Toby interviews Frank McNally, writer of ‘An Irish Diary’ for the Irish Times, about Brian O’Nolan as a journalistic influence, and as a man.
Toby: Welcome to Radio Myles, a podcast designed to entertain, intrigue, and maybe change your perspective on Flann O’Brien, aka Myles na gCopaleen, aka Brian O’Nolan. I’m your host, Toby Harris, and this podcast is brought to you with the support of Birkbeck College, University of London, and my guest this week is Frank McNally of the Irish Times. Welcome, Frank. So Frank McNally is an Irish Times journalist, chief writer of an Irish diary. where he comments on language, history, literature, and much more. Frank describes himself on Twitter as a runner, Monaghan football supporter, Flannorack, and a reluctant cat owner. Frank is a true Flannorack. He gives his pronouns as himself, ya man. And is always reporting back on the literary academic study of Flann O’Brien, but also Joyce Beckett and many other writers. And he relays this to Irish Times readers in such a brilliant way. Your man’s Column is a treasure trove, synthesizing literary anecdote and contemporary culture, which is well worth, in my opinion, the price of a paper on its own. So, thanks for being here, Frank. Did I get your bio right? Anything you want to add already?
Frank: You did, perhaps you were too kind, some of my critics would say, but I don’t, I don’t disagree with any of it.
Toby: Very good, very good. Yeah, really, really, I’m a big fan of the column, so super excited to have you. And of course, your unique perspective on especially in the Myles na gCopaleen persona of Flann O’Brien. When I was digging around for your bio, I was trying to figure out how you landed as an Irish Times journalist. Like what, what, what, where is it? How has your life taken you to this point? Have you always done journalism in one way or another?
Frank: No, I had a previous existence. Funny enough, I have a few things in common with the great Myles. I had a previous existence as a civil servant, albeit a rather more humble one than than he was. I spent most of the 1980s working in the Department of Social Welfare in Dublin, about, ironically, about 100 meters from where the Irish Times office now is. The Irish Times moved slightly nearer in the meantime because it used to be on, used to be on Fleet Street, but moved, it moved down onto Townsend Street, which is where I worked. throughout the 1980s. So I haven’t moved far geographically, but anyway, I moved from the civil service into journalism as he did.
Now he did it simultaneously for many years until the strain finally told and he he more or less got himself sacked from the civil service, which he, I think you couldn’t, you couldn’t really do legally. I think it was more that he was invited to resign in such a way that he was made an offer he couldn’t refuse, but but he spent 17 years or something in the civil service. In my case, it was only about eight, eight or nine. So I had that previous career. And then by a very roundabout route, I hadn’t gone to college after school and I didn’t really know anybody in journalism. So I spent a few days, a few years just, you know, writing stuff. A lot of it actually was kind of this may be how I ended up doing what I’m doing. A lot of it was wasn’t even journalism. It was sort of script writing.
And I remember briefly writing scripts for, for instance, Dermot Morgan, before he did Father Ted, before he became very famous, but he had a, he had a satirical program called Scrap Saturday. I remember being at the inaugural meeting of that once. This was when I was just floundering around looking for outlets to write anything for. And I did a bit of that. I wrote a few sketches for a show called Night Hawks, which is very influential in the early 1990s. Some of the same people were involved, Art Lohan and people like that were involved in it a lot.
And then finally, yeah, after three or four years of scratching around on the fringes of freelance life, I got myself a place on a on an MA in Journalism in DCU and from there I got a placement in the Irish Times and that very quickly turned into a life sentence, which continues. I’m quite grateful.
Toby: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. For the benefit of listeners to the podcast, you might be new to this whole area, new to Planet Brian. Would you mind giving us a thumbnail sketch of Flann, Myles, however we want to call him, in just a few words. Can you just introduce us to him?
Frank: Sure. Well, he was a man of the, the first thing he was a man of many personalities and many names, but he was to simplify it.
