Opening of the third play (the long version of Thirst):

The curtain goes up on the bar. It is after hours. Light from a distant street-lamp shines faintly on the window The bar is lit (very badly.) by two candles which are set on the counter, one of them stuck in a bottle. The publican, MR. C., who is suitably fat and prosperous in appearance, is leaning over the centre of the counter talking to PETER, who is sitting on a stool side-face to the audience. JEM, who is in the nature of a hanger-on, is away in a gloomy corner where he can barely be discerned. Both customers are drinking pints; the publican has a small whiskey. The curtain has gone up in the middle of a conversation between PETER and the publican.

MR. C.: (Dramatically.) And do you know why? (There is a pause.) Do you know why?
PETER: Begor, Mr Coulahan, I couldn’t tell you.
MR. C.: (Loudly.) Because he’s no good, that’s why. He’s no bloody good!

(He finishes his drink in one gulp, turns to the shelves for the whiskey bottle and noisily fills himself another. As the talk proceeds he is occupied with pulling two further stouts to fill up the customers’ glasses PETER smokes and bends his head reflectively. JEM is silent save for drinking noises. He shows his face for a moment in the gloom by lighting a cigarette.)

This is a collection of seven stage plays and seven TV plays by Flann O’Brien / Myles na gCopaleen, some of which were performed in his lifetime and some of which were not. I bought it in the run-up to the 2019 Dublin Worldcon, partly to see if Faustus Kelly, the first of the plays, was worthy of a Retro Hugo nomination, and partly to prep for a panel on Flann O’Brien that I knew I’d be doing at the convention. But I had not previously sat down and read it from cover to cover.

Some of these pieces are very slight, but some are very interesting. The 1943 play Faustus Kelly brings the Devil to the Irish Midlands to interfere in local politics. He finds it so awful that he returns to Hell. It’s interesting that the politician protagonist is depicted very clearly as living with a woman who he is not married to – and the local political activists take it in their stride. This is fifty years before Bertie Ahern became Taoiseach.

Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green is adaptation of The Insect Play by Karel Čapek (best known as the inventor of the word ‘robot’ in his play R.U.R.) and his brother Josef. Like Faustus Kelly, it was performed at the Gate Theatre in 1943. Where the Čapeks’ first scene features butterflies as mindless and vain literary salon types, writing poetry to each other, O’Brien makes the characters here bees representing the posh Anglo-Irish elite, engaged in idle self-destruction. The two other scenes are less changed. In the second scene, the Čapeks’ dung-beetles are solid middle-class citizens saving for retirement; O’Brien makes Mr Beetle specifically a Dublin civil servant. And the militarist, proudly engineering ants in the last scene are Ulster ants in O’Brien’s adaptation. The satire is mean and doesn’t always land right for the twenty-first century reader, but it must have been a great production.

The other one that struck me was The Dead Spit of Kelly, about a taxidermist’s assistant who murders his boss and then disguises himself in his boss’s skin, with surreal consequences. It was shown on RTE in 1962. A film version starring Colin Morgan and Jason Isaacs was announce in 2021 but does not seem to have got off the drawing board.

The rest are shorter pieces, and some of them are rather slight (there’s a dire skit about an airplane trip from Dublin to London with an annoying English passenger). But I am glad to have read them. You can get it here.

This was the unread book that had lasted longest in my non-genre pile (though all three of the pieces that I mention above actually have strong fantasy elements). Next on that pile is, er, Black Mountain by Gerry Adams. But I acquired it only in 2021, so I’m pausing that cycle for now until I have cleared the remainder of my 2019 and 2020 books. (I have read all of the non-genre books that I acquired in 2020, finishing with Summer by Ali Smith.)

Second paragraph of third story (“Eachta an Fhir Ólta: CEOL!,” translated by Jack Fennell as “The Tale of the Drunkard: MUSIC!”; sadly the original Irish-language text is not available):

“What is the meaning of this? What’s wrong with you!” I said. “It’d be more in your line to be in bed, instead of staggering around drunk all over the city like this. You’d be better off if you turned your back on the drink, and your face to the fireplace—an intelligent, mild-mannered man such as yourself—and took up another hobby, like fretwork, or listening to the gramophone. . . .”

