Cronin Anthony - No Laughing Matter

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
FLANN OBRIEN

Anthony Cronin

Poetry

Poems

RMS Titanic

Selected Poems

Reductionist Poem

Relationships

Letter to an Englishman

The Minotaur

Collected Poems

The Fall

Body and Soul

The End of the Modern World

Novels

The Life of Riley

Identity Papers

Memoir

Dead as Doornails

Biography and Criticism

A Question of Modernity

Heritage Now

An Irish Eye

Personal Anthology

The Last Modernist

Play

The Shame of It

NO LAUGHING MATTER

First published by Grafton Books in 1989

This edition published in 2019 by

New Island Books

16 Priory Hall Office Park

Stillorgan

County Dublin

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright Anthony Cronin, 1989

Foreword Kevin Barry, 2019

The Author asserts his moral rights in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-714-5

Epub ISBN: 978-1-84840-715-2

Mobi ISBN: 978-1-84840-716-9

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaon), 70 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Ireland.

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

It feels like a different world. In fact, the city of Dublin, as it is presented here and it is a character or player in the book in its own right seems to be not just of another era but of another dimension entirely.

As the pages turn, we come to imagine a monochrome place in mean winter light, a place of dank streets, broad-brimmed hats, priestly glances. The wind comes in a cold sweep from the bay and the ceaseless rain that it carries defines the ambience. Its a city where the attitudes are stiff and the licencing hours are tight. The shabby realities of the newly independent state betray the very dreams that fused it and, as a result, there is a waft of bitterness on the air, and it rises above even the stench of the usual bitternesses. Revolutionary fervour has transmuted into a new conservatism; the city attaches itself to ideas of the conventional and the respectable almost religiously; and thus it is a place where the boredom is so thick on the air that it might almost seem to have mineral properties.

It was just such a city, however, that happened to provide the optimal conditions for the emergence of a great fabulist, of an endlessly fiendish literary prankster, of a Flann OBrien. It was the sort of place where, if you didnt make mad stuff up, youd have gone off your game altogether.

Over the course of this precise, deft and tender book, Anthony Cronin demonstrates the ways in which the place and the time formed the man, and the ways in which the man, in turn, had an era-defining effect on the very tenor of the place.

Flann OBrien had a belligerent aspect, a savage and inky-black humour, and a default stance of blithe affront to the world, and all of these were massively influential in the Dublin of his time. His poses (if we are unkind enough to call them such) were adopted almost wholesale by a large proportion of the native literati and (if we are charitable enough to call it such) the intelligentsia.

The book is scrupulous and even-handed and it never baulks when it comes to the difficult places. It becomes clear quickly that in tracing from a Strabane cradle to a premature grave the life of OBrien, the biographer set himself an especially tricky task. OBrien, or ONolan, or ONuallin, was a capricious character, a man whose personal music or defining note could change on a shifting of the breeze. If he was sometimes playful and comic and light, he could be thorny and difficult too, and he could flitter from one state to the other inside the beat of a remark. But the book radiates a warming fairness Cronin is never blind to his subjects faults and weaknesses, which were legion, but always he provides (or at least he tries to provide) a forgiving context for them.

It should be noted that Cronin is himself a very fine stylist. That style is careful and it reaches always for the contextual overview; it is even, at times, pleasantly mandarin; but the biographers own voice emerges clearly in a way that feels off the cuff, and it is full of a kind of wry, sad humour.

Of course he had natural advantages when tackling this project Cronin was himself an intimate and a confidante of the scene he described. He was a novelist and a poet of high standing, but also he was a classic literary middle-man, that quietly busy archetype whose thankless job it is to make the connections on which a literary culture thrives. He excelled in this role indeed he can be seen as a kind of orchestrator for the Dublin literary scene of the 1950s and 1960s.

As Cronin traces patiently the life of OBrien, he reverts always, for telling detail, to the fictions and the newspaper columns. He understands a fundamental truth in documenting the life of a writer: if you look hard enough, and if you dig deep enough, all of the clues and all of the secrets are buried in the work.

Cronin understands, too, that there is nothing mysterious about prose style. A writers style is a direct projection of the personality, in fact of the soul, if such a thing can be said to exist. As that style is channelled directly from the subconscious, it contains base and original truths, and it all comes out on the page. A writer cannot hide from himself or herself on the page, most especially in the writing of prose fiction. Thus Cronin uses OBriens work as the sourcing depot for the details of this careful and telling portrait.

He has other and significant resources to draw on. Given the almost hysterically talkative nature of the milieu it depicts, it is natural that this biography should draw much of its energy from verbal sources. Friends, relations, even combatants of OBrien were enlisted by Cronin to give their views, their sides and their spins, and the narrative comes together as a symphony for these voices.

Let it be said that the book is sometimes very funny. It seems a casual thing to note but in fact it is massively important a book about Flann OBrien that didnt have a decent few laughs in it would be a disaster. Of course, given his quick decline and the endless frustrations of his artistic career, the humour within these pages necessarily leans towards the tragi-comic variety, but as was the life, so must be the biography. As the story of that life develops here, the reader will find herself saying over and again, Poor Flann Poor Flann , but also, contrarily, it will be difficult not to allow the corners of the mouth fold into the upturn of a smile.

The darkness is as important to the book as the light. The narrative accretes many tiny sadnesses as it goes along. These are mostly made up of the type of setbacks and reverses suffered by every and any artist, but Flann took them so badly, in fact so bitterly, and it is an uncomfortable truth the biography springs when it shows that in effect the writers work knocked his life out of whack. He simply wasnt able for the reverses, for the setbacks.