Article

Cross-Genre Reflections on Brian O’Nolan in Paul Muldoon’s 'Le Flanneur'

Author
  • Cross-Genre Reflections on Brian O’Nolan in Paul Muldoon’s 'Le Flanneur'

    Article

    Cross-Genre Reflections on Brian O’Nolan in Paul Muldoon’s 'Le Flanneur'

    Author

Options

Abstract

I read Paul Muldoon's dense, complex, shifting sonnet, ‘Le Flanneur’ (2011), to explore Muldoon’s reflections on and affinities with Brian O'Nolan. 'Le Flanneur' delicately considers O'Nolan's life, creations, and reception, in playful and slightly unsettling tones; it creates a mesh of impressions rather than a verdict. I suggest that both O’Nolan and Muldoon are drawn to reused and otherwise less-than-pristine language, like cliches and terrible puns; both are not only almost inevitably funny, but profoundly tricky and elusive-- while also inevitably readable. After discussing ‘Le Flanneur,’ I end by briefly suggesting grounds for a broader consideration of O’Nolan and recent English-language poetry. 

Keywords: Brian O'Nolan, Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, Paul Muldoon, Poetry, Allusion

How to Cite:

Calista McRae, ‘Cross-Genre Reflections on Brian O’Nolan in Paul Muldoon’s ‘‘Le Flanneur’’,’ The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 9, no. 2 (Fall 2025): 1–22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/ pr.23748

Downloads:
Download XML
Download PDF
View PDF

Published on
2026-01-12

Peer Reviewed

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Paul Muldoon’s poems do not make many explicit references to Flann O’Brien’s novels or Myles na gCopaleen’s columns. In The Prince of the Quotidian (1994), two days are spent ‘grading papers from the seminar’ ‘on Swift, Yeats, Sterne, / Joyce, and Beckett,’ but none of Brian O’Nolan’s pseudonyms are on that syllabus.1 Nor is he mentioned in the essays of Muldoon’s To Ireland, I (2000), an ‘abecedary of Irish literature.’ There is next to no scholarly work that considers the two writers together (there is much more, for instance, on Muldoon and Beckett). Jefferson Holdridge does note that Muldoon’s formal and conceptual experiments have few precedents in Irish poetry, and then links his work to Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien.2 Ruben Moi makes two brief references to O’Brien: that Muldoon’s early poem ‘Seanchas’ ‘approaches, with critical reservations and echoes of Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth, the long-standing Irish tradition of storytelling,’ and that the title of ‘At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999’ alludes to the title of At Swim-Two-Birds, ‘another multilayered text of subtle ironies and revisions.’3 And Tara Guissin-Stubbs—whose reading I aim to extend—considers a Muldoon poem for O’Brien as part of an absorbing chapter on sonnet ‘conversations.’4 Tracing affinities and influence can be especially uncertain when the two writers concerned are relentlessly punning, self-referential, and evasive; all the more so when they write in different genres.

Uncertainty multiplies even further when both writers populate their work with people from other periods, places, and genres. The narrator-author of At Swim-Two-Birds maintains that ‘The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required.’5 Muldoon draws characters from that corpus, as well as from film: in ‘Yarrow,’ for example, his speaker encounters inhabitants of Treasure Island (and other books from Muldoon’s childhood) in the middle of twentieth-century New York, and imagines a ‘cross-fade’ to ‘Elmer Kelton’s / stampeding herd / from The Day the Cowboys Quit, or The Oklamydia Kid / or, hold on, something by Jack Schaefer.’6 Cowboys were previously used in At Swim-Two-Birds, whose inner novelist writes a book introducing them to Dublin.7 Neither O’Nolan nor Muldoon restricts himself to borrowing fictional characters either. O’Brien gives Joyce a new career as a bartender in The Dalkey Archive; Muldoon makes Virgil a waiter in Howdie-Skelp (2021). Keats and Chapman are the subject of countless shaggy-dog stories in Myles’s columns; Muldoon’s long poem Madoc (1990) sends Coleridge and Southey to the United States (where the real-life poets had once planned to establish a utopian community). In At Swim-Two-Birds, Dermot Trellis ‘compel[s] all his characters to live with him in the Red Swan Hotel so that he can keep an eye on them and see that there is no boozing’; in his song ‘My Ride’s Here,’ Muldoon’s speaker stays at a Marriott with ‘Jesus and John Wayne.’8 Historical, mythological, and fictional characters fraternize in the work of both writers.

