IN AUGUST 1934, to amuse himself, Brian founded a comic periodical called Blather. Blather purported to be ‘The Only Paper Exclusively Devoted to Clay-Pigeon Shooting in Ireland’. It came out monthly and lasted six months. The office was on the second floor of 68 Dame Street. The paper’s own version of its address was 68 Blather Street, Blather Cliath!

The following is an extract from the Editor’s introduction in the first issue:

Blather is here.

As we advance to make our bow, you will look in vain for signs of servility or for any evidence of a desire to please. We are an arrogant and depraved body of men. We are as proud as bantams and as vain as peacocks.

‘Blather doesn’t care.’ A sardonic laugh escapes us as we bow, cruel and cynical hounds that we are. It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do you get the smell of porter?

Blather is not to be confused with Ireland’s National Newspaper, still less with Ireland’s Greatest Newspaper. Blather is not an organ of Independent opinion, nor is Ireland more to us than Republic, Kingdom or Commonwealth. Blather is a publication of the Gutter, the King Rat of the Irish Press, the paper that will achieve entirely new levels in everything that is contemptible, despicable and unspeakable in contemporary journalism …

In regard to politics, all our rat-like cunning will be directed towards making Ireland fit for the depraved readers of Blather to live in …

We have probably said enough, perhaps too much.

Anyhow, you have got a rough idea of the desperate class of men you are up against. Maybe you don’t like us?

A lot we care what you think.

The style is poor enough – it was modelled on an English comic paper called Rossle which like Blather had only a brief life. If one were to judge this as the work of a young man who aspired to serious writing in the future, you might conclude that there would not be much fame in store for him. But a perceptive eye would see the aptitude behind it. The style is completely consistent, and there is a sureness of touch in the handling of the material. It is not allowed to degenerate from its base source – that would present a danger that I came to recognize. I wrote some articles for Blather, in English of course, which stayed within the Blather format but were woefully clumsy. It gave me considerable amusement later when an American author attributed two of my articles to Brian and took such meanings out of them as indications of the qualities that were to blossom in his books!

Brian was already portraying in Blather an aspect of that humour which later evoked many laughs in ‘Crúiskeen Lawn’, the photographs and diagrams taken from old books to which he would attach a ridiculous meaning. There was a ‘competition’ in the first issue of Blather in which the reader was asked to put the right name to pictures of well-known people. Éamonn de Valera’s name appears under a photograph of a man who is as unlike him as he could possibly be. This man has a tin kettle tied to the top of his head with a cord. Under the correct photo of de Valera is the caption, ‘Mr Silas P. Hotchkiss, President of the Clanbrassil Street Brass Fender Founders and Tinsmiths’ Protection Association, Inc.’ The third picture carried a half-romantic literary reference and proved to be the choicest of the three. It showed a man with a straw hat in a Victorian suit sitting on a very high three-wheeler, the wheels of which were a few inches into the sea. It was captioned: ‘A beautiful mezzotint showing O’Blather going to call the cattle home across the sand of Dee.’

One can see some foreshadowing of his work in the Irish Times in the first verse of a poem which makes fun of Anglo-Irish words:

How many sales the six issues of Blather achieved in its short life is a long-lost statistic.