Eire's Columnist

On one Irish matter there is no argument in all Eire: the favorite Irish newspaper columnist is Brian O'Nolan, who writes for Dublin's Irish Times. He is small, dark, young (31). The impish O'Nolan, a novelist, playwright and civil servant, writes a six-a-week column titled Cruiskeen Lawn (The Little Overflowing Jug) under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen (pronounced Copaleen, means Myles of the Little Horses).*

There is nothing like Cruiskeen Lawn or its author anywhere in English or American journalism. His column is written in what O'Nolan describes as "socalled English" three days of the week; in "the kingly and melodious Irish" on the other three. It is as atmospheric of Dublin as the flower-&-vegetable women of Moore Street, or the giant Nelson's pillar which keeps a bleak eye socket on the drizzled city. Because he works as Assistant Principal, Local Government and Public Health officer all week, O'Nolan writes all six columns on Sunday.

The Monstrous Pun. Like the late James Joyce, O'Nolan is a master of the monstrous pun. Erudite, ironic, he devotes many a column to the hilarious systematic destruction of literary cliches, to parodies of Eire's leprechaun literature and the red-taped verbiage of Government service, to absurd home-economics hints. He is an unsparing, beloved critic of devotees of Irish, who overuse Eire's national tongue; a subtler critic of the clerics, who are not unaware of his innuendo and high irony.

A standard section of O'Nolan's column is a paragraph or two of bogus Keatsiana, in which he hangs most of his laboriously manufactured puns on the poet and his "friend" Chapman. Samples:

> Chapman and Keats went on tour with a pair of performing bears. Keats refused to believe they were tame and harmless, but consented to feed them. Chapman found Keats injecting a local anesthetic into the bears. They were numb but upright. "Chapman flew into a feverish temper and demanded the reason for this brutal and cynical outrage. 'There's safety in numb bears,' Keats said."

> In his youth Keats was a well-known amateur veterinary. An old lady brought him a sick cat, whose bladder Keats re moved. " 'A case of letting the bag out of the cat,' he remarked afterwards to Chap man."

> Keats's Irish terrier, Byrne, failed to come home one night. Chapman found the poet playing the violin, and remarked on his composure. "Keats smiled . . . 'And why should I not fiddle,' he asked, 'while Byrne roams?' "

> Keats was once a potato factor and, while delivering a ton of potatoes, was attacked by a ferocious pet pomeranian.

He kicked the dog and carried on. " 'When I make up my mind to deliver spuds,' he remarked afterward to Chapman, 'I have no intention of letting a pomme de terre me.' Chapman took no notice." The Retort Discourteous. O'Nolan is in a class by himself in adapting outworn instruments to his journalistic purpose.

One column explained the use of an obsolete snow gauge (complete with woodcut).

The snow gauge catches snow in a funnel, melts it in a pan below, stores and measures the residue. If there is a "moon faced" young man about the house who .discourses upon art, life, love, employs trite French phrases, "inevitably the day will come (even if you he ve to wait for it for many years) when h^ will sigh and murmur:

" 'Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?' (But where are the snows of yesteryear?) "Here is your chance. This is where you go to town. Seize the nitwit by the scruff of the neck, march him out to the snow gauge and shout: " 'Right in that bucket, you fool!' "I'll bet you'll feel pretty good after that." O'Nolan knows well that the funda mental internal policy of his Government is the revival of Irish language and Irish culture. He speaks and writes Irish accurately and fluently, but he is willing to urge frustrated Irish students to rebel against "print-suckled hacks who have learned Irish in their youth at the point of a strap, and who have made such a mess of their lives that they can exist only by correcting examination papers." This line is always good for letters.

Inventing hobbies of great men is an other O'Nolan pastime. Ardent biographers of the composer Handel were surprised to learn that their idol was such a close student of Parisian slang that he had written an authoritative work on the subject: Handel's L' Argot.

Tyrone to Tipperary. People who have sought O'Nolan since he became Eire's favorite columnist have had a hard time finding him. A conscientious, hard working civil servant, adept at answering letters, his days are busy with matters of state (e.g., settling claims for a recent orphanage fire). He passes as few nights as possible with the metropolitan arty crowd; among them he is a good drinker, poor conversationalist. He prefers the talk at the tough bars and quayside pubs.

One of the few things O'Nolan takes seriously is chess. He is equipped with a pocket chessboard, plays promiscuously with chance acquaintances. He has informally beaten World Champion Alekhine. He writes so easily that he grows bored with it. At Swim Two Birds, O'Nolan's first novel in English, is never concluded, just stops abruptly.

O'Nolan was a pale-faced, bucktoothed youngster of 23 when he scudded into Eire's Civil Service on a foam of brilliant answers to such questions as "How far is the earth from the moon?" Born in Northern Ireland's County Tyrone, he had lived until then without notable incident save a visit to Germany in 1933.

There he went to study the language, managed to get himself beaten up and bounced out of a beer hall for uncomplimentary references to Adolf Hitler: "They got me all wrong in that pub." He also met and married 18-year-old Clara Ungerland, blonde, violin-playing daughter of a Cologne basket weaver. She died a month later. O'Nolan returned to Eire, and never mentions her.

His views on Americans, whom he likes, were given a most favorable turn when Playwright William Saroyan turned up in Eire on a world tour "to see if it actually was a long way to Tipperary." O'Nolan thought that showed a refreshing curi osity. Saroyan told him that a better title for At Swim would have been Sweeney in the Trees (one character, cursed by a monk, lives in a tree). Later, Saroyan sent O'Nolan $50 for the suggested title.

O'Nolan bought Irish Hospitals sweep stakes tickets with the windfall and sent half of the counterfoils to Saroyan. Nei ther won anything.

* Both titles lifted from the opera Lily of Killarney, by Sir Julius Benedict, who lifted the latter from the most popular (with the Irish) of all Irish novels, Gerald Griffin's The Collegians (1828).

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