Flann O'Brien
"[3] O'Brien's father, Michael Vincent O'Nolan, was a pre-independence official in HM Customs Service, a role that required frequent moves between cities and towns in England, Scotland and Ireland.The Christian Brothers in Ireland had a reputation for excessive, prolific and unnecessary use of violence and corporal punishment,[5][6][7] which sometimes inflicted lifelong psychological trauma upon their pupils.Meanwhile, the story's hero, Shaun Svoolish, chooses a comfortable, bourgeois life rather than romance and heroics: In 1934 O'Brien and his university friends founded a short-lived literary magazine called Blather.[15] Given the desperate poverty of Ireland in the 1930s to 1960s, a job as a civil servant was considered prestigious, being both secure and pensionable with a reliable cash income in a largely agrarian economy.As a practical matter, this meant that writing in newspapers on current events was, during O'Brien's career, generally prohibited without departmental permission which would be granted on an article-by-article, publication-by-publication basis.[16] Though O'Brien's writing frequently mocked the civil service, he was for much of his career relatively important and highly regarded and was trusted with delicate tasks and policies, such as running (as "secretary") the public inquiry into the Cavan Orphanage Fire of 1943[17] and planning of a proposed Irish National Health Service imitating the UK's, under the auspices of his department—planning he duly mocked in his pseudonymous column.[18] In reality, that Brian O'Nolan was Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen was an open secret, largely disregarded by his colleagues, who found his writing very entertaining; this was a function of the makeup of the civil service, which recruited leading graduates by competitive examination.One column described the politician's reaction to any question requiring even a trace of intellectual effort as "[t]he great jaw would drop, the ruined graveyard of tombstone teeth would be revealed, the eyes would roll, and the malt eroded voice would say 'Hah?[23] In a piece published a few months before his death, he also reported a secondary cancer diagnosis and hospitalisations due to uraemia (a sign of liver failure) and pleurisy: in typical good-humour O'Brien attributed this declining health to "St Augustine's vengeance" over his treatment in The Dalkey Archive.His newspaper column, "Cruiskeen Lawn" (transliterated from the Irish "crúiscín lán", meaning "full/brimming small-jug"), has its origins in a series of pseudonymous letters written to The Irish Times, originally intended to mock the publication in that same newspaper of a poem, "Spraying the Potatoes", by the writer Patrick Kavanagh: I am no judge of poetry—the only poem I ever wrote was produced when I was body and soul in the gilded harness of Dame Laudanum—but I think Mr Kavanaugh [sic] is on the right track here.The managing editor of The Irish Times for much of the period, Gerard "Cully" Tynan O'Mahony (father of the comedian Dave Allen), a personal friend and drinking companion of O'Brien,[27] and likely one of the other occasional authors of the column, was typically one of those pressed for a name but was skilfully evasive on the topic.(Relations are said to have decayed when O'Nolan somehow snatched and absconded with O'Mahoney's prosthetic leg during a drinking session [the original had been lost on military service].)The following column excerpt, in which the author wistfully recalls a brief sojourn in Germany as a student, illustrates the biting humour and scorn that informed the "Cruiskeen Lawn" writings: I notice these days that the Green Isle is getting greener.Time will run on smoother till Favonius re-inspire the frozen Meade and clothe in fresh attire the lily and rose that have not sown nor spun.He contributed substantially to Envoy (he was "honorary editor" for the special number featuring James Joyce[28]) and formed part of the (famously heavy drinking) Envoy / McDaid's pub circle of artistic and literary figures that included Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, Brendan Behan, John Jordan, Pearse Hutchinson, J. P. Donleavy and artist Desmond MacNamara who, at the author's request, created the book cover for the first edition of The Dalkey Archive.He also wrote a column titled Bones of Contention for the Nationalist and Leinster Times under the pseudonym George Knowall; those were collected in the volume Myles Away From Dublin.Most of his later writings were occasional pieces published in periodicals, some of very limited circulation, which explains why his work has only recently come to enjoy the considered attention of literary scholars.There is also persistent speculation that he wrote some of a very long series of penny dreadful detective novels (and stories) featuring a protagonist called Sexton Blake under the pseudonym Stephen Blakesley,[29] he may have been the early science fiction writer John Shamus O'Donnell, who published in Amazing Stories at least one science fiction story in 1932,[30] while there is also speculation about author names such as John Hackett, Peter the Painter (an obvious pun on a Mauser pistol favoured by the war of independence and civil war IRA and an eponymous anarchist), Winnie Wedge, John James Doe and numerous others.O'Brien's journalistic pseudonym is taken from a character (Myles-na-Coppaleen) in Dion Boucicault's play The Colleen Bawn (itself an adaptation of Gerald Griffin's The Collegians), who is the stereotypical charming Irish rogue.It has also been read as a pioneer of postmodernism, although the academic Keith Hopper has argued that The Third Policeman, superficially less radical, is actually a more deeply subversive and proto-postmodernist work, and as such, possibly a representation of literary nonsense.The Third Policeman has a fantastic plot of a murderous protagonist let loose in a strange world peopled by overweight policemen, played against a satire of academic debate on an eccentric philosopher called De Selby.It also was put on in 1943 but quickly folded, possibly because of the offence it gave to various interests including Catholics, Ulster Protestants, Irish civil servants, Corkmen, and the Fianna Fail party.[50] In The Guardian feature "My Hero", John Banville chose O'Brien, writing: "O’Brien was a philistine as well as a consummate prose stylist, an artist who threw away his talent, a Catholic who allowed himself to drift into the sin of despair, and a great comic sensibility thwarted and shrivelled by emotional self-denial.
StrabaneDublinDean's Grange CemeteryUniversity College DublinMetafictionsatireAt Swim-Two-BirdsThe Third PolicemanAn Béal BochtThe Dalkey Archivepen nameIrish civil serviceIrish literatureCounty Tyronemodernistpostmodern literatureThe Irish TimesJames JoyceIrish republicanRevenue CommissionersGaelic RevivalSynge Street Christian Brothers SchoolThe Hard LifeChristian Brotherscorporal punishmentBlackrock CollegeHoly Ghost FathersOfficial IrelandJohn Charles McQuaidLiterary and Historical SocietyCivil Serviceliterary magazineGermanNazi GermanyCologneRhinelandIrish Civil WarSeán T. O'KellySeán MacEnteeCavan Orphanage Firethe UK'sopen secretalcoholismSouth DublinDeans Grange Cemeteryalcoholiccancer of the throatheart attackPatrick KavanaghR. M. SmyllieDave AllenGerald GriffinEfrem ZimbalistKun O'MeyerFleet StreetAnthony CroninBrendan BehanJohn JordanPearse HutchinsonJ. P. DonleavyDesmond MacNamaraThe BellNationalist and Leinster Timespenny dreadfulSexton BlakeAmazing StoriesDion BoucicaultThe Colleen BawnVulgar LatinUlster IrishConnemara ponymodernist novelspostmodernismliterary nonsenseGraham GreeneJorge Luis BorgesWhen Fiction Lives in FictionAnthony BurgessNinety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939Southern Illinois University PressDe SelbyFinnegans WakeHugh LeonardTomás Ó CriomhthainCapek Brothers'synonymous playFianna FailNorthwestern UniversityRobert Anton WilsonThe Widow's SonAlbrecht BehmelIst das Ihr Fahrrad, Mr. O'Brien?Kevin MyersFintan O'Toolethermodynamicsquaternionatomic theoryGoogle DoodleBBC Radio 4Great LivesJohn BanvilleSlattery's Sago SagaMaebh LongTavistockHurson, TessBelfastCronin, AnthonyLondonGrafton BooksIrish American Cultural InstituteOxfordGuinness, JonathanJohnston, DenisWaterloo, OntarioWilfrid Laurier University PressJordan, JohnLilliput PressChampaign, IllinoisDalkey Archive PressMcFadden, HughReview of Contemporary FictionO'Keeffe, TimothyTriesteUniversity of UppsalaLos Angeles TimesList of Old Rockmen