Word: flann
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...FLANN O'BRIEN READER, edited by Stephen Jones; Viking/ Richard Seaver; 447 pages...
Once there were these three Irishmen. Brian O'Nolan joined the civil service as a young fellow and retired 18 years later with a small pension and a sharp tongue. Before he was 30, Flann O'Brien had published a novel (At Swim-Two-Birds) that won praise from no less a boyo than Jimmy Joyce. Myles na Gopaleen took up writing the odd play now and then but spent close to 25 years doing funny pieces for the newspapers. Now here's a strange thing. All three of these lads died at the same instant...
...Flann O'Brien Reader aids and abets this judgment. Flannophile Stephen Jones has collected samples from four novels, a long Gaelic tale, stories, essays, teleplays and reams of humorous journalism. Jumbled together in this manner, the pieces gradually reveal a single mind behind the pseudonyms, one that was drunk with words and more than ready to defend fair language at the drop of a solecism...
...much matter which language, either. Flann was comfortable in German, French and Latin, although his English prose style was most thoroughly affected by his knowledge of Gaelic. He regularly mocked those nationalists and bicycling anthropologists who made the preservation of Gaelic a sacred mission. In The Poor Mouth (1941) a long tale written in the old language, O'Brien shows a linguist from Dublin religiously transcribing the grunts of a western Irish pig. Flann even joked about the impulse that led him to learn his native tongue: "Having nothing to say, I thought at the time that...
They did. The Best of Myles (1968) a selection of na Gopaleen's columns in Irish, French and English, gathers together some of the funniest and most incisive pieces of creative vitality ever in newsprint. Critics and fans of Flann resent Myles, O'Nolan's 'unfortunate literary identity,' a jester who distracted the aforementioned Dublin politicoaesthetes while the creative artist tried vainly tc work behind the scenes in his spare time. But perhaps O'Nolan himself, whose writing is always for and of the Irish public, thought his journalism as valid as his novels...