REVIEW OF BOOKS
Richard Luckett on life with Gopaleen and Klop
ACCISS — which, being interpreted, is ' Andy Clarkin's clock is stopped.' It was under this slogan that, in 1952-3, (Sir) Myles na Gopaleen (da) waged war against the Lord Mayor of Dublin. Readers of his column in the Irish Times were exhorted, on sighting their leading civic dignitary, to greet him with the ACCISS salute, one arm up, the other held out horizontally, an apposite reminder that the timepiece outside Clarkin's Pearse Street coal office had long since ground to, and remained at, a halt. More than a few of Gopaleen's audience would have seen an obvious innuendo: ACCISS was not so far removed from ' Axis,' and raised arms as the mayoral car passed through the streets had at least a suggestion of a ' Heil ' to them. And a smaller but significant group knew that their leader was heavily dependent for advice on the counsels of his wife Cis; the real sense of ACCISS, then, was 'Ask Cis.' So Gopaleen haunted Clarkin, by all accounts an amiable and well-meaning man, with a triple fate; and this was only an aspect of his persistent harrassment of the Dublin corporation. When, a few months later, it was mooted that Marshal Tito might be invited to the Emerald Isle for An Tostal, Gopaleen speculated that a councillor, on being asked whether Tito would really appear for the event, would be likely to answer along the lines of "that horse wouldn't stand a chance in any race short of four mile." What about a Titostalisator, then?
It might not have mattered if Myles na Gopaleen had been anyone other than the Principal Officer of the Planning Section of the Department of Local Government, and thus a prominent figure in many controversies closely linked to the city politics of Dublin. In his official capacity he was known by his real name, Brian O'Nolan. It was his happy conviction that his superiors would prove unequal to the task of demonstrating in court that he and (Sir) Myles na Gopaleen (da) were one and the same man. He may have been right, but it was never put to the test; an irate Minister for Local Government made it his business to see that O'Nolan was fired. As a result of the good offices of John Garvin, who has made a witty contribution to this volume of essays* about O'Nolan's personality and work, the action taken was less drastic but no less final; the miscreant was allowed to retire with a small pension, on the grounds of ill-health. Wearing the mantle of Gopaleen he continued to delight readers of the Irish Times; in other guises he contributed columns to unlikely Irish provincial newspapers. His output was remarkable, though from time to time interrupted by periods in hospital; his poor health cannot have been improved by his drinking. For a while he had a column in the Irish edition of the Sunday Dispatch but was dropped after the editor discovered that it was hopeless to Myles; Portraits of Brian O'Nolan edited by Timothy O'Keeffe (Martin Brian and O'Keefe £2.50) remonstrate with him when his copy arrived written in Irish. But here he was merely coming full circle: his original contributions to the Irish Times had been in Irish, and for a time they had attracted to a traditionally protestant, and pro-English paper readers of a very different political hue; yet paradoxically it was the popularity of the Gopaleen column, and the hope of a wider audience, that induced O'Nolan to turn increasingly to English. Before this, as a brilliant student at University College, he had composed Rabelaisian flights in Old Irish for the student magazine; these were read and hugely enjoyed by an audience restricted to the three Old Irish scholars who were O'Nolan's mentors, Their gleeful repetition of the matters divulged therein brought about a confrontation beween the President of the College, who had no Old Irish, and the editor of the magazine, who shared his ignorance. It was a situation which O'Nolan relished greatly.
Most comic writers have enjoyed the collision between fact and fantasy, and perhaps O'Nolan saw in his persecution of Clarkin something akin to Swift's campaign against the astrologer Partridge, which culminated in the mage's vain endeavours to prove that he was not dead. But O'Nolan also had a passion for the devious, which often threatened to make virtuosity, rather than correction, the end of satire. It extended to the way in which he presented his personality, for he was not merely Brian O'Nolan and Myles na Gopaleen, but also Flann O'Brien, and it was as Flann O'Brien that he made his most significant contributions both to literature and to humour. Under this name he wrote A Hard Life, The Dalkey Archive, the posthumously published The Third Policeman and, most memorable of all, At Swim-Two-Birds. At Swim-Two-Birds first appeared in 1939, and in the onset of war caused no major sensation though Joyce, half blind and a necessarily reluctant reader, gave it his enthusiastic approval. Until it was belatedly reprinted it was the world's most stolen book. To Joyce's observation that it embodies the "true comic spirit" no endorsement need be made; the book is a masterpiece. But it is pertinent to remark that no summary can remotely suggest either the comedy or the complication that it involves. Niall Sheridan, another contributor to Timothy O'Keeffe's volume, remembers telling O'Nolan, when he outlined the project, that the ' plot ' wasn't a plot but a conspiracy, and this judgment can hardly be disputed when it is considered that the narrator of the novel is engaged in writing a book about one Dermot Trellis, who has for twenty years voluntarily kept to his bed and is in turn writing a novel about his enemies who are riposting with a novel about Trellis. Joyce's own recipe of "silence, exile and cunning' has here been superseded by the ultracraftiness of those who, in the early years of the USSR, were so engagingly (if ominously) described as 'internal emigres.'
