No Laughing Matter

Anthony Cronin

• Publisher: New Island
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781848407152
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Biografías literarias

First published in 1989 No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien was the first full-length biography of Flann O'Brien. Rich in background, anecdote and social history, it is an extraordinary portrait of a writer and his times, perceptive, sympathetic and authoritative. Flann O'Brien (aka Brian O'Nolan) was born in Tyrone in 1911 and worked as a civil servant for many years. He also developed an alter ego, Myles na Gopaleen, whose saitrical column in the Irish Times soon acquired legendary status.

At Swim-Two-Birds, his first novel, appeared in 1939 and was praised by James Joyce, Graham Greene, Dylan Thomas and others. His second novel, The Third Policeman, failed to find a publisher at the time but has since been acknowledged as one of the most important novels to come out of Ireland in the twentieth century. With a foreword by acclaimed author Kevin Barry and striking redesign, No Laughing Matter is an undisputed classic of Irish literary biography.

1

Origins

Strabane today is a town of some 13,000 inhabitants on the border of County Tyrone and County Donegal, which is also the border between the Republic and the six counties of Northern Ireland. It is a pretty town, bisected by a sizeable, full-flowing river, the Mourne, with views of the Donegal hills on one side and the Sperrin mountains on the other; and in normal times it would be a peaceful place.

The times are not normal however, and in the Bowling Green, where the farmers once brought their flax in carts to Reilly’s flax stores, there is an unusually large and strongly fortified police and army barracks, enclosed in wire netting and bristling with the electronic technology which enables the army to maintain surveillance over a considerable area. Beside this is a terrace of pleasant three-storey houses. A plaque on number 15 commemorates the birth of the writer Brian O’Nolan or Brian Ó Nualláin there in 1911. Because nationalists have a majority on Strabane’s Urban District Council the plaque is in both English and Irish, but in the Irish version the word scríbhneoir, which means writer, is misspelled. The Irish form of the writer’s name is also used for a housing development, Ó Nualláin Park, which commemorates him.

Among the working-class housing estates high up on the left bank of the Mourne, the part known locally as ‘The Top of the Town’, support for the Provisional IRA is strong and there are Provisional slogans daubed on the walls. In recent years most of Strabane’s Main Street and many of the familiar buildings of the town centre have been destroyed by bombing, 31 shops, four banks, the town’s two hotels and the Town Hall, a classical edifice of considerable architectural merit, being the most recent tally.

The O’Nolans were not natives of Strabane. Brian’s father, Michael, came there as a Customs and Excise Officer in 1897. He had been born in nearby Omagh, a somewhat larger town with a greater air of bustle and importance befitting the administrative centre of the county Tyrone. He was not born O’Nolan, but Nolan; and he called himself Nolan for some purposes throughout his life.

Names were always a somewhat provisional matter for Michael O’Nolan, as they also would be later on for his son Brian. Born Michael Victor Nolan in July 1875, he was married as Michael V. O’Nolan, but signed the register as Miceál O Nualáin. His superiors in the Customs and Excise service continued to know him as Michael Nolan; and so, somewhat more remarkably, did the Revenue Commissioners of the Irish Free State when he was appointed a Commissioner later in life, though his colleagues in the office referred to him as Micheál Ó Nualláin. On Brian’s birth certificate his father’s name is given as Michael Victor O’Nolan, but five years later, in the census return of 1911, he gave his name as Miceál O Nualláin, though someone added Michael O’Nolan in parentheses underneath. When probate was taken out on his estate his name was given as Michael Nolan.

O’Nolan was unusual. Those Nolans who objected to the English form of their name or wished to be known by what they believed to be the Irish version of it called themselves Ó Nualláin, usually with two l’s and with a sine fada, signifying a long vowel, over the O, in the Irish manner, instead of an apostrophe after it, but on the occasions when law or custom demanded that they should return to the English version they called themselves simply Nolan. To Irish ears O’Nolan has a would-be aristocratic ring, a faint suggestion of chieftainship of the clan.

Michael’s father taught music at the Omagh Model School and he was plain Donal Nolan. Although the profession of music teacher at the end of the 19th century may conjure up a vision of an unworldly person in a threadbare coat giving ill-paid lessons to recalcitrant young ladies, the fact is that Donal Nolan was respectably employed within the school system, but he did nevertheless marry a pupil, Jane Mellon, the 18-year-old daughter of a ‘strong’ farmer from Eiscir Duffey, near Omagh. The couple had eight children, four sons and four daughters.

Michael Victor was the eldest son; and of the others the only ones to play any part in Brian’s life were Gerald, Peter and Fergus. Gerald and Peter both became priests, Peter joining the Carmelite Order and Gerald, or Gearóid as he now called himself, becoming in the course of time Professor of Irish at Maynooth College, the principal training centre for the Irish priesthood.

Unlike Michael, and perhaps Peter, Gearóid and Fergus were convivial spirits, talkative, humorous and fond of a drop. Fergus became a teacher and for a while he assisted Patrick Pearse, the poet who led the 1916 rebellion, at Scoil Éanna, the progressive Irish language school for boys which Pearse had founded. Charitable family legend attributed a certain over-fondness for alcohol in later years to the effect on him of Pearse’s subsequent execution.

While his family was still young Donal Nolan was transferred from Omagh to Belfast, where the boys grew up and attended the new Queen’s University. They were all classicists and were to be distinguished in later life by a good reading knowledge of Latin and Greek; but their deepest personal enthusiasm was for the Irish language.

Since the Parnell divorce case in 1890 and the split in the Irish party at Westminster which followed it, there had been widespread disillusion with politics in Ireland and a fervent revival of cultural nationalism. All over the country young people began to enrol in Irish language classes. The more enthusiastic went to the Gaeltachts, the Irish-speaking districts, to improve their vocabulary and acquire the authentic blas or distinctive pronunciation. Rather constrained late Victorian versions of Irish dancing and singing came back into vogue, the dancing very stiff and rule-bound, the singing much influenced by drawing-room ideas of folk music. Michael, Gearóid, Fergus and Peter all displayed an early enthusiasm for the language. They learned different dialects, Michael’s being Donegal and Gearóid’s, which Michael thought not very good, Munster.

Michael’s attitude to the language was thoroughgoing and systematic, not to say pedantic, as with everything he undertook. On visits to the Donegal Gaeltacht he made notes of pronunciation according to an international system, disagreeing in many cases with the findings of the great Quiggin, a much-respected authority of the time.

With the exception of Peter, the Carmelite, the brothers were also all amateur writers. Michael wrote a detective story later in life which his family believed was accepted for publication by Collins and would have been published were it not for his obstinacy about the terms they offered. Gearóid and Fergus collaborated on a book of short stories which they called Sean agus Nua (Old and New). The stories were written in Irish, but they also made a translation which they called Intrusions and they arranged for the private publication of both versions in one book as an assistance to language enthusiasts.

It is an odd sort of book. The stories are heavily plotted, with surprise dénouements, and they have a featureless urban setting which could be anywhere. Running through them is a marked vein of misogynism. The women characters are frequently wicked intriguers who are discomfited in the end. In 1920, when Brian was nine, his uncle Fergus had a play, A Royal Alliance, produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, a considerable enough achievement in a city where everybody wrote plays for the same theatre. Gerald also wrote an autobiography in Irish, Beatha Duine a Thuil, which has somewhat more literary merit than the stories in Sean Agus Nua.

After graduating from Queen’s, Michael Victor applied for a job in the Customs and Excise Service. He was posted to Strabane in 1897, which must have pleased him, for the little town on the Mourne was only a few miles from where he had been born. His mother had hoped that he would be a priest – Irish mothers of the time were insatiable in their desire for sons in the priesthood – but there is little doubt that, in becoming a civil servant, he chose a method of earning a living suited to his precise, methodical and pedantic temperament.

Michael Nolan was a nationalist. His job as a civil servant under the crown prevented his giving political expression to his views, but in concentrating on the language and all that went with it, he was, in any case, following the tide of the time. He was not long in Strabane before he began to give night classes in Irish and to organise feiseanna, competitions in which the entrants competed for prizes in Irish singing, dancing and recitation.

