Introduction

Brian O’Nolan’s most acclaimed novels—At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, and An Béal Bocht—were written during or in the lead-up to the Second World War. It was also during the early stages of the war that O’Nolan was commissioned by the Irish Times to write his Cruiskeen Lawn column.¹ Rarely, however, are these works associated with the catastrophic international context in which they first appeared.

This is not only true of popular knowledge of O’Nolan but also largely true of collections and criticism of his work until now. In collections such as John Wyse Jackson’s Flann O’Brien at War (articles written during the war, rather than articles about it) as in others, the aim is that of entertainment, rather than historical contextualisation.² The effect of the war on O’Nolan is treated at modest length in books such as Anthony Cronin’s No Laughing Matter and Carole Taaffe’s Ireland Through the Looking Glass, while Anna Teekell’s Emergency Writing dedicates a chapter to O’Nolan and Beckett (two writers who, as Christina Hunt Mahony writes, ‘had very different wars’).³ Catherine Flynn’s ‘“the half-said thing”: Cruiskeen Lawn, Japan and the Second World War’ and Germán Asensio Peral’s ‘“One does not take sides in these neutral latitudes”: Myles na gCopaleen and The Emergency’ provide small-scale studies of specific aspects of O’Nolan’s articles.⁴ The former focuses on a single, distant belligerent, though offers valuable reflections on O’Nolan’s relationship to the war more generally. The latter analyses O’Nolan’s opinions on the basis of six wartime articles, which are not necessarily representative of the full corpus of wartime articles (over a thousand). Clair Wills incorporates sections on O’Nolan in her cultural history of Emergency Ireland, including ones on his inventive jokes about wartime shortages and his ambivalent relationship to both the Gaelic Revival and the ‘Europhilia’ of his fellow intellectuals.⁵ Recently, Tobias Harris has argued that O’Nolan’s writing is comparable to the interwar European avant-garde, including Dadaism, the Frankfurt School, and other movements and artists whose work was deeply influenced by the contemporary political context of authoritarianism and political radicalism.⁶ Harris contends that the Cruiskeen Lawn articles can be read not only alongside contemporary Irish publications but also in ‘the broader context of European modernism and cultural criticism’ and that despite the ‘ironic distance’ identified by Taaffe in O’Nolan’s writings, one should not assume that O’Nolan’s writings were any more ‘devoid of politics’ than those of Berlin Dadaist Johannes Baader.⁷

However, despite the growth of interest in Brian O’Nolan and the value of the contributions mentioned above, his relationship to the unprecedented international crisis during which he wrote his most esteemed works has been a relatively under-researched topic. Yet O’Nolan wrote in depth on themes that had heightened relevance at that time: nationalism and national identity, cultural purism and essentialism, and ethnic stereotypes. Despite their neutrality and censorship, people in Ireland were not untouched by wartime reports from the mainland, nor was Ireland immune to contemporary problems such as antisemitism, xenophobia, and totalitarian organisations. Yet O’Nolan was writing in an environment where censorship severely limited both what could be known and what could be said about the war.

Taking a bird’s eye view of the entire corpus of Cruiskeen Lawn articles, from O’Nolan’s first article to those written in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, this essay will explore some of the considerable number of articles in which O’Nolan wrote about ‘what goes on on the shrapnel-pocked crust of H.M. Mother Earth,’ including the war and fascism.⁸ For this, I used the Irish Times digital archive and read all the articles that turned up under the search for ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ between summer 1940 and autumn 1945. While problems with character recognition may have meant that some articles slipped through the cracks, the search tended to produce over 200 articles a year, giving confidence that a large and representative sample of the wartime articles has been taken into account. From these results, I saved articles which I considered relevant to the themes of the war; the belligerents and their leaders; conditions in Emergency Ireland; Irish-German relations; and nationalism and fascism. A significant portion of the Cruiskeen Lawn articles at least fleetingly deal with one or more of these topics: I saved fifty-three articles from 1941, sixty from 1942, fifty-eight from 1943, forty-nine from 1944, and fifty-two from 1945. While another researcher may have regarded a greater or fewer number of the total Cruiskeen Lawn articles in this period as relevant, those which were saved made up a large enough corpus that to include every relevant article in this essay would be practically impossible, and plenty of material is left to examine more closely. Nonetheless, reading through them all gives one a good sense of O’Nolan’s overall attitude to these themes, at least as expressed by Myles na gCopaleen in the Irish Times columns, and how that attitude developed as the war progressed.

First, this essay will sketch the historical context of O’Nolan’s wartime writings: his background relative to that of the Irish Times, wartime censorship, and Irish nationalism. Next, it will analyse O’Nolan’s attitudes to the war and to life in ‘Emergency’ Ireland, focusing on themes such as censorship, violence, ideology, and reactions to the Allied victory. Finally, it will examine O’Nolan’s writing on nationalism and fascism in a European context. O’Nolan’s humour makes it difficult to determine the stands he takes (if any) on issues of his time. Nonetheless, a thorough analysis of how he reacted to these developments is timely.

‘The Irish mind is at peace because it fosters no malice’:⁹ The Context of O’Nolan’s Wartime Writing

On 10 July 1940, one of O’Nolan’s early pseudonymous letters to the Irish Times appeared on the same page as articles reporting on fighting in France. The Germans, despite ‘enormous and unthinkable losses,’ were approaching Paris: ‘the capital prepares itself for the worst with unshakeable calm.’¹⁰ O’Nolan, under the pseudonym F. O’Brien, argued with a ‘Mr. O’Connor’ about whether Ibsen wore a wig (or seven), and reprimands his adversary for a lack of seriousness:

It occurs to me that Mr. O’Connor’s article is not intended to be taken seriously. Very well, if it is, but if the presentation of a serious play by Chekhov in the Gate Theatre is to be made the occasion for oafish jokes, then the sooner we get into the war the better.¹¹

Less than twenty years after independence, the Second World War had the potential to polarise Ireland anew. To avoid the destabilising effect of strong disagreements at a time of emergency, censorship attempted to uphold neutrality in the press. It included censoring not only propaganda for either side and details that might be of strategic use to belligerents, but also material that might diminish support for neutrality (e.g., detailed information on concentration camps). This ‘sanitised reporting’ was intended to enable the Irish public to believe that neutrality was ‘not only justified as a means of self-preservation but was a moral response to the conflict.’ It did its job so well that Donal Ó Drisceoil has referred to censorship as ‘neutrality’s backbone.’¹² Censorship allowed Irish people to be ‘sustained in their faith’ in neutrality as an ‘ethical imperative’ throughout the war.¹³

While neutrality was popular in Ireland, censorship had high-profile opponents, including literary figures and some in the political establishment, such as Fianna Fáil minister Seán MacEntee, for whom O’Nolan would serve as personal secretary.¹⁴ O’Nolan’s Irish Times editor, Bertie Smyllie, who declared after the war that ‘this paper has never been neutral,’ was another opponent of censorship and frequently in conflict with the censor over his pro-Allied reporting. After the war was over, Smyllie castigated the censor for preventing the paper from articulating its convictions, and, in the pages of the paper, hailed the resounding defeat of Germany and Japan with triumphant approval.¹⁵ Neutrality was seen as a way to assert Irish sovereignty and independence from the UK and the Commonwealth. It was widespread across Europe at the start of the war: neutral countries in 1939 included ‘Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Portugal, Switzerland and Italy, not to mention the United States.’¹⁶ As the war progressed, neutrality grew rarer in Europe, as most of the countries listed above either had chosen to join the war, or had been invaded and occupied by a belligerent.

Smyllie’s pro-Allied outlook was not shared by everyone in Ireland. Irish nationalists tended either to regard the war as none of their concern, or to take up the cause of Germany, seeing it as an ally against Britain. During the Second World War, the IRA ‘was committed to aiding the German war effort,’ and its leader, Sean Russell, who died on a Nazi U-Boat seeking German aid, ‘identified Irish “freedom” […] with a Nazi victory.’¹⁷ Historical sympathy with Germany amongst Irish nationalists, dating back to before the First World War, was a matter not only of political and military expediency, but also of mutual cultural interest and admiration. German Celtologists had pioneered the study of the language as an academic discipline. Some combined this endeavour with an interest and involvement in Irish and German nationalism, seeing the two causes as connected.¹⁸ O’Nolan had become familiar with their work during his student days, as demonstrated by his early poem about Celtic Studies, ‘Binchy and Bergin and Best,’ which mentions Kuno Meyer, Heinrich Zimmer, Julius Pokorny, and the Zeitschrift as major contributors to the discipline.¹⁹ Such connections are unsurprising given their mutual animosity towards England and their shared philosophical roots in a Romantic Nationalism, for which language was central.²⁰ In the early 1940s, modern literature in Irish reached a turning point, and the language movement enjoyed a new wave of popularity, particularly among young, urban people, with sections of the movement attracted to fascism.²¹ Craobh na hAiséirghe, a branch of Conradh na Gaeilge of which Ciarán Ó Nualláin was a member, split into the fascist party Ailtirí na hAiséirghe. It and the more ‘culturalist’ (but still pro-Axis) Glúin na Buaidhe were a minority within the language movement, but a minority with influence, their leader, Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin, being elected to the Coiste Gnótha of Conradh na Gaeilge.²² Even the mainstream of the language movement was not averse to maintaining connections with Nazi Germany well into the war: at the Conradh’s fiftieth anniversary celebration in 1943, a congratulations telegram from Ludwig Mühlhausen was read.²³ Mühlhausen, a member of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) from 1932, was then Professor of Celtic Studies at Berlin and one of the organisers of the Irland Redaktion Nazi propaganda broadcasts aimed at an Irish audience in English and Irish.²⁴ After the war Irish language activists and Celtic scholars were influential in sheltering minority nationalists from Brittany and Flanders who had collaborated with the Nazis and helping them normalise their legal status and integrate into Irish society.²⁵

Different cultural circles in Ireland offered different interpretations of the war and of how Irish people should position themselves in relation to it. In this context, O’Nolan occupied interesting middle ground. As a writer with connections in different areas of Irish cultural and political life and possessing a good knowledge of German and of European ‘high culture,’ his position would not have been easy to predict—that is, assuming he took a position at all.

