AMONG THE lots for sale at Whyte's Dublin auction rooms this weekend, I see, is a letter from Brian O'Nolan. It was written to a friend in 1962, when O'Nolan was buoyed by the success of his recently-published The Hard Lifeand full of plans for more new work, although in time these would be thwarted by illness.
For the moment, however, the revival of his Flann O’Brien persona was in spate. So as the auctioneers note, this is not just a rare specimen of a letter from the comic genius, but “even rarer, an example of him in good humour”.
We’ll leave it to the master himself to answer, from beyond the grave, that last calumny. But the letter seems as good an excuse as any to mention the role in O’Nolan’s life of a publisher named Timothy O’Keeffe. Because insofar as the early 1960s saw an improvement in the writer’s humour, and in his fortunes generally, O’Keeffe was the man responsible.
By the end of the previous decade, O'Nolan was chiefly famous for his epic newspaper column, then 20 years old and still running. His book-writing career, by contrast, was extinct. The acclaimed debut novel At Swim-Two-Birdshad been published way back in 1939: its bad timing underlined when a German bomb destroyed the unsold copies (which was most of the copies) in a London warehouse.
When a follow-up, The Third Policeman, was rejected by publishers, O'Nolan buried it and pretended it was lost. His Irish spoof, An Béal Bocht– itself a small classic, written under the Myles Na gCopaleen franchise – did make it into print in 1941.
But of Flann O’Brien that, for two decades, was that. In the interim, he would put all his creativity into Cruiskeen Lawn: to the despair of bibliocentric critics, one of whom – writing him off as early as 1943 – called the newspaper work “brilliant but futile”. And as the 1950s progressed, O’Nolan was further sapped by another literary scourge, maybe even worse than journalism. So much so that, after he died, another critic asked rhetorically: “Was it the drink was his ruin or was it the column?” The presumption on ruin, in whichever manner, has since been challenged by O’Nolan revisionists who dare to argue that even things written in newspapers can sometimes be (whisper it) art. But either way, it was into the career of an almost forgotten novelist that Tim O’Keeffe emerged like a white knight in 1959.
The O’Keeffe family left Kinsale when he was only a child, apparently after anti-Treaty republicans (his father had been a Free State army officer) fired shots at the house. Thus the young Tim grew up in England. Despite which, he retained a special affinity for Irish writers – including Behan, Kavanagh, and Francis Stuart – championing their cause in the various publishing firms with which he would work.
O'Keeffe first suggested a reissue of At Swim-Two-Birdsin the mid 1950s. Unfortunately, he lacked the influence then to make it happen. In fact, O'Nolan's friend and biographer, Anthony Cronin, thought it part of the writer's "tragedy" that the young publisher didn't get to him at that time.
But by 1959, O'Keeffe had acquired enough clout to have his recommendations heeded. It only remained for him to nag O'Nolan – who like many writers had come to regard his earlier work as embarrassing juvenilia – to let At Swimback into print.
The flowering that followed saw him write not just The Hard Lifebut also The Dalkey Archive(a bit of a mess, it has to be said), before he ran out of health and time. And even after O'Nolan's death in 1966, O'Keeffe's rehabilitation work continued.
He encouraged the writer's widow to find the long-lost Third Policeman, published posthumously and at least as good as its predecessor. He also brought out a collection of the columns, The Best of Myles: corralling their anarchic brilliance into book form for the first time, so that even literary critics could appreciate them.
O'Keeffe's work was not of course confined to Irish authors. He seems to have had a talent for rescuing modernist classics whose first appearance coincided disastrously with the second World War. In any case, he is also credited with rediscovering a Polish masterpiece, Ferdydurke, published in 1937 by Witold Gombrowicz.
But his role in reviving interest in O’Nolan, and doing so while the writer could still benefit, makes him one of the heroes of the great man’s life, worthy of honouring in this, the centenary year.
In fact, O’Keeffe is not completely unsung even now: thanks largely to a woman who lives in his former family home. The indefatigable Jeanette Huber campaigned successfully to have a plaque erected in his honour in 2005 (the idea had been first suggested by Desmond O’Grady) and is now plotting a further commemoration, to tie in with the O’Nolan centenary, during this year’s Kinsale Arts Week, in July.
That good-humoured letter in Whyte’s may count as yet another memorial to O’Keeffe’s work. And speaking of humour, there is also his ultimate monument: the gravestone in St Eltin’s cemetery, Kinsale, where his ashes were buried in 1994.
For the notorious fact is that the last word on this eminent man of letters features a glaring typo. To wit, in a slip of the mason’s chisel, O’Keeffe is described for all posterity as a “gentelman publisher”. The surname means “gentle” in Irish, so the epitaph is doubly apt, or at least it would have been if had been correctly spelt. But O’Keeffe’s family clearly inherited a well-developed sense of humour and, after some consideration, they let it stand.