In the sheer volume of the sonnet’s verbal doublings, Muldoon mimics O’Nolan’s wordplay. As Guissin-Stubbs observes, ‘The verbal slippage of “Le Flanneur” is particularly pronounced,’25 even in the context of Muldoon’s unceasingly punning, etymologically alert poetry. And the pronounced slippage speaks to common ground: both writers are drawn to double entendres, bureaucratese, relentlessly flabby or euphemistic language, jargon, and wordplay.

Figurative speech in general attracts these two writers, but stock phrases are the strongest magnet of all.26 Myles produces the ‘hair of the dogma’;27 Muldoon tells us (in ‘Symposium’) that ‘A hair of the dog is a friend indeed,’ a phrase that echoes Jem Casey’s ‘a pint of plain is your only man.’ A phrase about drinking someone ‘under the table’ becomes, in Myles’s column, literalized in every way imaginable;28 in Muldoon’s ‘The Right Arm,’ the phrase ‘I would give my right arm’ is used for a small boy whose arm gets stuck in a candy jar.29 Muldoon’s poems are stippled with such usually unremarkable phrases: gliding turkey vultures have ‘been so long above it all,’ moths ‘wanted only their names in lights,’ a house wren ‘punch[es] above its weight.’30 Some stock phrases are funny because they are blatantly deceptive: one of Muldoon’s song lyrics observes that ‘There are no gentlemen / In a gentleman’s club’ and that ‘A direct flight to Reno / May stop at a hub.’31 Other phrases become funny when made literal, as when ‘the mountain is holding out’ and ‘the plain won’t level with me’ in a pantoum,32 or from being set next to similarly exhausted phrases: ‘Do what you must when you’re in Rome / Just don’t try this at home.’

Muldoon’s attention to clichés suggests a kinship with O’Nolan and more specifically with Myles, who sometimes aggressively brackets clichés: ‘it was felt that the relationship between the two countries had (much to gain)(from this frank exchange of views). It had been intended also to exchange notes but owing (to pressure of time) it was only found possible to exchange views.’33 Both writers string clichés together, at length. Myles announces his ‘Catechism of Cliché’ as ‘a unique compendium of all that is nauseating in contemporary writing’:34

Catechism after catechism brings out the mind’s doggedness and predictability, how it reaches for the closest word and readiest thought.36 Muldoon, in turn, backstitches such phrases together in ‘The Old Country’ (2006), an exceptionally relentless and ingenious accumulating that continues over thirteen linked sonnets:

One parallel these two passages expose, less related to language, is that both writers target Irish nostalgia, whether in its twee or romantic modes: Muldoon’s reference to ‘a grand wee mon’ in ‘The Old Country’ has an edge to it and recalls Myles’s mockery of the inevitably ‘lost’ ‘Gaels.’ But the main point is that clichés are prodigiously generative for both writers. ‘Symposium’ (1998) is another sonnet composed of tired proverbs, the sheer number of links reminding us how many such sayings there are in the world:

Muldoon has been writing poems that cascade this way for decades: ‘Position Paper’ (2019) is a five-page chain of similarly tired platitudes, twisted into new life: ‘One rotten apple keeps the doctor away. / When the doctor’s away the cat will get the cream.’39

For both Myles, over his years of catechisms, and Muldoon, over his years of similarly truism-driven poems, stock phrases are not only ways to imitate or mock euphemistic, nostalgic, or generally corrupted thought: to use such platitudes is to be inventive and self-exhausted, at once. Myles’s clichés tend to involve a louder satirical note than Muldoon’s: Muldoon sees them as being just about as alive or dead as any other bit of language. But both use stock phrases to varyingly sinister, sour, gleeful, playful, and pointed ends, and both elicit a semi-comic strangeness through markedly routine speech.

‘Le Flanneur’ reminds us that O’Nolan (again, especially as Myles) and Muldoon also share an obsession with puns. Ingenious and outrageous puns are everywhere in their work, and so prominent in both that brief mention is enough. In Muldoon’s ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ (1983), a character’s grandmother (the grandmother of Dante’s Beatrice, as it happens) is said to have ‘sat in the nude’ with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, repeating ‘Eros is Eros is Eros.’40 That joke could have come out of one of Myles’s Keats and Chapman columns, where the story of getting glued to a teacher ends with ‘I like a man that sticks to his principals,’ and where a servant who quits causes Keats to declare that ‘the last rays of feeling and life must depart […] ’ere the bloom of that valet shall fade from my heart.’41 Muldoon rarely ends with a punchline in the way Myles does, but both fill their work with words where multiple meanings jostle together. For instance, the opening joke of ‘Le Flanneur,’ about the ‘ordained’ spirit grocer, is reminiscent of the At Swim-Two-Birds narrator’s quip about an argument being ‘based on licensed premises.’42 (Is ‘still ordained’—‘still-ordained’—a joke also? Probably, in Muldoon.)

Thus, on the one hand, the coinage of ‘flanneur’ is a tribute to O’Brien’s own puns (as well as evidence of a tendency, shared by both poet and prose writer, to let puns run wild). On the other hand, in its addition of an n and loss of a circumflex, it is a tribute to O’Nolan’s deliberate typos. As Maebh Long writes, ‘Myles frequently plays with the typewriter’s introduction of errors’;43 she relays how he wishes in a 1944 letter for ‘a stetoscope,’ ‘a “stet” marker and viewer that would prevent the correction of intended non-standard spelling or syntax into standard yet incorrect and unintended text.’44 Muldoon, too, could use a stetoscope. ‘Send gives way to sned’ in ‘As,’ as we have seen; another poem glances at ‘the Black Horse avern / that still rings true / despite that T being missing from its sign,’ ‘avern’ turning the public house into the underworld. Typos, like clichés, are a kind of language writers normally try to avoid, and when they do appear, their comedy tends to be grounded in the risibility of error. O’Brien and Muldoon, however, both draw on their unrulier, more generative potential.

Typos, in turn, lead to corrections. Myles writes,

Some of Muldoon’s most famous poems are made out of the same construction. ‘Errata’ opens,

While Muldoon’s errors are quieter and more unsettlingly expressive, both authors’ sets of errata call up fleeting scenarios: what was said about Lamb instead of Bacon, or about the town or county of Antrim as opposed to the town or county of Armagh? What was the sentence that held forth on borsch? What happened at the farm? Myles’s and Muldoon’s corrections call attention to the flukes of typewriters, compositors, keyboards, copyeditors, and language itself. They both appreciate how much as little as a single character can change one’s meaning or create it, and they press at the weaknesses of words, to exceptionally inventive degrees.

In addition to evoking O’Nolan’s linguistic mischievousness, ‘Le Flanneur’ suggests the complexities of his career and reception, though ambiguously. As Guissin-Stubbs observes, ‘The poem, brilliantly slippery, builds the impression of a character who is equally elusive.’47 Words like ‘brilliantly slippery’ and ‘elusive’ describe not just O’Nolan and his work, but just about all of Muldoon’s work, too: both writers stretch the truth, especially as it concerns themselves. Hugh Kenner’s phrase for O’Brien—that he ‘made misinformation into an art form’48—works for Muldoon as well. So, at times, does the wish of the narrator of The Third Policeman: ‘I considered it desirable that he should know nothing about me but it was even better if he knew several things which were quite wrong.’49 The boundaries between autobiography and fiction in Muldoon’s poetry are often smudged, ragged, or nonexistent: what looks true might be made up, and what seems most contrived or outlandish may be true. Multiple critics have quoted this comment from a 1986 interview:

In one recent poem, Muldoon sees his ancestors as experts in ‘telling whopper after whopper,’51 a trait he inherited; the speaker of ‘Immram,’ for example, imagines his father ‘almost’ going to Argentina, but then the imagination takes over, and that ‘almost’ disappears, so that by the poem’s end, the father is seen ‘drinking rum / With a man who might be a Nazi.’52

Muldoon’s twistings of reality do not stem only from an impulse to mislead a reader: his speakers themselves often express epistemic doubt close to that of the narrator of The Third Policeman, who knows he will ‘have to forgo the reality of all the simple things [his] eyes were looking at.’53 In ‘Turtles,’ where water ‘has the look of tin,’ and where the speaker suspects that turtles may have ‘been enlisted by some police forces / to help them recover corpses,’ the speaker flatly admits that ‘I can’t be sure of what is and what is not.’54 When a Muldoon speaker ‘knock[s] hard’ on a front door that ‘open[s] then, as such doors do, / Directly on to a back yard,’55 the building’s paradoxical structure has properties in common with the barracks in The Third Policeman. Sometimes what a Muldoon speaker sees or hears seems to be subject to the oddities of other genres, as if he were a character in someone else’s work. The speaker of ‘Ohrwurm’ suspects that he is hearing nondiegetic sound—that ‘this low-level hum’s a soundtrack’—and losing his grip on time: that ‘everything I’ve seen so far I’ve seen so far in flashback.’56 In ‘The Key,’ a meeting with a man named Foley (of Foley sound effects) has uncanny real-world consequences, so that the speaker’s perception of the world becomes controlled by imperfect postproduction: ‘[I] sometimes run a little ahead of myself, but mostly I lag behind, my footfalls already pre-empted by other echoes.’57 Although less overt than the metafiction that defines At Swim-Two-Birds or the existential uncertainty of The Third Policeman, these moments—of not being sure of one’s reality, of suspecting one might be a character—speak to a shared interest.

‘Le Flanneur’ also speaks to facts, some facts that are now myths: it makes oblique allusions to O’Nolan’s life. Most immediately, the poem’s local allusions are a reminder that O’Nolan stayed in the city Joyce and Beckett left and the country Muldoon left. The milieu evoked is quietly fraught. Muldoon’s assertion that ‘it was never a pint of plain in a jug’ that ‘had the plain people of Ireland by the jugular’ implies something did, and invites the question: what was it? Given the pun on spirit and spirits, one answer might be the Catholic Church. O’Nolan was a Catholic with what he called (writing of Joyce) a ‘sense of doom that is the heritage of the Irish Catholic,’58 and his ambivalence about Catholicism is well documented. Maebh Long, quoting Anthony Cronin, reviews how ‘O’Nolan and his friends were themselves caught between despising the “Catholic triumphalism, the pious philistinism, the Puritan morality and the peasant or petit bourgeois outlook of the new state” and being unable to shake themselves free of Catholicism or Ireland.’59 Pádraig Ó Méaloid, writing of the creation of Father Fahrt, observes that O’Nolan ‘was too ingrained in his own Catholic faith to have actually transgressed against it, despite his opinion of the Church in general and the Jesuits in particular.’60 The Church is one part of the atmosphere that the sonnet is steeped in—a slightly quaint, slightly seedy, slightly eerie one of drink, gambling, popular newspapers, and shops.

Muldoon weaves this milieu together with a longstanding (though recently questioned) narrative about O’Nolan’s trajectory and reception: the narrative that ‘almost from the outset the career arc we follow is downward,’ as David Wheatley puts it.61 Many reviewers and critics note that after the disappointment of The Third Policeman, O’Nolan did little with fiction for twenty years; instead, he put his energies into the column. John Updike refers to a ‘twenty-year stint of churning out newspaper copy’;62 Hugh Kenner writes that ‘For twenty-five years the column used him up’;63 in the introduction to the Everyman edition of the novels, Keith Donohue comments that ‘Flann O’Brien fell silent, giving way to the jests and barbs of Myles na gCopaleen.’64 Though such accounts now seem like inaccurate generalizations to scholars working on O’Brien, the loss they suggest is important to understanding ‘Le Flanneur.’ Muldoon hints at that often-repeated verdict in how ‘Le Flanneur’ moves from the bizarre, supernatural, inventive comic novelist of the punning title to the slightly overfamiliar name of the columnist, and from the ethereal ‘spirit grocer’ to the flat ‘reality check.’ Muldoon does not explicitly blame the columns, but he does register the critical history.

‘Le Flanneur’ also acknowledges other elements that contributed to O’Nolan’s trajectory. Kenner sums up the most famous one, again rather cuttingly: ‘Was it the drink was his ruin, or was it the column? For ruin is the word. So much promise has seldom accomplished so little.’65 Cronin has a less specific but similarly two-pronged description of O’Nolan’s decline:

This sense of shortcoming and bad luck appears in Muldoon’s glances at day-to-day ways of frittering away time: in particular, the sonnet calls up O’Nolan’s reputation for spending time at Tim Humphreys’ and more and more time at pubs in general across the 1950s and early 60s.67 Such allusions bundle together a sense of O’Nolan’s life, shaped in part by his own tendencies and in part by his surroundings.

These dimensions of O’Nolan’s writing are most tightly entwined in the dense allusions right at the poem’s middle, in the seventh and eighth lines. There Muldoon draws together a refrain from a poem recited in At Swim-Two-Birds and a recurring figure from the columns. The Plain People of Ireland interrupt and heckle Myles: ‘Is this going to be long?’68 They demand to be entertained: ‘What about a couple of good jokes,’ they keep asking, and get them, day after day.69 In ‘Le Flanneur,’ those Plain People join forces with the At Swim-Two-Birds characters who applaud the ‘pint of plain’ poem, also known as ‘The Workman’s Friend.’ Most poems, according to Furriskey, Lamont, and Shanahan, do not appeal to ‘the man in the street.’ They are not anything an ordinary person would like; poetry is good mainly if it praises beer. Put into the same sentence, the simple poem (its quatrains are likely the simplest lines in all of O’Nolan’s work, and they have taken on a life of their own outside his work) and the columnist’s interlocutors reiterate not just plainness but the kind of pressure that even a less intrusive or plebeian audience brings.

That combination of allusions calls up O’Nolan’s desire to be widely read. As Clair Wills writes, O’Nolan ‘wanted to be a popular writer, but Irish society in the 1940s and 1950s simply did not provide enough people, or enough of the right kind of people.’70 He was shaped by his relations to his actual, imagined, and wished-for readers and what those readers wanted from him. Cronin, again, writes,

The folk song to which Muldoon alludes in the first quatrain, ‘The Flower of Sweet Strabane,’ might also relate to O’Nolan’s hopes for a large audience. That song begins in most versions with some variation on ‘If I were King of Ireland’; to readers of this essay, it might recall how ‘the King of the World gives way to Finn MacCool’ in Muldoon’s ‘As.’ And to readers of the columns, it might recall one 1943 Irish Times headline: ‘Myles na gCopaleen Crowned King at Tara’;72 now the Strabane-born writer is an ‘also-ran’ at a pub.

But Muldoon’s acknowledgement of O’Brien’s disappointments is ‘slippery,’ to return to Guissin-Stubbs’s word; appreciation runs along with the images of diminishment. They are compounded in the sonnet’s final line, where ‘you can still rely on Myles for a reality check.’ The point seems to be that O’Nolan’s satire dispels all kinds of illusions: he will tell you that you’re older and heavier. More broadly, he will make you admit unwelcome things about yourself or your world. His prose becomes the storefront window—the looking-glass of a spirit grocer—that tells you such things.73 The line is a tribute to O’Nolan’s satire in all its forms but explicitly the satire of the columnist. It is a little advertisement-like: ‘rely on’ has an air of desirable steadiness and trustworthiness, like a solid but unsurprising brand. Ambivalence pervades the form also. While ‘reality check’ makes a bracing slant rhyme to the pageantry and grandeur of ‘heraldic,’ as if to capture Myles’s brilliant deflations, that last line also has overly loud internal rhymes between rely, Myles, reality. Metrically, that last line lacks the faint iambic impulse of most of the previous lines; it feels like prose, which is a few characters away from feeling prosaic. The indirection and distance of the sonnet as a whole, however, keeps any line from sounding like a verdict. Its open-ended ‘you’s—one at the sonnet’s turn, one in its last line—send out tiny strands that bind O’Nolan and his pseudonyms, Muldoon’s speaker, and the imagined reader; taken with each line’s multiple tones of play and melancholy, it creates a mesh or a tangle of impressions.

All these subdued motifs—of enduring and deteriorating, of unreal and prosaic images, of unconstrained flânerie and miles of three-times-a-week columns, of generative wordplay and a blunt ‘reality check,’ of being ‘ordained’ for a vocation, of being an ‘also-ran,’ of being ‘less than’ what one could be—amount to a probing consideration of O’Brien’s work. The last sentence of ‘Le Flanneur’ (in which a flâneur, or at least a pedestrian, finally appears) is literally about sizing one’s self up and about self-reflection.

The word ‘flâneur,’ the word behind Muldoon’s title, brings one more element into the sonnet’s meditation on O’Nolan. It is a slightly odd word to use in connection with O’Nolan’s work, though people certainly do walk in his novels. In At Swim-Two-Birds, the narrator walks with his friend one night for the ‘discovery and embracing of virgins,’ and they cover ‘many miles together on other nights on similar missions.’74 But that sense of a mission is a little at odds with the serendipitous aimlessness of flânerie. And in general, O’Brien’s characters walk to commute, in rural settings; in The Third Policeman, for instance, walking is no solution to turning into a bicycle, because ‘the continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you.’75 That is, these characters do not tend to walk in the way a flâneur walks, to pass the time and see the sights, in a city. Muldoon’s coinage of flanneur—the word flaneur with two ns—thus might seem unjustified for his subject.

But the dissonance may be deliberate. When one thinks of Irish novels of flânerie, what comes to mind is Ulysses. From the beginning of his career, O’Nolan was rarely able to escape comparison with Joyce; Seán Ó Faoláin’s early review of At Swim-Two-Birds, for instance, said that it ‘had a general odour of spilt Joyce all over it.’76 References to Joyce persisted in later years—Cronin relays how ‘All his writing life Brian O’Nolan had had the word “Joyce” firmly attached to him’—and continue to this day. As Lucas Harriman writes,

Muldoon would be familiar with those constant comparisons, as well as with O’Brien’s own frequent and ambivalent references to Joyce. Joyce appears at the end of O’Brien’s last novel, The Dalkey Archive, as a hotel bartender who says he had nothing to do with Ulysses and has not even heard of Finnegans Wake. In the words of Stephen Abblitt, it is (among other things) ‘a brutal parody and a loving comical depiction of a literary forefather who clearly means everything to O’Brien.’78 It is an irreverent, strongly ambivalent gesture of debt: while O’Brien makes Joyce decidedly provincial, he also lets him have nearly the last words of his last published book.

Thus, Joyce hovers behind the title ‘Le Flanneur’ and the poem that follows, a little like a spirit or a partially glimpsed reflection. (He takes a literally ghostly form in Seamus Heaney’s long poem ‘Station Island,’ where he appears to speak to Heaney, advising him like a contemporary Virgil.) Amid its consideration of O’Nolan’s writing and reception, ‘Le Flanneur’ glancingly suggests that comparisons with Joyce are inescapable. As Muldoon writes in his essay on Joyce in To Ireland, I, ‘One could be forgiven for thinking that all of Irish, and indeed, almost all of world literature had been produced merely as a reamh sceal, a prelude or preliminary piece, to the work of the greatest of all Irish writers, James Joyce.’79 ‘Writers,’ not ‘novelists’: Joyce might tower for Muldoon himself as well. At the same time, Muldoon’s compressing of genres and periods—his imagining all literature ‘produced’ as a ‘prelude’ to Joyce’s work—has an O’Brienesque ring to it; recall the declaration that ‘The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo.’ In ‘Le Flanneur,’ Joyce and O’Brien cannot quite be separated: the spelling of flaneur with the extra n could come from Finnegans Wake or could be the punchline in a Keats and Chapman story.

One other shared quality may be important to Muldoon’s interest in O’Brien: within their respective genres, these two writers tend to occupy similar regions on the spectrum of experiment and intelligibility. That is: O’Brien’s work can be esoteric and self-referential, can be existentially absurd, has ‘disdain for certain, clear meaning and interpretation’80—but is, even at its most metafictional or recursive, unfailingly readable.81 One blurb that makes it onto the backs of At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman declares that of the ‘holy trinity’ of modern Irish novelists, O’Brien is ‘the easiest and most accessible of the lot.’ And although Muldoon’s poems are often intensely allusive, enigmatic, and cerebral, they are grounded in a voice that sounds like a speaking subject. When John Kerrigan points to Muldoon’s ‘long-proven ability to combine uncertainties of perspective with a lyrical lucidity,’ he captures his amalgam of inscrutability and intelligibility.82 Like O’Brien, Muldoon has self-reflexive and epistemologically questioning edges—but also what the Plain People of Ireland called ‘good jokes.’ Both novelist and poet partake of—or invent—overtly, aggressively experimental practices, but do so within a coherent and apprehensible frame and with at least surface-level verbal coherence and interest.

Muldoon might see many qualities in O’Nolan’s work that resonate with his own interests, but one quality is this idea of tricky intelligibility or readable shiftiness: critiques of Muldoon’s poetry have sometimes emphasized either difficulty or frivolity, or some combination of the two. Writing of Muldoon’s humour, Peter Robinson notes that ‘his tactics of airy indirection, his never being ponderous, can appear accommodations to a contemporary debasement of the principle that in order to teach a writer must first please, and Muldoon’s reduced idea of a poem’s encounter with the inner life of readers […] invites comparison with the leisure industry.’83 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, a little similarly, notes that critics have questioned ‘the poet’s engagement with real feelings and the real world. To what extent is he a highly inventive but emotionally evasive joker playing a slippery, virtuosic game of words and rhymes and allusions.’84 James F. Wilson, however, points to how irony and difficulty in fact are part of Muldoon’s substance: this poetry is ‘riddled with etymological puns, obscure references, shaggy dogs, and half-truths [and] can seem on the surface to mock everything, even while it calls up intense feeling.’85 Reading Muldoon, I sometimes hear an ambivalence about one’s irony, insouciance, and apparent detachment. Difficulty returns again and again in Muldoon’s 1995 interview with Dominique Gauthier, for instance. Towards the middle of the interview, Muldoon tells Gauthier: ‘Feeling at ease is the last thing I want to do. And it’s also the last thing I want the reader to feel.’86 But both earlier and later, as if to counter an assumption that his poems are obscure or complex, Muldoon returns to words like ‘accessible’ and ‘intelligible’ multiple times: ‘You know, nothing would please me more than to write … —well, actually, that’s what I am doing now! I’m writing short, reasonably accessible poems. They have surface immediacy, even if they are not completely intelligible. That’s what I’ve been trying to do for the last couple of years.’87 Even a ‘private system of imagery’ can be ‘intelligible too, to a wider audience.’88 This combination—moderately clear but never comfortable or complacent—is part of the appeal of ‘Le Flanneur,’ as it is with O’Brien.

I will end by returning to another poet, one who is an avowedly devoted reader of O’Brien and whose work is perched somewhere between the intelligible lyric and the avant-garde. At the beginning of this article, I quoted Gabriel Gudding’s declaration that At Swim-Two-Birds is his favourite book. Funny in ways quite close to how O’Brien and Myles are funny, his poetry tends to use a coherent voice but also vast fake catalogues, unseemly or truculent exclamations (à la Myles), and footnotes sometimes postulating extravagantly contrafactual things. For instance, there is a bizarre digression, within a frequently serious and angry collection of poems against factory farms, on how the rise of watches led to a weakening of telepathic powers and thus to Nazism, a theory as outré as anything in de Selby.89 Gudding’s poetry—in its faux-scholarly moments, its linguistic zaniness and impishness, its moments of silliness and sudden fierceness, its attention to the rigidity brought on by certain cultural expectations, its intertextual webs—suggests a debt to O’Brien that deserves more attention. But perhaps most saliently, Muldoon’s and Gudding’s work suggests that O’Brien exemplifies a middle way between experiment and the mainstream: there is ‘surface immediacy’ and a story underneath. O’Nolan’s intractably comic sensibility resonates not only with postmodern novelists but with lyric poets—with writers drawn to words that are worn out, to the occasional hair-raising pun, to worlds that seem controlled and random, sealed off and dizzyingly open.