I got this in preparation for the Flann O’Brien panel at the Dublin 2019 Worldcon, but I confess that I only skimmed it then. It’s a short collection of short pieces by the great man. The most interesting stuff is at the beginning, where he pokes fun at Irish language enthusiasts in a couple of pieces originally written in Irish (and heavily footnoted to explain the humour). Most of the middle section is material being tried out for deployment elsewhere (the story about the young man who was born for Ireland gets used twice).

At the end, Jack Fennell presents a story which he is certain is by a 21-year-old Flann O’Brien, and published in 1932 in, of all places, Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories – “Naval Control”, as by “John Shamus O’Donnell”. He has argued the case further in a recent Journey Planet, and I for one am convinced. How glorious, that Gernsback may have published the future author of The Third Policeman!

To be honest, I think this is really a book for Flann O’Brien completists, but there are a lot of us about, and it comes with a good foreword and scholarly apparatus. I don’t think any of the stories even clears the first step of the Bechdel test. But you can get it here.

This was my top book acquired in 2019 which is not by H.G. Wells. Next on that pile is The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless.

Third joke in full, with footnote:

Chapman had been in Harrod’s recently when a salesperson asked him to try a cologne just introduced by Armani. The advertisements made much of the fact that this new fragrance, simply named Amore, combined the most striking elements of other famous Armani scents: a trace of Code, a hint of Mania, overtones of Acqua di Gio, and plenty of Attitude. Chapman thought it quite manly, but to Keats it sounded like nothing but a mélange of incompatible odors. “So”, he sniffed dismissively, “what they’re telling us is Love is Armani’s blended thing.”<sup>3

3</sup> Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing
Title of a 1955 movie, and the theme song by Paul Francis Webster and Sammy Fain

A fannish tribute to Flann O’Brien’s Keats and Chapman stories, though I am not super convinced that it was worth the effort. You can get it here. The shortest unread book on my shelves that I had acquired in 2017; next on that pile is Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson.

Second paragraph of third joke:

‘I like to sit with my back to the engine,’ he explained.

I had read this as a teenager, which I went through my Flann O’Brien phase, and approached re-reading it with some trepidation; would the Suck Fairy have visited this collection of excruciating puns based around a totally fictional friendship between John Keats (1795-1821) and George Chapman (1559-1634)?

I’m afraid so. I am sure that over the table in a bar, Flann O’Brien would have told these with gusto, his face barely twitching as he reached the end and his friends collapsed with hilarity. But culture has moved on since his time, especially in Ireland, and a lot of the stories are laboured journeys to an uninspiring punchline. Here is one of the less aged ones:

One winter’s evening Keats looked up to find Chapman regarding him closely. He naturally enquired the reason for this scrutiny.

‘I was thinking about those warts on your face,’ Chapman said. ‘

What about them?’ the poet said testily. ‘

Oh, nothing,’ Chapman said. ‘It just occurred to me that you might like to have them removed.’

‘They are there for years,’ Keats said, ‘and I don’t see any particular reason for getting worried about them now.’

‘But they are rather a blemish,’ Chapman persisted. ‘I wouldn’t mind one – but four fairly close together, that’s rather—’

‘Four?’ Keats cried. ‘There were only three there this morning!’

‘There are four there now,’ Chapman said.

‘That’s a new one on me,’ Keats said.

You see what I mean?

The book also includes the script of Eamon Morrissey’s one-man show based on O’Brien’s work, “The Brother”, where the punchline is that although many claim to have died for Ireland, the barman was born for Ireland (in that his mother distracted a hostile British soldier at just the right moment to save the narrator). It’s a cringeworthy set-up, but it also sparks the interesting thought that there has been very little writing about gender-based violence during the Irish conflicts of the early 1920s. Can there really have been none at all?

This is minor stuff compared with The Third Policeman or At Swim-Two-Birds. But you can get it here.

This was the non-genre book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves (I don’t think the stories are very sfnal, even if Keats and Chapman lived two centuries apart in real life, and most of the stories are set long after Keats’ time, never mind Chapman’s). Next on that pile is a rather different matter, Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson.