Self-creation …

… Clair Wills reviews ‘The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien’ edited by Maebh Long — LRB 4 April 2019. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

There are embellishments here – O’Nolan got the sack from the civil service in 1953 because of his frequent and protracted absences, and for ridiculing his superiors in the newspaper column he wrote as Myles na gCopaleen; it is unlikely he ever studied in the US, though he may have travelled there in the late 1940s – but the biographical sketch is accurate in its essentials. It is repeated throughout this new edition of O’Nolan’s letters in scores of introductions and pitches that he sent to publishers; agents; provincial Irish newspapers; the British press, radio and TV; and even to firms that might be looking for someone to write advertising copy. He created fantastical backgrounds for himself under other names – whether as Flann O’Brien (‘As a lad I knew Ibsen … Swinburne and Joseph Conrad were also frequent visitors to my grandfather’s place … At dusk, Coleridge would sometimes look in on his way home for a final pipe, and more than once the burly shape of Lord Macaulay was known to grace the gathering’) or Myles na gCopaleen (‘Diaghilev I knew and liked, a strange genius of a man if ever there was one. But Fokine was the daddy of them all, and an exemplary family man among a crew of roués’). These letters, however, deal with the burdens of being plain Brian O’Nolan.