BOOKS

A taste

of Flann

Colin Welch

FLANN O'BRIEN: AN ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY by Peter Costello and Peter van de Kamp

Bloomsbury, (14.95

Like Whitman, Flann O'Brien con- tained multitudes. He contained himself, Brian O'Nolan, the name he had at christ- ening. He contained also the Irish civil servant Brian 0 Nuallain, whose almost unique command of the Irish language, so they say, long preserved him from the assaults of censorious superiors who were required to know Irish but did not, or not much. He contained Myles na Gopaleen, for many years the unforgettable col- umnist, funny but not only funny, of the Irish Times — `Cruiskeen Lawn' as his column was called, incidentally and appropriately, means 'little overflowing jug'. He contained also a chap called Lir O'Connor and other ghostly scribes who wrote for any paper which would print them, who wrote 'yet to be identified' Sexton Blake stories and may have written `disputable works such as the Stephen Blakesley novels'.

From these swirling seas of confusion rise the now famous and prized books, The Best of Myles, and the novels, At-Swim- Two-Birds, The Hard Life, The Dalkey Archive, The Third Policeman, mostly completed, submitted, rejected or with- drawn, revised, recast out of each others' entrails, struggling on to belated success per ardua ad astra.

Have these swirling seas engulfed five other major books by Flann O'Brien, written under other pseudonyms? O'Nolan (it is hard even to know what to call him) hinted as much. Costello and van de Kamp regard it as 'an exciting possibility'. But it is hard to be sure when 'your man' was joking. Or should it be 'your men'? There were here as many personae as pseudonyms, and all kept private, obscure and hidden behind what the printed page reveals and what legend (largely false) recalls. A life no more easy to chronicle than the ceaseless strivings of a basketful of crabs. What would its subject(s) have made of Costello and van de Kamp's unsatisfactory though not valueless com- pilation?

I'm sure, hilariously pedantic as he was about such matters, he'd have shuddered at and made fun of their at times awful English (one of them actually teaches English at Leiden). Hillary Spurling in the Observer has denounced their work as a mere 'snapshot album, with a dull, skimpy, pitifully ill-written and under-researched text'. Ill-written is certainly not unfair to sentences like this: 'But in the eyes of his admirers [at University College, Dublin] O'Nolan was not allowed to exit from the burlesque stage on which they wished to share for as long as they could'. (On the very same page an amusing limerick at the misogynistic O'Nolan's expense is flawed by a glaring misprint.) The tributes from O'Nolan's friends on his death are de- scribed as 'fulsome', which means 'cloying, excessive, disgusting by excess (of flattery, servility)' and so on. Not, I fancy, what our authors had in mind.

Some illiteracy may be forgiven in toilers who, after years of digging in some fasci- nating but hitherto neglected terrain, come back with a little crock of gold. For a start, it must be said that Costello and van de Kamp's biography of O'Nolan is, like Sir Anthony Eden as Prime Minister, the best we have. There is no other. Scathingly contemptuous as he was about 'the Joyce industry', O'Nolan might all the same have been secretly pleased at last to receive, in however inept and 'under-researched' a form, a little of the 'fulsome' attention denied to him and lavished on those like Synge he lambasted as fakes.

The book indeed leaves much in doubt. Is this because it is 'under-researched'? How can we know, unless or until further research answers questions now un- answered? Did O'Nolan, as he later apparently both claimed and denied, marry in 1933 an 18-year-old blonde German violinist who died within a month, of galloping consumption? Mrs Spurling gent- ly mocks our authors for being 'characteris- tically undecided'. Well, they appear to have checked the German registers. What more could they do? An A.J.A. Symons might not have been so easily put off, to be sure: his quest for Corvo was ten times as fruitful, and without the aid of a single snapshot.

Now, I am far from prudish about old photographs. Like you, I study them with rapt attention. Often they speak to us more clearly and movingly than reams of print. But really, the shameless irrelevance and superfluity of some of Costello and van de Kamp's illustrations is staggering.

O'Nolan undoubtedly visited Germany in 1933, and every year thereafter up to and including 1939. Did he, as he claimed, study at Cologne University? Our authors wrote to the rector to find out. A long negative reply in German from the lady archivist is photostatically reproduced nearly a whole page squandered! She kindly enclosed brochures: one of these, I fancy, is reproduced too — a large picture of the university O'Nolan seemingly never attended.

The text of the German chapter is further embellished by a tourist postcard of the Rhine (?) from the air, a photostat of Heine's Harzreise, pictures of Hitler and his Swastika-brandishing entourage, of Communists (one legless but, alas, not in the happy Irish sense) being arrested by Nazi police and of a Nuremberg rally. What importance did most of these things have for O'Nolan?

If our authors wrote an 'illustrated biography' of Hitler would they adorn it with pictures of O'Nolan? Perhaps not: but they might, just might, have some slight reason to do so. Their German chapter is interesting if speculative. They are mysti- fied by O'Nolan's German Schwarmerei. He 'disliked politics', they note: 'yet Ger- many was then the most political country in Europe'. Was it indeed? Did not Hitler also 'dislike politics' as ordinarily under- stood? Could there not have been some affinity between these two dislikes, as also between some Irishmen and any enemy of England, potential or actual, however ghastly? Was O'Nolan one of those Irish- men who, according to Arland Ussher, lacking all insight into 20th-century evil and confronted after the war with the horrors of Auschwitz, retorted, 'yes, but what about Bachelors Walk?' He fiercely condemned innocently boring, corrupt and provincial Irish politicians of his day. He never condemned the Nazis.

