It goes without Synge

BOOKS

HENRY TUBE

Brian O'Nolan, alias Flann O'Brien the novelist, alias Myles na gCopaleen the columnist, died in 1966. Not having followed his column as it appeared in the Irish Times during the last twenty-nine years of his life, I cannot claim to have read him, still less hailed him, at a time when it was neither profitable nor popular. The publication of The Best of Myles, a selec- tion from this delectable column edited by his brother, Kevin O'Nolan (MacGibbon and Kee 50s), enables me to endorse the author's own opinion : . . it goes without Synge that many of my writings are very fine indeed.'

Flann O'Brien seems to have received in his lifetime even less of his due meed than Myles. True, At Swim-Two-Birds was first published in 1939, but that was scarcely the year to choose for one of the literary debuts of the century and the book was not reissued until 1960. Since then the excellent Mr MacGibbon and the no less excellent Mr Kee have earned the thanks of a generation by publishing The Hard Life (1961), The Dalkey Archive (1964) and The Third Policeman (1967).

With Brian O'Nolan we will not here meddle. As Myles writes: `It only occurred to me the other day that I will have biographers. Prob- ably Hone will do me first and then there will be all sorts of English persons writing books "interpreting" me, describing the beautiful women who influenced my "life," trying to put -Irty work in its true and prominent place against the general background of mankind, and no doubt seeking to romanticise what is essentially an austere and chastened character, saddened as it has been by the contemplation of human folly.' But we need have no scruples about put- ting a glass on Myles himself, or for that matter Flann O'Brien. Were they not expressly called into being to wield the pen, and no quarter given or received? Is not the use of an alias, by writer as much as by criminal, the mark of your serious operator, the man (I speak now of the writer) for whom words are life, while what usually passes for it is only This is not quite as specious a thought as it sounds. Myles and, more subtly, Flann O'Brien concerned themselves with the weakness and badness of humanity (Poor suffering Hugh Manity,' as Myles knew him), and located these not so much in any conscious malevolence as in a dire combination of ignorance, compla- cency and lazy thinking. Why, in a world for the most part fair and smiling, whose inhabi- tants seem in theory to have almost limitless mental and physical abilities, should there be more often cause for black anger than for satisfaction, let alone elation? Because Enemy Number One is always weaving his nets. And who is Enemy Number One? Hugh Manity's own darling creature, the commonplace : the cliché of word, thought and deed.

No Red Cross knight ever pursued dragon, no policeman murderer, with half the zest and cunning of Myles on the tail of cliché. He beards it most openly and with least of a smile on his face where it hurts him most, that is, in the field of 'Criticism, Art, Letters': 'Art has nothing to do with the "delineation of creation," whatever about the creation of delineations. And it is news to me that there are still people in the world who are still brooding on that tawdry old conundrum, "the meaning of life." Would readers who are troubled in this regard write to me in confidence, enclosing a stamped addressed envelope?'

But cornering it in its weaker moments, among literary lollipops or limited editions, he grows more insouciant: 'You know that thing of Yeats beginning When you are old, Dan Grey, and full of sleep? Well, I have translated it into rather fine French.'

'Limited edition of 25 copies printed on steam- rolled pig's liver and bound with Irish thongs in desiccated goat-hide quilting, a book to treasure for all time but to lock away in hot weather.'

Through the thickets of the law-court, the legal department, •the letter to the paper, the leading article, the overheard conversation, the hobby and the home-doctor and home-lawyer, our hero stalks his glib prey. He compiles a Catechism of Cliché: 'What, as to the quality of solidity, impervious- ness, and firmness, are facts?

Hard.

And as to temperature?

Cold.

With what do facts share this quality of

frigidity?

Print.'

And he runs (where?) to earth those miserable men whom cliché has rotted body and soul, men who have passed beyond the mere word or phrase to the complete built-in conversation, who have no sooner spotted a likely victim but they have pickled him in aspic for the duration: The Man Who Can Pack, The Man Who Soles His Own Shoes, The Man Who Can Brian O'Nolan Carve, The Man Who Buys Wholesale. Emerg- ing dazed from his own encounters with these

monsters Myles offers this indispensable

advice: 'Is there, you may ask, any remedy, any way out for weaklings like you, is there any hope for the man who is too cowardly to insult such "people"? Well, don't go out at all is the only thing I can think of. Stay at home in bed,

Windows closed, blinds drawn, electric fire going full blast. Only the really tough bores will follow you there—and after all they're your relatives, aren't they? You can't get away from them, can you?'

But in order to run cliché to earth, Myles has to meet it (where?) on its own ground; for we have reached a point at which our language is as over-exposed as our beauty-spots. The remedy is a slow and painful one, and for the man who undertakes it not generally as lucrative as simply turning out more picture. postcards of the same old view. It is to alter the view, sod by sod, to re-live every experience, to• re-form every thought that the experience gives (what?) rise to, and to re-phrase every ex- pression of that thought. Alternatively, if you want quicker returns, you can re-frame the old picture-postcard in sucb a way that it sticks out a mile in all its mind-boggling absurdity. The first method is that of writers like Rabe- Grillet, Sarraute and Borges, the second, in the time-honoured English comic tradition, that of Myles na gCopaleen.

Flann O'Brien uses both methods. Keeping the front of your mind focused on the joke, the Irish blarney, the comicality of Joyce

serving in a Skerries bar and denying all re- sponsibility for Ulysses, of St Augustine en-

countered in a cave under the sea and having nothing of interest to say, of legendary Irish heroes who mingle with cardboard figures from Hollywood Westerns, and maintaining a polite and conversational tone, he contrives to slip into the back of your mind a rarer and more disturbing headful than you bargained for.

The implications of this headful may be sug- gested from an incident in The Hard Life. The narrator's brother gives a patent medicine be has concocted to his uncle, a not particularly pleasant character of the Bore class. The uncle eventually dies while in Rome on a visit to the Pope. The narrator asks his brother: 'Have you no compunction about your Gravid Water?' and the brother replies: 'Not at all.

I think his metabolism went astray. But any- body who takes patent medicines runs a calcu-

lated risk.' Now there was no malice on either side. The uncle (like the brother, a recurring figure in both Myles's and O'Brien's work) is an ignorant and bigoted petty tyrant, the brother a bright, commercially talented opportunist who would have been as happy to see his uncle

cured as killed. Probably happier, since it would have been a better recommendation for his product. But he is not put out, he sees nothing blameworthy in his complete disregard for the consequences of his action, any more than ha uncle did in bringing up his nephews with an eye only for his own convenience.

The Third Policeman, published posthu-

mously, though apparently completed (perhaps in an earlier version) as early as 1940, carries this theme to its apogee. The hero is a kind of successful playboy of the western world (and it is surely no accident that for Myles 'nothing in the whole galaxy of fake is com- parable with Synge') and iti landscape is an Ireland bathed in the soft light of paradise ot a picture-postcard. The surface (and I do not

refer to the steam-rolled pig's liver) of the book is as light and charming as a kindly fairy-tale; you will never again hold anything against policemen after meeting these three representatives of the force. Furthermore, it is decorated with a series of scholarly-type notes on the inimitable savant de Selby (who appears as De Selby in The Da!key Archive and whose mad brainwork is easily recognisable in Myles's 'Research Bureau' section), a character whose abhorrence of cliche carries him too far in the other direction, quite beyond reason: 'His con- clusion was that "hammering is anything but what it appears to be." ' But the faint whiff of sulphur, of some in- tangible frightfulness, which one gets at first reading and which is confirmed by the last chapter, grows stronger at every re-reading. It is a novel which compares, both for its highly worked style and its metaphysical energy, with Wuthering Heights, The Master of Ballantrae and The Justified Sinner, but which never ceases to bubble along like Myles on one of his best topics. 'It is,' as its narrator remarks when shown Policeman MacCruiskeen's carved box, 'nearly too nice to talk about it.' To this pitch does our penchant for the commonplace carry us, that we have no need of the Devil, since we do his work quite handsomely for him; and to this pitch does Myles's hilarious pursuit of the cliche carry him, that Flann O'Brien speaks with the tongues of angels and yet shows every cause why De Selby should want to 'destroy the whole world.'