Imposter Boy – Frank McNally on another appearance of the Flann O’Brien who wasn’t

I see that a portrait of Flann O’Brien has taken its deserved place on the walls of the Devonshire Arms, the much-talked about (and partly Irish-owned) London pub celebrated for the quality of its Guinness.
It’s an excellent picture by a fine artist, Belfast-born Dameon Priestly. There is one small drawback, however. The man featured in it is not Flann.
This confusion arises – again – because the painting was inspired by a well-known photograph of Brian O’Nolan, which has been much reproduced – even on some of his own books – although he doesn’t feature in it either.
The photo was taken circa 1945 in Dublin’s Palace Bar, a place O’Nolan (aka Flann, Myles na gCopaleen, and many other pseudonyms) did indeed frequent then.
He may well have been on the premises at the time. He is not, however, in the picture. The man who is was the poet Robert Farren (1909-1984), aka Roibeárd Ó Faracháin, as revealed by his son Ronan Farren in a letter to this paper in 2017. That letter was inspired by the photograph’s then most recent act of imposture, in this very newspaper – O’Nolan’s employer for 26 years – to accompany the review of a book about him.
And however unfortunate, as I wrote at the time, it was not without aptness that the shape-shifting writer had been so supplanted: “He of all people would have understood the existentially-threatening condition implied in a common Hiberno-English phrase: ‘He’s not himself lately’. O’Nolan spent his career pretending to be other people. And sometimes even the other people (eg Myles, often written by [his friend Niall] Montgomery, were not who they were supposed to be either.”
But seven years on, clearly, the image refuses to die. And its continued popularity suggests that, for many people, Farren presents a more convincing version of O’Nolan than O’Nolan could ever manage himself.
That’s to say, he looked the part of a comic writer, at least in that picture: stroking his chin as a playful thought crosses his mind, betrayed only by smiling, bespectacled eyes. You can almost see Farren thinking up an ingenious pun, like the one in which Myles invented a temperature scale based on “Farren Height”.
Whereas O’Nolan himself was something of a disappointment in this respect. His biographer Anthony Cronin remembered him as a “phantom” in the Palace Bar, always on the edge of the company forming “an invisible outer circle of his own”. Brendan Behan, who knew him later, said: “You had to look twice to see if he was there at all.”
I’m reminded of another O’Nolan-themed artwork, by David O’Kane, submitted some years ago for a competition in the writer’s native Strabane. It would have comprised the sculpture of an empty hat and overcoat, back-lit and projected onto a wall, throwing a Myles-shaped shadow onto lines from a 1944 column : “My presence here is a ‘phenomenon’ so completely outside of and beyond the planes of existence which human thought is able to hypothesize into the structure of the universe that – considered in ‘relation’ to that presence – the whole monstrous procession of life can only be understood as a sort of epiphenomenal magic lantern show, too dim, too dull, too intolerably indistinct to amuse even the most backward, the most barbarous, of infants.”
Getting back to Devonshire Arms and its core business for a moment, I gather that Irish co-owner Oisin Rogers was in part inspired by the popular social media site “Shit London Guinness”, which has spent years posting pictures of the badly poured pints for which that city is infamous.
Determined to buck this reputation, Rogers and co “built the pub around the Guinness installation”, at great expense, with best-practice technology, including gas-dispensing ratios.
As one review explained: “While most pubs in the UK spit Guinness out at a ratio of 70:30 nitrogen to carbon dioxide, The Devonshire does 82.18, which gives it the creamy head that’s closer to what you typically find in Ireland.”
The chemistry of reproducing Flann O’Brien in art is not perhaps as complex as that of serving Guinness, but there are some superficial similarities. The overcoat-hat ratio, in particular – about 80:20, typically – seems crucial.
Those two items of clothing may be the only things O’Nolan had in common with Farren. Unlike the latter, for example, the former did not wear glasses. But as in the proposed sculpture, the hat and coat were enough to suggest the rest of him.
Anyway, while we’re at it, this may a good place to mention that proposals are now invited for the 8th International Flann O’Brien Conference, which takes place next June.
Since its foundation in 2011, the biennial event has visited Vienna, Rome, Prague, Salzburg, Dublin, Boston, and Cluj (in Transylvania). Next year’s instalment will bring it all back home to the twin, river-divided towns of O’Nolan’s childhood – the Budapest of northwest Ireland, if you like – Strabane and Lifford.
Abstracts for papers should be submitted by December 1st (parishreview.openlibhums.org/news/759/). Among the suggested themes is “Flann and ideas of absence”.