for the rest of the day. I am not speaking contemptuously of journalism now; indeed a writer who has practised it hardly ever does. He enjoys it in fact perhaps too much, and he can hardly ever bring himself to do a sloppy job, knowing too well that those who inure themselves to doing sloppy jobs sooner or later become incapable of doing anything else, in any medium.
~from the excellent Dead As Doornails, by Anthony Cronin
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Reading Flann Brian O'Brien O'Nolan
Gilbert Sorrentino
Flann O'Brien is one of the half-dozen or so greatest comic writers in the English language of this or any other century, the equal of such geniuses of comedy as Sterne, Joyce, Beckett, Waugh, and Firbank. His mastery of comedic prose, its nuances, tropes, and subversions, is of such high degree that the merest gesture of his stylistic hand can turn a sentence or phrase from its course as sober conveyor of information to sabotager and ridiculer of that same information. Done the right way (and O'Brien invariably does it the right way), such writing can virtually collapse referential material and transform it into brilliant constellations of devastating hilarity. Little can stand before comedy of such purity, comedy so intensely focused and authorative that it rises above ideology, factionalism, religion, and the bloated niceties of propaganda and "right thinking." Inventors, or if you please, marshals of such anarchic laughter are dangerous people indeed, informed, as they are, by love, hatred, and, above all, perhaps, a salutary shame for the human species and its ridiculous pettinesses and pretensions. I think that O'Brien was fearful of or apprehensive about these extraordinary comic gifts, even as he permitted them to flourish, and flourish most notably, in his two greatest books, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. It's impossible to know or even to guess at whether this fear was caused by the classically Irish, macabre nature of the works themselves (both novels are cruel at their core, and many of their most deliciously risible scenes, conversations, and set pieces are rooted in pain, anguish, ignominy, humiliation, and death); or whether his very being as a comic artist was one he could not or would not change, lest such change damage his lavishly inventive psychology. Put simply, if, perhaps, reductively: Did he fear his books or did he fear the talent that created them? Whatever the case, he, arguably, attempted to protect himself, to shield himself from his own work, at once to own and disown it. At Swim-Two-Birds brusquely avoids its eerie logical conclusion--the assault upon and possible erasure of its primary creator, the writer himself--and The Third Policeman was, remarkably, repressed by its author during his lifetime (behind the preposterous, trumped-up story of the supposed loss of the supposed single copy of the manuscript), appearing soon after he was safely dead. The Dalkey Archive, a "re-vision" of The Third Policeman, and published during O'Brien's lifetime, has, not facetiously, in my view, a dedication to "my Guardian Angel, impressing upon him that I'm only fooling and warning him to see to it that there is no misunderstanding when I go home." I see this novel as a non-sinister apologia for the unearthly terrors of The Third Policeman, as well as a barrier between the latter and O'Brien; and the charge to his Guardian Angel has to do with the suppressed text, for which The Dalkey Archive was but a surrogate.
O'Brien believed that fiction is not far removed from life, that it is, in a sense, another kind of life, separate from the mundane by the thinnest of walls. He would have been, I suspect, highly amused, in his slashing, merciless way, at the claims to truth made by solemn, didactic, and "transgressive" memoirists. I don't mean, it should go without saying, that he harbored the innocent notion that will have the page famously mirroring the world, and that the more precisely representative the mirrored image, the closer we are to life. Joyce, with his precise detonations and subversions of specific locations, mores, events, and speech, with his straightforward retailing of the Facts--his realism, that is, that pulls its house down around itself--taught O'Brien (and everybody else who was paying attention) that such a notion was no more than a literary shibboleth. O'Brien's sense of the presence of the porous wall between what is here and what the writer makes to add to it was sophisticated and not a little spooky.
It would seem that in O'Brien's world, that which occurs within the confines of a book can "bleed" out of the book's pages and perform, in three dimensions, here in the actual space of the material world. It is as if the myriad signs of the book exist not only as the markers that can never represent or approximate the actual, but that can also--in a moment of authorial carelessness or even exuberance--escape from the book, shed their lives as signs, and become substantial, become, that is, the things that they had only pointed at. And when, as in At Swim-Two-Birds, the characters of the book are writers, storytellers, fabulists, bullshit artists of every stripe--linguistic magicians of one sort or another--their power to influence reality becomes enormous. And this, as I've suggested, frightened O'Brien in the odd, superstitious way that writers are often frightened by their work. It may be that literature is the last profession for which training does not equip its practitioners to understand its power over them: hence writers' reliance on hunches, talismans, coincidences, luck. It wasn't merely Brian O'Nolan's frivolity or eccentricity that effected his concealment of himself behind such names as Flann O'Brien, Myles na Gopaleen, George Knowall, and, even as a student, Brother Barnabas. "I didn't write this stuff!" one might imagine O'Nolan saying (to his Guardian Angel). And, in a certain odd but profound way, O'Nolan never wrote anything.