He was a, he was an unholy trinity of the real life, Brian Nolan, Brian Nolan, who was also known in Irish as Brian Ó Nualláin. O’Nualláin grew up in an Irish speaking household. But Brian, Brian Nolan or Brian O’Nolan, that was the main person. He wrote novels as Flann O’Brien, with the exception of An Béal Bocht. That and his newspaper work he did under the pseudonym of Myles na gCopaleen, which is an old 19th century stage Irish character. So those are the three broad personas. And they overlapped in lots of different ways, increasingly because of the newspaper column, which, which lasted for 26 years on and off with like increasingly long absences.
He became known throughout his lifetime, certainly in Dublin, as Myles, people would address him as Myles in the street, and he was happy to to answer them. But he was the real life in real life. As I said, he was Brian O’Neill on, and he was even probably in his, even as far as Brian or as Myles. He was an oddly bourgeois character. I think that was part of, in a way, maybe one of the problems with he sort of set himself self up in opposition to the great suffering artists, specifically Joyce and Beckett. And, you know, he was a man who wore a suit and tie and a hat. He was dapper insofar as he could. He could afford to to be. He paid his bills. He would have prided himself on, on stuff like that. But of course, as the years went by, he was also a very heavy drinker and probably because that also became increasingly accident prone and just Just the, the number, the number of minor or major accidents and mishaps he had in later years is almost comical if you go through his, there’s a chronology of them in Maebh Long’s Collected Letters. So, you know, while he maintained the he, he may have maintained the image of the bourgeois, the, you know, upright bourgeois citizen at the end, he was increasingly a rather hapless figure too as drink and bad health got the better of him.
Toby: I love that description and I think it is really important to bear in mind that, yeah, you could call it an attempt at a bourgeois upstanding, pay your bills on time, style of existence.
It certainly comes out in the tone of voice of some of the letters where he’s arranging various different affairs and he’s a, he’s an avid complainer when things aren’t going in his direction and a great, a great kind of writer of petitions to various agencies and banks and institutions that might have let him down or given him poor customer service in one way or another.
Frank: Obsessed with things like weights and measures and specifically as they related to alcohol, even though he, he drank copious amounts of alcohol as the years went by, but he was, he never lost his absolute insistence that he got correct measure and his suspicion that publicans were shortchanging him in various ways, or watering it down and whatnot.
So he had, yeah, he had those that too, that was a kind of a, and, and that, that, that infected the column more and more as the years went by, where he was almost presenting himself to the public. Sometimes it was a joke, sometimes he seemed to take him seriously as the as the citizen’s champion who was on top of these, staying on top of these issues on behalf of, on behalf of the reader and the taxpayer, you know.
Toby: Yeah, yeah, I like that. We’re gonna hear from some archival material from some of the Irish Times staffers who worked with him about the nature of his work as well, and apparently how precise and punctilious he was in his writing, but we’ll come to that in due course. I want to just go directly to this really, really interesting point of comparison in Myles for a period of, well, I’d say probably 15 years or so at least, did push out a column about three times a week in the Irish Times and in the form of Cruiskeen Lawn.
But you also, Frank, as the chief writer of the Irish Diary, formerly an Irishman’s diary, also publish a column several times a week and you published the column that was founded by Bertie Smiley, who was the legendary editor who brought Brian on board into the into the paper. What’s it like that experience to publish so much to be writing three times a week? And does it do you feel like you can relate to to our man in some way because of that? Yeah.
Frank: Yeah, I think at the, I think at the start of his, at the start of his career, I think he was often in six times a week, even, certainly five.
And he did them at the, at the start and at his most productive when he was also holding down a fairly senior job as a civil servant. He, he did them at least according to Cronin, he would write his week’s columns on a Sunday afternoon on the, on the the big Underwood typewriter at the same table sometimes as his younger or youngest brother, I think, Micheál many years younger, would be doing his, trying to do his school homework and or, or, or study.
And he was a great distraction because the noise of the typewriter, Micheál couldn’t, couldn’t concentrate with him. But as the years went by, it became sort of more, more and more infrequent. So maybe, you know, three days a week, Probably, it was probably a rough average. There were long absences as the years went by.
I know Catherine Ahearn, one of, one of the regular Myles critics, she has done she did a kind of, I think as part of her PhD, she did an audit on, of the columns and She traced the various absences and the stated reasons for them and and how he reintroduced himself or explained them away afterwards.
And I think she said he totaled his 26 years. He, he wrote 4, 200, if I’m, if I’m correct, 4, 200 columns. So I’ve only been doing it for about 16 years and I’ve been doing the Irishman’s Diary for about 16 years, but I think I’m up to about 3000 columns. So they do add up. And I, it’s interesting, you know, you could, you could say, I mean, there was definitely in his case, there was definitely a falling away of energy and creativity as the years went by.
He did get a bit crankier. I mean, the column at its brilliant best, the stuff that’s in the best of Myles is mostly from the war years and certain, you know, maybe the later 1940s. And he was still brilliant wrangly into the 1950s. Does it become. a bit more crankier, became more workaday as the years passed.
And of course, he had, you know, he had at least one stand in fairly regular stand in Niall Montgomery. Some say there were there were more than one. But anyway, Niall Montgomery wrote a lot of them. And we don’t know exactly which ones he he wrote because he used the same same byline. Myles was all sort of was one kind of continuous franchise. But Yeah I’m not sure if this was the question, but I would be conscious just because of the sheer longevity involved. And I suppose the fact that both, both columns tend towards the humorous, I mean, obviously to a much greater degree in Myles’s case, I mean, the the Irishman’s diary as it was, or Irish diary as it is now can be about anything.
I mean, a lot of them, a lot of the, a lot of the casual contributors often are, are amateur historians and that seems to be a regular theme in it, but certainly under my stint I would try to keep it humorous and probably when I’m doing that I always have, I can always feel the giant. looking over my shoulder.
And it definitely, you know, it definitely informs the things like, even when you’re not actually referring to it, and I would frequently refer to pick up themes that Myles has used and name checking, but even when you’re not doing that, you’re conscious of things like the catechism of cliche, if only to avoid some of the worst the worst traps of dead Official English like police, police language, which is still really, hasn’t changed actually in many respects since the 1940s.
But yeah, things like that. He’s always there. He’s always, he’s, he’s always there in the background. So I imagine for that reason alone, he’s definitely an influence on the diary. I mean, the diary, the, the diary did precede him by several years. It’s, you are right that Smyllie founded it in 1927 and the, the title, which is.
It’s become problematical in recent years. The title, the original title was an Irishman’s Diary. Most English newspapers have a column called simply the diary. The London Times to this day has the diary. Spectator magazine has a diary. It was a standard thing and everywhere else they’re just called the diary.
But I think it was Smyllie who was a reformer. He had the job of dragging what was an old Unionist Anglo-Irish paper into reluctantly into the Irish Free State. And in 1927, they were adjusting to the new reality. And I think the title of that column was a bit of a little bit of overcompensation where they said, why was it necessary to say that the diary in a paper called the Irish Times was written by an Irishman? I don’t know, I think, but it was, they were stressing the fact, cause they would have considered themselves British, you know, as well as Irish, but I think they were stressing the Irishness. So it was a bit of, I never liked the tautology in the fact that the column was called the Irishman’s Diary. And then of course, the man part of it became a problem in recent times.
I mean, that would have been taken for granted in the 1920s, 30s. In fact, it was one of the most progressive. Columns in that it became an Irish woman’s diary periodically from 1952 was one of the first to do that and has been many times since, but it’s still because it has obviously it. It takes the gender of the main writer who, at any given time, and the main writer the job hasn’t changed hands very often. I’ve been doing it 16 years. My predecessor was there for about a quarter of a century. So in the times when it could have been a female writer, it hasn’t been, there’ve only been probably two chances when it could have been.