This kind of reuse is at play in one of Muldoon’s few allusions to O’Nolan. The reference-saturated ‘As’ (2002), which mingles all kinds of evolutions and devolutions, is governed by the construction ‘as X gives way to Y.’ ‘As naught gives way to aught / and oxhide gives way to chain mail,’ its first stanza begins, and eventually leads to ‘and a pint of Shelley plain [giving way] to a pint of India Pale Ale.’9 On one level, that last image seems to be of a venerable pub staple being replaced by a craft beer (as was happening in the early 2000s, in the US). But on another level, the line swirls together references to three poets—Percy Shelley, Robert Browning,10 Jem Casey—and, implicitly, one novelist. The poem makes another potential reference to O’Brien: in a later stanza, ‘the King of the World gives way to Finn MacCool / and phone gives way to fax / and send gives way to sned.’ The globe as understood in ancient Mesopotamia shrinks to Ireland, and turn-of-the-century technology seems to go backward. And Finn MacCool is uprooted from Irish legend, again: previously borrowed by a fictional character created by another fictional character created by a man writing under a nom de plume, he is now borrowed by a poet. The giving way is uncannily fitting: the Greek epigraph to At Swim-Two-Birds (ἐξίσταται γὰρ πάντ’ ἀπ’ ἀλλήλων δίχα) translates as ‘for all things go out and give place to one another.’11

Beyond pointing to At Swim-Two-Birds as one of the many texts lodged in Muldoon’s head, ‘As’ suggests that Muldoon shares O’Nolan’s appreciation of reuse, wordplay, and even typos. Both O’Nolan and Muldoon are drawn to ‘received’ material in literature—not just reused characters, but reused and otherwise less-than-pristine language, like clichés, circumlocutions, euphemisms, and errata. Both writers play with the ways that some of our most reliable, most familiar things—commonplace phrases, mythic and historical figures, coherent selves, idealized places—cannot be trusted in the ways we think we can trust them. Even our own stories and perceptions are unreliable: given that our supposedly unique ideas are largely taken from others, our selves might be largely interchangeable, too. In pushing the ordinary up against the decidedly not ordinary, O’Nolan’s and Muldoon’s work gives off unpredictable but constant comic sparks.

This article discusses Muldoon’s affinities with and reflections on O’Nolan through a dense, complex, shifting sonnet, ‘Le Flanneur’ (2011). After discussing ‘Le Flanneur,’ I end by briefly pointing to grounds for a broader consideration of what O’Nolan—mainly but not always in his capacity as O’Brien—has offered recent Anglophone poetry. In the decades after Dylan Thomas’s much-repeated blurb of At Swim-Two-Birds as ‘just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl,’ a number of poets have read and praised O’Brien’s novels.12 According to John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara was reading O’Brien by the late 1940s.13 In Derek Mahon’s ‘Epitaph for Flann O’Brien’ (1975), O’Brien speaks in the sonorous, slightly redundant voice of another of his own borrowed characters: it opens, ‘Without whiskey, without porter / Of the black porter-blackness / And wine in fine bottles / Have I been these nine years.’14 More recently, Gabriel Gudding calls O’Brien ‘a goldenboy (maybe the goldenboy) of metafiction’ and At Swim-Two-Birds his ‘favourite book.’15 O’Brien’s inventive and almost intrinsically comic prose—deceptive yet clear, fantastical and earthly, angry and jokey—has been a spark for poets, across the gap of genre.

…

‘Le Flanneur’ was published in a Dublin Review celebration of O’Nolan’s centenary and then collected in Songs and Sonnets (2012).16 It runs, in full:

A spirit grocer is still ordained
after seven years ordinarily.
The Flower of Sweet Strabane is still an also-ran
in Tim Humphreys’ of Ranelagh.

For as long as curates have gone to the Curragh
their activities have been extracurricular.
It was never a pint of plain in a jug
had the plain people of Ireland by the jugular.

Now the girl on whom you used to dote
is in her dotage.
The Evening Herald is less than heraldic.