‘Get back to your own page and play with your Panzerdivision’: Emergency Ireland and the World at War

In the 20 October 1941 instalment of the Cruiskeen Lawn, Myles responds to a question from The Plain People of Ireland, ‘Well, what do you think of the war?,’ with a definitive ‘Nothing. I never think of the war.’²⁶ Some critics and historians have since argued that censorship’s limits on what could be written about the war resulted in an atmosphere of denial and distancing.²⁷ However, as Clair Wills has noted, both war and neutrality ‘demanded public engagement from even the most “detached” or “aesthetic” of writers,’ and Brian O’Nolan was no exception.²⁸ His first Cruiskeen Lawn article involved a breakfast-table dialogue proving that Irish had the vocabulary to talk about the war.²⁹ O’Nolan, however, generally focused more on the less violent topic of life in Emergency Ireland than on the continental war. He mostly kept the violence of the war at a humorous distance, only becoming ‘more topical’ about international events later in the war and with the suspension of censorship in May 1945, in its aftermath.³⁰

Myles’s casual observations on everyday life and conversation in Ireland were mostly about the realities of the Emergency, as experienced by ordinary people. In 1941 and 1942, he repeatedly refers to ‘scrámó,’ a fictional substance with endless uses, reflecting discussions about the rationing of the time.³¹ In one column he suggested burning An Gúm books to help with the fuel shortage; in another, with typical Mylesian irreverence for Irish nationalism, he wrote a new version of the ‘Shan Van Vocht,’ updated for a modern, unromantic Emergency Ireland:

The fags are hard to buy,

Says the Shan Van Vocht,

We know the reason why,

Says the Shan Van Vocht,

But as sure as you and I

Will one day come to die

They’ll be scarcer by and by,

Says the Shan Van Vocht.³²

Another target of satire was Ireland’s attempts at wartime security, such as the unintimidating Local Defence Forces, compared in one of Myles’s woodcuts to ogham stones (Figure 1).³³

Figure 1: ‘The Ogham Guard,’ from Cruiskeen Lawn, 12 September 1942.

While Myles’s tone when commenting on such aspects of Emergency life could not be described as respectful or patriotic, it was generally cheery: the jokes read not as harsh criticism but as attempts to amuse his readership with relatable points. A more contentious reality of Emergency Ireland was the censorship regime. On this, Myles’s tone was more acerbic. He wrote, ‘the fuss about censorship in certain quarters makes me laugh.’³⁴ In this attitude he differed not only from many contemporary writers, especially those in the Bell—of whom he spoke in contemptuous tones—but also from MacEntee and Smyllie. Myles’s teasing of Smyllie was more playful than his criticisms of the Bell, taking forms such as a wood-cut cartoon of the editor of the Irish Times—possibly Smyllie—angry about the censor (Figure 2) or fictional dialogues between the editor and Myles which turn the tension between them into a joke: telling the serious, war-focused editor to ‘Get back to your own page and play with your Panzerdivision,’ for example.³⁵ In his wartime articles, Myles spent more time attacking the opponents of censorship than censorship itself, a contrast to his mocking of censorship in other contexts (e.g., the censorship of risqué parts of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An t-Oileánach).³⁶ This may, however, be down to a playful or contrarian contempt for the Dublin literati (according to Harris, the Cruiskeen Lawn had a ‘vendetta’ against ‘all purpose liberal’ Seán Ó Faoláin), rather than because O’Nolan was a firm believer in wartime censorship.³⁷

Figure 2: The Editor of this newspaper just after he has had a conversation with the Censor, Cruiskeen Lawn, 12 December 1941.

Myles appeared to have been ambivalent about writing about the things that censorship obscured. He referred to the war in his articles: references to it pepper articles in the form of multilingual puns (e.g., a German official in France is a ‘Staat-Herr-Vichy-ach,’ a pun on státseirbhíseach).³⁸ The bloodshed attached to these sources of linguistic satire only occasionally rises to the surface. Myles’s references to war reports nearby in the paper or his use of war-related phrases in the catechisms of cliché (‘How will the armistice bring these problems? In its train’) show that he did not lack knowledge about the war but tended to avoid it as a topic.³⁹ Nor did O’Nolan have an aversion to violence as a literary topic: his novels contain enthusiastically violent passages, such as Dermot Trellis’s fictional creations imagining ‘the pulp of [the] banjaxed corpse’ of a man crushed by a train, or the ‘catastrophic blow in the head’ given to Bónapárt Ó Cúnasa by his teacher that leaves blood ‘pouring from the split [the] stick had made.’⁴⁰ When it came to wartime violence in the real world, however, Myles sidestepped the issue somewhat, possibly because he thought it would not pass the censor, but possibly also on principle. He criticised those who constantly wrote and talked about the war, writing in his first column that those who felt the need for words like ‘incendiary bombs’ in the morning were having a ‘ghoul’s breakfast,’ and in a 1943 column that ‘chatting away’ about ‘world cataclysm [… and] penalties of neutrality’ was ‘the old relentless stuff that makes the reader every morning push away the Luke Waugham egg and light a shaky cigarette.’⁴¹ Another occasion on which Myles expressed a weariness or distaste with talk of the war was when writing about the Irish Times’s coverage of the ‘Irish Exhibition of Living Art’: ‘I can only say that I’m damn glad there are no war pictures in this exhibition. It saves one the trouble of calling it a Salon de R.A.F.-U.S.A.’⁴² Another was in reaction to a piece that suggested women looking for a husband should read up on news and current affairs: ‘[it] astonishes me that anybody should be so anxious to get married as to go over there ←,’ Myles declared, with the arrow pointing to coverage of the war in Russia.⁴³ Tobias Harris has argued, however, that these last two examples can be read as criticisms of Irish artists and commentators who tried too hard to opine and ‘talk intelligently’ on events they had not experienced.⁴⁴ An article on Charlie Chaplin bemoaned how a man who was ‘a great clown’ had decided to make The Great Dictator, which Myles did not regard as highly as Chaplin’s 1920s work.⁴⁵ This suggested that Myles did not think it was the business of a comic artist to make serious political points, as these detracted from the humour.

