`What Vast Yeasty Eructation of Egotism'

Fitzsimmons, a loyal reader, noted my Myles na gCopaleen citation with approval and told me her father, a man “who could look at the sea for hours,” shared my enthusiasm for the journalist whose column, “Cruiskeen Lawn,” appeared in the Irish Times for a quarter-century. A note on his name: It might be translated “Myles of the Ponies” or “Myles of the Little Horses.” And a further note, on the name of the column: “The Full Little Jug of Ale” or “The Overflowing Little Jug.” And a further note yet: He was born Brian Ó Núalláin, or Brian O’Nolan, and readers of At Swim-Two-Birds know him as Flann O’Brien. With Beckett, he was the funniest and blackest of comic writers, and a man who, as the profusion of names suggests, lived by concealment and indirection.

The argument goes that Myles na gCopaleen’s accomplishments as a journalist signaled Flann O’Brien’s doom as a novelist. This may be so, but drink had much to do with both of their declines. Several “Cruiskeen Lawn” selections have been published and all are worth discovering. Take this, from Flann O’Brien At War: Myles na gCopaleen 1940-1945:

“I am, as you know, an Irish person and I yield to gnomon in my admiration and respect for the old land.”

And, from The Best of Myles, one of his Catechisms of Cliché:

“—In what can no man tell the future has for us?
-- Store.
-- With what do certain belligerents make their military dispositions?
-- Typical Teutonic thoroughness.
-- In what manner do wishful thinkers imagine that the war will be over this year?
-- Fondly.
-- Take the word, `relegate.’ To what must a person be relegated?
-- That obscurity from which he should never have been permitted to emerge.
-- What may one do with a guess, provided one is permitted?
-- Hazard.
-- And what is comment?
-- Superfluous.”

That Myles/Flann/Brian anatomized empty language in the pages of one of its reliable founts – the daily newspaper – is subversion of the most delicious sort. In his Catechisms of Cliché, he makes the vapid appear at first strange and agrammatical, as though clumsily translated from another language, which sets us up to wince and laugh at each correct response. I dare you to read one and not become self-conscious of your linguistic laziness. Common speech begins to sound like an attack of hiccoughs – involuntary and without meaning. In a fine appreciation, the late Gilbert Sorrentino wrote:

“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.”

No doubt O’Brien was tormented by his facility at journalism. Wouldn’t we rather have another At Swim-Two-Birds or The Third Policeman than more volumes of recycled columns? It was not to be, but we can comfort ourselves with the peculiarly interactive nature even of O’Brien’s minor work. His humor has self-reflexive bite and it implicates us while we laugh. Consider this, fellow bloggers, from The Best of Myles:

“Assuming that to `write’ is mechanically to multiply communication (sometimes a very strong assumption, particularly when one writes a book about peasants in Ireland) what vast yeasty eructation of egotism drives a man to address simultaneously a mass of people he has never met and who may resent being pestered with his `thoughts?’”