REGULAR READERS of this feature might recall my ongoing devotion to the Irish writer Flann O’Brien (1911-66; legal name: Brian O’Nolan; birth name: Brian O Nuallain), whose 1939 first novel At Swim-Two Birds first turned me on to the possibilities of Great Kickass Writing.
Today I want to talk about O’Brien’s other career, that of self-styled “newspaper funny man.”
A few months after the publication of At Swim, the conservative daily The Irish Times hired him to write a daily essay-and-humor column, “Cruiskeen Lawn.” For this work he took on another pseudonym, Myles na gCopaleen (“Miles of the Little Horses”).
The alternate name was more than just an affectation; it was a character.
The “Myles” persona was that of a distinguished older gentleman (O’Brien was only 29 when the column began), comfortable enough in his nobility to mix drawing-room anecdotes with bilingual or trilingual puns, yet enough of a man-of-the-people to gently bash both elitist modern artists and elitist modern-art denouncers.
Two collections of Myles columns have finally been issued in the U.S., by the Dalkey Archive Press (named after O’Brien’s fifth and final novel). The Best of Myles covers his 1940s work. The just-domestically-issued Further Cuttings follows the column into the ’50s.
I’ve just finished reading the first volume. On one level, it’s a remarkable account of normal daily life in one of the few European countries that had anything approaching “normal daily life” at the time. (Ireland, which had only become an independent country in 1920, stayed out of WWII, partly as an act of defiance against Britain.)
O’Brien writes nostalgically about old steam locomotives; relates fictional yet believable tales about his father, brother, and “married sister;” and makes droll comments upon such issues of the day as preserving the Irish language and coping with wartime shortages of consumer goods.
But O’Brien/Copaleen’s writing works on dozens of other levels.
Almost-too-clever-for-its-own-good wordplay meets up with de- and re-constructions of traditional columnist and “humorist” formats (fake inventions, wise bartenders, social-improvement campaigns, good-old-days reminiscences, etc. etc.), and gets cooked up within O’Brien’s astoundingly beautiful prose.
It’s enough to make any would-be modern funny writer, such as myself, give in and surrender all hope of ever becoming good enough.
But I won’t. At least not just yet.
TOMORROW: A few examples of O’Brien/Copaleen’s genius.
ELSEWHERE:
