‘NO BODY ARRIVES INTO THIS WORLD with his craft,’ says Seosamh Mac Grianna at the beginning of Pádraic Ó Conaire and Other Essays, in which he gives an account of the first essays he wrote himself but did not publish. It is probable that he is right in this assertion, but it seems that not everybody follows the same path in learning how to handle thoughts and then expressing them in words. Perhaps the craft of communications is learned in the memory or from reading – in any event I cannot contradict Niall Sheridan when he comments on Brian’s first essays in his university days: ‘Looking back, it seems to me that he burst onto the scene fully equipped as a writer’ (Myles: Portrait of Brian O’Nolan). If Brian had been engaged in writing unpublished work before going to university, it is hard to see how I would not have been aware of it – it was usual for us to go around together and to discuss whatever we were doing. Further, we slept in the same room – the long back room on the third floor of the house in Avoca Terrace. It was in that room that Brian did almost all of his early writing, on a table which he made himself and placed near the small window. The table, I fear, would not get any awards in a carpentry class in a vocational school, but it was strong and functional. That table witnessed the creation of At Swim-Two-Birds, An Béal Bocht and The Third Policeman. He made another table, an even cruder one, to put at his bedside for books.
While on the subject of this back bedroom, I recall that it had a ‘púca’ or ghost – and I don’t mean the ‘Púca Mac Feilimí’! Donal Bán O Céilleachair tells about a púca that used to be around his own locality in Cúl Aodha, called ‘An Béiceachán’, that used to scream like a bullock being confronted by a butcher. Our púca belonged to a like tribe – a crack in the door jamb was responsible for the screaming. On windy nights when a draught went down the stairs it would cause a piece of wallpaper near this crack to vibrate and give tongue to a deep scream that would last for a few seconds and then subside. This béicheachán would not always scream when expected – on many a windy night he would remain silent. Then, unexpectedly, on a night when the wind was not so strong he would start screaming again. I used to enjoy listening for the púca, but Brian didn’t take any interest in the púca’s nocturnal disturbances.
Like almost every writer, Brian began to write with pen and paper. However, for many years subsequently he did his composition directly on the typewriter. It was very seldom that he made a correction or re-wrote a sentence. He was a writer who wrote easily, without any mental difficulty. He never seemed to re-read what he had written other than to glance at the text as he typed it.
It is hard to define a point in time when one’s youth is over and adulthood takes over. In writing this memoir I planned to follow Brian through to his days in university and leave it at that. It is not for me to make a judgment on his work or his life. At the time I am recalling, the university period, he talked of owning a provincial newspaper. I do not know what exactly he had in mind but he mentioned it more than once. He mentioned the subject again when he was working in the Civil Service and probably enjoyed a fair amount of free time. Perhaps the smaller provincial paper, free of the problems and costs of a big newspaper, appealed to him as a base on which he could develop a new kind of paper, the like of which had never been seen before – who knows?