As a result of this approach, when explicit violence appears in the column, it stands out. Sometimes these rare moments of seriousness were provoked by more habitual topics like Irish literary life.⁴⁶ Myles was unimpressed by Patrick Kavanagh’s suggestion that literature’s romantic impressions of Ireland were what kept it out of the war, remarking that ‘if qualities of poetry or romance be enough to avert the monstrous claw of war, it seems to me a little unfair that your excellent Ireland should be unscarred while, say, France has been mutilated, Dresden erased, and important parts of London amputated.’ ⁴⁷ This comment was significant not only in its recognition of the destruction of some of Europe’s cultural centres, but also in its rejection of Kavanagh’s suggestion of Irish exceptionalism in areas of culture and romance.

As Taaffe has observed, Myles began to express stronger opinions about the war, with a darker, more cynical tone, as it drew to a close.⁴⁸ Despite his ambivalent relationship to wartime censorship, when it ended, he took advantage of his new freedom to write more explicit opinions. He still made fun of Smyllie decrying how wartime censorship had prevented him from publishing facts, declaring in May 1945: ‘IT CAN BE PUBLISHED NOW! You see, I was killed in France in 1940!’⁴⁹ The atom bomb inspired the publication of grim paragraphs: in one, Keats and Chapman are travelling in an area for testing atomic bombs and find ‘human backs blown off by the bomb […] piled in a heap in a nearby field.’⁵⁰ Even though Myles found things like the atomic bomb morally repugnant, the war provided raw material for his usual puns and wordplay: ‘O’Tomic Bomb,’ ‘abombic tomb.’⁵¹ Despite this explicitly violent content, Myles’s unconventional cultural juxtapositions often retained a ‘glib tone […] far removed from the realities of wartime Europe [, which] betrayed one effect of neutral Ireland’s isolation’; for example, in one article, he called CIÉ conductors a ‘new Gestapo,’ who would ship un-ticketed passengers to ‘dread Arbeitslager.’⁵²

The war meant that a democratic future in Europe was an uncertain thing, and it is possible that such concerns—about fascism, communism, democracy, and the merits or demerits of those systems—were on the minds of some Irish readers and commentators, even at their distance from the battlefields. How much these things could be discussed directly was, of course, limited; however, it seems that Myles found indirect ways to remind his readers of them. Shortly before the end of the war, Myles wrote a series on ‘contemporary constitutions.’ It included sections on freedom of speech and assembly in the 1814 Norwegian and 1920 Czechoslovak constitutions and the 1920 constitution of the Republic of Austria, which stated that ‘All citizens of the federation shall be equal before the law.’⁵³ That these constitutions were not ‘contemporary,’ because these countries had been under Nazi occupation which destroyed such rights, is fleetingly and euphemistically alluded to: after a digression on Austrian horsemanship, Myles observes, ‘at the moment of going to press, the Republic of Austria is no longer in business.’⁵⁴ With this series, Myles draws attention to democratic principles that hung in the balance at the time of writing, yet also treats these principles with his typical bathos, noting that free expression is ‘a most hollow and false permit,’ because one cannot have ‘liberty to explain to one’s wives the extent to which […] their slatternly housekeeping disgust one.’⁵⁵ In early 1941, in an article attacking anti-censorship intellectuals, Myles wrote,

And Democracy? I never touch it but if it means a Saturday paper full of articles by persons who ‘write’ about ‘the doctrine of free-will,’ ‘the basic principle of democracy’ and ‘belief,’ I think it is time we all changed over to the Nietzche Nietzche Shinbum.⁵⁶

A bus-stop conversation about ‘who is going to win beyond’ was likely a veiled way to discuss the war, and when one of the people in the conversation stressed, ‘YOUR MAN IS USING THE WHIP,’ it could have been intended to remind readers of the brutality of fascism. That said, the conversation was deliberately confusing, in that it left the reader unsure about its topic, and if it was about the war, it contained expressions indicating some equivalence between the belligerents: ‘But it’s not all on the wan side. Your man was up to some hooky work in his time too. […] There’s a pair of crows in it.’⁵⁷ Myles’s lack of seriousness makes it hard to draw conclusions about how exactly O’Nolan felt about fascism or democracy, or whether these extracts reflected his own thoughts or things he had heard other people say.

Immediately after the war, the column’s tone was one of flippancy, nostalgia, and omission, along with pessimism about war’s inevitability and cynicism about all those involved, regardless of which side they are on (‘peace is a highly abnormal condition,’ he observes in a column imagining ‘militarists’ and ‘technicians’ already planning the next war).⁵⁸ Myles maintains moral neutrality, not attributing blame to a specific country or ideology. Having avoided judging either side during the war, once it ended, he arguably showed more distaste for the perceived self-righteousness and hypocrisy of the Allies than for the crimes of the Axis powers they had defeated.⁵⁹ He was incensed by Smyllie’s statement that ‘Germany and Japan have been crushed, together with their miserable following of satellites,’ and responded with a series on the superiority of Oriental, especially Japanese, culture and manners over those of the West (and implying that within the West, the most cultured nation was Germany).⁶⁰ While an admiration for German or Japanese culture is hardly noteworthy, the timing of the expression is curious and suggests the praise was not entirely apolitical. The Nuremberg trials would, like the atomic bomb, become a ‘bugbear’ for Myles, who maintained that ‘this grisly farce of “trying” war criminals should not be persisted in.’⁶¹ His unfortunate comparison and equivalence of CIÉ conductors with the Gestapo must indicate that the weight of the crimes in question had not entirely sunk in.

Such reactions to the Allied victory were not unusual in Ireland. The Allies’ triumph saw a burst of sympathy for the defeated Axis powers and distaste for ‘what many people saw as an unattractive display of Allied triumphalism.’ This impulse could result in the Holocaust and other Axis crimes being overlooked or relativised: even the Irish Times wrote a year after the war, ‘the horrors of the concentration camps and lethal chambers, all the brutalities of the Japanese sadists in Malaya and Burma seem to us peccadilloes in comparison with the supreme crime of the atomic bomb.’⁶² Taaffe claims that Myles’s suspicion of the Nuremberg trials was ‘not unrepresentative of the Irish public opinion.’⁶³ Whether such criticisms had merit or not, they were likely useful in helping the Irish public maintain a belief in the moral rectitude of neutrality even after censorship had been lifted and the Nazi atrocities publicised. Myles chimed in with this view: ‘the recent war was an occasion for virtue for the Irish because you kept out of it.’⁶⁴ His support for Irish non-intervention was also informed by his understanding of Ireland’s true scale of influence. Upon the foundation of an Irish Institute for International Affairs, he asked, ‘Do they—in Washington, Moscow, Tokyo, Berlin—when in doubt ring up the Irish Institute for International Affairs?,’ implying that Ireland should not bother getting involved in international affairs, because Ireland is too small and irrelevant to make a difference.⁶⁵

This sense of Irish impotence and of wars’ inevitability may explain why Myles made few explicit judgements about either the events of the war or the ideologies of the belligerents, taking an ostensibly neutral position, even after the lifting of censorship would have allowed for a more partisan position. It is significant that Myles did not add his voice to the anti-censorship chorus or try to push its wartime limits in the pages of the Irish Times. His neutral and noncommittal stance on the wartime clash of ideologies possibly related not only to his distaste for earnestness, but also to his desire as a comic writer to amuse his public, rather than draw yet more attention to miserable news.⁶⁶ Some readers were grateful for this approach: in February 1941, Una McC. Dix. wrote to the editor, ‘What is left of my heart after two world wars and a revolution jumps for joy when I see him [Myles] in print.’⁶⁷ For Myles, as for many in Ireland, brutality and despotism abroad could only be observed from afar. Considering that, a prioritisation of morale at home is unsurprising. However, O’Nolan engaged more deeply with nationalism.

‘We are the Eireann-volk’: Nationalism, Nationality, and Europe

O’Nolan’s engagement with themes of national identity, stereotypes, and ideals has been widely acknowledged and studied. He has been recognised as both a critic and a purveyor of Irish stereotypes and of the national image as created by nineteenth-century British stage-Irish characters, by Anglo-Irish Revival writers, and especially by proponents of Gaelicism.⁶⁸ As discussed, ideas of a mystical connection between language, nationhood, and ethnicity and an anti-Enlightenment cultural primitivism praising purity and simplicity instead of progress (even if it meant poverty and ethnic essentialism) were not simply features of the Irish Revival, but part of a broader European ideological framework of Romantic nationalism. O’Nolan was aware of these connections and gave them thought in his numerous wartime writings on nations and nationalism.

To criticise the language movement, as Myles did, was to engage with Romantic conceptions of nationhood and, in Myles’s case, to undermine them. With An Béal Bocht, he established himself in Irish as a critic of the Irish-language movement, mocking especially the characteristically Romantic nationalist aspects of the Revival: the idealisation of the poverty and supposed primitivism of the peasantry and the obsession with finding indigenous culture in an unsullied form. As Myles put it in a 1944 column, those who wanted the Irish to be ‘like good folk in the Gaeltacht, living that simple life [… and] occupying ourselves with uncomplicated agricultural chores which distinguish all ethnic groups […,] denied the enervating influence of H.M. English Language’ and were seeking ‘a return to primal balance.’⁶⁹ Myles has been defined in opposition to Romanticism by critics such as Maebh Long and Carol Taaffe, the latter characterising An Béal Bocht as an ‘anti-romantic satire.’⁷⁰

This viewpoint brought Myles into conflict with the Irish nationalist theories and mythologies that underpinned the outlook of the Free State. He showed little reverence for the heroic or idealised figures of Irish nationalist culture, such as the Shan Van Vocht and Eamonn an Chnoic, who became comic characters in the Cruiskeen Lawn. However, as Tobias Harris has pointed out, to say O’Nolan attacked Irish nationalists would be ‘to simplify [his] intentions.’⁷¹ As Ciarán Ó Nualláin’s activities demonstrated, satirising aspects of Irish nationalism and holding nationalist beliefs were not mutually exclusive.⁷² Myles could take a nationalist tone on occasion, for example, when he was infuriated by Smyllie’s hailing of the triumph of the Commonwealth in the war, or in reaction to British or Northern Irish Unionist opinions on Ireland.⁷³ The targets of Myles’s humour shifted with the day, as he reacted to what he read that struck him as ridiculous. His exact relationship to Irish nationalism, as to many other topics, was ambiguous.

However, Myles regarded some contemporary nationalist movements with obvious contempt. Despite their small size, Ailtirí na hAiséirghe and Glúin na Buaidhe appeared frequently in the Cruiskeen Lawn, where they were never portrayed positively. Sometimes Myles merely made them figures of fun, announcing a Gaiety Theatre concert in which ‘among other things Ailtirí na hAiséirghe will sing’ or combining their logo with that of Córas Iompair Éireann in a woodcut (Figure 3).⁷⁴ On other occasions, he was more derisive, writing in 1943 that when he read that in AD 897 Ireland was ‘visited with a plague of strange worms,’ he ‘immediately [thought] of Ailtirí na hAiséirghe.’⁷⁵ On a Glúin na Buaidhe pamphlet about its aims for Irish youth, he wrote, ‘If I were one of the cynics of whom there are far too many in this country, I would probably here make a distinction between youth and infantilism.’⁷⁶ This is a typical Mylesian statement, in that he simultaneously voices a criticism while jokingly distancing himself from it, not committing to a clear stance, but drawing attention to and undermining the policies he finds ridiculous. He then mocked the ‘bias towards foreignism’ in Glúin na Buaidhe’s aspiration that their youth movement would ‘appear to Irish Youth as the Wandervogels appeared to the youth of Germany.’⁷⁷ His 1944 sketch An Sgian satirised the split between Glúin na Buaidhe and Ailtirí na hAiséirghe in the form of a screaming match between a Glúin na Buaidhe wife and her Aiséirghe husband. The husband eventually thrusts into his wife’s back a knife that had been presented to him by Conradh na Gaeilge on his wedding day. Reading the letter that had been presented with the knife (while finding fault with the Irish), which included congratulations on his taking ‘the noble woman’ for his wife, he looks towards her body now on the floor.⁷⁸ Mixing a satire of linguistic pedantry with dark humour, the play depicted the organisations’ members as both ridiculous pedants and as dangerous fanatics, violently intolerant even of small differences of opinion.

Figure 3: A combination of Ailtirí na hAiséirghe’s emblem and the letters “CIE,” from Cruiskeen Lawn, 27 January 1945.

Myles’s efforts to highlight the disturbing nature of sections of the language movement are examples of what Taaffe has identified as ‘an intermittent preoccupation [… with] the unsettling correspondences between the xenophobia of some language activists and the tenor of recent European politics.’⁷⁹ Although Myles generally adopted a neutral tone when writing about international relations, in his clearer condemnations of xenophobia in Ireland, he drew occasional parallels with the continent: ‘that distinguished Senator who said that the Irish people are better than any other people really meant that we are the Eireann-volk.’⁸⁰ Slánabhaile, a recurring character in the column who stands for puritanism within the Revival, is ridiculed for his intolerance of foreign culture.⁸¹ In multiple articles Myles mocks fears of ‘foreignism’ and the assumption ‘that things are either good (Irish) or bad (foreign).’⁸² Such condemnations of nationalism sometimes display a lack of perspective, such as his calling Irish-language fanatics in the early 1940s ‘the most nauseating phenomenon in Europe’—a judgement that reveals his greater concern for disturbing fascist groupings in Ireland than their far more brutal equivalents then occupying much of Europe.⁸³ Like any good satirist, Myles had a sharp eye for human ridiculousness, especially in the form of dogma.

