The Drafts

First, there is the question of how many drafts the Montgomery papers contain. Taaffe counts 159 Cruiskeen Lawn columns in Mongomery’s files dating from January 1947 to May 1958, while O’Neill provides dates of 1947 to 1962.⁹ Like O’Neill, we found that Montgomery’s drafts date from the 3^rd of January 1947 to the 6^th of February 1962. Taaffe might have discounted some of the shorter columns or combined separate, single-page sketches into large composite drafts, but unlike her 159 drafts we counted 200 drafts in total, of which 139 were locatable within The Irish Times and 61 were not.¹⁰ These drafts, which are a mixture of full columns (usually 3 to 4 pages), shorter contributions (which O’Nolan turned into short columns, turned into sections within columns, or used as the building blocks of longer pieces), and quotations of secondary sources, were used by O’Nolan in Cruiskeen Lawn columns dating 8 January 1947 to 12 January 1963.

There are different ways to assess the extent of Montgomery’s contribution. Taaffe was of the opinion that ‘Nearly all’ of the Montgomery drafts she sighted were published, and claimed that as the ‘Cruiskeen Lawn was appearing only three times a week after 1946, this comprised nearly a third of what eventually appeared in the Irish Times’.¹¹ According to Catherine Ahearn, there are 4,198 published columns, which means that we can prove that Montgomery contributed to 3.31% of them.¹² This is far below Taaffe’s estimation of a third of all material. However, when we look at the columns year by year, we see that Montgomery’s contributions in the 1940s were significant: for one year Montgomery’s involvement matches Taaffe’s estimate, as nearly a third of the published columns in 1948 involved his writing (see Table 1). In that year Montgomery wrote an average of 4 articles per month, with 6 appearing in June and December.

It is also very possible that the drafts in the National Library do not represent Montgomery’s complete contribution. O’Neill reports that Montgomery’s family thought he had destroyed his Cruiskeen Lawn material, which might indicate that the material at the National Library is just a portion of the drafts he wrote.¹³ A letter from Denis Devlin to Montgomery in 1946 implies that he was writing columns earlier than the National Library drafts indicate: ‘Are you still writing? or is you [your] free time still taken up with M. n. gC.?’¹⁴ This is potentially corroborated by O’Nolan’s letters: in July 1956 O’Nolan wrote to Montgomery from hospital with ‘serious kidney trouble’, saying that he ‘would be glad of any Cruiskeen material’.¹⁵ Cruiskeen Lawn columns continued to appear while O’Nolan was in hospital and across the start of August but the only drafts in the Montgomery papers for 1956 are dated 18 March, 29 September and 13 October. Perhaps Montgomery was simply busy at work and could not oblige, and O’Nolan found either the energy to write, old material somewhere else, or another stand in. Or Montgomery did write columns for his friend but failed to keep copies or destroyed them later. Yet, even if the Montgomery papers represent the total of his drafts, Montgomery contributed for a substantial portion of the Cruiskeen Lawn run. The first article was published on 12 December 1940 and the final appeared on the day of O’Nolan’s death, 1 April 1966: Montgomery’s drafts span 1947 to 1962. Even if his percentage contribution was small, the longevity of his involvement makes him an important part of the column’s history and of the Myles identity.

From Draft to Published Column

We began this project with the expectation of providing a neat, mainly uncomplicated list of the published columns that had been written by Montgomery. Previous accounts had suggested that not only were Montgomery’s contributions published with ‘very minor changes’,¹⁷ but that there were stylistic and content differences that rendered the O’Nolan columns and the Montgomery columns quite distinct. O’Neill cites John V. Kelleher, who said that he could ‘usually guess or spot that a column was by Niall, his style, his wit, his interests were so very different from Ua Nualláin’s. Ua Nualláin’s writing was rather loose; Niall’s was closely-woven. Ua Nualláin’s jokes were usually obvious; Niall’s were not infrequently a bit abstruse’.¹⁸ We agree that Montgomery had certain areas of interest, which Taaffe notes as including ‘more critical broadsides on art and literature’, although we cannot concur that the drafts provide sufficient evidence to substantiate her claim that Montgomery wrote the majority of columns on Joyce.¹⁹ O’Neill shares Taaffe’s sense of the importance of Montgomery’s contribution and describes the drafts as focusing on ‘politics and the government; partition; town planning and traffic; CIE, the ESB, and the theatre’.²⁰ However, we argue that concentrating on the themes of the drafts in isolation erroneously implies that Montgomery was the single author of the columns he drafted. Instead, matching the drafts with the published columns reveals that the majority of Montgomery’s contributions produced co-authored rather than single-authored columns. This realisation also means that the drafts offer us a new picture O’Nolan, as an editor as well as an author. This is a side of O’Nolan that we have limited access to in the case of his early period, as we have only relatively late typescripts of At Swim-Two-Birds and no early drafts of The Third Policeman, or that appeared to be absent in his later years, as the records regarding his later novels show limited, often hasty or careless, revisions.

