Flann O’Brien: 1911-1966

Flann O’Brien (1911-66)

[ See Flann O’Brien Gallery - as attached ]

Life

[Brian Nolan; usually Brian O’Nolan, or Ó Nualláin; pseud. “Myles na Gopaleen”; hereafter FOB]; b. 5 Oct. 1911, at No. 15, Bowling Green, Strabane, Co. Tyrone; son of Michael Victor O’Nolan [Mícheál Ó Nualláin] (d.1937) and Agnes O’Nolan [née Gormley], both from Omagh who met and married in Strabane, where Michael, an excise officer, taught Irish with the Gaelic League; one of 11 siblings incl. Micheál Ó Nualláin (d.2016, aetat. 88) and Ciarán Ó Nualláin, the Gaelic scholar - both memoirists of Brian; also worked in Glasgow and afterwards at Cappencur (nr. Tullamore); also worked ad interim in Inchicore, being in Dublin at the time of the Rising; returned there in 1923; Brian was third of 12 children - with siblings incl. Mícheál, Niall, Ciarán and two sisters; FOB learnt Irish at home; his father opted to join the Free State Customs Service and moved to Dublin in 1923; settled in rented house at 25, Herbert Place; Michael appt. Revenue Commissioner, 1925; FOB entered 4th form at Christian Brothers’, Synge St. [aetat. 12], then transferred to Blackrock College when the family move to Blackrock in 1927; and entered UCD, 1929, where he was active in the L & H and narrowly lost auditorship to Vivion de Valera; received a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses from Donogh McDonagh (son of Thomas MacDonagh) as a fellow-student; grad. BA in German, English and Irish, 1932; contrib. stories to The Irish Press - ‘Díoghaltais Ar Ghallaibh ’sa Bhliain 2032! [Revenge on the English in the year 2032!]’ and ‘Teacht agus Imtheacht Sheáin Bhuidhe [The Arrival and Departure of John Bull’], both in 1932;

contrib. to Comhthrom Féinne [viz., “Fair Play”] ed. by Niall Sheridan (May 1931-May 1935) - notably his “Scenes from a Novel”, later assimilated to At Swim-Two-Birds; encountered Heine’s short ‘student’ novel Die Harzreise on his college syllabus and also the Conspectus of the Arts and Natural Sciences - said by Niall Sheridan to have actually existed; said to have won a travelling scholarship to University of Cologne during the first six months of 1934; submitted an MA thesis on Irish Nature Poetry in the form of an anthology-treatise (as Brian Ua Núallain, ‘Nádúir-Fhilíocht na Gaedhilge: Trachtas maraon le Duanaire’, UCD Aug. 1934); at first rejected and then resubmitted on pink paper with commentary reluctantly added to satisfy the initial strictures of his examiners; launched Blather with his brother Ciarán, running through 5 [var. 6] issues (I.1-5, Aug. 1934-Jan. 1935), contributing to it under various pseuds. (e.g., “Brother Barnabas”); made a polemic speech at the L&H (UCD) entitled “What is Wrong with the L&H?”, 1935; entered Civil Service, 1935, rising to principal officer for town planning [Dept. of Local Planning - as secretary to Seán MacEntee; before retiring under official pressure, 19 Feb. 1953; suffered death of his father, 1937 - and assumed financial responsibility for his 11 siblings; first used pseud. Flann O’Brien in exchange of letters with Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faoláin in The Irish Times about ‘Ideals for an Irish Theatre’, in 1939;

completed At Swim-Two-Birds, which was then recommended for publication by Graham Greene as a reader at Longmans; appeared under the pseud. Flann O’Brien - though first proposing “John Hackett” - 19 April, 1939 (reissued 1960), and becoming an immediate critical success - finding a cult reception with Juan Luis Borges and others; had a copy delivered to Joyce by a friend visiting Paris with the phrase ‘diffidence of the author’ underlined on p.306 - eliciting the comment, ‘That’s a real writer, with a true comic spirit. A really funny book’ [Tóibín, 2012]; failed to find an American publisher [‘a little too odd for this market’]; contrib. “An Cruiskeen Lawn” [‘the full little jug’] column for The Irish Times at invitation of R. M. Smyllie (ed.) over pseud. “Myles na gCopaleen” [reduced to Myles na Gopaleen from 1952] being named after the character in Boucicault (4 Oct. 1940-1 April 1966 - 26 yrs. and 4,032 items); written solely in Irish for the first year and afterwards in English, and featuring ‘the Brother’, WAAMA, et al., in a series of raids on solecisms and pretensions, especially in the new governmental class and self-styled writers; up to one third written by Niall Montgomery and Niall Sheridan from 1947 onwards; [Carol Taaffe, 2008]; unsuccessfully submitted The Third Policeman manuscript to Longmans who rejected it [‘We realise the Author’s ability but think that he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so’; Cronin, 1989, p.101] - presumably found unsuitable to war-time British audiences; send it to var. other London publishers; practised subterfuges to explain their lack interest (viz., MS lost in a train, &c.); supposedly buried the MS which remained unpublished until 1967;

wrote a play, Faustus Kelly (Abbey 25 Jan. 1943), and then another, The Insect Play, based on that by Karel Capek which ran five nights at the Gate Theatre (1943); received advise on the latter from Erwin Schrödinger, then director of the DIAS; featured on the cover of Time magazine, 1943, with an article which he later called ‘[a] superb heap of twaddle that would deceive nobody of ten years of age’; acted as Secretary to a Commission which produced a notoriously inadequate report on an orphanage fire in Co. Cavan, 1943; contrib. article ‘Drink and Time in Dublin’ to first issue of Irish Writing (1946), as Myles na gCopaleen; drove into the rear of a car at lights and suffered a broken leg, remaining off work, Jan.-Sept. 1947; contrib. to Kavanagh’s Weekly (April 1952-14 June 1952), also as Myles na gCopaleen; issued An Béal Bocht (1941), being a parody of Gaelgeoir [language-revival] attitudes reflected in the autobiographies of Tomás Ó Criomhthain [O’Crohan], Séamus Ó Grianna, et al., here with characters such as the ubiquitous Jams O’Donnell, Bonaparte O’Coonassa, Osborne O’Loonassa (a tyrannical schoolmaster), and so on; made fun of T. F. O’Rahilly’s theory of two St. Patrick’s and Erwin Schrodinger’s dismissal of the First Cause, occasioning an apology from Smyllie, Editor of The Irish Times, to the Dublin Inst. of Advanced Studies, fostered by De Valera;

m. Evelyn McDonnell, 2 Dec. 1948; moved from parental home at Avoca Tce., Blackrock, to nearby Merrion Ave., and then to Belmont Ave., adjacent to Morehampton Rd., Donnybrook; final address in Stillorgan; published stories and articles including ‘The Martyr’s Crown’ (Envoy 1950); a letter of 1952 to John Garvin (Dept. Sec.) shows him at loggerheads about appointment to Principial Officer rank apparently due to his refusal to submit to medical examination in view of accumulated sick-leave; lambasted ‘Titostalinatarianism’ of Tostal Festival, 1953; contrib. ‘A Bash in the Tunnel’ to “James Joyce Special Number” of Envoy (April 1951); forced into retirement on account of increasingly erratic behaviour and derogatory remarks about his superior, the Minister for “Yokel Government”, Patrick Smith (FF Cavan), 1953; made the first Bloomsday pilgrimage with John Ryan, Patrick Kavanagh, and Anthony Cronin, 16 June 1954; denounced the plaque on birth-place of Oscar Wilde commemorating him as an Irishman in “Cruiskeen Lawn”, 1954; commenced writing for provincial papers, contributing a ‘A Weekly Look Around’ to Southern Star (15 Jan. 1955-3 Nov. 1956), as John James Doe; contrib. “Bones of Contention” aka “George Knowall’s Peepshow” [column] to Nationalist and Leinster Times (1960-1966); O’Brien interviewed for TV by Tim Pat Coogan, but managed to get drunk at 8.30am on a bottle of whiskey hidden in the toilet, in 1964;

contrib. ‘De Me’ to New Ireland (QUB 1964), as Myles na Gopaleen, also “The Saint and I” to Manchester Guardian (19 Jan. 1966), as Flann O’Brien; Timothy O’Keeffe at MacGibbon & Kee (London publs.) issued The Hard Life (1961), sub-titled ‘An Exegesis of Squalor’, featuring Fr. Farht, S.J., and others; FOB plotted to put the novel in the way of censors so as to win damages at the High Court - but the censors took no notice of it; An Béal Bocht reissued as The Poor Mouth (1964), in a translation by Patrick Power; issued The Dalkey Archive (1965), incorporating material recuperated from The Third Policeman and bearing the 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’ [viz., to die]; immediately dramatised by Hugh Leonard as The Saints Go Cycling In (1965); O’Brien wrote sporadically for Radio Telefís Éireann; his TV dramas incl. “The Dead Spit of Kelly”, being an adaptation of the story “Two in One” (pub. in The Bell); “Flight”, and “The Time Freddy Retired”; also scripted “O’Dea’s Yer Man”, James Plunkett as director supplying a needful rewrite before transmission; spent his last years at Waltersland Road, Dalkey; d. 1 April 1966, of cancer.

Posthumous: left “Slattery’s Sago Saga” unfinished at the time of his death; At Swim-Two-Birds reissued by Pantheon (London 1951), and again more successfully by McGibbon & Kee (London 1960); The Third Policeman was issued posthumously by MacGibbon & Kee (1967), with an epigraph from Shakespeare [‘… let’s reason with the worst that may befall’], and soon published in America as Hell Goes Round and Round; survived by Mícheál [Ó Nualláin] and Niall [O’Nolan], both living into the late 1990s; a third brother, Ciarán, serves as a memorialist; a revival of interest in Flann O’Brien was triggered by the brief appearance of The Third Policeman as an allusion in the American TV series Lost in 2005-06; papers of Flann O’Brien are held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre (Texas Univ., Austin); Brian O’Nolan’s papers and personal library acquired by The John Burns Library at Boston College, Feb. 1997; subject of an RTE documentary in the “Art Lives” series (March 2006); Brendan Gleeson will direct his son Domhnall in a film version of of At Swim-Two-Birds, with Colin Farrell, Cillian Murphy and Michael Fassbender, et al., in 2011;

100 Myles: The International Flann O’Brien Centenary Conference, directed by Werner Huber with Anthony Cronin as keynote speakerm took place in Vienna on 24th-27th July 2010, leading to the founding of the Flann O’Brien International Society with an annual conference in 2011; a centenary birthday event was held at UCD’s Newman House, during October 2010; a portrait of his brother by Micheál Ó Nualláin was used by An Post on the commemorative stamp at the centenary of Flann O’Brien’s birth in 2011; his Letters were edited by Maebh Long of the University of the Southern Pacific (Fiji), chiefly from US collections and with permissions from the writer’s family, and issued by the Dalkey Archive Press in 2018 - with a launch at Hodges Figgis of Dawson St. on the evening of 12th June; his personal library is held at the John J. Burns Library at Boston College, Mass. [USA] and has been catalogued in the Parish Review; Gerry Smith [Liverpool U] and others edited The Lost Letters of Flann O’Brien (2021) - being a letters to O’Brien purportedly written by academics, politicians, poets, musicians, a footballer and his mislaid German wife - but actually penned by June Caldwell, Anne Enright, John Banville, Catherine Dunn, Elaine Feeney, Michael Cronin, Gerald Dawe, Celia de Fréine, Katie Donovan, Roddy Doyle, Catharine Dunne, James Bacon, Anne Casey, William Wall, and others; The Third Policeman was read on by Patrick Magee as the Late Story on BBC4 on 24 Jan. 1997 [videocass. 30 mins]; The Third Policeman enjoyed a revival after its appearance in the American TV series Lost (2004-10). NCBE DIW DIB DIH DIL OCEL FDA OCIL

Biographial Overview

b. Brian Nolan; otherwise Brian O’Nolan, Brian Ua Núallain or Ó Nualláin, 5 Oct., Strabane, Co. Tyrone
Family moved to Dublin, 1923
Educated at Christian Brothers’ School, Synge St., then Blackrock College and UCD
Completed MA Diss., “Nádúir-Fhilíocht na Gaedhilge: Trachtas maraon le Duanaire”, 1934
Edited Blather (6 issues; August 1934-January 1935) his brother Ciarán
Entered Civil Service, 1935, rising to First Secretary of Dept. of Finance
Issued At Swim-Two-Bird (1939; reissued 1960)
Sent MS of The Third Policeman to the same publisher and was rejected, 1939 (ultimately printed by MacGibbon & Kee in 1967).
Issued An Béal Bocht (1941), later trans. as The Poor Mouth (1964).
Wrote Faustus Kelly, performed at Abbey Theatre, 1943
Wrote The Insect Play, based on play of Karel Capek, performed at Gate Theatre, 1943
Contrib. ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ to The Irish Times, 1940-1960 as pseud. ‘Myles na gCopaleen’ [at first in Irish]
Contrib. ‘Drink and Time in Dublin’ to Irish Writing, ed., David Marcus (1946), as. ‘Myles na gCopaleen’.
Married Evelyn McDonnell, 2 Dec. 1948
Contrib. ‘The Martyr’s Crown’ (Envoy 1950)
Contrib. ‘A Bash in the Tunnel’ to “James Joyce Special Number” of Envoy (April 1951)
Contrib. articles to Kavanagh’s Weekly, April-June 1952, as. ‘Myles na gCopaleen’.
Took early retirement from civil service, 19 Feb. 1953
Attacked ‘Titostalinatarianism’ of Tostal Festival, 1953
Inaugurated Bloom’s Day [“J-Day”] pilgrimage with John Ryan, Patrick Kavanagh, and Anthony Cronin, 16 June 1954
Contrib. ‘A Weekly Look Around’ [column] as ‘John James Doe’, Southern Star (15 Jan. 1955-3 Nov. 1956)
Contrib. ‘Bones of Contention’ aka ‘George Knowall’s Peepshow’ [column], Nationalist and Leinster Times (1960-1966)
Denounced plaque commemorating birthplace of Oscar Wilde in ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, 1954
Issued The Hard Life (1961)
Contrib. ‘De Me’, as ‘Myles na Gopaleen’, to New Ireland (QUB 1964)
Issued The Dalkey Archive (1965), soon afterwards dramatised by Hugh Leonard as The Saints Go Cycling In (1965)
‘The Saint and I’, Manchester Guardian (19 Jan. 1966).
Died, of cancer, 1 April 1966.
The Third Policeman (1967) published with an epigraph from Shakespeare [‘… let’s reason with the worst that may befall.’].

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Works

Novels

At Swim-Two-Birds (London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1939); Do. [reiss.] (London: Pantheon 1951); Do. [reiss.] (London: MacGibbon & Kee 1960); Do. [another edn.] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967, 1977, 1986, 1991, &c); Do. [USA edn.] (NY: NAL 1966); Do. (IL: Dalkey Archive Press 1999), 316pp.
An Béal Bocht (Dublin: An Press Naisiúnta 1941), and Do. [another edn.] (Dublin: Dolmen Press 1964); another edn. as An beál bocht, nó An milleánach: droch-sgeál ar an droch-shaoghal / curtha i n-eagar le Myles na gCopaleen [Seán Ó Súilleabháin nach maireann a tharraing an clúdach, an leárscáil agus an cat mara] (1975) [see note]; Do., trans. by Patrick Power as The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story about the Hard Life (London: Hart-Davis 1964, MacGibbon & Kee 1973), ill. Seán O’Sullivan; and Do. [another edn.] (London: Paladin 1993).
The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor (London: MacGibbon & Kee 1961), 157pp., ill. Seán O’Sullivan; Four Square Books 1964; Picador 1976; Flamingo 1994, &c.); Do. [another edn.] (London: Paladin 1992), and Do. [another edn.] (Scribner/Townhouse 2003), 170pp.; trans. in French as Une vie de chien (Paris: Gallimard 1972); Do. (London: Souvenir Pres 2011).
The Dalkey Archive (London: MacGibbon & Kee 1964; Paladin 1990);
The Third Policeman (London: MacGibbon & Kee 1967) [see reprint editions - infra.]

Reprint editions - The Third Policeman

The Third Policeman (London: MacGibbon & Kee 1967); Do. (NY: Walker c.1968), 200pp; Do. (London: Hart-Davis; MacGibbon 1973, 1975), 200pp.; Do. (NY: New American Library 1974) [qpp.]; Do. (NY: Penguin 1976), 200pp.; Do. (London: Pan Books 1974), [1], 173pp., port.; Do. (London: Granada 1983), 200pp.); Do. (Newburyport, US: Open Road Media 1976), 147pp.; Do. [rep. edn.] (Harmondsworth Penguin 1986) [with a copy of O’Brien’s letter to William Saroyan, 14 Feb. 1940]; Do. [Paladin Modern Classic] (London: Paladin 1988, rep. 1989), 207pp.; Do., intro. by Denis Donoghue (Norman, IL: The Dalkey Archive 1999), xiii, 200pp.; Do. [Paladin Books] (London: HarperCollins [Flamingo] 1993, 2001), 207pp.; Do. (London: Flamingo 2001), 228pp.; Do. (London: Harper Perennial 2007), 207pp.; Do., intro. by Richard Fortey (London: Folio Society 2006), xvi, 219pp., ill. [by David Eccles; in slip case]; Do. [Harper Perennial Modern Classics] (London: Harper Perennial 2007), 214pp. [See also Discography, infra.]

Digital copies: See the excellent per-page pdf copy of The Third Policeman at Wiki Phalkefactory.net - online [29.07.2021]; also per-page copy at Fadedpage [html/php] - online; 19.07.2021. A full-text copy of the novel is available here in RICORSO - as attached.

Trans. as

Der dritte Polizist: Roman; aus dem Englischen von Harry Rowohlt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1991).
Le troisième policier: roman, traduit de l’anglais et présenté par Patrick Reumaux; préface de Linda Lé (Paris: Phebus 2003).

Audiobooks:

The Third Policeman (Surrey: Naxos AudioBooks 2007, 2009).

Dramatic Works

Faustus Kelly: A Play in Three Acts (Dublin: Cahill 1943).
Robert Tracy, ed. & intro., Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green: The Insect Play (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1994), 88pp. [one act prev. held at Illinois Univ.; whole text rediscovered in Hilton Edward’s prompt copy of 1943; incls. J. McCormack, ‘Series Editor’s Preface’]

Translations

trans. Brinsley MacNamara, play, Margaret Gillan [as Mairead Gillan] (Dublin 1953).

Reprints & Collections

[as Myles Na gCopaleen,] ed., anthology of “Cruiskeen Lawn” (Dublin: The Irish Times 1943).
Kevin O’Nolan, ed., The Best of Myles: A Selection from “Cruiskeen Lawn” (London: MacGibbon & Kee 1968); Do. [another edn.] (London: Grafton 1987), and Do. [another edn.] (London: Paladin 1990, 1993).

Stories and Plays, intro. by Claud Clockburn (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon 1973); Do. [another edn.] (London: Paladin 1991).
Anne Clissmann & David Powell, eds., ‘A Flann O’Brien-Myles na Gopaleen Portfolio’, in Journal of Irish Literature III, 1 (Delaware: Jan. 1974).
Kevin O’Nolan, ed., Further Cuttings from “Cruiskeen Lawn” (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon 1976), and Do. [reiss.; John F. Byrne Literature Ser.] (Dalkey Archive 2000), 189pp..
Benedict Kiely, ed. & intro., The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman,[and] The Brother (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon 1976).
The Hair of the Dogma: A Further Selection from “Cruiskeen Lawn” , ed. Kevin O’Nolan (London: Hart-Davis &c 1977); Do. [another edn.] (London: Grafton 1989), and Do. [another edn.] (London; Paladin 1993).
Stephen Jones, ed., A Flann O’Brien Reader (NY: Viking 1978).
Martin Green, ed, Myles Away from Dublin (Granada 1985).
John Wyse Jackson, ed., Flann O’Brien at War: Myles na gCopaleen 1940-1945 (Duckworth 2000), 191pp..
The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman [and] The Brother (Dublin & NY: Scribner/Townhouse 2003), 188pp..
Flann O’Brien: The Complete Novels, intro. by Keith Donohue (Everyman Library 2007), xxxiii, 787pp. [At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, and The Dalkey Archive].
The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman [and] The Brother ([London:] Souvenir Press 2010), 1878pp. [incls. text of Eamon Morrissey’s monologue based on “The Brother” series].
Neil Murphy & Keith Hopper, ed., The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (Dalkey Archive Press 2013), 156pp. [incls. “Scenes in a Novel”; “The Tale of Black Pete”; “Two in One”; “John Duffy’s Brother” (1940); “Drink and Time in Dublin” (1946), and “Naval Control” by John Shamus O’Donnell - see review by Frank McNally under Commentary, infra.]

O’Brien’s articles as Myles na Gopaleen in The Irish Times, 1940-1963, are set out as a calendar of publication dates and corresponding titles (if any) in an appendice to Monique Gallagher, Flann O’Brien, Myles na Gopaleen et les autres: masques et humeurs de Brian O’Nolan, fou-littéraire irlandais [Littératures étrangères / Domaine irlandais] ([Villeneuve d’Ascq]: Presses universitaires du Septentrion [1998]), 298pp. [see page-extracts - attached].

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Articles & reviews

Sundry contributions to Comhtrom Féinne [later The National Student, UCD] (May 1931-May 1935), of which 15 are rep. in Myles before Myles, 1985];
[as Brother Barnabas,] ‘Scenes from a Novel’, in Comhtrom Féinne (May 1934), rep. Journal of Irish Literature, III, 1 (Jan. 1974);
“Cruiskeen Lawn” by Myles na gCopaleen/Gopaleen, The Irish Times (4 October 1940-1 April 1966);
‘Drink and Time in Dublin’ by Myles na gCopaleen, article, Irish Writing, 1 (1946) [rep. in Vivian Mercier and David H. Greene, 1000 Years of Irish Prose (NY: Devin-Adair 1952);
review of L. A. G. Strong, The Sacred River,in Irish Writing, 10 (Jan. 1950);
review of Patrick Campbell, ‘A Long Drink of Cold Water’, in Irish Writing, 11 (May 1950);
‘Donabate’, in Irish Writing, 20-21 (Nov. 1952), rep. Journal of Irish Literature (Jan. 1974);
‘I Don’t You’, in Kavanagh’s Weekly, 1, 3 (26 April 1952), rep. in Kavanagh’s Weekly (Kildare: Goldsmith Press 1981);
‘The New Phoenix’, in Kavanagh’s Weekly, 1, 4 (3 May 1952), rep. in Kavanagh’s Weekly (Kildare: Goldsmith Press 1981);
‘Letter to the Editor’, and ‘Motor Economics’, in Kavanagh’s Weekly, 1, 10 (14 June 1952), rep. in Kavanagh’s Weekly (Kildare: Goldsmith Press 1981);
[as John James Doe,] ‘A Weekly Look Around’, in Southern Star [Skibbereen] (15 Jan. 1955-3 Nov. 1956);
‘Baudelaire and Kavanagh’, in The Irish Times [Nonplus] (1959);
[as John James Doe,] ‘A Weekly Look Around’, in Southern Star [Skibbereen] (15 Jan. 1955-27 Oct. 1965);
[as George Knowall,] ‘George Knowall’s Peepshow’, in The Nationalist and Leinster Times [Carlow] (1960-1966) [‘Bones of Contention’, early/mid 1960, sel. in Myles Away from Dublin];
[as Myles na Gopaleen,] ‘De Me’, in New Ireland [QUB New Ireland Soc.] (March 1964) ;
‘George Bernard Shaw on Language’, Irish Times (28 Jan. 1965);
‘The Cud of Memory,’ in Manchester Guardian([q.d.] 1965);
‘The Saint and I’, in Manchester Guardian, 19 Jan. 1966);
‘Two in One’, in The Bell XIX, 8 (July 1954), pp.30-34, rep. Journal of Irish Literature, III, 1 (Jan. 1974);
Extract from The Poor Mouth, in Fiction, III, 1 (1974);
‘Three Poems from the Irish’, in Lace Curtain, 4 (Summer 1971).

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Sundry contributions (journals)

Blather [anon. & var. pseuds.] (Aug. 1934-Jan. 1935); Blather (Nov. 1934); Ireland Today (1938); Envoy, III, 12 (Nov. 1950); Weekly, 1, 7 (24 March 1952); Hibernia (Sept. 1960); New Ireland (1964); Evening Mail (Oct. 1961); The Harp (1960-65).

For titles and dates, see Journal of Irish Literature (1974) and Myles before Myles (1985)

Miscellaneous

Three articles [on dog-tracks dancehalls, and pubs,] in The Bell (1940).
autobiographical notice, in Twentieth Century Authors (1934).
‘De Me’ [autobiographical], 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];
[as Myles na Gopaleen,] on a Rouault painting in The Irish Times (1942); rep. in Fintan Cullen, ed., Sources in Irish Art: A Reader (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. as ‘A Bash in the Tunnel’ in A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce by the Irish, ed. John Ryan (Brighton: Clifton Books 1970), pp.15-20 [with variations, as infra]; and in Flann O’Brien, Stories and Plays (NY: Penguin 1977), c.p.207.

Manuscripts

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin holds two boxes of the papers of Flann O’Brien (R2707, R4815, and G8215), acquired by purchase and gift, 1965, 1970, and 1989; processed by Bob Taylor, 1997; RLIN Record ID: TXRC97-A18. Collection Incls. MS1 and MS2 of At Swim-two-Birds.
Letters to and from Brian O’Nolan, in O’Nolan Collection, Morris Library, S. Illinois Univ., Carbondale Illinois (USA).

Correspondence

Yours Severely: The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, edited by Maebh Long (Dublin/Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press 2018), 672pp.

Discography

The Third Policeman, read by Jim Norton (Redhill, Surrey: Naxos AudioBooks 2007 ), 6 sound discs; ca. 404 mins.

Stage adaptations ...

Hugh Leonard, The Dalkey Archive (Gate 1965).
Eamon Morrissey, The Brother (1974) [one-man show based on At Swim Two Birds].
Eamon Morrissey, The Third Policeman (Gate Th. 1974).
Jocelyn Clarke, At Swim-Two-Birds (Abbey Th. 1970).
Paul Lee, The Poor Mouth (1989) [as two-hander]
At Swim-Two-Birds [new version] (Abbey Th. 1998).
At Swim-Two-Birds (Blue Raincoat Co., at Project Th., Dublin 2011).
The Poor Mouth (Blue Raincoat Co., Oct. 2011).
At Swim-Two-Birds, film version dir. Brendan Gleeson (planned for 2011).

See Fintan O’Toole, ‘Lost in translation: a Wilde notion from Myles na gCopaleen’, in The Irish Times (5 March 2011), Weekend Review, “Culture Shock” [attached].

Did Flann write the interview with John Stanislaus Joyce?

In 1949 Maria Jolas published in the James Joyce Yearbook (1949, pp.159-69) an interview with Joyce’s father which she had found in typescript among his [Joyce’s] papers - presumably those entrusted to her husband. This was incorporated as an appendix in Hugh Kenner’s Dublin’s Joyce (1955) and reprinted by Robert Scholes and Richard Kain among the materials in The Workshop of Daedalus (1965, p.118-23). In the interim, however, John V. Kelleher had written a review of Kenner’s book suggesting that the interview was a fake concocted by Flann O’Brien [i.e., Brian O’Nolan].
In 1976 Margaret Heckard published an article entitled ‘The Literary Reverberations of a Fake Interview with John Stanislaus Joyce’ in the James Joyce Quarterly (13: 4, Summer 1976), pp.468-71 [available at JSTOR - online]). In it she cites a letter to her from Kelleher of 9 Dec. 1974 in which he tells how he carried a copy of the Yearbook to Dublin in 1950 and showed it to Niall Montgomery [sic], who introduced him to Flann and found him tickled that his hoax had got so far.
In his life of Flann O’Brien (No Laughing Matter), Anthony Cronin gave his own view of the matter suggesting that, ‘If one had any doubts about the authenticity of the interview they would be on the grounds that it is all a little too much in character and too picturesque in tone and idiom.’ (q.p.).
Richard Ellmann spoke with Niall Sheridan [sic Killeen] while preparing his 1959 life of Joyce (James Joyce, 1959) and was told that he and Flann along with Anthony O’Brien had visited the old man’s home but none of them had taken any notes and that the interview didn’t correspond to what had transpired on that occasion.
In 2013 Terence Killeen wrote an “Irishman Diary” article to The Irish Times (16 April 2013 - available online] proposing that the author of the interview may have been Joyce himself - given that details from it had been quoted in Herbert Gorman’s life of Joyce (1939) and that the work was overseen by Joyce, who presumably would not have admitted anything he knew to be fabricated: ‘What if Gorman had asked James Joyce if he could supply a sample of his father’s talk, and James had duly obliged?’ Killeen retells most of the details given above including the allusion to Niall Sheridan - rather than Niall Montgomery in Hackerd’s version - in connection with Ellmann’s intervention in the matter.

See also Bruce Stewart, ‘Another Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce and the Envoy (April 1951)’, in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 93, No. 370 (Summer 2004), pp.133-46) - copy as attached.

Adaptations: Leonard adapted The Dalkey Archive as The Saints Go Cycling In (Gate Th., 1965). See also Aubrey Welch, adaptation of At Swim-Two-Birds (Abbey, Feb. 1970) and another adaptation by the touring company Ridiculismus (Kilkenny Arts Week; Riverside, Coleraine, &c., 1995). The Third Policeman was recorded by Patrick Magee for BBC4’s ‘Late Book’ programme, produced by Maurice Leitch.

5 Translations by Jack Fennell from the Irish of Brian Ó Nualláin (Flann O’Brien)
	“Revenge on the English in the Year 2032!”, in The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien. Neil Murphy & Keith Hopper, eds. (Champaign/London/Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press 2013), pp.23-28. Originally published as “Díoghaltas ar Ghallaibh ’sa Bhliain 2032!”, in Irish Press (18 Jan. 1932), pp. 4-5. “The Arrival and Departure of John Bull”, in The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien. Neil Murphy & Keith Hopper, eds. (Champaign/London/Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press 2013), pp.29-34. Originally published as “Teacht Agus Imtheacht Sheáin Bhuidhe,” Irish Press (13 June 1932), p.4. “The Tale of the Drunkard: MUSIC!”, in The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien. Neil Murphy & Keith Hopper, eds. (Champaign/London/Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press 2013), pp.35-37. Originally published as “Eachtra an Fhir Ólta: CEOL!”, in Irish Press (24 Aug. 1932), p.4. “The Reckonings of Our Ancestors”, in The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien. Neil Murphy & Keith Hopper, eds. (Champaign/London/Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press 2013), pp.38-41. Originally published as “Mion-Tuairimí ár Sinnsir”, in Irish Press (29 Sept. 1932), p.4. “The Tale of Black Peter”, in The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien. Neil Murphy & Keith Hopper, eds. (Champaign/London/Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press 2013), pp.42-46. Originally published as “Aistear Peadar Dubh”, in Inisfail, 1.1 (March 1933), pp. 63-64.
	Note: Jack Fennell - ed. Limerick University, BA (Languages and Cultural Studies/English Lit. and Gaeilge) and MA (Comparative Literature and Cultural Studiesl; Erasmus placement at University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Autumn 2003, studying postcolonial literature and social psychology; PhD. on bilingual overview of Irish science fiction from the 1850s to the present day (2013); issued Irish Science Fiction (2014); translated short stories by the writer Flann O’Brien in The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013)

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Bibliography of Works by Flann O’Brien and Criticism on them (Free Library 2021)

See in this frame or in a separate window - or visit online.

Criticism

See also The Lost Letters of Flann O’Brien, ed. Gerry Smyth et al. (2021) - being letters purportedly written to O’Brien by writers, academics, politicians, poets, musicians, a footballer and his mislaid German wife of the 1930s - but actually penned by June Caldwell, Anne Enright [as Erwin Schrödinger], John Banville [John Keats], Catherine Dunn, Elaine Feeney, Michael Cronin, Gerald Dawe, Celia de Fréine, Katie Donovan, Roddy Doyle [as widow of Zane Grey], Catharine Dunne, James Bacon, Anne Casey, William Wall, and others.