Like many another young men of the time, he found romance where he had sought merely an expression of his cultural patriotism. Agnes Gormley was the daughter of a newsagent and bookseller who was the principal Catholic shopkeeper in Strabane. She was 18 when they met, 11 years younger than Michael Nolan. Like him, she had been born in Omagh.

The Gormleys had had an extensive business in Omagh, including a bakery, public house and grocery. They lived in some comfort, employing two local girls to look after the children; but in the 1880s, just before Agnes Gormley was born, a failure of the potato crop caused prolonged distress in the area. According to family tradition the Gormleys were ruined by the extended credit John Gormley advanced to local farmers. In any case the business was sold up; John Gormley got a job as foreman in a Derry bakery; and his wife, Agnes’s mother, opened a small newsagency and fancy goods business in Strabane, where he later joined her.

This was in Market Street, known as ‘the back street’ because it runs parallel to the Main Street; but in time John Gormley opened a shop in Main Street as well and was the first Catholic to assert his right to do so. When his daughter Agnes married Michael O’Nolan, John Gormley was one of the best-known and most respected figures in the town, at least as far as the Catholic community was concerned.

Agnes Gormley was one of John Gormley’s seven children, five boys and two girls. It was an immensely talented family; and the boys were all characters of the sort who create the quality of Irish small-town life and contribute to its lore and gossip. Eugene, the eldest, inherited the business in Main Street. Succeeding generations were to know him as a courteous, knowledgeable, impeccably dressed, handsome man, acquainted with the contents of the newspapers and books he sold. Naturally enough, these were not as many as a metropolitan bookshop would have carried, but he stocked a surprising number, ranging from penny dreadfuls to the sort of Irish travel books and books about Ireland that were part of the nationalist ferment of the time. He was himself, by long-standing intention anyway, a writer, whose history of Strabane never in fact materialised, though he published fugitive pieces here and there and belonged to the large section of the population of Ireland which had once had a play rejected by the Abbey. As a young man he was a serious-minded and idealistic nationalist and if not a member of the IRA was a close and active sympathiser. Later he became more moderate in his views and disappointed many Strabane Catholics by his lack of militancy about the Council’s failure to appoint an Irish teacher in the Technical School. A lifelong bachelor with a paternalistic and Olympian manner, dressed always in grey serge and standing usually at the rear of his shop, he had time for converse with young and old; and he is nowadays rightly regarded as having played a significant part in Strabane’s social and cultural history, so much so indeed that, like his nephew, he has been accorded the honour of having a part of one of the new housing estates named after him.

His brother Tom was the inevitable small-town genius who is also a ne’er-do-well. A talented violinist, in later life he would disappear for long periods, frequently returning without even the violin; but, by a paradox not uncommon in Ireland, as his condition worsened his reputation grew, the legend of his wasted talent becoming one of Strabane’s topics and surviving even a disastrous appearance at a concert in the Town Hall. Finally reduced to utter dependence on the rest of the Gormleys for support and on strangers for drink, he once sought to punish the upright Eugene for a refusal to give him money by adopting the role of mendicant musician and playing for coppers in Main Street outside the shop. He usually carried a brown paper parcel under his arm, which supposedly contained musical manuscripts, and he was known to have composed operas. In fact one song of which he wrote both words and music, ‘Ireland Live On’, achieved a certain amount of national popularity and was supposed, in Strabane anyway, to have been considered as a possible national anthem after the Irish Free State came into existence.

If opinion in Strabane was sometimes divided about Tom and his talents, there was more unanimity about his brother Joe. He too was a musician, but whereas Tom wore a tweed cap and looked sometimes in even greater need of a shave than he was of a drink, Joe affected a broad-brimmed black hat and a bow tie and he wore his overcoat slung over his shoulders like a cloak. Like Tom, he also wrote songs and some of them achieved the dignity of performance on the radio and publication in Dublin. He was the impresario and director of many musical productions on the Town Hall stage and coached successive generations of young singers, becoming a very central figure in the town’s activities. At one point he also had ambitions to be a photographer and set up his own studio, where he did the inevitable wedding and first communion studies. This was not a success and since Joe’s musical activities, however great a figure they enabled him to cut in the town, did not bring in a living either, he was ceded the original shop on Market Street. There he carried on a stationery and newsagency business much as Eugene did round the corner, with the addition of a twopenny lending library which stocked the sort of hardback thrillers and westerns designed for that trade. In later life he too was ‘fond of a drop’, but his drinking was not as publicly conducted as Tom’s.