In Nazi Germany 'he managed to get himself beaten up and thrown out of a Bierkeller for making uncomplimentary remarks about Hitler'. His later comment is odd: 'They got me all wrong in that pub'. In what way did them lads get him wrong? Had he conceivably made remarks in- tended to be complimentary which were misunderstood?

The text is further padded out with pictures of countless Dublin bars (these, I admit, apposite and highly evocative; why indeed so few of Dublin's romantic trams?); with postcards of St Stephen's Green; with portraits of Laurence Sterne, Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene; with Max Beerbohm's caricature of Yeats intro- ducing the fairies to George Moore; with photostats of O'Nolan's university degree documents and of a Dublin hotel card; with cows being herded through the streets of old Dublin; with a fatuous likeness not of Beachcomber, who powerfully influenced O'Nolan, but of Mr Thake, one of Beach- comber's less memorable characters; with two pictures of the majestic Customs House, where O'Nolan worked, one from the air (why not one from underneath?) and one of a pissoir on the Liffey, 'a charming relic of the Eucharistic Congress of 1932' (did O'Nolan relieve himself in it?) and with other illustrations, more or less charming and wayward, too numerous to record. How The Quest for Corvo would have been enlivened by representations, say, of Crispi and Giolitti, of Elgar, of Union Street, Aberdeen, of Little Tich and urinals in Venice!

The authors' pictorial diarrhoea could have been forgiven if it had not presumably excluded material more interesting. A photostat is provided of one of O'Nolan's first ventures in Irish into journalism: why no translation of it, even in part, or of a photostated satire, in Irish, of bogus peasant glamour? O'Nolan began for a college mag a serial, in Middle Irish and in the manner of Boccaccio, about Dublin students. He feared no consequences: only two or three of the most eminent scholars at UCD would be able to understand it. Nevertheless Dr Coffey, the president, hauled in the editor and charged him with publishing obscene material in Old Irish. Neither, it transpired, could read the offending prose, and the interview ended amicably. Extracts from this in English might have been more illuminating than the cows which amble across half the relevant page. In order to attract the attention of the editor of the Irish Times and to get a job there, O'Nolan wrote a series of letters to that organ attacking Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain and their whole school of writing. The editor was amused. Might not extracts have amused us too?

At once prodigally wasteful of space and mean with it, this book recalls nothing so much as some glossy recipe book called, say, A Taste of Provence, in which vaguely evocative descriptions of Provencale dishes are overwhelmed by sumptuous artwork. With the single reservation that it is all we have, A Taste of Flann deserves Miss Spurling's strictures, and perhaps one more besides: that its authors seem fatally short of humour. How O'Nolan would have laughed at their pedestrian musings, equivocations and strawless bricks! Yet a horrible doubt assails me: have the authors not too little humour but too much? Is their work a spoof, a brilliant and subtle parody, worthy of the master himself, of its iniquitous genre? Is it Mrs Spurling and I who lack humour, not they?

Well, it is not for me to turn on an ally and former Spectator star, but I do think with respect that Mrs Spurling, perhaps maddened by her Christmas reading, has got hold of the wrong end of one shillelagh. She seems to regard the incomparably funny 'Brother' in 'Cruiskeen Lawn' as one of O'Nolan's 'disguises', 'perhaps the sub- tlest, the most savage and surprising' of all. Come now: surely the Brother is a creation of O'Nolan's, or perhaps a distillation by him from countless surreal conversations overheard and affectionately treasured? No more is he a disguised O'Nolan than Capt Grimes or Mr Samgrass are Waugh disguised.

In the Brother dialogues O'Nolan is indeed surely present. But is he not the polite and patient auditor who is told at the bus stop about the Brother's surprising and now unfashionable views on, say, seals 'all them lads should be destroyed' — and who replies drily, 'That would be a con- siderable task'? The auditor is informed that Dublin Bay seals come out of the water in the middle of the night and steal tomato plants and children — 'they do take a great interest in the chislers. They do be barkin out of them during the daytime at chislers on the beach'. He courteously comments, 'That is most interesting'. He is informed of seals sitting above in the trams when they're standing in the stables at night, upstairs too, looking out in the moonlight with their big moustaches on them, with their wives and the young wans with them, great family people, always were. The auditor respectfully inquires, 'Is that a fact?'

His grave interventions, often austerely moral in tone (`your relative will no doubt be compensated elsewhere for his selfless conduct') link the fantastic to the hum- drum and thus make it funnier still. They remind me powerfully of Michael Whar- ton, creator as Peter Simple of other worlds of earth-linked fantasy, in which fun is not so much by art constructed as by art revealed.

Come to think of it, isn't there a look of Michael Wharton in the snap of O'Nolan which graces the dust-jacket? Two hand- some faces, reserved and sombre, in which a Stygian gloom and pessimism is relieved only by hints of a prodigious humour, itself dark and brooding. Surely these two in- comparable gallows humorists both de- serve to be immortalised rather better than is done here — unless you think, which is most reasonable, that they have already immortalised themselves.