Flann O'Brien died 40 years ago today. His daily Cruiskeen Lawn column for The Irish Times, which he wrote as Myles na gCopaleen, introduced such creations as The Brother and the Plain People of Ireland, as seen in the extracts below
THE BROTHER HAS it all worked out.
What?
The war. How we can get through the war here in the Free State. I mean the rationing and brown bread and all that class of thing. The brother has a plan. Begob you'll be surprised when you hear it. A very high view was taken when it was explained in the digs the other night.
What is the nature of this plan?
It's like this. I'll tell you. We all go to bed for a week every month. Every single man, woman and child in the country. Cripples, drunks, policemen, watchmen - everybody. Nobody is allowed to be up. No newspapers, 'buses, pictures or any other class of amusement allowed at all. And no matter who you are you must be stuck inside in the bed there. Readin' a book, of course, if you like. But no getting up stakes.
That strikes me as a curious solution to difficulties in this dynamic iron age.
D'ye see, when nobody is up you save clothes, shoes rubber, petrol, coal, turf, timber and everything we're short of. And food too, remember. Because tell me this - what makes you hungry? It's work that makes you hungry. Work and walking around and swallying pints and chawin' the rag at the street corner. Stop in bed an' all you'll ask for is an odd slice of bread. Or a slice of fried bread to make your hair curly, says you. If nobody's up, there's no need for anybody to do any work because everybody in the world does be workin' for everybody else.
I see. In a year therefore you would effect a saving of 25 per cent in the consumption of essential commodities.
Well now I don't know about that but you'd save a quarter of everything and that would be enough to see us right.
But why get up after a week?
The bakers, man. The bakers would have to get up to bake more bread, and if wan is up, all has to be up. Do you know why? Because damn the bit of bread your men the bakers would make for you if the rest of us were in bed. Your men couldn't bear the idea of everybody else being in bed and them up working away in the bakery. The brother says we have to make allowances for poor old human nature. That's what he called it. Poor old human nature. And begob he's not far wrong.
Very interesting. He would do well to communicate this plan to the responsible Government department.
And you're not far wrong there yourself. Bye-bye, here's me bus!
ON A RECENT Thursday I went to the pictures and saw a tall gentleman called Randolph Scott in a film called The Spoilers. At the end of the picture Randolph gets into a fight with another man in a pub. At the end of the fight there is no pub. The fight is so fierce that it is reduced to smithereens. Randolph, being the bad lot, gets a frightful thrashing, a frtfull throshou, afrajfyl tromaking, a fruitful . . .
The Plain People of Ireland: Whatsamatter?
Myself: Feel queer . . . dark . . . nase blooding . . . giddy . . . where am I?
The Plain People of Ireland: Ah sure you often meet that in the pictures too - that's altitude. You're too high up. No oxygen. The pilots do often have a black out. Come on down lower in the page and you'll be game ball.
Myself: All right. Thanks.
The Plain People of Ireland: Are you okay now?
Myself: Yes, thanks. I'm feeling all right now. Well, as I was saying, Randolph gets a frightful hiding, he is a terrible mess when the picture ends. But the following night I happened to see the same Randolph in another picture called, I think The Texan. All I can say is, fit and well he was looking after the hammering he got the night before.
The Plain People of Ireland: Will you have a bit of sense man. The Texan is an old picture. A real ould stager man. But The Spoilers is a new picture. It doesn't say because you see the one on wan night and then d'other on another -
Myself: Say no more. I realise I have been hasty. I will think before I shoot my mouth off next time. Yes. Let me see. Not bad down here. sort of . . . cool. The daddy was a steeplejack but I was never a man for heights. Though many's a time I bought an irish-timesful of chips from the Italian chap Vertigo.
What's this I have in me pocket? Dirty scrap of paper. Some newspaper heading I cut out. "LANGUAGE IN DANGER." Of course if I was a cultured European I would take this to mean that some dumb barbarous tonguetide threatens to drown the elaborate delicate historical machinery for human intercourse, the subtle articulative devices of communications, the miracle of human speech that has developed a thousand light-years over the ordnance datum, orphic telepathy three sheets to the wind and so on. But I know better.
Being an insulated western savage with thick hair on the soles of my feet. I immediately suspect that it is that fabulous submythical erseperantique patter, the Irish, that is under this cushion - beg pardon - under discussion.
Yes. Twenty years ago, most of us were tortured by the inadequacy of even the most civilised, the most elaborate, the most highly developed languages to the exigencies of human thought, to the nuances of inter-psychic communion, to the expression of the silent agonised pathologies of the post-Versailles epoch. Our strangled feelings, despairing of a sufficiently subtle vehicle, erupted into the crudities of the war novel. But here and there a finer intellect scorned this course. Tzara put his unhappy shirt on his dada (Fr. for hobby-horse as you must surely know), poor Jimmy Joyce abolished the King's English, Paulsy Picasso starting cutting out paper dolls and I . . .
I?
As far as I remember, I founded the Rathmines branch of the Gaelic League. Having nothing to say, I thought at that time that it was important to revive a distant language in which absolutely nothing could be said.