Though your flesh may not at first look gross
in the window of a spirit grocer’s
you can still rely on Myles for a reality check.17

Some words here seem part of a general evocation of O’Nolan’s prose. The seemingly unnecessary inclusion of ‘a jug,’ for instance, calls up the English translation of Cruiskeen Lawn as ‘full little jug.’ And ‘jugular’—another odd word in this context, less idiomatic than throat would be—calls up the jugular in the sudden, final sentence of At Swim-Two-Birds: to substantiate his declaration that numbers ‘account for a great proportion of unbalanced and suffering humanity,’ the narrator tells ‘the case of the poor German’ who ‘went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.’18 The several references to drink call up a constant ingredient in the novels and the columns, from the potent beer known as ‘The Wrastler’ in The Third Policeman to the ‘patent emergency trousers for the plain people of Ireland’ (designed to hold four bottles of stout in each leg) in the columns.19

One of those drink-related terms, however—‘spirit grocer,’ which technically refers to someone who can sell alcohol by retail, and which frames the poem—resonates with O’Nolan’s work in less specific ways as well. Simultaneously mundane and beautifully strange, it is an emblem for the mixture of physical and physics-defying scenarios in the novels: bicycles that act increasingly like humans and vice versa, large policemen who make infinitesimally small boxes, dead narrators and talking souls, real thornbushes that lacerate fictional characters, actual authors given decidedly unliterary careers. Seamus Deane characterizes O’Brien’s work as ‘strangely “magical” and yet rooted in a disabused realism.’20 That combination—of unearthliness and everydayness—is central to ‘Le Flanneur’; as Tara Guissin-Stubbs writes, it ‘seems to veer between reality and unreality, echoing the surreal flights of fancy of O’Brien’s novels.’21 While ‘spirit’ brings up all that is insubstantial, ‘grocer’ is prosy and corporeal, of a piece with the poem’s references to drink, romance, betting, and the ‘flesh’ of the poem’s end. The physical and metaphysical mix again in ‘curate,’ a word that can refer both to a priest and to a spirit grocer’s assistant. The latter meaning occurs in At Swim-Two-Birds, where characters hatch ‘a plot for putting sleeping-draughts in Trellis’s porter by slipping a few bob to the grocer’s curate.’22

The uncanniness of ‘Le Flanneur’ is crossed with, or compounded by, a faintly disillusioned feel, both in its images and through words that point to how time moves. Still occurs three times, along with now, never, and as long as;23 they create a pronounced sense of time passing, and thus of how one uses one’s time or of what time might do to one’s self. When the sonnet turns, at its volta, to a ‘Now’ and to a pointed ‘you,’ it moves from aging institutions to the realities of that self, which may be becoming as ‘gross’ as one of O’Brien’s policemen (of whom the word is used repeatedly).24 Muldoon’s discrete, relatively disjointed sentences lack the satisfaction of audible rhyme: instead, the end-words that bind each couplet together tend to make the sets of lines feel more disjointed or incomplete. Disguised or less-than-full rhymes are a staple for Muldoon, but to my ears, the rhymes of this sonnet are in part a deliberate departure from his virtuosically inventive ones: while Muldoon uses visual and partial rhymes creatively, the ones here seem pointedly muted. Words like ordained and ordinarily, dote and the similarly incapacitated dotage, gross and grocer (one who buys in the gross) are almost too close etymologically; and since there is not much context slippage, these pairings do not feel like full puns. The sonnet seems defined by linguistic detritus, by various faded or disintegrating words. Several phrases feel slightly etiolated or mechanical in their wordplay, though others grow new meanings; as a whole, the puns straddle invention and something closer to autopilot or autocomplete. ‘Le Flanneur’ seems to be considering what to say about a writer faced with early fame and later neglect, whose comedy is shot through with bitterness or dread, and whose work ranges from the brilliantly off-kilter to the self-repeating.

Clichés, puns, errors, errata

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

To what variable horizon can some people not be trusted?
As far as you can throw them.
What tribe has unique rights to the epithet finny?
Your men the fish.
Feathered?
Your men the birds.
Lost?
Your men the Gaels.35

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:

Every runnel was a Rubicon
where every ditch was a last ditch.
Every man was ‘a grand wee mon’
whose every pitch was another sales pitch
now every boat was a burned boat.
Every cap was a cap in hand.37

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:

You can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it hold
its nose to the grindstone and hunt with the hounds.
Every dog has a stitch in time. Two heads? You’ve been sold
one good turn. One good turn deserves a bird in the hand.38

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,

My proof-reader has drawn my attention to a few minor errata in my notes on the Ibsen school. Whilst they scarcely detract from the sense of the text, in the interest of strict accuracy, I had better correct them. For ‘borsch’, therefore, read ‘bosh’; for ‘toupee’ read ‘tepee’, and, of course, for ‘Lamb’ read ‘Bacon’.45

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

For ‘Antrim’ read ‘Armagh’.
For ‘mother’ read ‘other’.
For ‘harm’ read ‘farm’.
For ‘feather’ read ‘father’.46

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.

Misinformation, uncertainties, biographies

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:

I do, quite often, engage in leading people on, gently, into little situations by assuring them that all’s well and then—this sounds awfully manipulative, but part of writing is about manipulation—leaving them high and dry, in some corner at a terrible party, where I’ve nipped out through the bathroom window.50

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 ineffably sad process might not have occurred exactly as it did if there had not been flaws in the man himself which made it possible, and of course gigantic public calamities in the world at large which had an effect upon Dublin and on Dublin life, producing exactly the conditions which were needed for it.66

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,

‘Myles’ supplanted Flann O’Brien, even, in important externals at least, Brian O’Nolan. The latter became known to one and all, even personally, as Myles, and was humoured and tolerated as such. The fate of the licensed jester had befallen him. He existed in and through the response and understanding of his audience.71

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.

Predecessors, legacies

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,

Ever since the 1939 publication of At Swim-Two-Birds, two things have remained fairly constant. One is that no reprinting, and very few reviews, of the book have appeared without including the blurb from Joyce. […] Another is that literary critics, when turning their eyes to the satiric O’Brien, have almost inevitably made at least cursory mention of the towering Master of Irish Modernism.77

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.

Notes

  1. Paul Muldoon, The Prince of the Quotidian (Wake Forest University Press, 1994), 24. [^]
  2. Jefferson Holdridge, The Poetry of Paul Muldoon (The Liffey Press, 2008), 195. [^]
  3. Ruben Moi, Paul Muldoon and the Language of Poetry (Brill, 2020), 30, 298. [^]
  4. Tara Guissin-Stubbs, The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 145–46. [^]
  5. Flann O’Brien, The Complete Novels (Knopf, 2007), 21. [^]
  6. Paul Muldoon, Collected Poems 1968–1998 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 349–50. [^]
  7. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 31. [^]
  8. Paul Muldoon, in a song lyric written with Warren Zevon, General Admission (Gallery Books, 2006), 101. [^]
  9. Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 36. [^]
  10. See Robert Browning’s ‘Memorabilia,’ which opens, ‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, / And did he stop and speak to you?’ The Complete Poetical Works of Browning (Houghton Mifflin, 1895), 193. [^]
  11. For discussion of the epigraph, see Tobias W. Harris and Joseph LaBine, ‘John Garvin and Brian O’Nolan in Civil Service: Bureaucratic, Joycean Modernism,’ The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 6, no. 1 (2022): 5–8. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the epigraph’s relevance. [^]
  12. Most obviously, a number of recent and contemporary Irish poets appreciate O’Nolan. Seamus Heaney, in the introduction to his Buile Suibhne translation, speaks to how At Swim-Two-Birds ‘gave [Sweeney] a second life, as hilarious as it was melancholy.’ Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), n.p. Brendan Kennelly examines satire in The Poor Mouth at length, declaring the book ‘funny, sad, bitter, outrageous, bleak, insulting—and totally unforgettable.’ Journey into Joy: Selected Prose (Bloodaxe Books, 1994), 188. [^]
  13. John Ashbery, ‘Introduction,’ in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (University of California Press, 1995), viii. [^]
  14. Derek Mahon, The Snow Party (Oxford University Press, 1975), 28. [^]
  15. Gabriel Gudding, ‘Pure Humor,’ UB Poetics discussion group (The Poetics List), 2 December 2002, https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/poetics/archive/logs/txt/2002_12.txt. [^]
  16. It is not the first O’Nolan-related event in which Muldoon has participated: he read poems at a 1986 symposium marking the twentieth anniversary of O’Nolan’s death. See Anne Clune, ‘Flann O’Brien: Twenty Years On,’ The Linen Hall Review 3, no. 2 (Summer, 1986): 5. [^]
  17. Paul Muldoon, Songs and Sonnets (Enitharmon Press, 2012), 20. [^]
  18. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 217. [^]
  19. Myles na Gopaleen, The Best of Myles (Penguin, 1983), 126. [^]
  20. O’Nolan is one of the two writers (the other being Patrick Kavanagh) whose work Deane characterizes this way. See Seamus Deane, ‘Seamus Deane,’ in In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland, ed. John Brown (Salmon Publishing, 2002), 107. [^]
  21. Guissin-Stubbs, Modern Irish Sonnet, 146. [^]
  22. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 98. [^]
  23. This sense of aging is intensified by echoes of Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour,’ which begins with a declining, picturesque Maine island and its inhabitants: ‘still’—Muldoon’s repeated word—occurs twice in Lowell’s opening lines, along with an image of an heiress now ‘in her dotage.’ Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 191. [^]
  24. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 267, 270, 337. [^]
  25. Guissin-Stubbs, Modern Irish Sonnet, 145. [^]
  26. O’Brien’s reworkings of cliché have received critical attention. In particular, Tobias Harris—in an essay that explores O’Nolan’s indebtedness to Karl Kraus—writes of O’Nolan’s ‘aware[ness] of how the ineffectual elements of a country’s administration are mirrored in its thickets of worn-out euphemisms, which are propelled into popular diction via questionnaires and forms.’ ‘The Catastrophe of Cliché: Karl Kraus, Cruiskeen Lawn, & the Culture Industry,’ The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 3, no. 2 (2016): 14. See also Ruben Borg on how ‘part of O’Brien’s genius was the recasting of English as a sort of mummified tongue,’ in Borg’s Fantasies of Self-Mourning: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite (Brill, 2019), 149, and Maria Kager on the comic affordances of O’Brien’s bilingualism, in ‘Lamhd Láftar and Bad Language: Bilingual Cognition in Cruiskeen Lawn,’ in Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority, ed. Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan, and John McCourt (Cork University Press, 2017). [^]
  27. Flann O’Brien, The Hair of the Dogma: A Further Selection from ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ (Paladin Books, 1989). [^]
  28. na Gopaleen, Best of Myles, 336. [^]
  29. Muldoon, Collected Poems, 107–8. [^]
  30. Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes (Faber and Faber, 2006), 78; Collected Poems, 62; Frolic and Detour (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 116. [^]
  31. Paul Muldoon, Word on the Street (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 13. [^]
  32. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, 87. [^]
  33. na Gopaleen, Best of Myles, 28. [^]
  34. na Gopaleen, Best of Myles, 202. [^]
  35. na Gopaleen, Best of Myles, 98. [^]
  36. I am grateful to a reviewer for noting Muldoon’s ‘A Collegelands Catechism’ in Moy Sand and Gravel. The two authors’ use of catechism speaks not only to their interest in set forms and their Catholic upbringings, but to the deep influence of Joyce—for instance, the catechistic ‘Ithaca’ episode in Ulysses and especially the piles of stock language of ‘Eumaeus.’ [^]
  37. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, 40. [^]
  38. Muldoon, Collected Poems, 409. [^]
  39. Muldoon, Frolic and Detour, 101. [^]
  40. Muldoon, Collected Poems, 138. [^]
  41. na Gopaleen, Best of Myles, 181. [^]
  42. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 17. [^]
  43. Maebh Long, ‘Is It about a Typewriter? Brian O’Nolan and Technologies of Inscription,’ The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 4, no. 2 (2020): 6. [^]
  44. Long, ‘Is It about a Typewriter?’ 7. [^]
  45. Flann O’Brien, Myles Before Myles (The Lilliput Press, 2012), 194. [^]
  46. Muldoon, Collected Poems, 445. [^]
  47. Guissin-Stubbs, Modern Irish Sonnet, 145. [^]
  48. Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (Knopf, 1983), 9. [^]
  49. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 269. [^]
  50. Clair Wills, Nick Jenkins, and John Lancaster, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon,’ Oxford Poetry 3, no. 1 (1986): 19–20, quoted in Mia Gaudern, The Etymological Poetry of W. H. Auden, J. H. Prynne, and Paul Muldoon (Oxford University Press, 2020), 42. [^]
  51. Paul Muldoon, ‘Wave,’ New Yorker, 24 September 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/wave-c-k-williams. [^]
  52. Muldoon, Collected Poems, 85. [^]
  53. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 297. [^]
