Brian O’Nolan was born one hundred years ago today, on the 5th of October 1911, in Strabane in the North of Ireland. He went on to become the novelist Flann O’Brien and the newspaper columnist Myles na gCopaleen. He died on April Fool’s Day 1966, aged just 54. So we are getting on for a half-century on from his death already. Flann O’Brien has quite a lot of readers, people who cherish and appreciate his work. They like it for its humour, its comic deployment of pedantry and absurdity, the finicky attention to words and syntax from a man who grew up speaking Irish before turning to English, and made the same movement in his newspaper column Cruiskeen Lawn. I think that academics can do a good job of helping to maintain a writer’s readership, but in this case that has not really been necessary. Lots of academics like Myles, but lots of people who have little to do with universities like him too. The fact that his humour can appeal, quite gently and happily, to so many people is something I like about this writer.
This year, Flann O’Brien’s admirers have mustered the energy to hold a number of events marking the centenary. But today is the centenary proper. How can one do justice to this date? I will simply quote Myles’s peroration on calendrical inevitabilities, published in the Irish Times on New Year’s Day 1945.
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On behalf of my constituents (the human race) whom I have had the honour of representing for so long on the Governing Body of the University of Life, I wish to express the regret we all feel that this should, at last, be 1945. It is, of course, nobody’s fault – all are absolved without qualification. Indeed, one might pause to pay a well-deserved tribute to those thoughtful people who have been in recent years endeavouring to interfere, through the medium of high explosives, with the ‘normal’ movement of the heavenly bodies and thus disrupt the mechanism that conditions the mystical arcanum known as ‘time’. For my own part, my conscience is crystal-clear. Warning after warning I gave of the approach of 1945 – both the day and the hour were predicted. No heed was taken and ….. now …. now it is too late.