Monographs & Collections

Timothy O’Keeffe, ed., Myles: Portraits of Brian O’Nolan (London: Martin, Brian & O’Keeffe 1973) [contents].
Ciarán Ó Nualláin, Óige an Déarthár .i. Myles na gCopaleen (Baile atha Cliath: Foilseacháin Náisiúnta Teo. 1973); trans. as The Early Years of Brian O’Nolan, Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen; translated from the Irish by Róisín Ní Nualláin; edited by Niall O’Nolan (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1998), 110p., ill.
Anne Clissmann, Flann O’Brien: A Biographical and Critical Introduction to His Writing (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1975) [Chap. 4, ‘Bicycles and Eternity’, pp.151-81].
Anthony Cronin, Dead as Doornails: A Chronicle of Life (Dublin: Dolmen/Talbot 1976; rep. Oxford Pbks. 1994) [extracts; on O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan].
Rüdiger Imhof, ed., Alive-alive O!: Flann O’Brien’s ‘At Swim-Two-Birds’ (Dublin: Wolfhound 1985, 1993) [contents].
Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times Of Flann O’Brien (London: Grafton 1989; rep. Paladin 1990) [extracts]; and Do. [rep. edn.], with new intro. (Dublin: New Island Press 2003), 250pp.
Sue Asbee, Flann O’Brien (Boston: Twayne Publ. 1991), xiv, 142pp. [extract; based on thesis, “Flann O’Brien: A Postmodernist and His Reader” (Univ. of London 1986).
Thomas F. Shea, Flann O’Brien’s Exorbitant Novels (Assoc. UP 1993), 183pp. [see contents].
Keith Hopper, Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernism (Cork UP 1995), 192pp. [see extract]; Do. [rev. 2nd edn], with a Foreword by J. Hillis Miller (Cork UP 2009), 292pp.
Anne Clune & Tess Hurson, eds., Conjuring Complexities. Essays on Flann O’Brien (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies [QUB] 1997), 233pp. [contents].
Keith Donohoe, The Irish Anatomist: Flann O’Brien (Dublin & Bethseda: Maunsel 2002), 222pp. [chaps.: Vertiginious extravagance; Anatomy of a murder; The Irish less; The uncrowned king of Ireland, 1940-1945; Myles Gloriosus, 1945-1952; Notes; Bibliography [203-15; based on thesis at CUA, Washington].
Joseph Brooker, Flann O’Brien [Writers & Their Work] (Tavistock: Northcote House 2004 [dig. edn. 2008]), viii, 120pp., ill [1], and Do.(Gateshead: Athenaeum Press 2005), 128pp.
Maebh Long, Assembling Flann O’Brien (Bloomsbury Academic 2004), 256pp. [Chaps.1. Fragments of Palimpsests. 2. Driven to Repeat. 3. Ireland on Trial. 4. A Hard Life for Women. 5. Archival Fantasies; details online; accessed 27.07.2021].
Thomas C. Foster, A Casebook on Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (IL: Dalkey Press 2005) [see contents]
Carol Taaffe, Ireland Through the Looking Glass: Flann O’Brien, Myles na gGopaleen, and Irish Culture Debate (Cork UP 2008), 286pp.
Jennika Baines, ed., “Is It About a Bicycle?”: Flann O’Brien in the Twenty-first Century, with a foreword by Micheál ÓNualláin (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2011), 175pp. [see contents].
Michael O’Nuallain, The Brother (Dublin: [the author] 2011), 48pp.
Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan & Werner Huber, eds., Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (Cork UP 2014), 296pp. [see contents].
Julian Murphet, Rónán McDonald & Sascha Morrell, in Flann O’Brien & Modernism (London: Bloomsbury 2014),249pp. [see contents].
Maebh Long, Assembling Flann O’Brien (London: Bloomsbury Publishing 2014), 256pp. [Chaps.: 1. Fragments of Palimpsests; 2. Driven to Repeat. 3. Ireland on Trial; 4. A Hard Life for Women; 5. Archival Fantasies). [Available at Google Books - online; accessed 30.01.2017.]
Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan & John McCourt, eds., Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (Cork UP 2017), 256pp. [see contents].
Ruben Borg & Paul Fagan, eds., Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour (Cork UP 2020), 358pp., [contribs. Nicholas Allen, Jennika Baines, Ruben Borg, Joseph Brooker, Paul Fagan, Rose Harris-Birtill, Maebh Long, Maria O’Donovan, Carol Taaffe.

See also ...

Neil Cornwell, The Absurd in Literature (Manchester UP 2006), xii, 354 p.; espec. pp.251-64 [also deals with Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and Daniil Kharms].
Irina Perianova, ‘The Mysterious Spirals of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman”, in Litinfo: Georgian Electronic Journal of Literature (2014) - available as pdf; accessed 18.07.2021.

Flann O’Brien Society ‘best article-length publication’ awards - 2018 - Parish Journal

Ronan Crowley, ‘Phwat’s in a nam?: Brian O’Nolan as a Late Revivalist,’ in Borg, Fagan, and McCourt, eds., Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (Cork University Press, 2017), pp.119-135.

Catherine Flynn, ‘“the half-said thing”: Cruiskeen Lawn, Japan and the Second World War,’ in Borg, et al., op. cit., pp.71-86.

Keith Hopper, ‘“Silent, so to speak’: Flann O’Brien and the Sense of an Ending,’ in Michael McAteer, ed., Silence in Modern Irish Literature (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2017), pp.177-87.

Yael Levin, ‘Who Hobbles after the Subject: Parables of Writing in The Third Policeman and Molloy,’ in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Summer 2017), pp.105-121.

Pádraig Ó Méalóid,‘The Hunting of the Flann or Now We Know How Many Holes It Takes to Fill the Irish Times: A Cautionary Tale’, in Dublin Diversion (2018) [n.pp.]`

Anna Teekell, ‘Unreadable Books, Unspeakable Worlds: Beckett and O’Brien in Purgatory’, in Emergency Writing: Irish Literature, Neutrality, and the Second World War (Northwestern UP 2018), pp.159-204.

Contact Viennacis Anglistik <viennacis.anglistik@univie.ac.at>

Sundry online venues ....

The Flann O’Brien International Society and Annual Conference (2011)

Call for Papers: ‘Reading Brian O’Nolan’s Libraries’ - The Parish Review: Official Journal of the International Flann O’Brien Society - [ online ]

The expanding field of Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien/Myles na Gopaleen) scholarship has undergone a remarkable transformation in the wake of the writer’s 2011 centenary. This renewed scholarly interest has given rise to a range of Cultural Materialist, Deconstructionist, and Genetic approaches, amongst others, that have explored the representation, and indeed the limits of, knowledge within O’Nolan’s oeuvre. His writing continues to resonate within the public sphere, as is attested by the many reissues, adaptations, and collections of his works, including the recent publication of his dramatic works and short stories by Dalkey Archive Press. As Flann O’Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman) and Myles na Gopaleen (“Cruiskeen Lawn”, An Béal Bocht), O’Nolan is celebrated, in part, for his savage parodies of academic institutions, erudite individuals, and pedagogical methods; a reputation that appears to rest uneasily alongside this increasing scholarly attention. [See further, infra.]

The IFOBS Brian O’Nolan Bibliography (Jan. 2017)

[Note: The bibliographical is an online collaborative work of compilation by members of the International Flann O’Brien Society, edited by Paul Fagan of the University of Vienna; available online; accessed 30.01.2017. Please visit that website for updates.]

Or view current copy at Jan. 2017 - here.

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Bibliographical details

Timothy O’Keeffe, ed., Myles: Portraits of Brian O’Nolan (London: Martin, Brian & O’Keeffe 1973), incls. Niall Sheridan, ‘Brian, Flann, and Myles’, Irish Times (2 April 1966) [here pp.32-33]; John Garvin, ‘Sweetscented Manuscripts’ [pp.54-61]; James White, ‘Myles, Flann and Brian’ [pp.62-69]; John Montague, ‘Sweetness’, [q.pp.], et al.

Query: Donagh MacDonagh, ‘The Great Lost Novel’, unpub. MS (London: MacGibbon & Kee).

Anne Clissmann & David Powell, eds., ‘Brian O’Nolan/Myles Na gCopaleen Portfolio’ [ Special Number], Journal of Irish Literature, 3 (January 1974), containing Plays and stories; incls. contribs. by Seamus Kelly, ‘Brian O’Nolan, Scholar, Satirist, and Wit’; J. C. C. Mays, ‘Brian O’Nolan: Literalist of the Imagination’, pp.47-115; David Powell, ‘Who was Myles and What Was He?’; and Myles Orvell, ‘Entirely Fictitious: The Fiction of Flann O’Brien’, pp.93-103; also portofolio of juvenalia; two plays, The Insect Play and The Man with Four Legs; two stories, Two in One and Donabate; also ‘Sheaf of Letters’ ed. by Robert Hogan and Gordon Henderson; checklist by Powell, pp.104-12.

Rüdiger Imhof, ed., Alive-alive O!: Flann O’Brien’s ‘At Swim-Two-Birds’ (Dublin: Wolfhound 1985; 1993), incl. early pieces by Graham Greene (‘A Book in a Thousand’, p.42), V. S. Pritchett (‘Death of Finn’, p.55), Antony West (‘Inspired Nonsense’, p.55), Niall Sheridan (‘Brian, Flann and Myles’, p.74); also J. C. C. Mays (‘Literalist of the Imagination’, p.83), Anthony Cronin (‘After Swim’, p.112), Rüdiger Imhof (‘Two Meta-Novelists: Sternesque Elements in Novels by Flann O’Brien’, p.162)’, John Coleman, ‘The Use of Joyce’, et al.; Thomas Hogan [pseudonym of Thomas Wood, of the Dept. of External Affairs; also wrote as ‘Thersites’ in Irish Times], ‘Myles na gCopaleen’, in The Bell, XIII, 2 (1946), pp.126-40 [a witty ad hominem attack].

Anne Clune & Tess Hurson, eds., Conjuring Complexities: Essays on Flann O’Brien (Belfast: IIS/QUB 1997), 233pp. content: Acknowledgements and Abbreviations [vii]; Tess Hurston, ‘Suspension of Disbelief’ [viii]; Anne Clune, Introduction [xi]; Daniel Jacquin, ‘Flann’s Savage Mirth’ [1]; Caoimhghin Ó Braolchain, ‘Comparatively Untapped Sources’ [9]; Cathal Ó Hainle, ‘Fionn and Suibhne in At Swim-Two-Birds’ [17]; Anthony Cronin, ‘Squalid Exegesis: Biographical Reminiscence, Part the First’ [37]; Michael Cronin, ‘Mental Ludo - Ludic Elements in At Swim-Two-Birds’ [47]; Sue Ashbee, ‘At Swim-Two-Birds: Readers and Literary Reference’ [53]; David Cohen, Arranged by Wise Hands: Flann O’Brien’s Metafictions [57]; Hugh Kenner, ‘The Fourth Policeman’ [61]; Paul Simpson, ‘The Interactive ‘World of The Third Policeman’ [73]; Alf Mac Lochlainn, ‘The Outside Skin of Light Yellow: Flann O’Brien’s Tribute to Berkeley’ [83]; Jane Farnon, ‘Motifs of Gaelic Lore and Literature in An Beal Bocht’ [89]; Steven Young, ‘Fact/Fiction: Cruiskeen Lawn’ [111]; Hurson, ‘Conspicuous Absences: The Hard Life’ [119]; Chris Morash, ‘Augustine ... O’Brien ... Vico .... Joyce’ [133]; Jose Lanters, ‘“Unless I am a Dutchman by Profession and Nationality”: The Problems of Translating Flann O’Brien into Dutch’ [143]; Rüdiger Imhof, ‘The Presence of Flann O’Brien in Contemporary Fiction’ [151]. Notes [165]; Primary Bibliography by John Wyse Jackson [185]; Secondary Bibliography by Anne Clune [187; containing listings of critical studies, reviews of works and critical studies, newspaper notices (per journal), dissertations, &c.]; Contributors [231] ISBN 0 9853890 675 5 pb. [x hb].

Keith Donohoe, The Irish Anatomist: Flann O’Brien (Dublin & Bethseda: Maunsel 2002), 222pp. CONTENTS: Vertiginious extravagance; Anatomy of a murder; The Irish less; The uncrowned king of Ireland, 1940-1945; Myles Gloriosus, 1945-1952; Notes; Bibliography [203-15; based on thesis at CUA, Washington];

Thomas F. O’Shea, Flann O’Brien’s Exorbitant Novels (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP 1992), 183pp., with index. CONTENTS: Comhthron Féinne and Blather, The Early Experiments [17]; At Swim-Two-Birds, Exorbitance and the Early Manuscripts [50]; At Swim-Two-Birds, Verbal Gamesmanship and Palimpsest [81]; The Third Policeman, ‘Re-inscribing’ the Self [113]; The Hard Life and The Dalkey Archive, The Craft of Seeming Pedestrian [142]. [Select Bibliography as in Works and Criticism, supra.]

Thomas C. Foster, ed., A Casebook on Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (IL: Dalkey Press 2005). CONTENTS: Thomas C. Foster, ‘Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds: An Introduction’; M. Keith Booker, ‘Postmodern and/or Postcolonial? The Politics of At Swim-Two-Birds’; Monique Gallagher, ‘Frontier Instability in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds’; Kelly Anspaugh, ‘Agonizing with Joyce: At Swim-Two-Birds as Thanatography’. Selected Bibliography. [The text is available online at Dalkey Archive Press as pdfs [individual pagination only].

Publ. notice: This casebook investigates Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. Thomas C. Foster provides an overview and introduction to the novel. M. Keith Booker’s “Postmodern and/or Postcolonial?: The Politics of At Swim-Two-Birds” focuses on O’Brien’s use of “popular” culture, including a mobilization of both American popular culture and Irish mythology. Monique Gallagher writes on “Frontier Instability in At Swim-Two-Birds,” in which she discusses O’Brien’s destabilizing strategies in the novel. Kelly Anspaugh’s “Agonizing with Joyce” examines the Oedipal conflicts with Joyce that inform the novel’s intertextuality.

Jennika Baines, ed., “Is It About a Bicycle?”: Flann O’Brien in the Twenty-first Century, with a foreword by Micheál ÓNualláin (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2011), 175pp. CONTENTS: Joseph Brooker, ‘Myles’ tones’; Jon Day, ‘Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn: bibliographical issues in the republication of Myles na gCopaleen’s journalism’; Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja, ‘The truth is an odd number: At Swim-Two-Birds’; Richard T. Murphy, ‘’A root of the new sprout’?: Flann O’Brien, minor literature and the modern Gaelic canon’; Adrian Naughton, ‘“Nádúir-fhilíocht na Gaedhilge” and Flann O’Brien’s fiction’; Amy Nejezchleb, ‘O’Brien’s your man: Myles, modernity and Irish national television’; Carol Taaffe, ‘Plain People and Corduroys: the citizen and the artist’; Samuel Whybrow, ‘Flann O’Brien’s science fiction: an ‘illusion of progression’ in The Third Policeman’; Baines, ‘A portrait of the artist as a Dubliner : eroding the künstlerroman in The hard life’; Frank McNally, ‘Notes from an Irishman’s Diary’.

Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan & Werner Huber, eds., Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (Cork UP 2014), 296pp. CONTENTS: Keith Hopper, ‘Coming off the rails: the strange case of “John Duffy’s Brother’’; Jack Fennell, ‘Irelands enough and time: Brian O’Nolan’s science fiction’; Marion Quirici, ‘(Probably post-humous): the frame device in Brian O’Nolan’s short fiction’; Paul Fagan, ‘“I’ve got you under my skin’: “John Duffy’s Brother”, “Two in One”, & the confessions of Narcissus’; Thierry Robin, ‘Tall tales or “petites histoires”: history & the void in “The Martyr’s Crown” and “Thirst”’; Ute Anna Mittermaier, ‘ In search of Mr Love, or: the internationalist credentials of “Myles before Myles’’; John McCourt, ‘Myles na gCopaleen: a portrait of the artist as a Joyce scholar’; Tom Walker. ‘“A true story”: The Third Policeman and the writing of terror’; Neil Murphy, ‘Myles na gCopaleen, Flann O’Brien, and An Béal Bocht: intertextuality and aesthetic play’; Ondrej Pilny, ‘“Did you put charcoal adroitly in the vent?”: Brian O’Nolan and pataphysics’; Alana Gillespie, ‘“Banjaxed and bewildered’: Cruiskeen Lawn and the role of science in independent Ireland’; Maebh Long, ‘The trial of Jams O’Donnell: An Béal Bocht and the force of law’; Thomas Jackson Rice, ‘Brian O’Nolan: misogynist or “ould Mary Anne”?’; Jennika Baines, ‘The murders of Flann O’Brien: death and creation in At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, An Béal Bocht, and “Two in One’’.’

Julian Murphet, Ronan McDonald & Sascha Morrell, eds., Flann O’Brien and Modernism (London: Bloomsbury 2014), 224pp. CONTENTS: Rónán McDonald & Julian Murphet (both of University of New South Wales, Australia), ‘Introduction’; 1. Sean Pryor, ‘Making Evil, with Flann O’Brien’; 2. John Attridge, ‘Mythomaniac modernism: lying and bullshit in Flann O’Brien’; 3. Stefan Solomon, ‘“The outward accidents of illusion”: O’Brien and the Theatrical’; 4. Stephen Abblitt, ‘The Ghost of “Poor Jimmy Joyce”: A Portrait of the Artist as a Reluctant Modernist’; 5. David Kelly, ‘“Do You Know What I’m Going to Tell You?”: Flann O’Brien, Risibility and the Anxiety of Influence’; 6. Maebh Long, ‘An Béal Bocht, Translation and the Proper Name’; 7. Joseph Brooker, ‘Ploughmen Without Land: Flann O’Brien and Patrick Kavanagh’ [see copy]; 8. Dirk Van Hulle, ‘Flann O’Brien’s Ulysses: Marginalia and the Modernist Mind’; 9. Baylee Brits, ‘“Truth is an Odd Number”: Flann O’Brien and Infinite Imperfection’; 10. Rónán McDonald, ‘“An astonishing parade of nullity”: Nihilism in The Third Policeman’; 11. Julian Murphet, ‘Flann O’Brien and Modern Character’; 12. Sam Dickson, ‘“No unauthorized boozing”: Flann O’Brien and the Thirsty Muse’; 13. Sascha Morrell, ‘Soft drink, hard drink, and literary (re)production in Flann O’Brien and Frank Moorhouse’; 14. Mark Steven, ‘Flann O’Brien’s Aestho-Autogamy’; 15. Mark Byron, ‘Modernist Wheelmen’.

Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan, & John McCourt, eds., Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (Cork University Press, 2017), 346pp. CONTENTS. PART I - “Neither popular nor profitable”: O’Nolan vs. The Plain People. Carol Taaffe, ‘“Irreverence moving towards the blasphemous”: Brian O’Nolan, Blather and Irish popular culture’; Maebh Long, ‘“No more drunk, truculent, witty, celtic, dark, desperate, amorous paddies!”: Brian O’Nolan and the Irish stereotype’; Maria Kager, ‘“Lamhd láftar and bad language: bilingual cognition in Cruiskeen Lawn’; Catherine Flynn, ‘“The half-said thing”: Cruiskeen Lawn, Japan and the Second World War’ [71-86]; Katherine Ebury, ‘“Physical comedy and the comedy of physics in The Third Policeman, The Dalkey Archive and Cruiskeen Lawn”. PART II - Mixed inks: O’Nolan vs. his peers. Dirk Van Hulle, ‘“Widening out the mind”: Flann O’Brien”s “wide mind” between Joyce”s “mental life” and Beckett”s “deep within”’; Ronan Crowley, ‘Phwat’s in a nam?: Brian O’Nolan as a Late Revivalist’ [119-35]; R. W. Maslen, ‘Fantastic economies: Flann O’Brien and James Stephen’; Ian Ó Caoimh, ‘The ideal and the ironic: incongruous Irelands in An Béal Bocht, No Laughing Matter and Ciarán Ó Nualláin’s Óige an Dearthár’; John McCourt, ‘More “gravid” than gravitas: Collopy, Fahrt and the Pope in Rome’. PART III - Gross impieties: O’Nolan vs. the sacred texts. Louis de Paor, ‘“A scholar manqué”?: Further notes on Brian Ó Nualláin”s engagement with Early Irish literature’; Alana Gillespie, ‘In defence of “gap-worded” stories: Brian O’Nolan on authority, reading and writing’; Ruben Borg, ‘Reading Flann with Paul: modernism and the trope of conversion’; Dieter Fuchs, ‘The Dalkey Archive: a Menippean satire against authority’; Tamara Radak, ‘“Walking forever on falling ground”: closure, hypertext and the textures of possibility in The Third Policeman’. [See Publisher’s notice under Notes - as infra.]

Borg, Fagan & McCourt (2017) - Publisher’s Note:

With its penchant for dissecting rehearsed attitudes and subverting expectations, Flann O’Brien’s writing displays an uncanny knack for comic doubling and self-contradiction. Focusing on the satirical energies and anti-authoritarian temperament invested in his style, Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority interrogates the author’s clowning with linguistic, literary, legal, bureaucratic, political, economic, academic, religious and scientific powers in the sites of the popular, the modern and the traditional.
By taking O’Brien’s riotous clashes with diverse manifestations of authority as an entry point, the volume draws together disparate elements of the writer’s work. Each chapter reflects on some aspect of his iconoclastic impulses; on the impertinent send-ups of pretension and orthodoxy to be found in his fiction, columns, and writing for stage and screen; on the very nature of his comedic inspiration.... Among the topics addressed are O’Brien’s satirical use of the pseudonym, the cliché and the Irish language; his irreverent repackaging of inherited myths, sacred texts and formative canons; and his refusal of literary and ideological closure.
The emerging picture is of a complex literary project that is always, in some way, a writing against the weight of received wisdoms and inherited sureties. Together, these essays invite us to reconsider O’Brien’s profile as, at once, a local comedian, a critic of provincial attitudes, a formal innovator and an inimitable voice in the twentieth-century avant-garde. Most pressingly, Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority compels us to consider the many ways in which O’Brien’s texts bring into sharp relief the kinship between comic genius and an anti-authoritarian temperament.

Available at Cork University Press - online; accessed 21.06.2019.

