Dead as Doornails by Anthony Cronin

Author:Anthony Cronin [Cronin, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781843512202
Google: AnYr5po4ADYC
Publisher: Lilliput Press, Limited
Published: 2011-09-14T23:00:00+00:00

6

BRIAN O’NOLAN was a small man whose appearance somehow combined elements of the priest, the baby-faced Chicago gangster, the petty bourgeois malt drinker and the Dublin literary gent. The face under the black hat was invariably smooth-shaven, pallid, ageless in a childish but experienced way, thus combining elements of the gangster and the priest. The brim of the hat was wide, as had been fashionable among literary men in Dublin for two generations, but it was bent downwards in front, which added to the baby-faced Nelson effect, as did the generally cross expression of the childishly regular features and small mouth. Besides the hat, which he was seldom without, he almost always wore a dark gaberdine, about which there was something slightly sacerdotal also, even in the way the belt invariably hung down in a loop behind, but which suggested also the clerk or civil servant, garbed for the street and the relaxed converse of the pub.

He had been of course a civil servant to begin with, after what used to be called ‘a brilliant career’ in University College Dublin, where he was the prodigy of the avant-garde littérateurs of his generation. Shortly after leaving there and entering the civil service he published a book of amazing virtuosity, At Swim-Two-Birds, which dealt with the novel form in an utterly nihilistic way, while retaining, in dialogue and description, elements of realism far beyond the compass of most novelists. Then with his college reputation and his book behind him, while still in his twenties, he began to write a daily column for the Irish Times, which immediately and deservedly attained a local celebrity far surpassing that of any individual piece of journalism that twentieth-century Ireland has known. The book had been published under the pseudonym Flann O’Brien; the column, which was consistently funny, often penetrating and had a cast of characters of its own, was signed Myles na Gopaleen. Of all the remarkable things about it, the standard of hard-edged, incisive prose that its author was able to maintain was perhaps the most so.

It all sounds like a marvellous beginning, but of course it was nothing of the kind. Brian became somehow fixed at a time of brilliant promise and pyrotechnical display, unable to shake off the reputation for prodigious cleverness he had early acquired. This reputation was transplanted from the hothouse confines of U.C.D. to the equally pernicious atmosphere of intimately acquainted Dublin. His humour became the currency of its denizens, the mode of his column their manner of response, to personality, to much in public affairs, even, to some extent, to literature. And by a curious but inevitable inversion he became their creation. He continued to grind out the column, but with the exception of An Béal Bocht, a short satirical work in Irish, so far as anybody knew he wrote no more books. ‘Myles’ supplanted Flann O’Brien, even, in important externals at least, Brian O’Nolan. The latter became known to one and all, even personally, as Myles, and was humoured and tolerated as such.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.