So it’s predominantly an Irish man’s diary and that definitely did become a problem. And then even the binary nature of an Irish man’s woman’s diary was probably increasingly becoming a problem. So recently online, they’ve reinvented it finally as just. an Irish Diary. And, but it’s a twin track system because in the print edition to appease our loyalist readers, some of whom tend to be older, it’s still an Irishman and Irishwoman’s Diary.
Toby: Oh, I see. So it’s actually different online than it is in print.
Frank: As the Chinese say: one newspaper, two systems.
Toby: That’s, that’s really interesting. I mean, I suppose not to make too much light of the matter, but I suppose at some point even the identity ‘Irish’ will become problematic and it will have to revert to what all the London newspapers do.
Frank: Although there have been exceptions. I mean, I know Americans have written it and I know at least one Palestinian writer has written on occasion. Irish has always been fairly elastic as a concept, you know.
Toby: And just to go back to Smyllie for a minute. I believe that as the editor of the Irish Times, he also had the sinecure of the status of being the correspondent in Ireland in Dublin for the London Times, right? So, which was an extra source of income. I’m sure that tradition doesn’t continue any longer. The Irish Times is its own entity.
Frank: No, no, I don’t think so. Funny, the main thing I know about, I mean, I, I know a lot about Smyllie because he was such a, he was such a famous character and he features in the biographies of several of the writers at the time, including Patrick Kavanagh as well. But in terms of the Irishman’s Diary, he was, he was a regular contributor himself, usually on Saturdays. for many years. And unusually, whereas the, the, the the main contributor used to be called Quidnunc. That was the, whenever Smiley was writing it, he always used the name Nichevo or Nichevo. I’m not sure how you pronounce that. And so you always know when you see that byline, you know, that was Smyllie. So there’s a little bit of vanity on his part.
Toby: I asked you if you could prepare for us a passage of, of maybe Myles, it doesn’t have to be, if there’s anything you’d like to, to, to, to read out again, just from the perspective of readers who might be new or listeners who might be new rather might appreciate a little bit of a snippet of, of Myles.
Frank: I, I, I remembered, I only remember that question as recently as about 15 minutes ago in a panic. I thought, Oh my God, what? And so I dug out the best Myles. I’ll read a piece that he wrote. My favorite piece is The Best of Myles. I don’t, you know, I’m not a big fan. The stuff that gets, that gets done most often is stuff like The Brother for instance, stuff that’s easily sort of easily dramatized, or the Keats and Chapman stories, which are bad puns.
I’m not a big fan of those. They’re kind of repetitive. And he’s essentially a bore, really, as Eamon Morissey said, and he made a one man show of him. But my favorite parts of The Best of Myles are the miscellaneous section at the back, because it just captures the random madness of the column at its best.
So I think I’m going to read this piece that he wrote the main persona who had a sort of a, had a sort of personality, he was also sometimes writing as Myles na cGopaleen, the Dá, who was a man of apparently 700 hundred years old, had been born in different centuries and different continents. So you never really knew what the voice was. In this, he’s taking the voice of an old veteran London Fleet Street reporter who had been around in the 1880s, which we know is not true because he was born in 1911. But anyway, it’s preposterous. Fairly typical for Myles, but nevertheless preposterous yarn about something that he supposedly got up to back then.
Years ago when I was living in Islington, a cub reporter in the service of Tay Pay, founder of that modern scourge, the ‘gossip column’, I had great trouble with my landlord. The man was a vulgar low bowler-hatted plumber who tortured me exquisitely by his vulgarity of dress, talk, and aspect. The situation rapidly became Russian. Evenings in the yellow gaslight, myself immersed in a letter to George Harris, or painfully compiling my first novel, the gross plumber audibly eating tripe in an armchair behind me. The succession – the crescendo of ‘Greek’ emotion–irritation–anger–loathing–then hatred, and then the quiet grey thought – I will do this creature in. I will do for him, gorblimey, if I have to swing for it!
