Long-time readers of this column will be aware that there exists in literary circles a widely circulated photograph purporting to be of Flann O’Brien in Dublin’s Palace Bar, circa the early 1940s, but that is in fact of the poet Robert Farren.
It’s a very convincing Flann photo, unless you’re a certified Flannorak who knows, for example, that the real-life man behind the pseudonym, Brian O’Nolan, did not wear glasses.
O’Nolan was indeed a Palace regular. He may well have been there on the day in question, out of shot. I’m beginning to wonder if the rascal didn’t take the picture himself and mislabel from mischief.
As portrayed, Farren is the very image of a comic novelist and newspaper satirist, stroking his chin while reading the paper, with the hint of a conspiratorial smile. He looks more like what Flann should have looked like, arguably, than O’Nolan himself could ever manage.
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Hence the appearance of the picture even on some of Flann’s own books, as well as in the review pages of this newspaper, and more recently on the wall of the Devonshire Arms in London, where as noted here last year (Diary, November 2nd), a new portrait of Flann had been based on the Farren photograph.
This column had always escaped the imposture until now. Then, last weekend, while we were temporarily distracted, the phantom struck again.
By coincidence, on the day in question, the Diary was about a book Flann once planned to write, but didn’t. Then I opened my paper next morning to find the column illustrated by the dreaded picture Flann could have been in, but isn’t.
Of course, we changed it online as soon as possible. The poor subeditor, meanwhile, faced the usual disciplinary procedures (he refused the blindfold and died like a soldier, in fairness). But it was too late for the print edition, in which, like a master-con man, Farren once again successfully posed as Flann.
As also noted here before, the recurring misidentification is in one way an apt tribute to O’Nolan, a man who spent his career pretending to be other people, first in a long series of fake letters to The Irish Times and later in a literary career conducted under multiple pseudonyms.
But his now inextricable photographic relationship with Farren is also beginning to resemble the plot of one of his own short stories, the gothic horror tale Two in One.
That features a pair of taxidermists, the narrator Murphy and his loathed boss Kelly, whose constant bullying goes too far. One day, Kelly accuses his employee of having neglected to include a tail on one of his stuffing jobs, which happens to be a Manx cat.
Murphy snaps and in a moment of rage, beats Kelly to death. Then, in panic, he conceives a daring plan to cover up the murder. Using all his professional skills, he will skin Kelly, preserve the hide, and wear it when the need arises, posing as the dead man.
For a while, it seems he has committed the perfect crime, his disguise fooling even people who knew Kelly well. But he has overlooked something, and soon a terrible realisation descends:
“The mummifying preparation with which I had dressed the inside of the skin was, of course, quite stable for the ordinary purposes of taxidermy. It had not occurred to me that a night in a warm bed would make it behave differently. The horrible truth dawned on me the next day when I reached the workshop and tried to take the skin off. It wouldn’t come off! It had literally fused with my own! And in the days that followed, this process kept rapidly advancing. Kelly’s skin got to live again, to breathe, to perspire.”
After that, one thing leads to another. The police call one day, investigating the whereabouts of Murphy. Eventually, they arrest “Kelly”, who is in fact Murphy, for the latter’s murder.
At the end of the story, Murphy sits on death row, charged in effect with killing himself: “Even if I could now prove that Murphy still lived by shedding the accursed skin, what help would that be? Where, they would ask, is Kelly?”
Not that the real-life Brian O’Nolan and Robert Farren would have killed, never mind stuffed, each other. Writing as Myles na gCopaleen in this newspaper, O’Nolan did enjoy the occasional joke at Farren’s expense, but they were not rivals, so it wasn’t personal.
If anyone got under Farren’s skin, or vice versa, it was his fellow poet, Patrick Kavanagh. They were on the opposing sides in what has been called “the poetry wars of 1941”, which pitched Kavanagh’s modernists against the traditionalists, led by Farren and Austin Clarke.
Poetic differences aside, Kavanagh also envied Farren’s job in RTÉ. If not his skin, he would have liked to wear his rival’s State-sponsored salary.
Kavanagh’s ultimate revenge was to include Farren alongside Austin Clarke and others in The Paddiad (1949). The poetic equivalent of a drive-by shooting, that was set in another Dublin pub, The Pearl, to which most of The Palace set had by then relocated.
