Flann O’Brien

By: James Parker
October 5, 2009

The myth of FLANN O’BRIEN (Brian O’Nolan, 1911-66) is that he squandered himself in the smalltime, wrote too much for the newspapers and not enough for the ages, gassed off his libido in puffs of wit or washed it away under black smotherings of drink. But his art, like his life, was an experiment in dead ends: a paradigmatically dull career and a production-line writing schedule provided ideal circumstances for his strange, back-of-the-classroom creativity. The man who would be private secretary to three successive Ministers for Local Government wrote a novel about monstrous policemen who talk in surreal pedantries and are obsessed with bicycle maintenance. A five-times-a-week newspaper column, often typed on Civil Service stationery, became the occasion for flights of comic avant-gardism. But the wildest of his fancies retained a quality of being improvised against tedium, even against despair. “Tiny periods of release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect,” he wrote in a 1958 column. The question that remains, then, is one he posed himself in his column: “How can you always write so interestingly?… Seldom, I mean, have… so many things been written for so many people… by so few a man.”

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READ MORE about the Partisans Generation (1904-13).

Flann O’Brien

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