The Wholesale Safety Pun Factory

For my taste, there's a little too much "Allen Barra" in this here Flann O'Brien article by Allen Barra--not to mention overmuch breathless insistence on how funny O'Brien is (which, to be fair, he is)--but it's still pretty good.

I'm not sure I go along with the conclusion here, though, for several reasons that should be obvious:

No 20th century Irish writer has had a classier set of groupies: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Graham Greene, Dylan Thomas, William Saroyan, John Updike and William H. Gass, to name just a few who offered him enthusiastic cover blurbs. Yet he remains Ireland's best kept literary secret, and probably always will. Myself, I divide all the people I have ever met into two broad categories -- my friends, and those who don't fall off their chair laughing heartily while reading O'Brien. On my soul, if she did not laugh at my favorite passages, I'd dump Angelina Jolie. Myself, I divide all the people I have ever met into two broad categories -- my friends, and those who don't fall off their chair laughing heartily while reading O'Brien. On my soul, if she did not laugh at my favorite passages, I'd dump Angelina Jolie.

And yet, it's hard to argue with those who would count him as perhaps the greatest failure of Irish letters. (RP's italics)

This isn't really saying much, of course; contending that it's hard to argue with people who believe O'Brien is perhaps this or that leaves plenty of rhetorical wiggle room.  YPTR, for one, would assume that there are even greater failures in Irish letters--you know, people who failed to leave even one decent novel behind.  By my count, O'Brien wrote at least 2 or 3 great books, and some pretty good ones, too.

But all this didn't stop Hugh Kenner from wondering: "Was it the drink was his ruin, or was it the column?"

As Barra reports, the drink didn't help.  Then there was the column, "a daily dose of vitriol, satire and just plain nonsense":

For 25 years, [O'Brien] wrote one for the Irish Times, under the pen name Myles na gCopaleen, the content of which was accurately described by Richard Watts in a 1943 story for the New York Herald Tribune as "devoted to magnificently laborious literary puns, remarkable parodies of De Quincey and others, fanciful literary anecdotes, and erudite study of clichés, scornful dissection of the literal meaning of high-flown literary phraseology and a general air of shameless irony and high spirits."

So O'Brien wasted his talents producing a daily burst of nonsense under a strange pen name, involving himself in pun-making, parody, irony, satire, and various other kinds of literary burlesque?

Uh oh.

Comments

[Scott]

Rake--I understand your worries and, truth be told, I have contemplated these myself. I must say that there have been many days I would have given up the litblog lifestyle completely, where it not for the significant and unique benefits and counteract the deleterious effects on my writing. For instance:

* the 7.5% renumeration on all referred Powells orders (I'm almost up to enough for a Dover Thrift edition of Ethan Frome!)
* the high-quality literary spam
* the low, but still significant, possibilty that a high-profile author/literary personality will notice my diss of his work and write me a mean-spirited, slightly incoherent e-mail

[Rake]

Don't forget the personal satisfaction derived from posting a withering assessment of some schmoe who spelled Finnegans Wake with an apostrophe. That's what helps me sleep at night.

[Pintofplainisyourman]

He would write a provacative letter to the Irish Times under an assumed name, then write a letter attacking his own earlier letter under a different assumed name. At one point it's thought that nearly 3/4ths of the letters the Irish Times was publishing were Flann arguing with himself under various aliases.

[gaM'foolan na'weme]

What a load of tree frogs is that, the Irish Times vetted each an every piece o' pie afore commencing to murf it down, you wankly collector o' string.

[Pintofplainisyourman]

Your "Internet Irish" is insulting, and how ungracious to our host. Have you neither a concept of what spam is or what is shame?

[NcLamon 'f wuhaIgnyWe]

Me shame is 3/4 spam anyway, ya friggin booze-labbed wiffle-tree. Have you now shame or no concept of tinned meat? I was raised on em both when not starvling for a point o me mother's amber wash of gain.

[Rakesy C. Earwicker]

Haw haw. This, friends, is the best Irish humor this side of a Lucky Charms commercial.

[K'xwi M'niwh]

For peat's sake, sod off, boys, this is the Rake's turf.