Because At Swim-Two Birds is a great comic novel, because The Third Policeman is its near rival, because O'Nolan is the only writer who has ever really learnt from Joyce, and in his experimentations trumped the other players in the game long before they had even been dealt their cards, any light on the man is worth having. Possibly the degree of illumination cast by Myles is slight, but that is in the nature of the subject. Legends even grew up around him, and even so brief a note as that prefacing the Penguin At Swim
contains inaccuracies. So we must be grateful for a sketch of his early years by his brother,
and for the characterisations offered by his friends. The aim of the editor was to catch something of O'Nolan's quality "before his memory gets snuffed out by pedantry," a worthy endeavour, and in some measure successful. Yet, as J.C.C. Mays remarks, in his
admirably concise study of O'Nolan's literarY output, an essential part of O'Nolan's personality was his zealous guardianship of his privacy: hence the elaborate construction of personae, and also Gopaleen's assaults on pundits and experts, on all who presume to sit in judgement. This attitude was not simplY anti-authoritarian (though O'Nolan's phobias embraced the police): it extended to the spokesmen of any self-righteous group, such , as the literary adviser from the Christian Brothers whose discursive discourse on the evils of drink, appended to part of the novel being written by the narrator, crops up in At Swim, or the Plain People of Ireland whose cony ments adorn the writings of Sir Myles, or the bores whom Gopaleen devastatingly categorises and describes — the Man with the Watch. the Man with the Blade, etc. If, therefore, what we discover about O'Nolan from this book always seems a little tangential, then this is to be expected, for in a way he had made his personality into just that part which he cared to reveal, and given a different day. a'different person, it too would change. We must look through the pages of his work to find him, and as the creator of the Keats/Chapman saga (the uninitiated will simply have to buy or borrow that splendid compilation The Best of Myles), the expositor of the cognate problems of the Steam Man or, ' best of all, the author of At Swim, he has never died. There are men with a comic gift who either I never commit it to paper or, if they try, never fully realise it. They may not be artists, and even if they are their medium may not be literary. Jonah Ustinov (known to the familY friends as Klop) comes into the first categorY. whilst his son — despite his plays — comes into the second. As it is, if anyone today hears the name Ustinov they will naturally think of Peter, and presumably it is the filial achievement that will attract them to this bookt. In his account of his brother's life Kevin O'Nolan demonstrates that a sense of the comic is apt to run in families, and partly for this reason admirers of Peter Johanovich will not be disappointed. Against all the odds, it must be said, for next to the almost invariablY unwitty lives of the wits (I cannot be alone in having been bamboozled by the notion of The Life and Times of George Selwyn, a repute' tion that had perished utterly by even the third volume) amongst the dullest books pos' sible are lives of husbands by widows. It was O'Nolan's view that all biographies are either
too devout, or too distorted in their effort t° debunk, and thus that "biography is the lowest form of letters." Widows, even todaY. tend to promote the view that they were right
to marry their husbands, and the same iril" pulse that prompts them to put pen to paper inhibits its subsequen.t untrammeled flow. Nor, on the whole, is virtue interesting. It was Klop's fortune to marry a woman with a personality as interesting as his own'
and this was not his only unusual achieve; ment. His father left Russia for voluntarY
11 exile after having abjured orthodoxy and become a protestant. He eventually acquired WUrttemberg citizenship and settled in Palestine, where he married a girl by birth half German, a quarter Portugese and a quarter Abyssinia, thus ensuring for his descendants the Ethiopian strain which some have seen as fostering Pushkin' s genius. When the Kaiser's war broke out the Ustinovs, senior, returned to Russia, whilst Klop and his brother, German by birth, enlisted in the German army and there served with gallantry. After the war, against the advice of everyone,Klop ventured into the chaos of revolutionary Russia (he had never visited the country before) to find his parents. It was there that he met Nadia Benois, niece of the stage designer and a painter in her own right. She has now written an entertaining account of his extraordinary background and of their life together, an account that is both frank and loving. The humour doesn't altogether come off; Klop must have been a splendid raconteur but whilst it is easy to see why the stories that Mrs Ustinov reports were funny when told their survival on the page is precarious. It is as a modest but vivid account of a shared life that the book comes alive. It has its moments of comedy, though; the happiest concerns Peter, who at the age of three was taken to a party in the German Embassy. Perched on a sofa beside the aged and dignified wife of the ambassador he chose a lull in the conversation to enquire "Are your from Hamburg?" "Yes," came the reply, "This is correct." "Our cook is also from Hamburg," Peter then observed and added kindly "Let us talk German because you know, you speak rotten English." The refusal to be awed, the concern for language, and the sheer shattering effect are all qualities that O'Nolan would have warmly approved.
Previous page