  54. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, 50. [^]
  55. Muldoon, Collected Poems, 41. [^]
  56. Paul Muldoon, Maggot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 72. [^]
  57. Muldoon, Collected Poems, 198. [^]
  58. Brian Nolan, ‘A Bash in the Tunnel,’ in Irish Literature: A Reader, ed. Maureen O’Rourke Murphy and James MacKillop (Syracuse University Press, 1987), 327. I hear an edge in Muldoon’s tone, in part because of his own views on organized religion; priests in his poems tend to be politely intrusive, at best. In one early poem, a priest holding confession sounds too interested in where a girl was ‘touched’ by a man; in another, ‘the priest of the parish / […] came enquiring about our “status.”’ Muldoon, Collected Poems, 79, 337. [^]
  59. Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter (Fromm International Edition, 1998), 48, quoted in Maebh Long, Assembling Flann O’Brien (Bloomsbury, 2014), 10. [^]
  60. Pádraig Ó Méaloid, ‘Note: When is a Fahrt not a Fahrt?’ The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 100. [^]
  61. David Wheatley, ‘Yours Severely,’ Literary Review, July 2018, 31. [^]
  62. John Updike, ‘Back-Chat, Funny Cracks,’ New Yorker, 11 February 2008, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/11. [^]
  63. Kenner, Colder Eye, 257. [^]
  64. Keith Donohue, ‘Introduction,’ in O’Brien, Complete Novels, xiv. [^]
  65. Kenner, Colder Eye, 255. [^]
  66. Anthony Cronin, Dead as Doornails (Poolbeg Press, 1980), 111. [^]
  67. While Tim Humphreys died in 1954, Humphreys Grocer was still in operation at 79–81 Ranelagh. As it happens, in the mid-nineteenth century there was a Nolan’s Pub on this site. See Maurice Curtis, The Little Book of Ranelagh (The History Press Ireland, 2017), 136–38. [^]
  68. na Gopaleen, Best of Myles, 82. [^]
  69. na Gopaleen, Best of Myles, 92. [^]
  70. Clair Wills, ‘Anti-Writer,’ London Review of Books 41, no. 7 (4 April 2019), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n07/clair-wills/anti-writer. [^]
  71. Cronin, Dead as Doornails, 111. [^]
  72. Cronin, No Laughing Matter, 139. [^]
  73. Seeing one’s face in the window of a liquor store is especially appropriate, given that the narrator of At Swim-Two-Birds uses a mirror ‘supplied gratis by Messrs Watkins, Jameson and Pim,’ which ‘b[ears] brief letterpress in reference to a proprietary brand of ale.’ O’Brien, Complete Novels, 7. [^]
  74. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 44. [^]
  75. O’Brien, Complete Novels, 300. [^]
  76. Seán Ó Faoláin, ‘Irish Gasconade,’ John O’London’s Weekly, 24 March 1939, 970, quoted in Cronin, No Laughing Matter, 92. [^]
  77. Lucas Harriman, ‘Flann O’Brien’s Creative Betrayal of Joyce,’ New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua 14, no. 4 (2010): 91. [^]
  78. Stephen Abblitt, ‘The Ghost of “Poor Jimmy Joyce”: A Portrait of the Artist as a Reluctant Modernist,’ in Flann O’Brien and Modernism, ed. Julian Murphet, Ronan McDonald, and Sascha Morrell (Bloomsbury, 2014), 65. [^]
  79. Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I (Oxford University Press, 2000), 50. [^]
  80. Donohue, ‘Introduction,’ xiii. [^]
  81. In his article on parallels between O’Brien and Pirandello and by extension between O’Brien and European counter-realists more broadly, Neil Murphy writes that ‘the tradition of intellectual scepticism, of playful reaction to the intense impositions of fixed knowledge systems, repeatedly emerges throughout the history of the novel, its forms of mischief resonating in ever-increasing cycles that echo each other, even as they appear in different guises and declare oppositional perspectives.’ ‘Traces of Mischief: Flann O’Brien and Luigi Pirandello,’ in Flann O’Brien: Acting Out, ed. Paul Fagan and Dieter Fuchs (Cork University Press, 2022), 108. Several essays in Borg et al.’s Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority speak to O’Nolan’s interest in being widely read. See in particular Carol Taafe’s account of how O’Nolan ‘inclin[ed] towards popular culture, to the everyday world.’ ‘“Irreverence moving towards the blasphemous”: Brian O’Nolan, Blather and Irish Popular Culture,’ 33. And see, in the same volume, Maebh Long’s ‘“No more drunk, truculent, witty, celtic, dark, desperate, amorous paddies!”: Brian O’Nolan and the Irish Stereotype,’ as well as John McCourt’s ‘More “Gravid” than Gravitas: Collopy, Fahrt and the Pope in Rome.’