As I've noted, the ending of At Swim-Two-Birds is sudden and unexpected, although I can't for a moment imagine what a "satisfactory" ending might look like. The mysterious and beautiful virtuoso prose of the last three pages comprise, I would argue, a coda that is outside of the novel's narrative of web-like and multi-planed concerns. That book ends with the destroying fire which brings to a close the various existences of the invented writers who might well have succeeded, such was their power, in calling into question the very fact of O'Nolan's existence; or, perhaps more potently, written him off as a creator.
In At Swim-Two-Birds, we are proffered, then, a dizzying proposition: any fictitious character can be made into a writer, who, in turn, can create his own fictitious characters who are writers, and so on. And there is nothing to prevent--so the machinery of the novel posits--one of these characters from hitting on the idea of writing the ultimate creator of the book (O'Nolan/O'Brien) into another fictitious character, distorting the work beyond recognition. That the "prime mover" of the text might do this himself and to himself is of little moment: writers, as a regular practice, use their work to comfort, soothe, excite, entertain, amuse, and flay themselves. There is, indeed, a cure for such possible distortion of the text--its destruction. Get rid of the book and the writer cannot be at its mercy.
O'Brien didn't destroy his book, but he made certain that the novel's major writer, the lazy and sullen student of literary bent who creates Dermot Trellis (a nicely exaggerated surrogate for the student, and himself a sullen writer), is left without the book that we have been reading. It is suddenly burned in a stove by Trellis's servant. It's very much to the point that this fiery destruction of the text occurs--if you will bear with me for a brief excursion into vertigo--not within the frame text created by O'Brien, but within the frame text created by O'Brien's student writer; and that the servant who does the burning is Trellis's servant, Trellis being, as the reader, of course, knows, the writer who has created characters who exist in yet another frame also inhabited by Orlick Trellis, Dermot's son, who has been born out of wedlock as a fully grown, wholly developed, adult writer who hates his father.
O'Brien, shielded from the dangers of his own fiction by a pen name, strengthens that shield by placing even the obliteration of his narrative at two further removes from himself, viz., Dermot/the student/O'Brien/O'Nolan. The burning of the text, that is, occurs within a fiction that O'Brien's fictitious writer has created; and O'Brien is himself a fiction created by O'Nolan.
This is a magical book, a book of great risk and danger, and O'Brien would never attempt anything like it again, since, I believe, the "solution" to such a book must have been, for him, always the same: to get rid of the thing before it could get rid of him. The Third Policeman presents a circular hell filled with demons and the dead, a hell of terrible adventures and stygian comedy. But it has a single narrator and the terrors of the novel are rigidly contained in its circular form: there is no vertical movement apparent in the text, and the magnificently loony footnotes are encrustations, not new levels, of story.
Hugh Kenner says that O'Brien was "somehow scared" of this latter novel, suggesting that this may have been so because of the fact that there is no Satan in O'Brien's hell, this absence calling the existence of God into question. The implication here is that the book frightened O'Brien because of its odor of blasphemy, if not heresy. This may well have been so, but I can't quite agree with
Basically, The Third Policeman was a book that was "possible" for O'Brien to write, despite its flirtation with Manichaeism; while At Swim-Two-Birds was the book that was "no longer wonderful but terrible," as the dead hero of The Third Policeman says of the demon policeman, MacCruiskeen's, creation of intricately fashioned chests, one of which is said to be smaller than a bigger chest which is itself too small to be described. The hero says, "I shut my eyes and prayed that he would stop while still doing things that were at least possible for a man to do."
The First Bloomsday
L to R: John Ryan, Anthony Cronin, Myles na Gopaleen, Patrick Kavanagh and Tom Joyce
The day was
This day was the fiftieth anniversary of Mr. Leopold Bloom's wanderings through
To mark this occasion a small group of
Sadly, no-one expected O'Nolan to be sober. By reputation, if not by sight, everyone in
The rest of the party, that first Bloomsday, was made up of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, the young critic Anthony Cronin, a dentist named Tom Joyce, who as Joyce's cousin represented the family interest, and John Ryan, the painter and businessman who owned and edited the literary magazine Envoy
Ryan had engaged two horse drawn cabs, of the old-fashioned kind, which in Ulysses Mr. Bloom and his friends drive to poor Paddy Dignam's funeral. The party were assigned roles from the novel. Cronin stood in for Stephen Dedalus, O'Nolan for his father Simon Dedalus, John Ryan for the journalist Martin Cunningham, and A.J. Leventhal, the Registrar of Trinity College, being Jewish, was recruited to fill (unknown to himself according to Tom Ryan) the role of Leopold Bloom.
Kavanagh and O'Nolan began the day by deciding they must climb up to the Martello tower itself, which stood on a granite shoulder behind the house.As Cronin recalls, Kavanagh hoisted himself up the steep slope above O'Nolan, who snarled in anger and laid hold of his ankle. Kavanagh roared, and lashed out with his foot. Fearful that O'Nolan would be kicked in the face by the poet's enormous farmer's boot, the others hastened to rescue and restrain the rivals.
