The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien
Edited by Meabh Long
[Dalkey Archive Press]
As the title of this volume, Collected Letters: Brian O’Nolan, Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, suggests, its subject is a man of slippery identity; ‘self-evident shams’ were, after all, Brian O’Nolan’s avowed shtick. It reminds us, too, that this obscure reveller from County Tyrone was deconstructing identities, with delightful whimsy, long before the heyday of postmodern theory and its hip literary offshoots.
It’s no surprise, then, that the ‘real’ O’Nolan proves as tricksy as his textual avatars: peppered with apocrypha, fustian, and all manner of ‘cod’, the letters treat us to a cornucopia of shapeshifting redolent of his celebrated ‘novels’, At Swim-Two Birds and The Third Policeman. We get neither clues with which to decode O’Nolan’s novels and short stories, nor facts to educe a faithful portrait, for he has little interest in confession, instead favouring ludic duplicity.
Spanning the entirety of his prolific career, the letters begin with O’Nolan’s early attempts at inveigling publishers into taking At Swim, and end with his alcohol-induced decline and eventual death on April Fool’s day, 1966. Among the juvenilia is an uproarious contretemps with Sean O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor in the pages of The Irish Times. What began as pugilistic bravado risked descent into actual fisticuffs; O’Nolan threatened to give O’Connor ‘the mother and father of a beating.’ Another early gem showcases O’Nolan at his burlesque best, lampooning Joycean braggadocio: ‘it is a pity you did not like my beautiful book. As a genius, I do not expect to be readily understood.’ The popularity of these exchanges would earn him a permanent column, under yet another hilarious pseudonym, Myles na gCopaleen.
The letters after about 1960, however, offer less by way of mirth. An infirmed O’Nolan is increasingly bed-bound, and is diagnosed with throat cancer in June 1963. He becomes more irascible, almost assaulting the ‘surgeon bastard’ who botched a kidney biopsy, before discharging himself against all sound advice. While the topics of his deteriorating health and travails with his final novel, The Dalkey Archive, are relayed with typical comic verve – confined to a chair after breaking his leg, he compares himself to a ‘stricken Dracula’ – many of the letters are plainly poignant: one senses an ominous realisation in phrases like, ‘I’m not in any serious trouble.’
A drawback to being as persistently funny as O’Nolan is that it risks countermanding our inclination towards empathy: it is often assumed the comic will glean the comedic from the tragic. His other distinguishing feature, how he decants himself into various textual personae, can lead us to forget, too, that alcoholism was a trait not solely of his – however lively – paginations, but of the flesh-and-blood O’Nolan. As Maebh Long writes in an excellent introduction to the collection, his addiction has long been sentimentalised.
The editors of this collection deal commendably with the complexities of curating O’Nolan’s letters. It’s at times difficult be sure of whom precisely we are reading, from whom a letter is being sent, and to whom one is being addressed. But such is the nature of the fun.
Words: Luke Warde
