Bore-Hunting in Dublin

Most fiction writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries know the form and understand that they will meet the same fate: good reviews for a first novel, a larger advance for the second, severely reduced advances for any subsequent volumes, poor sales, the casting adrift by their publishers, full-time jobs in cardboard box factories or part-time jobs in academia, then oblivion. My own fantasy, as an ageing cuckoo nesting in various universities in the early part of this century, was to find a beautiful and energetic student to front my works so that I could enjoy a new career by proxy. Perhaps not: he (or she) might have been praised for their ability to satirize the politically regrettable thought patterns of men and women of previous generations, but surely the trick would only work once. Perhaps the answer would be to dream up a suitable pen name and start afresh.

Brian O’Nolan used various pen names in his life; indeed, his own identity has been almost completely subsumed by the most famous of them, Flann O’Brien. Born in 1911, he was by 1940 a Dublin civil servant, a part-time writer and an almost full-time drinker. He managed to complete his office work efficiently in the morning and then, leaving his overcoat on the back of the office door as a token of his presence, he would go for a lunch that lasted most of the afternoon and early evening in a round of pubs. As Flann O’Brien, he had had his novel At Swim-Two-Birds published in London in 1939. (The second of his masterpieces, The Third Policeman, remained in his desk drawer until after his death: see SF no.41 for both books.) But At Swim sold only a couple of hundred copies. The English reviews were mixed and a little puzzled, and the remaining unsold stock was destroyed in an air raid. Re-cloaked as Myles na Gopaleen, he began a new role as a columnist for the Irish Times in October 1940. Here, he produced a huge amount of extraordinary comic and satiric journalism, which was not collected in book form until after his death in 1966. I have read all his work several times, but the one kept in my bedside pile is the collected journalism in The Best of Myles (1968). The Irish Times was Ireland’s leading newspaper, although its circulation was only about 30,000 and that mainly confined to Dublin and the larger towns. However, it was the paper of choice of the political and intellectual classes – who happened to be Myles’s prime targets. Its editor, Bertie Smyllie, was of the old school of newspapermen, welcoming to talent whatever the peculiarity of its possessors. He was also a drinker who often ran into his new columnist in the pub. Their odd professional relationship (Smyllie could not read those of Myles’s first columns that were written in Irish) lasted until the 1950s, before foundering on Smyllie’s alcoholism and Myles’s own difficulties with his health and a growing acerbity and bitterness in his work and social life. The Best of Myles is chosen from his work written in the 1940s, when Ireland was still dominated by the Catholic Church and a stern government. Its position in the war was to declare itself neutral (‘Neutral against whom?’ was the Dublin joke). The movement away from the country by the young to the British mainland, drawn by its jobs and comparatively free sexual climate, continued throughout the war. But Myles showed little interest in sex of any sort; his answer to celibacy was to drink. Drinking took up most of his days and evenings: his only sober time was on Sundays when he generally wrote his columns for the following week. Each daily column was limited to between 500 and 600 words, but Myles soon began to run these on in serial form from day to day, elaborating on his subject and building up to a comic climax. One of his many inventions was a book-handling scheme, which was intended as a service for the ‘illiterate, but wealthy’ person who has shrewdly noticed that ‘most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses’. But how, if the rich owner is unable or unwilling to read, can he appear to be a cultivated man, and his books look as if they have been read and reread? Myles’s proposed scheme at first involved two grades of bookhandling by a skilled operative. In ‘Popular Handling’ each volume is ‘to be well and truly handled, four leaves in each to be dog-eared, cloakroom docket or other comparable article to be inserted as forgotten bookmark’. ‘Premier Handling’ adds more dog-ears plus ‘a suitable passage in not less than 25 volumes to be underlined in red pencil, and a leaflet in French on the works of Victor Hugo to be inserted in each’. The following day’s column sees the appearance of ‘De Luxe Handling’, with further refinements including exclamation and interrogation marks in the margins and ‘not less than 30 volumes to be treated with old coffee, tea, porter, or whiskey stains, and not less than five volumes to be inscribed with forged signatures of the authors’. The day after that brings ‘Le Traitement Superbe’. This includes all of the above but is completed by a master-handler who will insert in the margins an appropriate phrase from the following list: Rubbish! Yes, indeed? I don’t agree at all. Why? Yes, but cf. Homer, Od., iii, 151. Quite, but Bossuet in his Discours sur l’histoire universelle has already established the same point . . . Myles scored in two ways with his book-handling scheme, for it satirized both the sub-literate but rich and the pretentious clots who actually do write comments in the margins of books (especially those in the stock of the London Library). Brian O’Nolan’s mastery of language is the key to his humour. He had a peculiarly mixed education (a condition that seems an essential opening to the lives of many writers). At home, he was brought up speaking Irish and learned his first English through reading. At school, Latin and English were drummed into him by the decidedly unchristian Christian Brothers but, fortunately for him, he was later transferred to another school run by the more kindly, if unworldly sounding, Holy Ghost Fathers. University College Dublin completed his education and introduced him to drink, a wide range of talented and lively minded friends, and a horror of boredom. To Myles, a bore was not simply an irritating person who took up an inordinate amount of space and time, but a force of perverted nature who could be actively destructive. In his chapter on ‘Bores’, and in the one on the language they speak, ‘A Catechism of Cliché’, he lovingly dissects them. Take Christmas. There is the simple, relatively harmless bore who remarks, ‘Christmas? Do you know, I do always think it is a sad time,’ and then there is the more advanced bore, who begins, ‘Do you know, the best Christmas I ever had was in Morocco. There was a crowd of us on the boat – I hadn’t been married more than a week at the time – and we shipped anchor at Algiers. The first thing we see is . . .’ but by then you are on your way out of the door. Then there is The Man Who Does His Own Carpentry and Talks About It, and The Man Who Buys Wholesale – you know, the one who, while us poor duffers are paying the shop price, knows where to get things cheap. But the prize bore is one to whom a whole other chapter (‘The Brother’) is devoted – Myles regularly runs into a man who gives detailed accounts of his brother’s lectures to his unfortunate fellow lodgers on the evils of white bread, the ignorance of doctors, the harm lurking in eggs and the dangers of the Dublin water supply . . . But Myles is not simply a critic of others: some of his writings were intended for the betterment of humanity. These mainly come from the Myles na Gopaleen Central Research Bureau. The dedicated scientists of the Bureau come up with Trink, intended to be a boon for those who enjoy reading and drink and wish to have the benefits of both at the same time. Work on the invention does have its drawbacks, though. Let Miles explain:

