Flann O'Brien - Early writings, Novels, Journalism

Writer and journalist, born in Strabane, Co Tyrone, W Northern Ireland, UK. He studied at Dublin, and his first and major novel was At Swim-Two-Birds (1939, translated into Gaelic, 1956). A civil servant, he contributed a column to the Irish Times for some 20 years under his Irish pseudonym. Best known as an idiosyncratic newspaper columnist, various anthologies appeared after his death - The Best of Myles (1968), The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman and the Brother (1976), and Myles From Dublin (1985).

Flann O'Brien (October 5, 1911, Strabane, County Tyrone Ireland – April 1, 1966 Dublin) is a pseudonym of the twentieth century Irish novelist and satirist Brian O'Nolan (in Irish Brian Ó Nuallain), best known for his novels An Béal Bocht, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. He also wrote many satirical columns in the Irish Times under the name Myles na gCopaleen.

Most of O'Nolan's writings were occasional pieces published in periodicals, which explains why his work has only recently come to enjoy the considered attention of literary scholars.

Early writings

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

O'Nolan wrote prodigiously during his years as a student at University College Dublin, contributing to the student magazine Comhthrom Féinne under various guises, in particular the pseudonym Brother Barnabas. Think it over.'

In 1934 O'Nolan and his student friends founded a short-lived magazine called Blather. The writing here, though clearly bearing the marks of youthful bravado, again somewhat anticipates O'Nolan's later work, in this case his Cruiskeen Lawn column as Myles na gCopaleen:

Blather is here.

Novels

Flann O'Brien novels have attracted a wide following for their bizarre humour and Modernist metafiction. At Swim-Two-Birds works entirely with borrowed (and stolen) characters from other fiction and legend, on the grounds that there are already far too many existing fictional characters, while The Third Policeman has a superficial plot about an Irish country youth's vision of hell, played against a satire of academic debate on an eccentric philosopher, and finds time to introduce the atomic theory of the bicycle. The Dalkey Archive features a character who encounters a penitent, elderly James Joyce (who never wrote any of his books and seeks only to join the Jesuit Order) working as a busboy in the resort of Skerries and a scientist looking to suck all of the air out of the world. Other books by Flann O'Brien include The Hard Life (a fictional autobiography meant to be his "misterpiece"), and An Béal Bocht, (translated from the Irish as The Poor Mouth), which was a parody of Tomás Ó Criomhthain's autobiography An t-Oileánach .

As a novelist, O'Nolan was powerfully influenced by James Joyce. Indeed, he was at pains to attend the same college as Joyce, and Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann has established that O'Nolan, fully in keeping with his literary temperament, used a forged interview with Joyce's father John Joyce as part of his application. He was none the less sceptical of the Cult of Joyce which overshadowed much of Irish writing, "I declare to God if I hear that name Joyce one more time I will surely froth at the gob."

Flann O'Brien is rightly considered a major figure in twentieth century Irish literature.

At Swim-Two-Birds is now recognized as one of the most significant Modernist novels before 1945. At Swim-Two-Birds was one of the last books that James Joyce read and he praised it to O'Nolan's friends - praise which was subsequently used for years as a jacket blurb on reprints of O'Brien's novels. Southern Illinois University Press has set up a Flann O'Brien Center and begun publishing all of O'Nolan's works.

O'Brien influenced the science fiction writer and conspiracy theory satirist Robert Anton Wilson, who has O'Brien's character De Selby, a would-be obscure intellectual in The Third Policeman, appear in Wilson's Illuminati Trilogy.

Journalism

The third of twelve children, O'Nolan became a civil servant like his father. Under the pen name of Myles na gCopaleen ("Myles of the little horses" or "Myles of the ponies"), O'Nolan published a regular column in The Irish Times, titled "Cruiskeen Lawn." That Myles na gCopaleen was the pen name of a civil servant was no secret, and O'Nolan was eventually forced to retire for satirising a government minister in his newspaper column. The middle aged O'Nolan proved unable to make profitable use of his enforced leisure, so that he never regained the heights of his early work.

"Cruiskeen Lawn", meaning "Little Brimming Jug," is an example of the sort of bilingual humour O'Nolan frequently employed. Because O'Nolan's first language was Irish, he felt free in "Cruiskeen Lawn" to ridicule linguistic nationalists and their delusions of independence.

"Cruiskeen Lawn" featured a number of regular characters, such as the "PLAIN PEOPLE OF IRELAND" [sic] who periodically interrupt Myles's flights of fancy to demand clarification or explanation, the poets Keats and Chapman whose adventures always end in an elaborate pun, and "the Brother," and "the Da".

The "Cruskeen Lawn" pieces have been collected into a number of books, such as The Best of Myles and Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn.