Flann O'Brien

Brian O'Nolan (Brian Ó Nualláin; 5 October 1911 – 1 April 1966), his pen name being Flann O'Brien, was an Irish civil service official, novelist, playwright and satirist, who is now considered a major figure in twentieth-century Irish literature.

Born in Strabane, County Tyrone, he is regarded as a key figure in modernist and postmodern literature.

His English language novels, such as At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, were written under the O'Brien pen name.

His many satirical columns in The Irish Times and an Irish-language novel, An Béal Bocht, were written under the name Myles na gCopaleen.

O'Brien's novels have attracted a wide following both for their unconventional humour and as prominent examples of modernist metafiction.

As a novelist, O'Brien was influenced by James Joyce.

He was nonetheless skeptical of the "cult" of Joyce, saying "I declare to God if I hear that name Joyce one more time I will surely froth at the gob."

O'Brien's father, Michael Vincent O'Nolan, was a pre-independence official in HM Customs Service, a role that required frequent moves between cities and towns in England, Scotland and Ireland.

Although of apparently trenchant Irish republican views, he did, because of his role and employment, need to be discreet about them.

At the formation of the Irish Free State in 1921, O'Nolan senior joined the Irish Revenue Commissioners.

O'Brien's career as a writer extended from his student days, through his years in the Irish civil service and the years following his resignation.

O'Brien's mother, Agnes (née Gormley), was also from an Irish republican family in Strabane, and this, then and now largely nationalist and Catholic town, formed somewhat of a base for the family during an otherwise peripatetic childhood.

Brian was the third of 12 children; Gearóid, Ciarán, Roisin, Fergus, Kevin, Maeve, Nessa, Nuala, Sheila, Niall, and Micheál (in that period, known as the Gaelic Revival, giving one’s children Gaelic names was somewhat of a political statement.) Though relatively well-off and upwardly mobile, the O'Nolan children were home-schooled for part of their childhood using a correspondence course created by his father, who would send it to them from wherever his work took him.

It was not until his father was permanently assigned to Dublin that Brian and his siblings regularly attended school.

O'Brien attended Synge Street Christian Brothers School, of which his novel The Hard Life contains a semi-autobiographical depiction.

The Christian Brothers in Ireland had a reputation for excessive, prolific and unnecessary use of violence and corporal punishment, which sometimes inflicted lifelong psychological trauma upon their pupils.

Blackrock College, however, where O'Brien's education continued, was run by the Holy Ghost Fathers, who were considered more intellectual and less likely to use corporal punishment against their students.

Blackrock was, and remains a very prominent school, having educated many of the leaders of post-independence Ireland, including presidents, taoisigh (prime ministers), government ministers, businessmen and the elite of "Official Ireland" and their children.

O'Brien was taught English by the President of the College, and future Archbishop, John Charles McQuaid.

According to Farragher and Wyer:

"Dr McQuaid himself was recognised as an outstanding English teacher, and when one of his students, Brian O'Nolan, alias Myles na gCopaleen, boasted in his absence to the rest of the class that there were only two people in the College who could write English properly, namely, Dr McQuaid and himself, they had no hesitation in agreeing. And Dr McQuaid did Myles the honour of publishing a little verse by him in the first issue of the revived College Annual (1930)—this being Myles' first published item."

The poem itself, "Ad Astra", read as follows:

Ah!

When the skies at night

Are damascened with gold,

Methinks the endless sight

Eternity unrolled.

O'Brien wrote prodigiously during his years as a student at University College Dublin (UCD), which was then situated in various buildings around Dublin's south city centre (with its numerous pubs and cafés).

There he was an active, and controversial, member of the well known Literary and Historical Society.

He contributed to the student magazine Comhthrom Féinne (Fair Play) under various guises, in particular the pseudonym Brother Barnabas.

Significantly, he composed a story during this same period titled "Scenes in a Novel (probably posthumous) by Brother Barnabas", which anticipates many of the ideas and themes later to be found in his novel, At Swim-Two-Birds.

In it, the putative author of the story finds himself in riotous conflict with his characters, who are determined to follow their own paths regardless of the author's design.

For example, the villain of the story, one Carruthers McDaid, intended by the author as the lowest form of a scoundrel, "meant to sink slowly to absolutely the last extremities of human degradation", instead ekes out a modest living selling cats to elderly ladies and begins covertly attending Mass without the author's consent.

Meanwhile, the story's hero, Shaun Svoolish, chooses a comfortable, bourgeois life rather than romance and heroics:

O'Brien, who had studied German in Dublin, may have spent at least parts of 1933 and 1934 staying in Nazi Germany, namely in Cologne and Bonn, although details are uncertain and contested.

In 1934 O'Brien and his university friends founded a short-lived literary magazine called Blather.

The writing here, though clearly bearing the marks of youthful bravado, again somewhat anticipates O'Brien's later work, in this case, his "Cruiskeen Lawn" column as Myles na gCopaleen:

He claimed himself, in 1965, that he "spent many months in the Rhineland and at Bonn drifting away from the strict pursuit of study."

So far, no external evidence has turned up that would back up this sojourn (or an also anecdotal short-term marriage to one 'Clara Ungerland' from Cologne).

In their biography, Costello and van de Kamp, discussing the inconclusive evidence, state that "...it must remain a mystery, in the absence of documented evidence an area of mere speculation, representing in a way the other mysteries of the life of Brian O'Nolan that still defy the researcher."