See also review by Germán Asensio Peral, in Estudios Irlandeses/Journal of Irish Studies, 14 (Feb.-March 2019)

Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority purports to examine the concept of authority as applied to Irish writer Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen. In their Introduction, the editors advance the volume’s intention ‘to make a pitch for a mode of inquiry more finely attuned to the multifacetedness and prodigality of the writer’s riotous imagination in its own inveterate questioning of fixed positions and commonplaces ’ (9). Furthermore, the introduction traces O’Nolan’s history of both authoritarian, mock-authoritarian and anti-authoritarian rhetoric throughout his oeuvre, starting with Blather (the short-lived journal co-founded in 1934 with his brother Ciaran and lifelong friend Niall Sheridan), to his long-lasting Irish Times column Cruiskeen Lawn (1940-1966), noting his ‘knack for dissecting the spurious authorities of institutions’ (6) and his ability to write ‘against the weight of received wisdoms [and] inherited sureties’ (8). The volume is thus arranged in a thematic way; divided into three heterogeneous parts, each with five individual chapters thematically resonant with each part as a whole.
The volume’s opening section, ‘“neither popular nor profitable”: O ’Nolan vs. The Plain People’ pits O ’Nolan’s work against the popular and common, thus magicking him away from the elevated modernist and post-modernist pedestal where he normally stands under the eyes of academic scrutiny. Carol Taaffe’s essay opens the section by building on her seminal Ireland Through the Looking-glass: Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and Irish Cultural Debate (2008) by displacing him from a generally perceived status as a self-appointed knight of the Dublin intelligentsia, conversely remarking his ‘instinct to orientate himself towards the daily press rather than the world of the limited edition’ (33). She sees Blather, Cruiskeen Lawn and the pieces published in The Bell as challenges to Irelan ’s social and cultural conservatism of the mid-twentieth century. Taaffe argues that these are examples of O ’Nolan’s democratic, therefore anti-authoritarian, energies as a writer, and are, in turn translated into never-ending dialogue with the public sphere. In the same vein, Maebh Long’s chapter makes a compelling case to see some of O’Nolan’s works - Blather, Cruiskeen Lawn and his plays and teleplays - as predominantly engaged with Irish popular culture. She contends that O’Nolan wields rather than discards cliché in an attempt to show that "the stereotype has so long interacted with national and international senses of Irish identity that the real was always contaminated, and O’Nolan is authentically representing the already inauthentic’ (49). Consequently, these works can be understood as openly criticizing how post-independence Ireland bizarrely embraced the Wildean notion of life imitating art, thus concluding that Irish identity was partly driven to performance and inauthenticity. Maria Kager switches the focus to the linguistic realm but retains the interest in the popular sphere by examining O’Nolan’s representation of Irish localisms, cliches, poor or ungrammatical language and accents in the early [..].

Available at Gale EBooks - online; accessed 22.07.2021.

The Dublin Review, ‘Flann O’Brien at 100’ [Special Issue], ed. Brendan Barrington (Autumn 2011) - “Writers reflect on a genius unfulfilled” - with contributions from Kevin Barry, Angela Bourke, John Butler, Ciaran Carson, Roddy Doyle, Ann Marie Hourihane, Paul Muldoon, Joseph O’Connor, Ian Sansom, and Carol Taaffe.

See also Robert Looby’s informative and amusing biographical notice at The Modern Word - online [accessed 31.01.2011] - copy as attached.

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References
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 3: selects At Swim-Two-Birds; The Best of Myles; 93 [At Swim, nihilistic extravaganza; The Third Policeman, language of the dead], 250 [Joyce paired the English original of Beckett’s Murphy with O’Brien’s At Swim as ‘Jean qui pleure’ and ‘Jean qui rit’, and was able to quote sections of it from memory]; 523 [a tragic group, with Kavanagh and Behan, ed. comm. on Anthony Cronin’s Dead as Doornails]; 526n [err. for C. C. O’Brien]; 611 [‘experimental tradition’, in Deane’s Celtic Revivals, 1985], 639 [‘By the time Flann O’Brien emerges with his resuscitated banalities, the tongue will be lodged wholly in the side of the mouth’, Declan Kiberd, Anglo-Irish Attitudes, Field Day Pamphlet, 1984]; 658 [rems. on O’Brien’s satire on the absurdity of Gaelic nationalist rural pieties]; 684 [‘exile-at-home’, ed. comm. Seamus Deane]; 937 [Benedict Kiely comments in 1968 on Frank O’Connor’s view that Ireland could not produced novelists; ed. comm.]; 939 [Patrick McGinley O’Brienesque acc. ed. JW Foster]; 942 [modernism of, ed.], 949 [Patrick Boyle, Irish-English dialect ear compared to]; 1431 [in biog. notice on Charles Donnelly, his contemp. at UCD].

BBC “Arena” Arts Programme with the collaboration of RTE:

Three Irish Writers [Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh, and Brendan Behan’, in BBC Arena series; written and presented by Anthony Cronin (1991) - available at YouTube - online; see also shorter edition - online [accessed 21.05.2019].

Albert Manguel, ed., Anthology of Fantasy Literature (1983), contains ‘John Duffy’s Brother’ [story], pp.371-76, from Stories and Plays by Flann O’Brien [copyright Brian O’Nolan 1941, and Evelyn O’Nolan, 1973, rep. permission Viking/Penguin Inc and Brandt & Brandt agency].

Peter Ellis (Cat. 10; 2002) lists Faustus Kelly: A Play in Three Acts (Dublin: Cahill 1943), rare; performed 25th Jan. 1943 [£950]; The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor (MacGibbon & Kee 1961), 157pp. [£250].

The Modern World Website Page on Flann O’Brien

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre (Texas Univ., Austin), holds two series: Works (1934-1963) and Criticism (1989). WORKS: At Swim-Two-Birds, two typescript drafts, the first containing extensive marginalia and holographic additions by author, ‘was most likely composed between 1934 and 1937.’ (Thomas F. Shea); The second: typescript bearing signed note by author indicating that it is ‘the final version for Longmans Green’, typed in 1937. Also a group of clippings relating to the 1960 republication of At Swim-Two-Birds, together with a note from O’Nolan to Niall Montgomery 21 Sept. 1960). The Dalkey Archive: here in four drafts; the first, a holograph, dated ‘November 1962 ... July 1963’; the others dated August, September and October 1963, of which the first is identified as ‘first typescript’, the second as is described as ‘first typescript drastically revised’, the last being a typescript bound in boards and dated October 1963. Faustus Kelly (1943) in two manuscripts each in a ruled notebook, together with a number of unbound leaves of dramatic writing for that play. CRITICISM: a typescript draft of Thomas F. Shea, Flann O’Brien’s Exhorbitant Novels (Bucknell UP 1992). Go to: HRC (Texas) [link].

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Notes
At Swim Two Birds: Gl. Snáimh-dá-en (‘swim-two-birds’), is one of the resting-places of Sweeney (in Buile Suibhne) after his madness came upon him at the battle of Moira [Magh Rath], on Devinish Island between Clonmacnoise and Shannonbridge; Flann O’Brien spent part of his childhood at nearbyTullamore, in Co. Offaly. (See P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.150.)

Why Flann?

Flann O’Brien told his publisher that he adopted the name Flann for the benefit of a common Irish name (O’Brien) with an unusual one (q. source). But A Short History of Ireland by P. W. Joyce offers a possibly different inspiration in the form of an account of a work called the Synchronisms of Flann, of whose author he writes:

‘This Flann was a layman, Ferleginn or chief professor of the school of Monasterboice: died in 1056. He compares the chronology of Ireland with that of other countries, and gives the names of the monarchs that reigned in Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome, from the most remote period, together with most careful lists of the Irish kings who reigned contemporaneously with them. Copies of this tract, but imperfect, are preserved in the Books of Lecan and Ballymote.’ (P. W. Joyce, A Short History of Ireland from the Earliest Times to 1608, Longmans 1893, p.27.)

The case is a little comparable with that of James Joyce who inevitably included the Martyrology of Gorman in the Shem chapter of the Wake - reflecting the biography of himself that had been prepared by Herbert Gorman. Modern Irish writers must have their ancient antecedents. Perhaps, too, O’Brien felt that the multiculturalism of his avatar - or, at least, his zany collocation of radically disparate culture epochs - was apposite to his own procedure as a deeply achronological writer. [BS]

Suibhne’s verses: ‘Terrible is my plight this night / the pure air has pierced my body, / lacerated feet, my cheek is green - / Oh might God, it is my due. [&c.]’, selected in Flann O’Brien’s translation from At Swim-Two-Birds (Penguin edn., p.84); otherwise entitled ‘Wolves for Company’ in ‘Frenzy of Sweeney’, from John Montague, ed., The Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974), p.83.

The Third Policeman (1967): A thriller, a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the story of a tender, brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle, and a chilling fable of unending guilt, The Third Policeman is comparable only to Alice in Wonderland as an allegory of the absurd. Distinguished by endless comic invention and its delicate balancing of logic and fantasy, The Third Policeman is unique in the English language. (See COPAC records online; accessed 24.08.2009.)

Myles na Gopaleen - meaning Myles of the Ponies [lit. Little Horses]. O’Brien’s Irish Times pseudonym was originally the sobriquet of a character in a play by Dion Boucicault and, prior to that, a character in Gerald Griffin’s Collegians (1829) - as supra.

Stage version: A theatrical adaptation of At Swim-Two Birds was made by by Ridiculusmus, a Derry and London-based company wit David Woods, John Hough, Pete McCabe, and Angus Barr (reviewed at Cleere’s Theatre, in Kilkenny, Sunday Ind., 20.8.1995).

Locus classicus: A proximate source for the pastiche of Irish medieval lyrics conducted by Flann O’Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds is to be found in the ‘Cyclops episode’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, viz., the song of the Citizen’s dog Garryowen: ‘The curse of my curses / Seven days every day / And seven dry Thursdays / On you, Barney Kiernan, / Has no sup of water / To cool my courage, / And my guts red roaring / After Lowry’s lights.’ (Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn.,p.404.)

Sharpened needles (in The Third Policeman): The idea of ‘sharpness’ connected with iron needless is the subject of a discourse in J. M. Synge’s Aran Islands (1907). ‘“Take a sharp needle”, he said, “and stick it under the collar of your coat, and not one of them will be able to have power on you.” Iron is a common talisman with barbarians, but in this case the idea of exquisite sharpness was probably present also, and perhaps some feeling for the sanctity of the instrument of toil, a folk-belief that is common in Brittany. The fairies are more numerous in Mayo than in any other country, though they are fond of certain districts in Galway […].’ (Coll. Works, II: Prose, 1966, ed. Alan Price; p.80).

Carletonesque? Compare the nature-descriptions of The Third Policeman with this in the opening passage of William Carleton’s “Ned M’Keown”: ‘[A] delightful vale, which runs up, for twelve or fourteen miles, between two ranges of dark, well-defined mountains, that give to the interjacent country the form of a low inverted arch. [..., &c.’; p.22, and the following on Knockmany:] ‘On the north-west side ran a ridge of high hills, with the cloud-capped peak of Knockmany rising in lofty eminence above them; these, as they extended towards the south, became gradually deeper in their hue, until at length they assumed the shape and form of heath-clad mountains, dark and towering. The prospect on either range is highly pleasing, and capable of being compared with any I have ever seen, in softness, variety, and that serene lustre which reposes only on the surface of a country rich in the beauty of fertility, and improved, by the hand of industry and taste. Opposite Knockmany, at a distance of about four miles, on the south-eastern side, rose the huge and dark outline of Cullimore, standing out in gigantic relief against the clear blue of a summer sky, and flinging down his frowning and haughty shadow almost to the firm-set base of his lofty rival; or, in winter, wrapped in a mantle of clouds, and crowned with unsullied snow, reposing in undisturbed tranquillity, whilst the loud voice of storms howled around him. [...; &c.]’ (Wildgoose Lodge and Other Stories, ed. Maurice Harmon, Cork: Mercier Press 1973, pp.22-23.)

