Myles of wit measured by the column

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 18:44

DAVID ROBINSON praises Myles na gCopaleen

HIS first novel in English is one of the most sparkling examples of literary post-modernism; his first one in Irish one of the most scabrously funny in the language.

Weighed against such masterpieces as At Swim-Two-Birds and An Bal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), the columns Brian O'Nolan (aka Flann O'Brien) wrote in the Irish Times as Myles na gCopaleen are generally dismissed by the critics. Yet for lovers of unbridled, extravagant wit, the best of Myles na gCopaleen's Cruiskeen Lawn columns – mostly from 1940-44 – are hard to beat. Indeed, according to SJ Perelman, himself no slouch in the humour business, The Best of Myles (1968) has never been bettered.

It is here you find the various takes on the lives of Keats and Chapman, whose adventures are shaggy dog stories leading up to the most outrageous puns. Here too that one finds such hilarious columns as those about the Bookhandlers/Escort services, set up to provide the books of the nouveau riche with furious underlinings and other proofs of readership.

Throughout these columns range the Plain People of Ireland, insistent on being involved in the story and bringing flights of fancy down to earth (the Catechism of Clich would, for example, already have informed readers as to the kind of place flights of fantasy are usually brought down). Here one meets The Brother or the Da, both of whom had a neat way of shattering middle-class pretentiousness with their own bilious, often absurdist comments.

In early middle age O'Nolan succumbed to alcoholism (Myles Away from Dublin, his collection of later columns for other Irish newspapers, is one of the most disappointing books I have read). But those early Cruskeen Lawn columns, written while his wit still sparkled, when he let fly with unrestrained exuberance at every last example of the Free State's mediocrity, have a confidence and verve that hasn't dulled – as so much comic writing does – over the decades.

That confidence would soon curdle into crabbedness and drunken despair, as the critics failed to see the brilliance of what he was trying to do in At Swim-Two-Birds, as the publishers rejected what posterity now hails as his masterpiece, The Third Policeman. But for a few years, while the rest of Europe tore itself to bits, a civil servant in Dublin penned a comic newspaper column that no-one has yet outshone. The latest edition of The Best of Myles is, I find, UK Amazon's 137,329th best-selling book. What a joke!