With some difficulty O'Nolan was stuffed into one of the cabs by Cronin and the others. Then they were off, along the seafront of
In pubs along the way an enormous amount of alcohol was consumed, so much so that on Sandymount Strand they had to relieve themselves as Stephen Dedalus does in Ulysses. Tom Joyce and Cronin sang the sentimental songs of Tom Moore which Joyce had loved, such as Silent O Moyle. They stopped in Irishtown to listen to the running of the Ascot Gold Cup on a radio in a betting shop, but eventually they arrived in
They went no further. Once there another drink seemed more attractive than a long tour of Joycean slums, and the siren call of the long vanished pleasures of Nighttown.
From Flann O'Brien, An Illustrated Biography -- Peter Costello and Peter Van Der Kamp
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MYLES NA GOPALEEN'S IRISH TIMES
BLOOMSDAY COLUMN 1954
J-DAY
THIS IS A SMALL, shy and simple article. It can be written only within the week or so in which a number of courageous men made off with about 200 rifles and a lesser amount of other lethal gear.
Every man concerned could have been shot dead. Why did they risk so much for so little?
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THIS SHEER impulse to rebel, without regard to reason or results, is likely to be commemorated on this day. It is June 16th--and James Joyce wrote half a million words about what happened in
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CRUISKEEN LAWN
By
MYLES NA GOPALEEN
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with, impaled in the text, an enormity of "philosophical material."
In this task Joyce did not go into someone's workshop and choose the tools he needed: he took the whole lot. Thus does one find side by side monasticism and brothelism.
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I DO NOT WISH to provoke still another world war by invading
Joyce was in no way what he is internationally claimed to be--a Dubliner. In fact there has been no more spectacular non-Dubliner. Not once did he tire of saying that he was never at home. This absence may have been a necessity of his literary method, but it has often occurred to my irreverent self that maybe he hadn't the fare. Joyce was a bad writer. He was too skilled in some departments of writing, and could not resist the tour de force. Parts of "Ulysses" are of unreadable boredom. One thinks of a violinist corrupting with "cadenza" a work wherein the composing master had in the text practised masterly abstention from fireworks. Beethoven had a big row with the violinist Kreutzer on this very point.
Joyce was illiterate. He had a fabulously developed jackdaw talent of picking up bits and pieces, but it seems his net was too wide to justify getting a few kids' schoolbooks and learning the rudiments of a new language correctly. every foreign-language quotation in any of his works known to me are wrong. His few sallies at Greek are wrong, and his few attempts at a Gaelic phrase are absolutely monstrous. anybody could have told him the right thing. Why did he not bother to ask?
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THAT LAST QUESTION evokes a complementary question, of which there is no mention on the horizonless bog of American exegesis. Was the man a leg-puller? Was "Finnegans Wake" the ultimate fantasy in cod? Did he seek to evolve for himself, chiefly by talking in strict confidence to stooges, mostly American, a mythical personality? Did...(pardon me while I swallow this yellow capsule)...did...James Joyce ever exist?
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It seems he did, and that he done what he done. There is something intimidatingly authentic about print. My own first contact with the man in a literary collision was a quotation fired at me. This: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
Many a time had I read that piece with admiration. In recent years I have asked a few wise men what the words mean. They mean nothing.
But are they intended to mean nothing, in the sense of meaning something exact? Or are they intended to suggest an imponderable theme for reflection, as night--day--life-- death--are used in various patterns in "Finnegans Wake?"
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JOYCE'S MAIN WORK, "Ulysses," is "not banned" in
It would surely establish the utterly ignored fact that Joyce was among the most comic writers who have ever lived. Every time I get influenza I read about The Citizen and his Dog; penicillin has nothing on them.
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IT IS NOT EASY to close up satisfactorily this unpremeditated note. A number of ideas come to the surface.
Here is one. would it appear blanshardish for a committee of
Who can be answerable for James Joyce if it not be the Jesuits?
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From The Dalkey Archive
Flann O'Brien --1964
--Mr Joyce, how did you live in all those years?
--Teaching languages, mostly English, and giving grinds. I used to hang around the Sorbonne. Meals were easy enough to scrounge there, anyway.
--Did the Catholic Truth Society pay you for those booklets you wrote?
--Not at all, why should they?
--Tell me more about Ulysses.
-- I paid very little attention to it until one day I was given a piece from it about some woman in bed thinking the dirtiest thoughts that ever came into the human head. Pornography and filth and literary vomit, enough to make even a blackguard of a
--Well was the complete Ulysses , do you think, ever published?
--I certainly hope not.
Mick paused for a few seconds and pressed the bell for service. What would he say? Frankness in return seemed called for.
--Mr. Joyce, he said solemnly, I can tell that you have been out of touch with things for a long time. The book Ulysses was published in
--God forgive you. Are you fooling me? I am getting on in years. Remember that.
Mick patted his sleeve, and signalled to the server to bring more drinks
· Flann O' Brien 1962
The Hard Life -On Guy Fawkes
Chapter 10
"-Now listen her, Father. Listen carefully. This is the first part of November. In the year 1605 in
-Flan O' Brien, The Hard Life, An Exegesis of Squalor, Pantheon Books,