As Cronin finds, ‘Myles was against racism or doctrines of cultural purity in all their forms,’ and his column happily mixed a plethora of cultural influences from inside and outside Europe.⁸⁴ It included such incongruous mixtures as an Irish haiku, humorous translations of the names of European cities and composers into Irish (Kharkiv became ‘Cathair Cobha,’ Chopin Feargus Ó Coipín), and a ballet programme written in French but with Gaelic font.⁸⁵ This playfulness emphasised an Ireland within Europe and Irish and European language cultures that were not mutually exclusive. German culture in particular often featured. Occasionally, its contemporary totalitarianism was alluded to—a German visitor cried, ‘Sieg Heil!’ to an Irish-speaker, who replied, ‘What does he say is in the cell?’ (sa chill)—but more often Myles focussed on Germany’s academic culture and excellence.⁸⁶ While excluding no part of the world on principle, Myles generally appears to believe that exceptionally cultured peoples existed and that Germany and Japan were amongst them. In his strange 1945 hymns to the superiority (not equality) of Japanese culture over that of the West, he made an exception for German culture, where the implied innate inferiority of the Occidental ‘had not prevented certain citizens of German nationality, from producing works which […] are very fine.’⁸⁷ O’Nolan’s knowledge of German culture was deep, and his German fairly fluent: one column featured a ‘Professor Otto Beideseiten,’ who wrote at length and in correct German about Myles’s column. Besides a knowledge of more academic aspects of Germany, Myles displayed a command of contemporary German culture, such as the 1920s student song ‘Ich hab’ mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren.’⁸⁸

The German culture he admires is not, however, German culture as defined by the NSDAP. Myles’s Germany included artists such as Heinrich Heine (author of Die Harzreise, which the protagonist of At Swim-Two-Birds, presumably studying German, must buy) and Mendelssohn (‘Feidhlimidh Mac Mindil’ to Myles), whose works were denigrated by the Nazis on account of their Jewish birth.⁸⁹ He was also, as Harris has demonstrated, influenced by the kind of modern German thinkers and artists, many of them Jewish, whom the Nazis persecuted, such as Sigmund Freud.⁹⁰ Myles’s infrequent references to Jews more generally are mixed. Although he was not immune from the antisemitic stereotypes that were widespread in Ireland at the time, writing in one column, ‘The Jew is a good man for accumulating money,’⁹¹ he did display sympathy towards the Jewish people in the aftermath of the Holocaust, especially during the Jewish insurgency against British rule in Mandatory Palestine.⁹²

Clair Wills has described Myles’s derision of the ‘Europhile literati,’ who talked about Kafka and Braque, concluding that Myles was as against ‘Europhilism’ as against ‘Celtophilism,’ ‘finding Europe not in the cultural sphere, or in leisure, but in warfare and belligerence.’⁹³ Tobias Harris, however, has pointed out that O’Nolan moved in the same circles as those Europhile literati, with some of his close friends involved in the promotion and study of European modernism, especially Joyce.⁹⁴ Myles was ambivalent towards Europhiles in Ireland and, increasingly, towards Europe itself. Yet he was not immune to evocations of pre-war European culture and leisure, and he often referred positively to major figures of European ‘high culture.’ There is a nostalgia to Myles’s evocations of German culture and to the Europe of the Cruiskeen Lawn, and his columns tended towards that which was cultured, bookish, or zany about the continent before the wars destroyed it. His imagined Europe was probably one from before the First World War and definitely one from before the Second. He reflected, ‘the great nation [of Germany …] has honoured me with no less than fifty doctorates […] and left me with nothing but the most pleasant memories of Heidelberg on the Neckar,’ and mused on what a French-Gaelic acquaintance who visited Ireland in 1914 might be doing had she not died on the Lusitania (maybe selling ‘dirty pictures in Budapest’).⁹⁵ He quoted pre-1914 articles from An Claidheamh Soluis on international relations, and reported visiting Greeks wearing fez while subscribing to the Language Fund.⁹⁶ If nostalgia for the old Europe was how Myles and other Irish writers escaped from the reality of its destruction and the question of who was to blame, he was not alone. In the years after the war, light, nostalgic films were popular as a means of escapism in German and Austrian cinema, a trend anticipated during the war by the German cult comedy Die Feuerzangenbowle (1944), in which a grown man pretended to be a secondary school student and the idealised Kaiserreich, in which the film was set, ‘serve[d] as a substitute for life in the present.’⁹⁷ The same could be said of the imagined Europe of the Cruiskeen Lawn.

This attachment to the old Europe helps to explain why Myles, who had previously been derisive of those who complained of ‘foreignism,’ was suspicious of some foreign influences, such as ‘planning,’ in the immediate postwar period.⁹⁸ His derision of ‘Paud keeping step with world hysteria in the belief he is being “modern”’ can be read not as a condemnation of Europe generally or of Irish people looking to it for cultural inspiration (which Myles himself does), but as a condemnation of postwar European modernity.⁹⁹ The old Europe, for Myles, with its composers, philosophers, and scholars was a source from which Irish culture could draw, whereas postwar Europe was defined by war crime trials, rubble, and new anxieties. His reluctance to deal directly with Germany’s culpability for the war and the existential threat Nazism posed to a democratic, multi-ethnic Europe (and to the Modernist culture to which O’Nolan belonged) may be attributed to the fact that these were aspects of the uglier Europe that Myles preferred not to write about—or was prevented from writing about by censorship. Even when Myles condemned Nazism, he charitably interpreted the behaviour of Germans: in falling for the ‘trumpery trash’ of Nazism, they had demonstrated ‘the unsuspected fragility of the human intellect.’¹⁰⁰ Perhaps, in wanting to maintain a jovial relationship with all nations, Myles avoided making judgements against one in particular, preferring to see all forms of nationalism as equally silly, all armies as equally destructive, and all causes as equally vain.