Joseph Sheridan le Fanu: O’Nolan read the stories and novels of Le Fanu in teen-age and was actually reading him when a neighbouring house was visted by a poltergeist, according to his brother Ciarán’s account: ‘Presently, you would hear the sash of a window being pulled up roughly, even though you knew all the windows were closed and locked. Then the sound of a small iron ball being rolled across the bedroom floor. This would be followed by the sound of something heavy falling down the stairs making massive thumps.’ (Quoted in Roger Boylan, ‘“We Laughed, We Cried”: Flann O’Brien’s triumph, in Boston Review, 1 July 2008 - available online; accessed 05.08.2021.) [Vide, Ciarán Ó Nualláin, The Early Years of Brian O’Nolan, Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen; trans. Róisín Ní Nualláin, ed. Niall O’Nolan, Dublin: Lilliput Press 1998; qpp.]

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Sheepness of allsheep: O’Brien owes an obvious debt to James Joyce in his celebrated account of the atomic structure of a sheep: ‘What is a sheep only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around and doing intricate convolutions inside the sheep? What else is it but that?’ (The Third Policeman, 1993 Edn., p.86.) Cf. Stephen Dedalus: ‘Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.’ (Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn., 1962, p.238.)

J. W. Dunne: Dunne’s Experiment with Time offers a conceptual framework of The Third Policeman: ‘Death involves the continuation of the mind, but on a different time scale, called “time 2”. The mind, when it enters this different time-scale, which is the “fourth dimension” (a dimension which does not involve any kind of forward progression) wanders about in a daze and has to learn to control its focus of “attention”. Otherwise its new world seems like the world of a nightmare.’ [Student source.]

William Saroyan [1]: O’Brien was not unique in wishing to write like Saroyan. See, for instance, a story by John Hillier, in which the Bob Crawshaw, a British World War II bomber, writes a ‘chit’ for sending home if he does not return: ‘He got to his bunk and took his pen and some paper and sat down and wrote “Dear Father and Mother and Eileen.” [26] Then he leaned back and chewed the end of his pen, and he thought, Christ, I wish I could write like William Saroyan and those types, and he thought of flying at night on a trip. Up there with yourself, feeling tingling all over your body with no taste except the nothing but the dryness of the back of your throat and seeing everything, including your own death, and your own aircraft catching fire and falling out of the sky, leaving you still up there watching it and yet being all the time inside the plane in the middle of all the searchlight beams on God’s earth and the red, white and green sausages of small-arms fire curling all round the sky in search of you.’ (“Daylight on Berlin”, in The Penguin New Writing, ed. John Lehmann, March 1943, pp.25-26; cf. O’Brien’s letter to Saroyan, quoted in Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter, 1989, as given in Quotations, supra.)

William Saroyan [2]: Note that the epithet ‘bum’ - as in Flann’s phrase ‘bum book’ - also occurs in an American connection when Sean O’Faolain records, in Vive Moi, that ‘an American friend once said to me when I talked to him about University College Cork: “Well Sean, it may have been a bum joint but it suited you down to the ground.”’ (Vive Moi, q.p.; quoted in John A. Murphy, ‘O’Faolain and U.C.C.’, in The Irish Review, 26 (Autumn 2000), pp.38-50; p.40.)

Flann & DIAS: Eamon de Valera helped Erwin Schrödinger [var. Schroedinger] to escape Nazi Germany with his wife and attached him to the DIAS. Schrödinger gave a lecture at Dublin University (TCD) Metaphysical Soc. with arguments for ‘not regarding causality as an irremissable necessity of thought’ and claiming that ‘open-mindedness towards these questions was the most imperative demand.’ Flann O’Brien objected to ‘an argument that could do away with the first cause’ and let fly at the Institute in his Irish Times column during Nov. 1942: ‘Talking of this notorious Institute (Lord, what I would give for a chair in it with me thousand good-lookin’ pounds a year for doing “work” that most people regard as recreation). A friend has drawn my attention to Professor O’Rahilly’s recent address on “Palladius and Patrick”. / I understand also that Professor Schrödinger has been proving lately that you cannot establish a first cause. The first fruit of the Institute therefore, has been an effort to show that there are two Saint Patricks and no God. [...] The propagation of heresy and unbelief has nothing to do with polite learning, and unless we are careful this Institute of ours will make us the laughing stock of the world.’ (Alannah Hopkin, The Living Legend of St Patrick, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1989, p.151.)

See also ‘How Myles na gCopaleen belled Schrödinger’s cat’, in Irish Times (22 Feb. 2001) - with the additional information that Schrödinger laughed off the attack but the DIAS demanded an apology from the editor Robert Smyllie, who supplied it along with an assurance that Myles would never mention the Institute again.’ (See further under Quotations, supra, and see also note on Arthur Riordan, Improbable Frequency, infra.]

Dord Fian: ‘The music that Finn loved was that which filled the heart with joy and gave light to the countenance, the song of the black bird of Letter Lee, and the melody of the Dord Fian, the sound of the wind in Droum-Derg, the thunders of Assaroe, the cry of the hounds let loose through Glen Ra, with their faces outward from the Suir, the Tonn Rury lashing the shore, the wash of water against the side of ships, the cry of Bran at Knock-an-awr, the murmur of streams at Slieve-mish and oh, the black bird of Derry-Cairn. I never heard, by my soul, sound sweeter than that. Were I only beneath his nest!’ (q. trans.; John Philip Cohane, The Indestructible Irish (NY: Hawthorn Books 1969, p.172.)

Dear Editor: Nolan wrote up to nine letters under daily to The Irish Times under different names during 1940, before he was given a column of his own. “Two in One”, a story of a taxidermist’s assistant who murders his employer and hides within his skin, only to be arrested for his own murder. (David Wheatley, review of John Wyse Jackson, ed., Flann O’Brien at War: Myles na gCopaleen 1940-1945, Duckworth 1999, in Times Literary Supplement, 21 July, 2000, p.29.)

Home Rule?: ‘That’s a nice piece of law and order for you, a terrific indictment of democratic self-government, a beautiful commentary on Home Rule.’ (The Third Policeman, Flamingo Edn. 1993, p.165.) Flann O’Brien appears to set his second in the period of Home Rule, a form of independence never actually accorded to Ireland and perhaps intended as a jocose equivalent of the Irish Free State. Equally, this might be taken as feature of the three policemen, who stand as oddly Victorian figures in their Irish setting, or else contemporaries of the novelist who remain uncertain as to prevailing politic arrangements in the era when the novel - and their part in it - is set (viz., 1940).

Conan Kennedy: Kennedy conjectures that the name de Selby is taken from the De Selby Quarries on Mount Seskin Road between Terenure and Blessington, nr. Jobstown [nr. Tallaght], from which hard-core for the roads of S. Dublin was extracted, and pursues the connection with Walter Conan (1867-1936), proprietor of a tailoring firm which made academic gowns and shared buildings and business interests with the De Selby company as well as being - more significantly - was the inventor of a meat preservation system, incandescent gas lamps, a keyless lock and an index carding sysem and a depth charge (patent fuse) that was adopted by the British war office as an anti-submarine weapon. Sir John Ross and Walter Conan himself give accounts of the invention, trial and attempted exploitation of the fuse. (See Looking for De Selby, Killala: Morrigan 1998). [Note: Jobstown (nr. Mt Seskin is the highest of the Tallaght Hills.]

Oscar O’Brien: At one place, a least, Flann adopts the Wildean manner of wit in characterising the peculiarities of De Selby: ‘Another of de Selby’s weaknesses was his inabilility to distinguish between men and women. […] The age, the intellectual attainments and the style of dress of the Countess would make [that] a pardonable error for anybody afflicted with poor sight but it is feared that the same cannot be said of other instances.’ (The Third Policeman, 1993 Edn., p.173-74.)

Murder most foul: Liam O’Flaherty, in his school-days, wrote a story of a farmer who murders his wife which he quoted in Shame the Devil (1934; 2nd. imp. 1939): ‘He struck with his spade on the head many times, blaspheming joyously at each stroke, how she sank into the furrow, where she bled so profusely that the ensuing blows made her gore splash into her murderous husband’s face.’ (Quoted in Patrick Sheeran, “The Novels of Liam O’Flaherty: A Study in Romantic Nationalism”, UCG/NUI PhD Diss., 1972, p.54.) Cf. the murder with which The Third Policeman begins.

Aldous Huxley, Point Counterpoint (1928), Philip Quarles: ‘Put a novelist into a novel. He justifies the aesthetic generalisations, which may be interesting - at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same story you are, you can make a variation on the theme. But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the second novel? And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there’s a Quaker holding a box of oats on which is a picture of another Quaker holding another box of oats, &c., &c. At about the tenth remove you might have a novelist telling your story in algebraic symbols or in terms of variation in blood pressure, pulse, secretion of ductless glands, and reaction time.’ (NY Harper 1965 Edn., pp.301-02; quoted in Niall Fisher, ENG507 UUC 2002.)

Bashed about: O’Brien’s ‘Editorial Note’ to the “James Joyce” Special Issue of in Envoy (1951, pp.6-11) was reprinted by John Ryan ‘A Bash in the Tunnel’ in his edited collection A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce by the Irish (1970, pp.15-20), with small variations, viz., in place of O’Brien’s editorial words, ‘I doubt whether the contents of this issue will get any of us any forrarder. / A little, perhaps. Mr. Cass seems to establish that Joyce was at heart an Irish dawn-bursting romantic, an admirer of de Valera […]’, Ryan has given: ‘Some think that Joyce was at heart [... &c.]’ Again, where O’Brien writes, ‘This issue of ENVOY claims to be merely a small bit of that garden’ (Envoy, p.11), Ryan substitutes, ‘All we can claim to know is merely a small bit of that garden’. (A Bash [... &c.], p.20.)

Tomás Ó Criomhthain [O’Crohan]: At the end of The Islandman, Ó Criomthain provides the original for the parody that O’Brien produced in The Poor Mouth: ‘‘[…] to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be again.... that when I am gone men will know what life was like in my time and the neighbours that lived with me.’ Cf., ‘Yes! I think that I shall never forget the Gaelic feis which we had in Corkadoragha. During the course of the feis many died whose likes will not be there again and, had the feis continued a week longer, no one would be alive now in Corkadoragha in all truth.’ (The Poor Mouth [An Beal Bocht], trans. Patrick C. Power, 1973; Picador 1975, p.61.) [See further, under Ó Criomhthain, infra.]

Tom Stoppard professed admiration for O’Brien’s first novel, At Swim Two Birds in an early interview [with Giles Gordan, Transatlantic Review 29 (1968)], and there are clear signs that Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, Stoppard’s only novel to date, was written under its influence. At Swim is about a student who writes a novel about a novelist who is eventually taken over and killed by his own characters; Stoppard - somewhat less ambitiously - writes about a latter-day Boswell (Moon) who is chronicling the day-to-day activities of his patron (Malquist) and is eventually killed by the repercussions of those activities. Besides this self-reflexiveness, the two novels share a predilection for ready-made characters, often of a bizarre kind, ‘nigger skivvies’ in O’Brien’s Dublin, a black Irish Jew in Stoppard’s London, and cowboys in both. (See Richard Corballis, ‘Modernism and Postmodernism in Travesties’, in Joycean Occasions, ed. Janet Dunleavy, 1991, p.163.)

Blooming anxiety: The theory of anxiety of influence invoked by Seamus Deane and others to describe Flann O’Brien’s relation to James Joyce takes its rise and definition from Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (NY: OUP 1973). See Alex Davis, ‘Irish Poetic Modernisms: A Reappraisal’, in Critical Survey, 8, 2, 1996, pp.186-97; cited on Thomas MacGreevy Archive [online].

Improbably Frequency, a musical farce by Arthur Riordan and Bell Helicopter (directed by Lynne Parker for Rough Magic) is set in Dublin 1941 and features Flann O’Brien, Erwin Schrödinger, et al., among the dram. persona: ‘As he seeks out the truth on Irish shores, Faraday is drawn in many different directions, his suspicions aroused with regard to just about everyone he meets. Why do the songs on O’Dromedary’s popular radio show all seem to forecast the weather? Why does the lovely Philomena turn up everywhere there’s trouble? Just what do the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger and the hack Myles na gCopaleen have to hide? […].’ Note that the IRA-veteran is called Muldoon. (Dublin Th. Fest.,2004; see RTÉ Arts Online / October 2004 [link].)

Check names and dates of family members, chiefly brothers and wife; also, check family home at Avoca Tce. [all as supra], being at right angles to Avoca Rd., Blackrock and facing The Smoothing Iron (mentioned by Joyce in Finnegans Wake).

RTÉ “Arts Live” edition on “Flann O’Brien” (March 2006), produced by Liam Ó Muirthile, incls. contribs. from Anthony Cronin, Louis de Paor, Declan Kiberd, Alan Titley, Micheál Ó Nuallain (br.) and comic Tommy Tiernan; also an interview with Tim Pat Coogan and the film of the first Bloomsday recreation (1954) shot by John Ryan in which O’Brien, Cronin, and Patrick Kavanagh took part. A conference was on 1st April organised at UCD by Jennika Pierie, with presentations from Joseph Brooker (Birbeck), Carol Taaffe (TCD), Gregory Dobbins (UC, Davis).

Call For Papers: “Reading Brian O’Nolan’s Libraries” - The Parish Review
Official Journal of the International Flann O’Brien Society

The expanding field of Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen) scholarship has undergone a remarkable transformation in the wake of the writer’s 2011 centenary. This renewed scholarly interest has given rise to a range of Cultural Materialist, Deconstructionist, and Genetic approaches, amongst others, that have explored the representation, and indeed the limits of, knowledge within O’Nolan’s oeuvre. His writing continues to resonate within the public sphere, as is attested by the many reissues, adaptations, and collections of his works, including the recent publication of his dramatic works and short stories by Dalkey Archive Press. As Flann O’Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman) and Myles na gCopaleen (“Cruiskeen Lawn”, An Béal Bocht), O’Nolan is celebrated, in part, for his savage parodies of academic institutions, erudite individuals, and pedagogical methods; a reputation that appears to rest uneasily alongside this increasing scholarly attention.

The John Burns Library at Boston College acquired Brian O’Nolan’s papers and personal library in February 1997, yet a complete inventory of the latter has only just been compiled and published for the first time in the most recent issue of The Parish Review (2.1, Fall 2013), guest edited by Maebh Long. (A copy of the issue, including the full inventory, is available from the International Flann O’Brien Society by contacting the general editors at viennacis.anglistik@univie.ac.at). This is an important and exciting resource for O’Nolan scholars: the library contains over four hundred books, periodicals, and newspapers in French, German, Greek, Irish, and Latin on subjects as diverse as archaeology, philosophy, politics, psychology, science, and theology. Additionally, there are literary texts from the Classical, Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian, and Modern periods. Due to the complexity of this collection, its potential as a resource for scholarship is only beginning to be examined.

A forthcoming issue of The Parish Review (October 2014) will take up the question of how to assess Brian O’Nolan’s personal library, particularly in light of the representation of archives, marginalia, and scholarship across his oeuvre. We will encourage dialogue between frequently polarized critical approaches, asking which O’Nolan we might find between these shelves. Is O’Nolan’s work invigorated or exhausted by questions of influence? Does the representation of scholarship within his work mark a point of potential or resistance for archival approaches? What might be gathered from the annotations and marginalia within this wide-ranging collection of texts? Or should O’Nolan scholarship be spared from such lines of inquisition?

The editors invite proposals on any aspect of O’Nolan’s writing, but are especially interested in papers that explore the holdings at the Burns Library and/or investigate the wider epistemological issues that arise within his work. Potential topics for papers include, but are by no means limited to:

•   How models of influence are sustained by and/or undermined by
O’Nolan’s work
•   The complexities of O’Nolan’s national and intellectual contexts
•   The representation of libraries and/or scholarship within modernist
and post-modernist texts
•   O’Nolan’s engagement with, or response to, specific literary movements
•   How emerging methodologies and technologies might inform our use and
understanding of O’Nolan’s library.

Proposals of no more than 300 words should be submitted to theparishreview@gmail.com by 31 January 2014. The Essays will be limited to 5,000 words and adhere to the MLA style guide. They will be submitted for peer-review to the editors by 31 May 2014. Contributors can expect to receive feedback by 31 July 2014.

Vienna Centre for Irish Studies
Universitaet Wien
Spitalgasse 2-4, Hof 8
1090 Wien
AUSTRIA
Tel.: +43 1 4277 42481

Flann O’Brien International Society and Annual Conference - online.

Dead policeman?: An essay by Tom Walker in Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies, ed. Ruban Borg, et al. (Cork UP 2014), gives an account of The Third Policeman’s debt to the true story of a Garda officer killed in Clare in 1929 and so to ‘a further Irish historical context: terror’. (Val Nolan, blog review of Contesting Legacies - online; accessed 15.01.2014.)

Sago Saga (unfinished drama): Flann O’Brien was working on satirical novel about an American millionaire who sought to prevent more Irish famines and destitute Irish emigrants coming to the US by replacing Irish potato-cultivation with a tropical plant called sago. (See Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘There is no shame in laughing at Famine satire’, in The Irish Times, 11 Jan. 2015 - online; accessed 16.03.2021. [Elsewhere deemed to be a satire on de Valera and John F. Kennedy.]

Cavan Orphanage Fire (1943): The fire which occurred on 23 February 1943 at St Joseph’s Orphanage in Cavan killed 26 girls trapped in their dormitory at the Poor Clare Orphanage. It was widely believed that the nuns focussed on extinguishing the blaze, which started with a flue in the lower-floor laundry, because they feared the girls being seen outside in their night-wear. Wikipedia writes:

Over concerns about the causes of the fire and the standard of care, a public inquiry was set up. The report’s findings stated that the loss of life occurred due to faulty directions being given, lack of fire-fighting training, and an inadequate rescue and fire-fighting service. It also noted inadequate training of staff in fire safety and evacuation, both at the orphanage and local fire service. / This finding has been disputed by many, including in a limerick written by the secretary to the inquiry, Brian O’Nolan, better known as the author Flann O’Brien, and one of the counsel representing the Electricity Supply Board, Tom O’Higgins, later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and presidential candidate.

In Cavan there was a great fire,
Judge McCarthy was sent to inquire,
It would be a shame,
If the nuns were to blame,
So it had to be caused by a wire.

[...] The remains of the dead girls were placed in 8 coffins and buried in Cullies cemetery in Cavan. A new memorial plaque was erected in 2010 just inside the convent gates at Main Street, Cavan. The plaque was anonymously donated to the Friends of the Cavan Orphanage Victims group.

Available at Wikipedia - online; accessed 24.07.2021.

Note: the Cavan orphanage fire of 23 Feb. 1943 is noticed in Brewster’s Book of Irish Fact and Fable (2011) - online [accessible by password only].

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Frank McNally, ‘An Irishman’s Diary’ (The Irish Times, 14 Feb. 2013) - notes that Flann was newly appointed as Assistant Principal Officer in the Department of Local Government at the time and hence became Secretary to the Inquiry Committee. McNally writes further:

[...]
‘For long afterwards, the nuns’ role in the disaster was the subject of much rumour. There is no doubt that the rescue operation was, in general, very flawed. But it was also suggested that the nuns, reluctant to have the girls seen in their night clothes, had kept dormitory doors locked until it was too late. The suspicion lingers that the inquiry too was a cover-up, or at least that it failed to ask the right questions. A telling detail is that, while most of the protagonists - the nuns, the attorney general, Cavan Urban District Council, the ESB (electrical wiring being one of the things implicated) - hired teams of barristers, the children were represented only by solicitors.
O’Nolan’s role was confined to summarising the evidence presented. But his private attitude to the proceedings later emerged in an infamous limerick concocted with one of the lawyers involved, the future chief justice, TF O’Higgins:

“In Cavan there was a great fire;
Joe McCarthy came down to inquire,
If the nuns were to blame,
It would be a shame,
So it had to be caused by a wire.”

Behind this grim joke lurks the uncomfortable question as to whether O’Nolan himself was part of a conspiracy of silence. In No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien, his friend and biographer Anthony Cronin touches on it, briefly. He largely excuses him on the basis that the inquiry was set up on narrow terms, to examine the immediate causes of the blaze and its aftermath, not to investigate how the orphanage was run, allegations about which came later and would have been unknown to him. /
Certainly, says Cronin, if O’Nolan was aware of any deliberate cover-up, he never mentioned it in conversation, whereas he did speak of “the harrowing nature of the evidence ... and the impression it had made on him”. In any case, his involvement in the inquiry illustrates one of the paradoxes of O’Nolan’s life: that he spent much of it simultaneously working as a servant of the State, while also writing a famously anarchic and iconoclastic newspaper column. More than most people, he was aware of the inadequacies in the newly-founded state, of which he was a pillar, and more than most he had an outlet to share indiscretions with a national audience. In some ways, he did. Yet in all potential conflicts of interest, he seems to have remained true to the Official Secrets Act by which he was bound. As Cronin put it: “his reticence in relation to matters that he had official cognisance of was always remarkable”.

For good or bad, 1943 was a pivotal year in O’Nolan’s dual life. His satirical play, Faustus Kelly, opened and closed at the Abbey in January. And with that, the curtain fell for almost two decades on any literary activity other than Cruiskeen Lawn (which, incidentally, appeared only once during the period of the Cavan hearings). His civil service career would come to a bad end a decade later when, where his growing alcohol-related absenteeism had failed, a veiled insult to his minister in one of the columns earned him forced early retirement. But he would serve as private secretary to a succession of ministers before then. And in 1943, he was at the peak of his administrative powers. When his report was published in September, it made for a rare event: the writer being mentioned in this newspaper by his real name (Irish version). Notoriously pseudonymous, he masqueraded at various times as Myles na gCopaleen, Flann O’Brien, and under a plethora of other false identities, often on letters to the editor. On this occasion, however, the other tribunal members expressed formal thanks to their secretary, Brian O Nuallain, for his “assiduous care and attention”.

Available at The Irish Times (14 Feb. 2013 - online; acccessed 06.08.2021)

An Beal Bocht v. An tOileanach ...

The original cover-image for An Béal Bocht (1941) by Seán Ó Suilleabháin’s is generally taken as a parody of the cover for Tomas Ó Criomhtháin’s An tOileánach (1929) by Austin Molloy - as one novel is a parody of the other.

Information supplied by Feargal Whelan at the “20th Century Irish Art” group
on Facebook modernated by David Britton (17.09.2024)

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