`What Vast Yeasty Eructation of Egotism'

Today would have been the 97th birthday of Flann O’Brien, né Brian Ó Nualláin, aka Brian O’Nolan, aka Myles na gCopaleen, had he not died, age 55, on April Fool’s Day in 1966. A reader in Dallas, an attorney, recently read The Poor Mouth (An Béal Bocht, 1941) -- the dampest, smokiest, chilliest, most foul-smelling rendering of squalor I know -- and found it amusing. He informed me of this on a postcard mailed from Ireland, on the front of which was a prettified, hand-tinted version of the narrator’s hut in The Poor Mouth:

“We lived in a small, lime-white, unhealthy house, situated in a corner of the glen on the right-hand side as you go eastwards along the road. Doubtless, neither my father nor any of his people before him built the house and placed it there; it is not known whether it was god, demon or person who first raised the half-rotten, rough walls.”

Last year, Everyman’s Library paid us the compliment of publishing, at last, The Complete Novels – At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Dalkey Archive. Don’t let the blather about postmodernism or metafiction scare you. Fiction can’t get funnier, nor journalism. As Myles na gCopaleen, O’Brien wrote the “Cruiskeen Lawn” column in the Irish Times for 25 years. In 2003, Dalkey Archive Press (a name borrowed from O’Brien’s final novel) published At War, a selection of columns written between 1940 and 1945. Here’s a sample, “On Henry James”:

“`How rarely,’ says Mr Sean O’Faolain in the Irish Times, `one hears the name, today, of Henry James.’

“Fair enough. (Though around in my place, Mr O’F., the crowd often speak of him Tuesday evenings, few friends in for a glass of sherry and some dry chat.)

“But my memory is as bad as the next. What actually was the name of Henry James? It’s on the tip of my tongue. Shanachy or Shaughnessy or some name like that unless I’m very much mistaken. Willie James the brother I knew very well.”

I learned of O’Brien as a college freshman, four years after his death, from two books – The Situation of the Novel by Bernard Bergonzi and The Irish Comic Tradition by Vivian Mercier. Both authors quote a phrase from At Swim-Two-Birds, “a lacuna in the palimpsest,” containing two words then new to me, and I was hooked. Bergonzi (from whom I also learned of B.S. Johnson) and Mercier are worth reading or rereading while much subsequent O’Brien scholarship would turn his books into unfunny, unreadable puzzles. Myles (in The Best of Myles) had their number 60 years ago:

“Assuming that to `write’ is mechanically to multiply communication (sometimes a very strong assumption, particularly when writing a book about peasants in Irish) 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’?”