One other Gormley brother had a notable influence on Brian. This was George, who departed early for Dublin where he became a sports reporter on the daily Irish Independent and finally sports editor of the old Evening Mail. Talkative, gregarious, a noted anecdotalist even in Dublin journalistic circles and a frequent visitor to his brother-in-law’s various houses, George Gormley impressed himself deeply on the imagination of his nephew and cast a certain glamour over the trade of journalism which, in Brian’s eyes, it was never quite to lose.

Agnes Gormley was just 20 when she married Michael Victor O’Nolan in 1906. She was an attractive, cheerful girl; and though not as talented as some of the Gormleys – or perhaps, to be more exact, not so accomplished – she had a good singing voice and a more equable disposition. She was not as fond of books as her husband or her brother Eugene were. In later life her favourite reading was hagiographical, though this need not suggest an unusual ambition for sanctity on her part. Like her husband, Agnes Gormley was a devout Catholic, but the lives of the saints, as recorded by Alban Butler, Curtayne and others were favourite reading matter for many Irish mothers in the first half of this century.

In marrying her, Michael Victor married into a family which was certainly warmer, more ebullient and more colourful than the rather serious-minded and ambitious O’Nolans. His son Brian’s character would show both sides in fairly equal measure; and almost everything in it can be exemplified among his parents and his uncles. There was a predisposition towards words and music, the modes and the substance of art; and there was equally the methodical, logical, detail-shredding mind of the civil servant. There was a certain harshness and a strong dash of worldly ambition, but there was also a gentle unworldly part of him which shrank from conflict and was quickly despondent. Related to this was a split between a fierce respectability on the one hand and the erraticisms of the easily exacerbated creative temperament, assisted by drink, on the other. Even the urban, urbane and sophisticated humorist can be exemplified in the figure of his journalist uncle, George Gormley.

In marrying Agnes Gormley Michael O’Nolan also married into Strabane, a town with which all his children, including Brian, would have an almost lifelong relationship. Although Brian would very deliberately and consciously decide to be a Dubliner, Strabane always remained home. Among the many terms of abuse which his persona, Myles na Gopaleen, would deploy so magnificently later on, ‘corner boy’, ‘shop boy’ and even ‘peasant’ would betray something of shopkeeping Strabane and its values.

The marriage took place in the parish of Murlogh, the ceremony being performed by the bridegroom’s priest brothers, Gearóid and Peter, who conducted it in Irish – ‘an interesting departure from the usual custom’, remarked the Derry Journal.

Shortly after his marriage Michael O’Nolan took a house at 15 The Bowling Green, Strabane, then a quiet residential square in one corner of which was a flax store. As was usual with Irish marriages until very recently, children arrived in quick succession. Brian, born on 5 October 1911, was the third child. He was preceded by two brothers Ciarán and Gearóid (Gerald), and followed by a sister, Roisín. Eventually there were to be 12 children in all: seven boys and five girls. Partly because there was a sister in between and partly because there was then a two year gap before the next brother, Fergus, was born, the three eldest boys formed an exclusive coterie within this large family.

The language of the O’Nolan home was Irish. Agnes O’Nolan’s knowledge of the language, though not as extensive as her husband’s, was quite sufficient to ensure that there was no necessity to speak anything else; and since even the maids were imported from the Donegal Gaeltacht no English at all was spoken. The size of the family meant that it could be self-contained and as none of the boys was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Origins
• 2. The Brilliant Beginning
• 3. The Dubliner
• 4. The Close
• Sources
• Bibliographical Note
• Index
• Plate Section