Burning Issues: Frank McNally on an unfortunate metaphor, and the continuing mysteries of the ‘Flannagram'

Irish Times

07-05-2025

Listening to a BBC Radio documentary on books the other night, I was struck (on the elbow, near the funny bone) by a comment made about
Flann O'Brien
's debut novel At Swim-Two-Birds (1939).
Reflecting on which, in conversation with one of her guests, presenter Emma Smith suggested the title must have been 'a slow burn' at the time and added: 'It doesn't fly off the shelves like certain other books of the wartime period.'
Her choice of metaphor was unfortunate in the circumstances, because the documentary's wider subject was the German firebombing of the City of London in December 1940. That included the obliteration of Paternoster Row, which had been the centre of British publishing for centuries.
Five million books went up in flames. And At Swim-Two-Birds, most of the print run of which was stored in Longman's warehouse, in the middle of ground zero, burned as quickly as any. It flew off the shelves all right, but in the form of smoke.
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The four-and-a-half-hour bombardment on the night of December 29th was likened to a 'second great fire of London'.
A measure of the destruction was a story reported by the Scotsman newspaper of a war tourist who wanted to see the damage and asked a policeman for directions to Paternoster Row. 'There ain't no Paternoster Row,' replied the policeman.
Despite good reviews and strong support from Longman's in 1939, At Swim-Two-Birds had not sold well. The promotion included a 247-word eulogy from Graham Greene, printed on the dust-jacket. But poignantly, sales did not quite match Greene's word count, coming in at a paltry 244 before the Germans bombed the rest.
On the upside, the novel survived to be considered a classic eventually. And the 1940 fire was good news for the few who had bought a first edition. Blackwell's bookshop, a spokesman for which was interviewed on the documentary, has one for sale currently at a cool £20,140 (€23,643).
Mind you, there are first editions and first editions. Sheet stock of the original did survive somewhere, and this was reprinted, with a slightly different cover and reduced price, in 1941 or 1942.
If I understand correctly, those are still considered the first edition but in a 'second state'. A fuller excavation of the detail is contained in Pádraig Ó Méalóid's 2024 essay on the subject for The Parish Review (not to be confused with the Paris one): the Journal of Flann O'Brien studies.
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In a separate but not unrelated development, meanwhile, my attention has been drawn to a recent letter in the Financial Times from a person identified as 'Blair Noonan, Dublin'.
Short and amusing, it was about the number of English and Welsh people applying for Irish passports since Brexit (160,000 so far), and the possibility that this could be leveraged into more high-quality football players playing for Ireland.
Noonan noted that 6.7 million UK residents (Northern Ireland included) are potentially entitled to Irish passports, comfortably more than the Republic's entire population. His optimism unbound, he concluded: 'The World Cup beckons.'
But of less interest than the letter, perhaps, is the name of the writer. For, as has also been drawn to my attention, Blair Noonan is an anagram of 'Brian O'Nolan' (the real-life Flann, who was himself famous for writing pseudonymous letters to newspapers, most notably The Irish Times).
This might well be mere coincidence, except that the person who did the attention-drawing here is a long-time (if only occasional) correspondent of mine, Walter Götz, a man with proven expertise in the area.
I've never met Walter and don't know where he's from. But his latest email chides me in what sounds like a German accent. Despite my interest in fake Flann letters, it accuses, 'for many years you are not paying attention already'.
Sure enough, I now find that Blair Noonan has been a regular writer to this newspaper too over the past decade, including occasions when he was responding to the Irishman's Diary.
And it was, after all, the same Walter who previously alerted me to the preposterous Manny Aspe-College (an anagram of Myles na gCopaleen), the slightly less preposterous Angela Polsen-Emy (ditto Myles na Gopaleen, minus the ecclipsis), and a Swedish gentleman named Alfe Ninbörn (formed from the letters Flann O'Brien), all of whom have been serial writers to newspapers, British and Irish.
It's said that part of the reason Brian O'Nolan was hired as an Irish Times columnist in 1940 was to rescue the letters page from his pseudonymous antics. Editor Bertie Smyllie had been in on the joke at the start but then found himself sensing the 'fine Italianate hand' of O'Nolan even on letters that might have been genuine.
The cautionary tale about such paranoia is Oscar Love, a regular writer to the editor once who was widely assumed to be an invention of O'Nolan's but turned out to be real. If Blair Noonan turns out not to be a pseudonym, I apologise for doubting him.
In the meantime, another question arises. Who is this mysterious international Flannagram expert, Walter Götz?