It is funny how small things irk far beyond their own intrinsic significance. The way he sucked at his dirty pipe, too lazy or stupid to light it. The trick of never lacing his boots up completely. And his low boasting about his drinking. Forty-eight pints of cider in a Maidenhead inn. Mild and bitter by the gallon. I remember retorting savagely on one occasion that I would drink him under the table. Immediately came the challenge to do so. ‘Not now,’ I remember saying. ‘But sooner than you think, my good friend.’ That is the way we talked in those days. Possibly it was just then that I first formed my murderous resolution. But I digress.
When I had finally decided to murder this insufferable plumber, I naturally occupied my mind for some days with the mechanics of sudden death. I was familiar with the practice of homicide fashionable in the 80s and I laid my plans with some care. I took , to locking my bedroom so that the paraphernalia of execution could be amassed without arousing the suspicions of the patient. The chopper was duly purchased. Together with a spare hatchet in case the plumber’s skull should withstand a chopper. I attended a physical culture class to improve my muscles. Alcohol and tobacco were discontinued. I took long walks on Sunday afternoons and slept with the window wide open. But most important of all – remember that I speak of the gaslit eighties – I purchased a large bath and the customary drums of acid.
I was then ready. The precise moment of execution did not matter so much. It would coincide with some supreme extremity of irritation. And it did. One evening, reopening the manuscript of my novel, I discovered traces of tripe on the clean copper-plate pages. The wretched plumber had been perusing my private documents. I went upstairs whistling ‘The Girl in the Hansom Cab’, came down cheerfully with the chopper behind my back, and opened the ruffian’s skull from crown to neck with a haymaker of a wallop that nearly broke my own arm. The rest was simple. I carried the body up to my room and put it in the bath of acid. Nothing more remained but to put things in order for my departure next day for a week’s holiday with my old parents in Goraghwood, my native place. When I returned to London, I went up to the bedroom with some curiosity. There was nothing to be seen save the bath of acid. I carried the bath down to the sitting room and got a glass.
I filled the glass with what was in the bath, crept in under the table and swallowed the burning liquid. Glass after glass I swallowed till all was gone. It was with grim joy that I accomplished my threat that I would drink this plumber under the table. It was the sort of thing one did at the turn of the century.
It’s just mad. And, you know but he had, he had talent for that kind of thing. I only discovered in Boston, actually there were certain similarities between Myles and Edgar Allen Poe, who we think of as a horror writer specifically, but Edgar Allen Poe in his time was was actually a comedy writer with a dark twist and Myles is a comedy writer with a dark twist and some of their some of their stuff is not too far apart. Obviously Myles is funnier, but that’s partly because he is, he’s more modern than Edgar Allan Poe. But he had a, he had a very dark imagination.
Toby: Well, let’s, let’s zoom in a bit further and just on that, on, on the circumstances of writing. So I’m quite, I’m quite keen to get your take on how the mechanics of it worked and how he was able to kind of pull off his stuff like invading the the Irishman’s Diary, but i’m just going to play you two different accounts. So and I think we’ll just listen to them both because the first one’s quite short so these are, there were, there’ve been two there were two longest documentaries made about, about Flann in the 90s by Anthony Cronin and one in the for the centenary in a Bowman documentary. And both of them have these treatments of the column in some ways that are a little bit, a little bit different. This is Cronin, who’s got hold of Bruce Williamson. That’s someone you can kind of maybe shed some light on as well and, and look a bit more about.
Bruce: I used to have to deal with his copy when it came into the office in the Irish Times. And I was delighted and entranced by the clarity and simplicity of the prose. It was as clear as gin, beautiful. And punctuation, everything. Of course, nobody would presume to subedit Myles. My job was to read it for legal trouble, you know? Had he gone over the top? Sometimes you didn’t know, and sometimes you knew damn well.
Toby: So that’s Bruce Williamson, and and I think we have another account here. I think this is a few others involved in various ways with the paper talking, talking about him, so it’s a slightly longer clip.
Niall Sheridan: I introduced him to Bertie Smyllie in the old Palace Bar, and Bertie took to them very quickly. They got on wonderfully well. Neil Sheridan on the beginnings of Myles na gCopaleen’s Irish Times career. And within ten minutes he had he had hired Myles to do a column for the Irish Times. At first it was only in Irish, and a rather ludicrous situation developed because there was nobody in the Irish Times who could read Irish. You know, they were in the same position as I was in relation to the old Irish. Smyllie rang me up and said you know, I said, I’m getting stuff here and you know, we can’t read it. Would you read it for us? So, you know, I had the ludicrous position where they were sending this stuff to me to read for libel and various other things, unknown to Brian.
Ben Kiely: The first time that let me see. Yes, it would have been, I think, the first time I ever actually saw him. It was in Delere Street. And R. M. Smyllie was standing there as some pacifist, as the legs of stone in the desert, you know, two and poofing at the pipe. And Myles was standing much smaller than him and arguing and jabbing his forefinger at him. What the argument was about I do not know, I suspect it was about what R. M. was not paying for, for the column or something of that sort. But it was the impassivity of the enormous man and the sort of gallic activity of Brian that made the whole scene really worth photographing. I certainly photographed it in my memory, I can see them still.
Bruce Williamson: He used to have them quite often, though not very often face to face. They did, of course, sometimes meet, they’d be drinking together, and then they were usually quite amiable and Myles would sometimes make fun of Smyllie or jibe at him, but this was all done in quite a friendly spirit. On the other hand, when changes had been made to his copy (or, to be more accurate, we didn’t change his copy, we sometimes cut it). He then used to write in letters the most fearsome invective against the editor. And sometimes he was sufficiently affronted to withdraw his services altogether.
Toby: Do these accounts ring true to you, that, that he submitted some, pretty much perfect copy that only really had it had to be edited for for libel. And also that he seems to have had this quite – I’m not sure if it’s a quality of the times – but quite a fractious relationship with the editorial staff and with Smyllie. But yeah, one of great respect that seems to pervade the accounts at least. These are recorded, you know, quite a few years later. You know, probably in the 1970s, most of that material. But there’s, there’s some respect there. And I guess another way of asking is how did, how do you think the reputation of Myles fared in the Irish Times?
Frank: You know, I, I never met Bruce Williamson. Very interesting. In fact, I’d never really seen the man talk until I saw that. One person I have spoken, he was still alive, who had, who experienced Myles in person. One of the few people who, who I, who I’ve been able to ask about this is Michael Viney, who still does a column from West of Ireland on the natural world on wildlife and. He must be in his eighties now, but as a very young man, probably the early 1960s, freelancing the Irish Times. He was deputizing on the Irishman’s Diary one day and he made some – this had nothing to do with Myles, by the way. Myles was very precious about his own copy – but in this case it was Ney was writing anonymously in the Irishman’s Diary.
And he included some basic but egregious grammatical error, which he would not now make, he said, but he was a young man at the time, a relatively small thing. And Myles took the trouble (this is late career Myles) took the trouble of finding out a who it was who had written this and sen him a postcard correcting it and calling him: you ignorant bollocks. And you know, this has nothing to do with him. It’s not even, it’s not his own column. It’s not like somebody has changed his column and introduced a mistake to it. In which case you might well be, you might well be anger.
Toby: You’ve been a, an amazing guest Frank with so much insight. So once again, thanks so much for being on the podcast and sharing your unique insights into into Myles.
Frank: Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.
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