We're delighted to print an extract from The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, edited by Maebh Long and published by Dalkey Island Press.
An unprecedented gathering of the correspondence of one of the great writers of the twentieth century, The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien presents an intimate look into the life and thought of Brian O’Nolan, a prolific author of novels, stories, sketches, and journalism who famously wrote and presented works to the reading public under a variety of pseudonyms. Spanning the years 1934 to 1966, these compulsively readable letters show us O’Nolan, or O’Brien, or Myles na gCopaleen, or whatever his name may be, at his most cantankerous and unrestrained.
NB: The following letter is accompanied by numbered annotations, to offer further context and explanation.
To the Irish Times, LTE
29 July 1940
Literary Criticism Sir, – At last, I said to myself, the Irish banks are acknowledging the necessity for hygiene (1) . My eye had lighted on the heading "Spraying the Potatoes" and I had naturally enough inferred that our bank notes were being treated periodically with a suitable germicide, a practice which has long been a commonplace of enlightened monetary science in Australia. When I realized that the heading had reference to some verses by Mr Patrick Kavanagh dealing with the part played by chemistry in modern farming, my chagrin may be imagined. I am no judge of poetry – the only poem I ever wrote was produced when I was body and soul in the gilded harness of Dame Laudanum – but I think Mr Kavanagh is on the right track here. Perhaps the Irish Times, tireless champion of our peasantry, will oblige us with a series in this strain covering such rural complexities as inflamed goat-udders, warble-pocked shorthorn, contagious abortion, non-ovoid oviducts and nervous disorders among the gentlemen who pay the rent.
However, my purpose in writing is to intervene briefly in the Donnybrook which has developed in your columns on the subject of literary criticism. First, I think it is time somebody said a seasonable word on this question of sewerage. Mr Harvey, who lives in the honky-tonk ridden West End of Cloughjordan, accuses Mr Kavanagh of preoccupation with "middens", "back-yard cesspools", and of seeking to conduct the public through the city sewers. Irish newspapers and periodicals have published many thousands of articles in which the work of Irish writers has been associated with sewers, sewer-rats and sewerage, and to a lesser extent with muck-ranking and other operations usually carried on sewerage farms.
So much for the readers, or, if one may term them so, the anti-writers. Now if we turn to the writers, we find that the same boot is also on the other foot. In his latest book Mr Sean O Faolain talks about things which emerge from sewers, and likens the east-wind that blows occasionally in the republic of Letters to "the drip of a broken pipe". Other writers have frequently invoked the image of the humble sewer rat, when dealing not only with the public, but with each other. In fine, the writers and anti-writers indiscriminately accuse each other of being sewer-minded and both classes roar "Yah! Sewer Rat!" with equal venom. To say the least of it, this is confusing. One would imagine that anybody who can read or write in modern Ireland asked for nothing better than a quiet evening down a sewer, moving an idle oar down the dark streams, browsing in quiet backwater with a drowsy angler’s eye on the plunging rats, "wine-bark on the wine-dark waterway". (2) Probably Mr Harvey thinks that, when Mr Kavanagh lays down his Homeric fountain-pen for the day, he strolls out into the street, opens a manhole and disappears for the evening; or that when two intellectuals talk about walking down O’Connell street, they mean wading down the magnificent vaulted Gothic sewer below the street. At this rate any house agent who hears a prospective client inquiring particularly about the plumbing and drainage of a house will know that he is dealing with a literary bird. Certainly, if it is true that our native intellectuals foregather in the sewers, there must be serious congestion. If there is a Carnegie library in Cloughjordan, there must be a terrific crush in the most fashionable cesspool.
As regards boy scouts,(3) I agree with Mr Kavanagh. The idea is one of the most pernicious of our British importations. All boy scouts seem to be warts in the process of becoming prigs. At a time when any normal young fellow should be learning how to hold his own in a game of three-hand solo, the wretched boy scout is learning absurd blue-sea rope-knots and – of all things in a land where the coillte (4) have been ar lar (5) for centuries – trailfinding and woodlanding. They are also encouraged to do one good deed a day, notwithstanding the well-known axiom that it’s only by doing noble deeds all day long that life can become one grand sweet song. It would fit these youngsters better to learn to find their way across the city via the sewers. Then they would have some prospect of growing up to become great writers.
Few would support Mr Kavanagh in his unsympathetic judgment of Gone With the Wind. (6) A book that has won for its author many thousands of tons of tubers cannot be dismissed so lightly. There are many people of the writing class in Ireland who cannot regard seriously any book which has not been banned for obscenity, and which has not involved all concerned in catastrophic libel suits. This may be all very well as a general rule of thumb, but there must be exceptions. There are still people in the world, thank heaven, who can relish a good wholesome story well told. To be curled up with a good book of an evening is one of the few simple pleasures left to us. To me and Mr Harvey, I mean.
Yours etc., F. O’Brien, Dublin.
(1) 20 July Patrick Kavanagh’s review of Maurice Walsh’s The Hill is Mine in the Irish Times sparked a new onslaught of letters. As Kavanagh questioned the lines between art and popularity he made passing references to Gone with the Wind and the Boy Scouts, and these became the subject of intense debate. Under the title ‘Literary Criticism’ F.L.J. threw the first punch 22 July, followed by Oscar Love 23 July, with F.J.L., Harold C. Brown and Frank E. Prenton Jones indignantly defending scouting 24 July. The decision to reduce Kavanagh’s article to a discourse on the Boy Scouts was continued 25 July by David Meredith, Love and N.S. Harvey, who began to get political as the Scouts were linked to Hitler Youth and events in Europe. 26 July Prenton Jones and F.J.L. moved from Scouts to potato diggers. 27 July Kavanagh’s ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ was printed in the literary page, and Judy Clifford and Love continued the Scouts-Hitler Youth-farm labour connection. H.V. Briscoe came to Kavanagh’s defence, and Niall Montgomery urged the Editor not to pander to such debasements. 29 July Ewart Milne spoke up for Kavanagh, Brown brought the conversation back to Lord Baden-Powell, and Harvey to potato-digging.
(2) Ulysses, Cyclops episode.
(3) The Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland (1927–2004) was founded by Fathers Earnest and Tom Farrell as a Catholic-focused scouting organisation.
(4) Irish: woods.
(5) Irish: missing/gone.
(6) Gone with the Wind (1936), an American plantation and civil war novel written by Margaret Mitchell, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937.
The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, edited by Maebh Long and published by Dalkey Island Press, is in bookshops now.
