English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Irish Times         

Flann O'Brien. At War. Edited and introduced by John Wyse Jackson. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2003. 191 pp. $13.95.

By Wim Van Mierlo, University of London

            Under the nom de plume Myles na gCopaleen, the Irish novelist Flann O’Brien published his witty, acerbic columns called “Cruiskeen Lawn” (a mock-Irish title signifying “a full cup”) in The Irish Times. He began the column in 1940, first in Gaelic then increasingly in English, and continued it off and on in the Times and a score of Irish provincial newspapers until his death in 1966. This new collection of Myles na cGopaleen's columns, lovingly edited by John Wyse Jackson, is the American edition of At War, which first appeared in London in 1999, and offers some further selections from Myles's columns, covering the years of the second world war.

The figure of Myles is a delightfully vituperative curmudgeon who lambastes the ills of society, criticizes government inefficiency, scorns the self-centeredness of Irish literary coteries, and caustically ridicules the stupidity of the middle classes, all with a roundabout sharpness and absurd humor that veers from the slapstick to the ingenious. For maximum effect, O'Brien deliberately exaggerates the foibles and dadas of his persona Myles, or that of Myles’s many larger-than-life incarnations such as the old grey fella, the brother, Sir Myles na cGopaleen, the da; the plain people of Ireland, Keats and Chapman. The absurdity of Myles's campaigns is no better illustrated than in the range of topics he tackles: the Atomic bomb, alcoholism, books, the civil service, dentistry, emigration, the Free State government, the Gaelic language, international relations, journalism, the literary establishment, opium, “politics, polite learning and the strangeness of the times” (26), public houses, science, the war, and so on—or, to put it briefly, life and society in all its diverse and multiple aspects. With the right kind of mind, it is easy to take to Myles's silly and at times bizarre humor as well as his adept and versatile way at handling language, the puns and endless digressions, his imitations of the Dublin lingo; others may find his jokes all too plain and easy, the writing without great depth or significance. Yet however comic the overtones, he is taking Dublin and Irish life to task. On the whole, Myles’s newspaper outbursts are a grotesque but at heart vitriolic survey of a self-inflicted paralysis that, according to the writer Flann O’Brien, held Irish society and culture in its grip.

            Flann O'Brien's newspaper contributions have not yet been edited in full, but have been appearing piecemeal in collections since his death. For the interest of literary history, a complete edition seems overdue. Earlier collections, the first of which were edited by the writer’s brother, Kevin O’Nolan, in the 1960s, are still in print and offer the reader a decent cross-section of Myles's writing, but even though these collections are representative of the four million words or so that together constitute Myles’s newspaper output, one does not get a sense of the totality, or of the progression, the occasion, the effects, and the contexts of the column. The items followed each other in The Irish Times with a clear sense of direction, as a topic addressed on one day was very often continued on the next. What prompted O’Brien to tackle a particular topic? How did he move from one column to the next? What daily events was he or was he not responding to? These questions simply cannot now be answered without recourse to the original newspapers. Most of the earlier collections do not even list the sources where the column was originally published, so that every sense of chronology is lost. Commendably, At War is an exception to that, conveniently placing dates and page references to The Irish Times in an appendix. Yet even here there is something misleading.  Limiting himself to the war years, the editor picked pieces in English that to him seemed most interesting and omitted any that were already published. What he does not mention is that the Best of Myles (1968) roughly covers the same period, so that there is more than a considerable amount of overlap between the two volumes.

Personal taste was definitely the guiding rationale behind selecting the pieces for At War—and for all other collections for that matter. Jackson does not hesitate to stress the literary quality of Myles na gCopaleen. By the same token, one has to admit that what argues against a complete edition is probably the question of the column’s unevenness: writing under pressure, and increasingly suffering from the vicissitudes of drink, O’Brien was not always able to sustain that same high-quality of humor, and some of the columns, as we can see even in the present volume, do not live up to the mark.

Nevertheless, even though ephemeral, the column forms a central part of O’Brien’s œuvre not just in a literary but also in a political and ideological sense. I do not entirely support the claims that are often made for O’Brien’s postmodernism. In the columns Myles indulges in masks and personae, but the tenor is too much straightforward leg-pulling to be truly postmodern. The columns are thoroughly enjoyable for their humor, their cleverness, their play on words and any other inherently literary quality, while of course the pseudo-scientific rambling or the opinionated drivel that pour from Myles's pen must be read as counterpart to some of the outlandish philosophical or pseudo-scientific gibberish that the protagonists in O’Brien’s fiction turn out, but the driving force behind Myles’s column is not solely literary. It cannot be when he writes so vehemently and passionately about censorship, government ideology, the intellectual and literary world of Dublin, language and the Gaelic question, or Ireland’s alleged neutrality during the war. Behind the “literary” nonsense that Myles produces tongue-in-cheek, there is a good deal of the world and of Irish society in the column that interacts with the newspaper around him but that remains largely hidden to the reader of this volume.

But these are not serious objections; just a plea for more. At War remains a thoroughly enjoyable addition to Flann O’Brien’s canon and will provide much pleasure to readers who relish Myles's journalistic rambles and ramblings. And lest we forget, that too was O’Brien’s purpose in writing the column, what kept him at his desk day after day, until personal problems interfered. In Myles’s own words, he could never get enough of any particular question that happened to come his way: “I will have more to say on this subject in a day or two, and by heavens it will be worth reading” (38).