When put on paper and dried, [Trink] emits a subtle alcoholic cloud . . . [However] considerable difficulty has been encountered in perfecting the invention, not because of any major snag, but because our research workers emerge from the laboratory day after day in a hopeless state of inebriation and are unable to give any coherent account of their experiences.

Another invention solves the problem of carrying drink safely home after the pub shuts at night: emergency trousers with long eellike pockets that can hold four bottles of stout in each leg. In other chapters, Myles lays into the idiocies and pomposity of the language of the Law, Education and the Arts. Are we still plagued by the sort of idiotic questions Myles finds in exam papers? ‘Why does the poet pray to be made one with the West Wind?’ As Myles replies, ‘For that matter why do I make damn sure not to walk on the cracks in the pavement? Why does my wife fall out of the bed every July? . . .’ The use of mock erudition, exactly parodied speech and literary styles, and the logical pursuit of political, social and artistic policies to their usually foolish ends, goes back to Jonathan Swift (another great user of pen names) and his description in Gulliver’s Travels of the ludicrous work of the scientists and governors of the isle of Laputa. The only real contemporaneous rival Myles had in this field was ‘Beachcomber’ ( J. B. Morton) whose column appeared in the Daily Express in the same period. This took on much the same targets; Beachcomber’s insipid poet Roland Milk is a worthy companion to Myles’s Lyndsay Prune, while his Mr Justice Cocklecarrot rules over a court in London as surreal as that ruled over by His Honour, Judge Twinfeet in Dublin. (The tradition continues today in the deliciously accurate parodies of modern celebrities by Craig Brown in Private Eye – a magazine that also enables the well-known and not particularly talented to condemn themselves out of their own mouths in ‘Pseuds’ Corner’.) Brian O’Nolan, alias Flann O’Brien, alias Myles na Gopaleen died, rather appropriately, on 1 April 1966. Like most great comedians, he was a melancholy man who drank to keep private demons away. He was often silent in company, but he observed and noted what others said and transmuted it into comic gold in his novels and newspaper columns. It’s very difficult to write about humour, for the obvious reason that any commentary tends to act like a powerful herbicide on a flower bed – ‘You had to be there,’ we say as we trail off lamely after retelling a good joke badly. There is only one solution – to go and read the original jokes in The Best of Myles.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 80 © William Palmer 2023