In his charitable view of Germany, Myles expressed an idea of general human frailty that reflected his frustration with nationalism and in turn led to a desire to break free from national categories altogether. In 1943, he wrote that ‘No decent person should consent to being called an Irishman, an Englishman, a Jew, or a German simply because of considerations of geography or because of a genealogical convention.’¹⁰¹ In another column he asked whether he could ‘divest himself from Irishry’: the ‘serious difficulty’ was that ‘if you renounce[d] one “nationality” you must simultaneously assume another. It’s like being cured of the flu on the condition that you are satisfied to contract measles.’ He concluded, ‘to be a person completely unaware of nationalist neuroses [was] a very fine ambition.’¹⁰²

Although such statements may be disconnected from the European reality that racial and national categorisation was not consensual and often fatal, they reveal O’Nolan’s despair at the venom of contemporary nationalism and the negative effects of attaching national labels to human beings. Labelling had been challenged in An Béal Bocht, such as when Sitric is denied a bottle of water by a Gaeilgeoir because it ‘spoiled the effect’ of a Gaelic peasant, or when Bónapárt, so used to being mythologised, asks the Seanduine Liath, ‘Are you sure the Gaels are people?’¹⁰³ In his resistance to anything that denied individual variation (e.g., ‘a knowledge of Irish does not necessarily connote adherence to the social, cultural or political philosophies of any other Irish speaker’), Myles was asserting that belonging to a linguistic or national group should not be allowed to overrule the freedom, needs, and uniqueness of the individual human being.¹⁰⁴ If there was a conflict between being ‘Gaelic’ and being ‘human’ (daonna), as he jokingly implied there was, he thought it was more important to be human and to recognise that in others.¹⁰⁵ The horrors of the war convinced many that ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’ as a form of state power should never again be prioritised over the rights and dignity of the individual human being.

Conclusion

Emergency Ireland was home to radically different interpretations of the contemporary global context. Though Irish neutrality, in the military sense, enjoyed broad support, bolstered domestically by censorship, Irish commentators and political actors found ways of making their sympathies clear. Under the penname of Myles na gCopaleen, O’Nolan’s writing for the Cruiskeen Lawn demonstrates an extensive if inconsistent engagement with the war, life in Emergency Ireland, and related themes of national and ethnic identity, fascism, democracy, and international relations. In referring to the war and wartime international relations, Myles avoided taking sides, seemingly giving priority to the entertainment of his readers in neutral Ireland, who received enough serious news and propaganda from other quarters. His attitude was possibly born of censorship, or of a view that serious politics was not the business of a comic (as his judgement of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator would suggest), or of a genuine belief—shared by most of the Irish population—that neutrality was the sensible position, even the moral high ground, aided by a fatalistic outlook that people in Ireland had negligible influence anyway.

At the end of the war, a more opinionated and darker tone emerged. It is present in Myles’s spirited suggestion of the superiority of Japanese (and, in passing, German) culture, his distaste for Smyllie’s triumphalism, and his criticism of the atom bomb and of the Nuremberg trials. None of these things entailed an outright pro-Axis outlook, and, indeed, all were common in Ireland at the time. However, the timing of these articles and Myles’s lack of interest in the crimes committed by the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany, which were being publicised contemporaneously (for example, in May 1945, the Irish Times included harrowing reports of the liberation of Bergen Belsen concentration camp), does lead the reader to question Terence Brown’s claim that O’Nolan was ‘reminding The Irish Times readership of what was at stake in the European war.’¹⁰⁶ Ultimately, Myles expressed approval for Ireland’s policy of neutrality—‘the recent war was an occasion for virtue for the Irish because you kept out of it’—for opting not to rock the boat.¹⁰⁷ While, as Tobias Harris has argued, O’Nolan’s work contained similarities to the kind of avant-garde writing that the Nazis regarded as ‘degenerate,’ in his writing about National Socialism, O’Nolan maintained a ‘careful ambivalence.’¹⁰⁸ Whether such public ambivalence about National Socialism is compatible with being, as Harris characterises O’Nolan, ‘modernizing, republican, [and] anti-fascist’ remains an open question. More strident was the column’s attack on xenophobic and chauvinist currents within the Irish language movement and Irish cultural nationalism, and it is here that Harris’s characterisation of O’Nolan’s writing as ‘anti-fascist’ and ‘anti-authoritarian’ is most convincing.¹⁰⁹ O’Nolan’s criticisms were both acute and courageous: acute, in that they placed Irish cultural nationalism within its often overlooked European context; courageous, in that O’Nolan was ridiculing and making serious (if humorously expressed) criticisms of an influential section of Irish society, to which some of his family and university friends belonged.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.