To the question of authorship, then, while agreeing that Montgomery was interested in particular topics and had a slightly different style, if the drafts and published columns are representative, we contend that Kelleher’s certainty about his ability to spot the difference between Montgomery and O’Nolan, or a firm insistence that certain topics signal a particular author, depends on the faulty assumption that each column was written by one author. Only 11% of the columns based on Montgomery’s drafts were published without changes. All other columns were a varying blend of O’Nolan’s and Mongomery’s work. Take, for example, this rather nice example of a collaborative building up of a pun. In a draft in 1947 Montgomery turned George Eliot’s The Mill in the Floss into ‘the mill in the flaws by T.S. Eliot’, which O’Nolan changed into ‘the mule in the flaws by T.S. Eliot’.²¹ Similarly, a draft by Montgomery from 31 May 1948 spoke about a play by Tierney, presumably Michael Tierney, Professor of Greek at UCD who became President of UCD in 1947. Montgomery notes that Greek tragedies are ‘hearse-say’, a joke that O’Nolan rejects in that form, but amends into a new closing line: Myles, he writes, did not got to see the play because he was ‘too busy working on that new thing of mine “The Wooden Hearse of Tory”!’.²² At other times O’Nolan used a basic idea by Montgomery, or just some of the quotations that Montgomery used, to write a whole new piece. The attempt to separate the Cruiskeen Lawn columns into those by O’Nolan and those by Montgomery misunderstands the layers of combined work that the published versions reveal.

Of the 139 columns published, only 15 could be described as having no changes. The other 124 columns all have some amendments, from minor changes of names and places to the addition of new opening and concluding paragraphs to the complete rewriting of a concept. In Table 3, the detailed table that concludes this article, we have tried to signal change, without committing to descriptions either so detailed that they repeat the columns or provide information useful only to someone who has the drafts to hand. As such, we have divided the drafts into no changes, minor changes and major changes, adding notes where we considered them useful. Montgomery was clearly alert to the ways his drafts were amended: on most of the drafts he marked any cuts with red pencil lines and ‘rewrite’, but these annotations were so common that we have not repeated them below. An example of annotation we have preserved are the marks ‘100C’ which he wrote on 5 drafts, including one we could not locate in The Irish Times, in 1950. 100C could mean 100 copies, as on the draft written 26 February 1950, which was published in The Irish Times on 1 March 1950, there is a new stamp with the date 23 September 1966 and, by hand, ‘Copy to Douglas Gageby’. Gageby was then editor of The Irish Times, and Montgomery was potentially corresponding with him about the ‘Best of Myles’ column they were running following O’Nolan’s death. We have noted unusual instances such as these, but we have not provided an exhaustive account of cuts and Montgomery’s notations. Instead, we’ve approached the presentation of information on the basis that scholars have access to the digital Cruiskeen Lawn columns and are interested in the origin of the published work, rather than the precise fate of specific sections of the drafts. At times our annotations simply read ‘minor changes’ or ‘major changes’, but for others we provide more information. For the column published on 30 July 1947, for example, which was drafted by Montgomery on 26 July, we have noted the following: ‘Changes to the first two paragraphs, with Montgomery’s material from ‘I am terribly sorry’. Minor changes, new ending’. In this instance, then, rather than simply designate major changes, we show that O’Nolan made substantial changes to the opening and closing but few changes to the main body of the text. As the annotations to Table 3 show, this reflects a tendency across the drafts – O’Nolan made the largest number of changes to the start and finish, often writing completely new material for these sections.

