Word: nolan
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...reader of The Poor Mouth will convert to Gaeligorism) we owe this Irish luck to the growing influence of the Flann O'Brien cult, though Flann had little to do with this book of Nolan's. The Irish have known Flann, Myles, and Nolan for a long time, but though more Ph.D. dissertations have been written on Flann O'Brien since O'Nolan's death in '66 than were written on Joyce in the first ten years after his death, the reading public in this country rarely encounters O'Brien's four English novels: At Swim-Two-Birds...
...imposed incessant political and literary demands on promising Irish writers of the time. Reviews of Stories and Plays concur; Bernard Bernstock said "the fault (for O'Brien's laspe in productivity)...lies in the political and intellectual life of northern Ireland." He notes that O'Nolan, unlike Joyce or O'Casey, did not leave Ireland to be free to write about his country without "being expected to dance attendance on the critics...
CRITICS LIKE BENSTOCK, Cockburn and even Niall Sheridan, mutual friend of O'Brien and Joyce, seem to regret O'Nolan's other identities: as Myles na Gopaleen, columnist for the Irish Times, and as Brian O'Nolan, civil servant (until he was fired for his opinions in the Times). Sheridan wrote of O'Nolan that perhaps "the demands of journalism syphoned off piecemeal his enormous creative vitality...
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...
Adding The Poor Mouth ("edited" by na Gopaleen) to The Best of Myles, it's an open question whether Myles isn't the best of O'Nolan. The Gaelic novel is not only written for and of the Gales, but also purports to be by one-a certain Bonaparte O'Coonassa. But the credit transparently belongs to Myles, the columnist concerned about the so-called preservation of Gaelic Ireland, and the satirist who could mock things Gaelic as he lamented their passing, even making fun of his own concerns. All simultaneously, and in the language of the issue, the "Gaeltacht...