MIRTH & MISERY

Mention his name--or, rather, any of the three names he used--and it is like one of those codes used by secret societies. If you get a blank stare, you know you’re dealing with one of the uninitiated. But if there is an immediate smile (always a smile), you know you’re in the company of a fellow member, another admirer of Brian O’Nolan, or Flann O’Brien, or Myles na Gopaleen.

A good case can be made that after James Joyce, Myles (the name Dubliners use) was Ireland’s greatest modern writer. But even though all his books remain in print 32 years after his death, he is not well-known outside his native country.

Now, however, a penetrating biography by Anthony Cronin, “No Laughing Matter” (Fromm International, 1998), is raising interest in Myles’ life and in his work as the author of five novels and a remarkable newspaper column that ran for 26 years and endures in three collections.

A new edition of his first novel, “At Swim-Two-Birds,” was published last week by Dalkey Archive Press. In March, the only film based on his fiction was shown at the Dublin Film Festival. The screening sold out, forcing a move to a larger theater, and it sold out. That the first cinematic expression of this quintessentially Irish work was made by an Austrian, in German, titled “In Schimmen-Swei-Vogel,” would make perfect sense in Myles’ world.

All his work glows not just with euphoric language, but with deadpan hilarity and a commitment to irreverence driven by skepticism of anything remotely serious or somber. (“If university education were universally available and availed of,” he wrote, “the country would collapse in one generation.”)

But the biography reveals this writer of splendid comedy to be essentially a sad man of many gloomy demons, not least his firm belief in Manichaeism, the ancient philosophy that human life is a battleground of Good versus Evil and that the latter always has fresh troops.

Myles took a well-developed Irish pleasure in bitterness. Much of it was directed at himself: He systematically drank himself to death, seven months shy of his 55th birthday.

On a recent mild Saturday afternoon, Cronin--who was a friend and drinking companion of Myles’--came to the Westbury Hotel here to speak about him. It was a First Communion Saturday in Ireland, and the hotel’s spacious upstairs lounge was packed with celebrating families. Cronin suggested the bar and settled in for talk and coffee.

“That’s such a loaded word, ‘friend,’ ” he said. “He had no friends, really. But I suppose I was, yes, in a way. I was somebody he found it possible to talk with. . . .”

At 73, Cronin has become a grand old man of Irish letters with an international reputation; he is an active and influential player in the blood sport that is Dublin’s literary life. Perhaps his own finest book is “Dead As Doornails” (Poolbeg Press, 1976), a portrait of literary and bohemian Dublin in the ‘40s and ‘50s. One chapter starts with a description of Myles as “a small man whose appearance somehow combined elements of the priest, the baby-faced Chicago gangster, the petty bourgeois malt drinker and the Dublin literary gent.”

Creating Literature in a Second Language

Brian O’Nolan was the name with which he was born, in 1911 in the Ulster town of Strabane, near the Donegal Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking area. Irish Gaelic was the language of home, yet four of his five novels would be written in English: Like Beckett and Nabokov, he did much of his most important writing in what was a second language to him.

“His English, especially in ‘At Swim,’ he treats with that care and scrutiny people used to give Latin in the 18th century,” Cronin said, sipping coffee. “It was kind of a remote language because he read English before he was allowed to speak it.

“He also, like most people in this country, has fun with English. We take it as a rather marvelous invention which hasn’t always been here.”

The O’Nolans moved to Dublin when Brian was 11, and he entered a school run by the Christian Brothers, of whom he later would write: “Though they were not by any means uniformly savage, the worst of them were scarcely human at all. . . . I would not be bothered today to denounce such people as sadists, brutes, psychotics, I would simply dub them criminal and expect to see them jailed.”

He entered the Irish civil service and in 1939 published “At Swim-Two-Birds” in England, under the name Flann O’Brien. “There were rules in the civil service about publishing under your own name, easily circumvented by a nom de plume,” Cronin explained. “Even though everyone knew who the author was.

“Flann is a very rare name,” he continued. “I’ve only known one other person named Flann. It’s delightful, though; it has a real literary ring to it, doesn’t it? Perfect.” A man politely eavesdropping on the conversation said, “You know now, my father was from East Clare, and there’s a church out there, St. Flannen’s. Did you know that?”

Cronin smiled. “I didn’t. But I’m sure Myles did.”

“At Swim” attracted little attention, though it was noticed by Graham Greene and by Joyce himself, who said the author was “a real writer, with the true comic spirit.” He called it “a really funny book.”

It actually is three books in one, each with its own opening: The protagonist is a writer who creates characters who start to plot against him and eventually start writing about him. Over the course of “At Swim’s” 315 pages, we come to know “The Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class,” mythological Irish heroes, bone-idle students and Shanahan, arguably the greatest barroom bore in literature. There is wise humor throughout. In a dissertation on evil, the author says: “Put a thief among honest men, and they will eventually relieve him of his watch.”

It’s a “book of amazing virtuosity,” said Cronin, “far beyond the compass of most novelists.” Dylan Thomas read it and called it “just the book to give your sister, if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.” But it sold precisely 244 copies over the next dozen years, until it was issued in a small American edition that sold moderately.

Flann O’Brien’s other novels were equally challenging. “The Third Policeman” is a strange, chillingly funny description “of the world of the dead and the damned, where none of the rules and laws (not even gravity) holds good.” O’Nolan completed it in 1940, but when it was quickly rejected by a publisher, he kept it in a drawer, telling people he had lost it on the train. It finally was published posthumously in 1967.

In 1941, he published his only novel in Gaelic, “An Beal Bocht,” searing satire that Cronin calls “an astonishing description of the human condition. Human life reduced to the basics. Funny, oh, God. But it’s much more than just a joke.”

More than 30 years would pass before it would be translated into English as “The Poor Mouth.” Meanwhile, aimed at the limited Gaelic-reading audience, “An Beal Bocht” brought in practically no money and became O’Nolan’s third commercial failure in a row. He claimed he didn’t care, that he had achieved his goal of creating a masterpiece in his beloved mother tongue.

And he wrote no more fiction for 20 years.

Never far from a perverse worldview, he seems to have decided, Cronin said, that if the English publishing world rejected him, he would reject it, with silence.

“A tragedy,” Cronin continued. “There was no publisher or agent fussing over him, advising him if the next thing to do was the right thing.”

Finally, the success of a new edition of “At Swim” spurred him to write two short novels: “The Dalkey Archive,” in which the eternal war of Good and Evil rages especially fierce; and “The Hard Life,” whose characters and themes include Jesuit Father Kurt Fahrt and a plot to enlist the Vatican’s support of public lavatories for women.

Flann O’Brien “was an Irish realist, not an Irish romantic,” said Cronin.

“If he owes any of his popularity to his Irishness, it is not because he presents the place in a rosy or picturesque way,” he said. “And if he is, right enough, an Irish humorist, he is certainly not an ‘Oirish’ one.”

At Home, His Columns Hit a Nerve

Among the people of Ireland, however, O’Nolan was best known and loved for the column in the Irish Times that he wrote as Myles na Gopaleen (Myles of the Little Horses).

“He got the name,” Cronin said, “from a book by Gerald Griffin, very famous in the 19th century, called ‘The Collegians,’ which was then turned into a play and then an opera, ‘The Lily of Killarney.’ So ‘Myles na Gopaleen’ isn’t as abstruse as it seems. Well, maybe it’s more so.”

The column, which first appeared in October 1940 and ran until O’Nolan’s death, “was almost holy writ to intellectual Dubliners,” said Cronin. “Its humor became their humor, its mode of response to many sorts of situations, public and private, became their mode of response.”

It was so ingeniously elastic that anything could appear in it; it was a machine with many moving parts. To name just three: the Plain People of Ireland, a cunning group, “fond of a drop,” who engage cliche and faked ignorance to make their point; Keats and Chapman, a couple of wandering beyond-effete poets who go to great lengths to produce epigrams disguised as puns; and The Brother, a hapless but arrogant figure who has an answer (usually wrong) to all the problems of life.

Myles was not only the writer, but also a figure in the column who had been everywhere, done everything. He could, on occasion, be a publisher announcing a new book: “Limited edition of 25 copies printed on steam-rolled pig’s liver and bound with Irish thongs in a desiccated goat-hide quilting, a book to treasure for all time but to lock away in hot weather.” He had been Einstein’s partner, studied music with Scarlatti, ran colleges, huge corporations and banks. At home he was known as Sir Myles, or “The Da.”

He would produce three or four of these columns a week, often writing them in batches on Sunday afternoons, “hammering them out on his Underwood typewriter,” Cronin said, “with scarcely any hesitation or apparent agonizing.”

But he wasn’t paid much for them, and in 1953, financial disaster struck: Because of his constant lampooning of politicians (including his own immediate superior) in his column, the civil service forced him to resign. He took a small pension and tried hustling work as a freelance writer but didn’t have much success. Cronin’s book quotes heartbreaking letters that O’Nolan wrote begging publishers for work.

A Life That’s Tragic--and Comic

His life became one of awful routine. Delivering his column to the Times office early in the morning, he would retreat to the pub and nearly every day of the week had to be helped home by midafternoon. He never traveled, had acquaintances but few friends, had no interest in food, art, music or anything really except pounding out another column and getting to the pub to start drinking all over again.

“When licensing hours changed in Dublin for closing time,” Cronin recalls, “everyone knew the new rules except Myles. But he always knew exactly when opening time was.”

He was married in his late 30s, but, Cronin said, “I could uncover no hint of sex in his entire life.” His wife, Evelyn, moved them into a one-story house with no stairs for her husband to climb or fall down.

His life can be viewed as tragic, but he seemed to live in a world where comedy was inescapable.

Consider the first Bloomsday pilgrimage. In “Ulysses,” Joyce had traced a day in the life of fictitious Dubliners Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. June 16, 1954, was the 50th anniversary of that day, and Myles decided to gather some friends to follow Bloom and Dedalus’ steps through the city.

“The plan was an ambitious one,” recalls Cronin, one of the five men involved. “The cityscape was to be traversed almost in its entirety.”

Two horse-drawn carriages, the kind still used at funerals then, were hired and the pilgrims assembled in the morning at a friend’s house, next to the Martello Tower where “Ulysses” begins. Spirits were high and became more so when, as Cronin says, the host “gallantly set out a tray of drinks.” One led to another; the pilgrimage never made it past the first pub.

Later that night the friends found themselves in a suburban pub. The landlord, spotting the carriages and Myles dressed in black, came over and said, “Nobody too close, I trust?” Myles said it was a friend, a fellow by the name of James Joyce. The publican inquired if he meant the local plastering contractor. “No,” grunted Myles. “The writer.”

“Ah, the sign writer!” the publican exclaimed, happy to have solved the mystery. “Little Jimmy Joyce from Newton Park Avenue! Sure, wasn’t he sitting on that stool there Wednesday last.”

Even when Myles would try to be serious, comedy sought him out. He was the rare writer who could recognize it and bring it into the world. Even his death had a wink about it. As the last sentence in Cronin’s biography notes, “He died peacefully and rather unexpectedly on 1 April 1966. April Fools’ Day.”

When I first read him, I was struck by the originality, the true test of originality is that there are no imitators, writers can figure out other writers, how they do things. But no creative writer I know has truly figured out (O’Nolan’s) technique. He’s not a minor novelist but one of the greatest and most important writers of the century.- Pete Hamill

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--From “The Third Policeman”

Reprinted by permission of Dalkey Archive Press

I put my hand into my pocket to see if my wallet was there. It was, smooth and warm like the hand of a good friend. When I found that I had not been robbed, I decided to talk to [this stranger] genially and civilly, see who he was and ask him to direct me. . . . I made up my mind not to despise the assistance of anybody who could help me, in however small a way. . . .

“More luck to you,” I said.

“More power to yourself,” he answered dourly.

Ask him his name and occupation and inquire what is his destination.

“I do not desire to be inquisitive, sir,” I said, “but would it be true to mention that you are a bird-catcher?”

“Not a bird-catcher,” he answered.

“A tinker?”

“Not that.”

“A man on a journey?”

“No, not that.”

“A fiddler?”

“Not that one.”

I smiled at him in good-humoured perplexity and said:

“Tricky-looking man, you are hard to place and it is not easy to guess your station. You seem very contented in one way, but then again you do not seem to be satisfied. What is your objection to life?”

He blew little bags of smoke at me and looked at me closely from behind the bushes of hair which were growing about his eyes.

“Is it life?” he answered. “I would rather be without it,” he said, “for there is a queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon.”