There is no definite way to distinguish between amendments made by O’Nolan and amendments made by the editor. Jack White reports that ‘Copy was scrutinized for libel, scurrility and double-meanings: columns that offended were chopped ruthlessly or thrown into the wastepaper basket’.²³ In a column published in 1948, for example, Myles writes that ‘You have professors above there in Merrion Square that can split cube roots and square the atom and all’.²⁴ But the draft had a longer sentence: ‘… square the atom and all and down the road in the Ann Doyle you have a show that P.T. Barnum in his hey-day never had annting like it for sheer burlesqueue’.²⁵ Montgomery had written his draft in April 1947 but it was not used by O’Nolan until November 1948. Perhaps O’Nolan felt an attack on the government was unnecessary at that time, perhaps an editor found it inappropriate. There are similar instances where the source of the edits is unclear. We are, however, of the opinion that the majority of the changes were made by O’Nolan, as the extent and nature of the amendments usually exceed what can reasonably be assumed to be the work of a copy editor. Many of the changes also reflect the interests we see in O’Nolan’s work across his different genres. O’Nolan had a stronger engagement with the visual and spatial impacts of the text than Montgomery, frequently adding typographic play such as changing a simple coordinating conjunction like ‘but’ to read ‘BUT… (and it’s a big “but” as you can see)’,²⁶ or the simple ‘to be’ into ‘2 B’,²⁷ or adding an image, as he did to the column on 1 December 1948. Similarly, in 1950 his reworking of Montgomery’s column included putting the opening paragraph at the end, and to one in 1948 that suggested readers vote for Myles he added slogans in bold caps set off from the body of the text: ‘A VOTE FOR MYLES IS A VOTE FOR THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD!’²⁸

A willingness to engage with visual play was matched with a greater tendency to add digressions and asides. O’Nolan inserted Welsh into a draft dealing with the new government: ‘isn’t it grand to think that there is somebody in the country who is willing to listen to the publicans’ wails? ---- A ydych yn adnabod rhywun yma o’r enw Oliver Flanagan? […] Sorry! And don’t blame the printer – that’s genuine Welsh. It was that word “wails” above that put me off’.²⁹ In June 1947 Montgomery’s draft quotes an article about bacon factories, to which O’Nolan adds a speculation on whether the phrase ‘bacon factory’ is as bad ‘as “steam-roller” and “vacuum-cleaner”: trying to roll steam is a futile business and who ever heard of a dirty vacuum?’³⁰ O’Nolan also had a sharp eye for potential. He changed, for example, Montgomery’s ‘I have a wife and six children’ to ‘I have a waif and sick children (sic!)’, thereby not only enlivening the phrase by transcribing its pronunciation, but also building in a sense of pervasive illness and poverty into a simple description of fact.³¹ At other times O’Nolan cut rather than added, and often for reasons that are unclear. Montgomery provided many puns which were quite in keeping with the Cruiskeen Lawn style, though not all of them were used by O’Nolan. He rejected Montgomery’s opening gambit in the draft of 25 October 1947 – ‘Age has brought me Fays to Fays’ – despite keeping the majority of the rest of the column.

The differences, then, that Kelleher notes are less the stark difference between O’Nolan and Montgomery, but arguably the difference between pieces written solely by O’Nolan and those co-authored by O’Nolan and Montgomery, with O’Nolan’s skills in copyediting, reshaping, and seeing the potential for digressions or wordplay readily apparent. O’Nolan’s canon is one of adaptation and assemblage, but the reworking evident in his writing can also be understood as an editorial process. Allowing for the final amendments by subeditors at The Irish Times, we find that even during periods of stress and ill-health, O’Nolan shows himself to be considered, deliberate, and often heavy-handed in his reworking of these drafts. O’Nolan frequently represented himself as engaged in the business of literature and focused on the income he could generate from his writings.³² But if that is all he cared about, then there was no need to make amendments to Montgomery’s drafts – they ranged from the perfectly acceptable to quite excellent and would have stood very comfortably within the Cruiskeen Lawn canon. Yet change them he did. The amendments he made, from the minor to the major, might in another author seem unremarkable, as most authors prefer their own mode of expression. But given the limited access we have to O’Nolan’s drafting process, given how often he insisted on his interest in writing being financial rather than aesthetic, and given what we know of the pressures resulting from work commitments, and later ill-health and poor finances, his regular decision to edit the drafts’ commentary, word-play, tone, and form is a significant example of investment in his own style rather than in simply earning a pay cheque. Which brings us to the unpublished drafts in Montgomery’s files.

The Unpublished Drafts

We primarily matched drafts in the Montgomery papers with the published columns through keyword searches. Some we found after a single word or phrase – the 9 March 1949 column was located with the first search term, in this instance ‘silver-haired’ – while some required multiple searches before we located the edited match. The column published 18 August 1954, for example, was not located until the 23^rd keyword, in this case the phrase ‘single malt’. Some, despite being checked by all three researchers on the team, we could not identify. For one of the drafts from 3 January 1947, for example, we tried 30 words and phrases to no avail: silver tassel; spheroid; gaskets; micky scott; frivolity; spoliation; repugnance; buccal; sparrow-hawk; inexhaustible; light-houses; scalded; manx coastal; livery; swollen; exovation; spoilation; frailty; admonitions; repugnance; inexhaustible; debasement; tortured grin; incapacity; fish-eyes; bloody sunshine; frivolous propositions; lengthen my mouth; natural phenomenon; fool’s contempt. Perhaps O’Nolan rewrote the draft so extensively that none of these words remained, but it is also possible that the scan was faulty, so the optical text recognition could not catch similarities. For these reasons and despite extensive checks, 61 columns remain unlocated.

If, then, we cannot say with certainty that all unlocated drafts were unpublished, we are also not able to make definite claims about why certain columns did not appear. Given the extensive rewrites that O’Nolan performed on many of the columns, it is also possible that he did not like the topic or Montgomery’s treatment and simply did not use them. 36% of the unused drafts were quite short – 1 or 2 pages in length – so perhaps O’Nolan found them less useful. Given that there was sometimes a gap between Montgomery’s date on the drafts and the date when the material was published, perhaps O’Nolan put them aside to be used later and misplaced them or forgot. However, as O’Nolan wrote to Basil Clancy in 1960 asking that he be paid for the Cruiskeen Lawn columns that The Irish Times received but did not print, it is also possible that some of Montgomery’s columns were rejected by their editors rather than O’Nolan. This is implied by the notes that Montgomery wrote on some of his drafts: on four draft articles, none of which we could find in the published columns, he wrote a version of ‘LEADING ARTICLE MUST NOT BE ATTACKED’.³³ On a short draft from October 1948 that addresses confrontations regarding the Abbey Theatre via, Montgomery explains, strategic changes to a letter signed ‘Pat’ originally published in Ireland Today 2, no. 3 March 1937, Montgomery wrote in red pencil ‘Suppressed by I.T.?’³⁴ This information perhaps came from O’Nolan, who would have had greater experience with editorial preferences about the leading article, or directly from the editor and was reported back by O’Nolan for future reference. Either way, the 61 unused drafts give us significant insights into the amount of wasted time and effort the Cruiskeen Lawn column involved (see Table 2).

To the question of whether the unlocated columns were unpublished because they are of inferior merit, we cannot give a conclusive response, not least because assessments about quality will always be subjective. That noted, we are not of the opinion that Montgomery’s drafts are consistently poor versions of the Myles style and manners. Take, for example, this draft of a Keats and Chapman anecdote by Montgomery, a contribution that appears unpublished. The opening lines tell us that Chapman has graduated from university and is thinking of marriage.

His choice fell on a lady named Minnie Waters, by whom his regard was not reciprocated, as she was enamoured of the poet, Keats, who found her attentions very distressing. Chapman, to the lady’s mortification, was assiduous in pressing his suit. The result was that the three were seen everywhere in each other’s company. Chapman was insistent in his attempts to obtain an interview tête à tête with her; finally she consented to this and appointed an hour and a place where they should meet. Chapman, elated at his success, purchased a quantity of very valuable clothing and arrived, wearing most of it, at the appointed spot. The lady, however, was not there to meet him. After about a quarter of an hour he became impatient. His devotion was soon rewarded in an unexpected manner for, suddenly hearing a window open overhead, he looked up and was greeted by an enormous shower of water which deluged him from head to foot and caused irreparable damage to his new raiment. He rushed home to change and lost no time in recounting the incident to Keats. I take it, said Keats, that you are cured of your infatuation for this lady; for Chapman had told him how his retreating figure had been followed by her ringing laughter. Chapman however assured him that this was not the case and that he fully forgave her the childish prank. I see; says Keats sententiously, Minnie Waters cannot quench love.³⁵

The closing pun plays with the line from the Song of Solomon ‘many waters cannot quench love’, and while its play is predicated on a pursuit that might make us uncomfortable today it would not have troubled Montgomery or O’Nolan. This story might not rank among the greatest contributions to the Keats and Chapman canon, but it is an acceptable example of the form and it is difficult to see why it did not meet muster.

Nor do hints in letters between O’Nolan and Montgomery add much clarity. On 29 March 1956 O’Nolan wrote to Montgomery:

I am much obliged for the material I received this morning. […] The stuff about censorship is good but I think you have overlooked a few of the more violent details. First, a thing marked Personal and Confidential arrives in an open envelope bearing a threehalfpenny stamp. The recipient is invited to send the ludicrous petition back marked “Private and Confidential”. The use of the Irish article “an” by illiterate persons deserves a department of pain to itself; “Anne Tostal” always sounds like a beautiful Hungarian spy. The “An Taoiseach” spiel breaks down in the petition, where “the” is mentioned. But there is a week’s fuel in the whole dreadful thing.³⁶

It seems probable that O’Nolan is referring to a draft dated 18 March 1956, which engages with censorship and the Irish Association of Civil Liberty. The IACL had sent a letter in which they questioned the efficacy of the Censorship act. They have, they write, been

considering the present operation of the censorship act, and the undesirable banning of publications of widely recognized literary merit. While not questioning the necessity for some form of censorship they believe that the time is opportune for an investigation by An Taoiseach into the wording of the Censorship Act, 1946.³⁷

The IACL urged recipients to sign the enclosed petition asking for a review of the Act. The petition does, as O’Nolan’s letter states, move between the phrase ‘An Taoiseach’ and ‘the Taoiseach’.³⁸ Yet An Tóstal, which O’Nolan describes as sounding like Anne Tostal, the Hungarian spy, does not appear in this or any of the extant drafts. Despite his certainty that there was a ‘week’s fuel’ in Montgomery’s draft, we were not able to locate any published columns on the topic. The only time that the Irish Association of Civil Liberties is mentioned was some years earlier in a column published on 20 October 1948. Did O’Nolan decide not to turn the material into columns or were they censored by the editors? The question remains, for now at least, unanswered.

The Drafts and their Publication

The following pages of this article present a table that connects the drafts and the published columns. The first column provides the date on which the Cruiskeen Lawn installment was published, the second shows the date Montgomery wrote on the draft, the third presents our notes on the differences between the two, and the final any relevant annotations by Montgomery. Any content in the fourth column by us is in square brackets. We also have a list of unlocated columns that we have not included here but are happy to provide to any interested researcher.

Conclusion

As we have outlined above, the differences between the drafts and published columns illuminate the ways O’Nolan and Montgomery worked together, while also showing O’Nolan’s clear investment in reshaping drafts according to his preferences. The realization that the columns arising from the Montgomery papers are primarily co-authored rather than single-authored is a significant development in our understanding of Myles and the Cruiskeen Lawn. Comparing the archival and newspapers versions of the column also affords us new insights into O’Nolan as an editor. While we cannot offer readers the full experience of reading the archival and newspaper versions line by line, we hope that our analysis and the details of Table 3 are a useful resource for scholars seeking insight into the authorship of the Cruiskeen Lawn.

Competing Interests

Maebh Long is one of the editors of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies but was not involved in the peer review or acceptance process. The other authors have no competing interests to declare.