    John Kerrigan, ‘Paul Muldoon’s Transits: Muddling through after Madoc,’ Jacket 20 (December 2002), http://jacketmagazine.com/20/kerr-muld.html. See also Keith Booker, who writes that The Third Policeman ‘suggests the futility of human epistemological inquiry largely through a down-to-earth parody of the excesses of scholarly research.’ Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire (Syracuse University Press, 1995), 128.

    Peter Robinson, ‘Muldoon’s Humor,’ in Politics and the Rhetoric of Poetry: Perspectives on Modern Anglo-Irish Poetry, ed. Tjebbe A. Westerndorp and Jane Mallinson (Editions Rodopi B.V., 1995), 32, 45.

    Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, ‘Introducing Paul Muldoon: “Arbitrary and Contrary,”’ in Paul Muldoon: Poetry, Prose, Drama: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (Colin Smythe, 2006), 5.

    ‘Paul Muldoon, The Art of Poetry No. 87,’ interview by James S. F. Wilson, Paris Review 169 (Spring 2004): 53–91, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/30/the-art-of-poetry-no-87-paul-muldoon.

    ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon by Dominique Gauthier 18 September 1995,’ Etudes irlandaises 22, no. 1 (1995): 57.

    ‘An Interview,’ 64.

    ‘An Interview,’ 55.

    Gabriel Gudding, Literature for Nonhumans (Ahsahta Press, 2015), 85.

    Acknowledgments

    I thank Enitharmon Press (www.enitharmon.co.uk) for allowing me to quote ‘Le Flanneur’ in full.

    Competing Interests

    The author has no competing interests to declare.

    References

    Abblitt, Stephen. ‘The Ghost of “Poor Jimmy Joyce”: A Portrait of the Artist as a Reluctant Modernist.’ In Flann O’Brien and Modernism, edited by Julian Murphet, Ronan McDonald, and Sascha Morrell. Bloomsbury, 2014.

    Ashbery, John. ‘Introduction.’ In The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen. University of California Press, 1995.

    Booker, Keith. Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire. Syracuse University Press, 1995.

    Borg, Ruben. Fantasies of Self-Mourning: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite. Brill, 2019.

    Borg, Ruben, Paul Fagan, and John McCourt, eds. Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority. Cork University Press, 2017.

    Browning, Robert. The Complete Poetical Works of Browning. Houghton Mifflin, 1895.

    Clune, Anne. ‘Flann O’Brien: Twenty Years On.’ The Linen Hall Review 3, no. 2 (Summer, 1986): 4–7.

    Cronin, Anthony. Dead as Doornails. Poolbeg Press, 1980.

    Cronin, Anthony. No Laughing Matter. Fromm International Edition, 1998.

    Curtis, Maurice. The Little Book of Ranelagh. The History Press Ireland, 2017.

    Deane, Seamus. ‘Seamus Deane.’ In In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland, edited by John Brown. Salmon Publishing, 2002.

    Donohue, Keith. ‘Introduction.’ In O’Brien, Complete Novels.

    Gaudern, Mia. The Etymological Poetry of W. H. Auden, J. H. Prynne, and Paul Muldoon. Oxford University Press, 2020.

    Gudding, Gabriel. Literature for Nonhumans. Ahsahta Press, 2015.

    Gudding, Gabriel. ‘Pure Humor.’ UB Poetics discussion group (The Poetics List). 2 December 2002. https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/poetics/archive/logs/txt/2002_12.txt.

    Guissin-Stubbs, Tara. The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

    Harriman, Lucas. ‘Flann O’Brien’s Creative Betrayal of Joyce.’ New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua 14, no. 4 (2010): 90–109. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25801030.

    Harris, Tobias. ‘The Catastrophe of Cliché: Karl Kraus, Cruiskeen Lawn, the Culture Industry.’ The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 3, no. 2 (2016): 7–20.  http://doi.org/10.16995/pr.3188.

    Harris, Tobias W., and Joseph LaBine. ‘John Garvin and Brian O’Nolan in Civil Service: Bureaucratic, Joycean Modernism.’ The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 6, no. 1 (2022): 1–16.  http://doi.org/10.16995/pr.6569.

    Heaney, Seamus. Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.

    Holdridge, Jefferson. The Poetry of Paul Muldoon. The Liffey Press, 2008.

    Kager, Maria. ‘Lamhd Láftar and Bad Language: Bilingual Cognition in Cruiskeen Lawn.’ In Borg et al., Flann O’Brien.

    Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer. ‘Introducing Paul Muldoon: “Arbitrary and Contrary.”’ In Paul Muldoon: Poetry, Prose, Drama: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Elmer Kennedy-Andrews. Colin Smythe, 2006.

    Kennelly, Brendan. Journey into Joy: Selected Prose. Bloodaxe Books, 1994.

    Kenner, Hugh. A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers. Knopf, 1983.

    Kerrigan, John. ‘Paul Muldoon’s Transits: Muddling through after Madoc.’ Jacket 20 (December 2002). http://jacketmagazine.com/20/kerr-muld.html.

    Long, Maebh. Assembling Flann O’Brien. Bloomsbury, 2014.

    Long, Maebh. ‘Is It about a Typewriter? Brian O’Nolan and Technologies of Inscription.’ The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 4, no. 2 (2020): 1–16.  http://doi.org/10.16995/pr.2882.

    Long, Maebh. ‘“No more drunk, truculent, witty, celtic, dark, desperate, amorous paddies!”: Brian O’Nolan and the Irish Stereotype.’ In Borg et al., Flann O’Brien.

    Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

    Mahon, Derek. The Snow Party. Oxford University Press, 1975.

    McCourt, John. ‘More “Gravid” than Gravitas: Collopy, Fahrt and the Pope in Rome.’ In Borg et al., Flann O’Brien.

    Moi, Ruben. Paul Muldoon and the Language of Poetry. Brill, 2020.

    Muldoon, Paul. Collected Poems 1968–1998. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

    Muldoon, Paul. Frolic and Detour. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.

    Muldoon, Paul. General Admission. Gallery Books, 2006.

    Muldoon, Paul. Horse Latitudes. Faber and Faber, 2006.

    Muldoon, Paul. ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon by Dominique Gauthier 18 September 1995.’ Etudes irlandaises 22, no. 1 (1995): 53–70.

    Muldoon, Paul. To Ireland, I. Oxford University Press, 2000.

    Muldoon, Paul. Maggot. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

    Muldoon, Paul. Moy Sand and Gravel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

    Muldoon, Paul. ‘Paul Muldoon, The Art of Poetry No. 87.’ Interview by James S. F. Wilson. Paris Review 169 (Spring 2004): 53–91. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/30/the-art-of-poetry-no-87-paul-muldoon.

    Muldoon, Paul. The Prince of the Quotidian. Wake Forest University Press, 1994.

    Muldoon, Paul. Songs and Sonnets. Enitharmon Press, 2012.

    Muldoon, Paul. ‘Wave.’ New Yorker, 24 September 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/wave-c-k-williams.

    Muldoon, Paul. Word on the Street. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

    Murphy, Neil. ‘Traces of Mischief: Flann O’Brien and Luigi Pirandello.’ In Flann O’Brien: Acting Out, edited by Paul Fagan and Dieter Fuchs. Cork University Press, 2022.

    na Gopaleen, Myles. The Best of Myles. Penguin, 1983.

    Nolan, Brian. ‘A Bash in the Tunnel.’ In Irish Literature: A Reader, edited by Maureen O’Rourke Murphy and James MacKillop. Syracuse University Press, 1987.

    O’Brien, Flann. The Complete Novels. Knopf, 2007.

    O’Brien, Flann. The Hair of the Dogma: A Further Selection from ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’. Paladin Books, 1989.

    O’Brien, Flann. Myles Before Myles. The Lilliput Press, 2012.

    Ó Méaloid, Pádraig. ‘Note: When is a Fahrt not a Fahrt?’ The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 100–101.  http://doi.org/10.16995/pr.3253.

    Robinson, Peter. ‘Muldoon’s Humor.’ In Politics and the Rhetoric of Poetry: Perspectives on Modern Anglo-Irish Poetry, edited by Tjebbe A. Westerndorp and Jane Mallinson. Editions Rodopi B.V., 1995.

    Taafe, Carol. ‘“Irreverence moving towards the blasphemous”: Brian O’Nolan, Blather and Irish Popular Culture.’ In Borg et al., . Updike, John. ‘Back-Chat, Funny Cracks.’ New Yorker, 11 February 2008. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/11. Wheatley, David. ‘Yours Severely.’ Literary Review, July 2018. https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-severely. Wills, Clair. ‘Anti-Writer.’ London Review of Books 41, no. 7 (4 April 2019). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n07/clair-wills/anti-writer. Wills, Clair, Nick Jenkins, and John Lancaster. ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon.’ Oxford Poetry 3, no. 1 (1986): 14–20.

    [^]