LITERARY CRITICISM:Having trekked through all 26 years of Myles na gCopleen's 'IrishTimes' column, Carol Taaffe argues that it deserves consideration as a work of literature writes Fank McNally - Ireland Through the Looking Glass: Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and Irish Cultural Debate By Carol TaaffeCork University Press, 274pp. €39
ONLY THREE years to go to the centenary celebrations, and Hugh Kenner's rhetorical question still sounds ominously like the last word on Brian O'Nolan. Lamenting that never had so much early promise yielded so little, Kenner asked "Was it the drink was his ruin, or was it the column?" - thereby damning the writer and the journalism profession in one go.
The great Canadian critic at least waited until O'Nolan was dead before delivering that verdict. A similar one had been returned way back in 1946, in literary journal The Bell, when O'Nolan and his famous Irish Times column, Cruiskeen Lawn (written as Myles na gCopaleen), were both still in their prime.
The very first profile of O'Nolan published in Ireland, it suggested his best work (the debut Flann O'Brien novel At Swim-Two-Birds) was already far behind him. Adding insult to journalism's injury, it did not even include drink in the list of suspects for his ruination. His current work (Cruiskeen Lawn), said the profile, was "brilliant but futile".
In Ireland Through the Looking Glass, Carol Taaffe reopens the case for O'Nolan's defence by arguing, however tentatively, that the column deserves consideration as a work of literature. At its early best, she suggests, Cruiskeen Lawn's "endless variations of nonsense, satire, parody, wordplay and wit, and its open-ended nature any number of narratives to be assembled" carried the controlled chaos of At Swim-Two-Birds to another level, and added the disposability of a daily newspaper to its impeccably modernist mix.
In any case, she argues, "as a sprawling mass of comic writing that defies easy classification", Cruiskeen Lawn is unique in Irish letters and "has few parallels anywhere". This makes it at least as worthy of critical consideration as the late, inferior Flann O'Brien novels, which received more attention only because of their genre.
EVEN AS SHE attempts to rehabilitate the column, however, Taaffe also introduces some startling revisionism about its authorship. It has long been common knowledge that there was more than one hand involved in Myles. In fact, the deniability this allowed him probably prevented the axe from falling on O'Nolan's civil-service career (in the Department of "Yokel Government", as Myles called it) even earlier than it did.
The general belief is that he was assisted by two Nialls: his old UCD pals, Sheridan and Montgomery. Literary detectives, including Taaffe, have found only the latter's fingerprints. But having trawled the files, she suggests he wrote far more - at least of the later Myles - than was previously believed.
His papers indicate that in the post-war years, when Cruiskeen Lawn was down to three days weekly, Montgomery was writing nearly one-third of it. He was particularly active in June 1947, for example, when the column spun nearly "two weeks of material from the Institute of Architecture's Yearbook" (Montgomery's day job was as an architect).
THE ANTI-JOYCEAN grudge for which the later Myles was famous also appears to have been largely Montgomery's work; although in his final novel, The Dalkey Archive, Flann O'Brien would take his own grim revenge against the master in whose shadow he and his generation of writers lived.
Taaffe's engaging and insightful book continues what has been something of a Flann O'Brien revival of late, ever since The Third Policeman featured in the wilfully weird American TV series Lost.
The irony is that for many years, that novel was itself lost. Or at least that was the official line. In fact, embarrassed at its rejection by publishers in 1940 - the first setback in what still promised to be a brilliant career - O'Nolan invented a number of cover stories and buried the manuscript.
On its eventual publication in 1967, it was recognised as a small masterpiece: albeit one that defies analysis. Taaffe sees a vague parallel between the strange world occupied by its nameless narrator - who is dead from early in the story, but doesn't realise it - and the alternative universe of neutral Dublin during the war. But she concedes that the book does not bear much contextual reading.
In fact, The Third Policeman's vision of hell (apparently inspired by O'Nolan's childhood experiences of living in the midlands, near Tullamore) seems to be set in pre-independence Ireland, hence the policemen rather than gardaí and references to "parliament" rather than the Dáil.
None of which means anything either, because, as Taaffe argues, despite being a murder mystery of sorts, the novel is closer to the nonsense literature of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear than to conventional crime fiction. Thus her clever title, Ireland Through the Looking Glass: a double-edged reference to Joyce's famous description of Irish art - "the cracked looking glass of a servant" - and to Alice in Wonderland.
The initial failure of The Third Policeman set the course of O'Nolan's next 20 years, which for good or bad - the success of An Béal Bocht apart - would be dominated by the column.
Taaffe has bravely trekked through all 26 years of Cruiskeen Lawn's wonderland, tracing its progress from the ingenious invention of the early days, to a more coherent, conventional satire, then the "slow calcification of comic persona", and the eventual emergence of a somewhat "dour cultural critic".
She agrees with those who complain that O'Nolan was essentially a reactive writer, and that for all his invention, there was a destructive bent that worked against creativity. From At Swim-Two-Birds onwards, he was continually questioning and mocking his own pretensions, along with those of others, "as if the critic were forever overtaking the writer".
But then there was a fundamental contradiction at the centre of O'Nolan's personality, which Taaffe characterises as "conservative subversive".
As a high-ranking civil servant, and also as a writer who had stayed at home, O'Nolan had a stake in the new Ireland, however disappointing it had proved so far. In this he was no different from most of the UCD elite of his era. In 1931, Taaffe notes, there were fewer than 1,700 students registered at the university. Such a privileged minority "could be confident of future success in the Free State and signs of disaffection with the status quo were often quite cosmetic".
So although Cruiskeen Lawn could and did involve some "lacerating self-interrogation", she suggests that O'Nolan also "embodied the very values he mocked". Even some of the values he disagreed with he seems to have internalised. During the Irish Censorship Board's long reign of terror, for example, he never managed to make the black-list, membership of which was a badge of honour for other writers.
IN FACT, AT the start of his second coming as a novelist, with The Hard Life in 1960, O'Nolan hatched a scheme to get his book banned by the "ignorant balloxes". He told his publisher this could be achieved by the mere name of one of the characters: "Father Kurt Fahrt, SJ". The plan was to challenge the ban in the High Court, prove that the book did not offend on any statutory grounds (which he knew to be the case), and collect damages.
Even as he plotted this, however, he was also advising a confused Timothy O'Keeffe not to give any obvious ammunition to the censors in the blurb.
In the event, the conservative in him seems once more to have won out over the subversive. The book was not banned. Paying a dubious compliment, Taaffe comments that: "Again O'Nolan proved that he was the only writer of note working in this period who could successfully negotiate the whims of the Irish censorship authorities."
Frank McNally is an Irish Timesjournalist and writer of An Irishman's Diary