The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 92

THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE FEBRUARY 22, 1998 BIOGRAPHY F4 The man who was Myles behind Perforated portrait of a queen embracing the manner of life, and often the opinions, of a comfortable philistine. O'Brien's weakness (if so it be) for respectability, for being a man not likely to be found cadging drinks on the strength of his genius, made up a large element in the various personae that inhabited his work. In addition to being the man of nonsensical science and abstruse wisdom, the cunning fellow and the astonished reporter, he appeared as the person of offended sensibilities, the last civilized creature, the put-upon ratepayer, and, in a grander manner, the lord of all he surveys, a captain of industry, the benevolent magnate and benefactor of humanity. Whoever he is, he is always taken aback by the world, by its crudeness and badness, and skeptical of official explanation. He puts himself forward as the man to rely on, prepared to put everything to rights by setting things squarely on their heads, modestly, yes, and with decorous anarchism.

But as Cronin shrewdly observes, for all his invention and flouting of givens, O'Brien had no real intellectual curiosity and was a simple Manichaean at heart "What prompts a sane inoffensive man to write?" he asked in one column. "What vast yeasty eructation of egotism drives a man to address simultaneously a mass of people ha has never met and who may resent being pestered with his 'thoughts'?" Cronin shows that while O'Brien certainly aspired to literary fame, he wrote for money first of all, and hoped indeed, really expected to become a rich, popular It is sad to read here of his applying to a certain Ethel Mannin, a best-selling author of the day, asking for her comments on "At Swim-Two-Birds" (she was not impressed) and dreaming of a success like "Gone with the Wind." Cronin, who knew O'Brien and made up part of the same Dublin literary coterie, perfectly renders the man and his milieu. This is a tragic story of waste, of an ingenious writer crippled by the inability to recover from rejection, ruined by drink and by hours squandered in "licensed tabernacles." He was possessed of aspirations that were both unworthy of his talent and unrealistic in themselves. Unwilling to take the leap of faith that art demands, Flann O'Brien was a genius shackled to the soul of a provincial. Katherine A Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge.

NO LAUGHING MATTER The Life Times of Flann O'Brien By Anthony Cronin. Fromm IrdernationaL 260 pp. Illustrated $29.95. By Katherine A. Powers Dublin, wrote Anthony Cronin in his splendid memoir, "Dead as Doornails," was in the late 1940s "an odd and, in many respects, unhappy place." Ireland's neutrality and censorship of the press during World War II lent the conflict "a sort of ghastly unreality," and in its aftermath came a pervasive feeling of dispirited inconsequence.

No one worked this sense of dingy alienation to such comic effect as Brian O'No-lan, bearer of the pen name Flann O'Brien, and best known at the time as Myles na Gopaleen. In this last guise he wrote the column "Cruis-keen Lawn" for The Irish Times from 1940 until his death, in 1966. The present book, Cronin's biography of the man Patrick Kavanagh customarily referred to as "poor Myles," was first published in England in 1989 and now, at last, appears here. In it we find an astute, sympathetic, and dismaying portrait of a disappointed, self-doubting man of genius, and the sorry spectacle of much-wasted powers. O'Brien (as he will be dubbed -henceforth) was a virtuoso of elastic and nimble language, his wit growing out of the architecture of speech itself.

He was raised speaking only Irish, his father being a supporter of the movement to revive it as the national tongue. Still, he spent hours of his youth reading books in English and listening to conversations in that language in the shop run by his uncle. His first recorded English words, uttered when he was a boy, were characteristic of his fascination 1 with the highflown phrase and, indeed, of his predilection for outrage: "And as for you, sir," he said, rounding on his father, who had scolded him, "if you do not conduct yourself I will do you a mischief." Later, as a writer, his style or at least one of them was bemused and distanced, its oddness and meticulousness reflecting, as Cronin puts it, something like "surprise that such a language as English exists and can be made to express facts or describe appearances and feelings." O'Brien's mastery of comic pomposity, pedantry, and pastiche arose, A. -J V' Maw? Queen Elizabeth is the royal subject eludes stamps in four unique panes. The first pane features nine 26p stamps with the" margin of the Wilding portrait of the queen.

The second has six 20p stamps -three with the phosphor band left, and three light. The margin depicts the stamp designer Edmund Dulac (1882 to 953) at work. The, third is a mixed pane with the top bottom rows each consisting of a 20p stamp, a 26p and a 20p. The middle row has a 37p stamp, a pictorial label and a 37p stamp. The front page of The Daily Telegraph from June 3, 1953, showing the Royal Family on Buckingham Palace balcony after the coronation, is shown in the margin.

On the fourth and final pane, there are mixed stamps: top and bottom rows with 37p and 26p stamps and the middle row with 26p and 37p Black aj abe defgh White Not an end game? White to move and win. Answer elsewhere on page. the playoff was converted into a two-game round, and Joel Benjamin captured this prize. Jacob Chudnovsky of Ohio is one of many strong chess players at Harvard and MIT. He is a Harvard freshman, and won the Boston University Open in November by a score of 4-0.

He also placed second in the Harvard University Open. Here is a game from the B.U. tourney in which Black, struggling to find a little oxygen, finds himself, instead, in the middle of a fatal combination. KING'S INDIAN ATTACK Royal Mail is celebrating the reissue of the first stamp from the reign of Queen Elizabeth II with c. "The Definitive Stamps Portrait," a Pres- tige Stamp Book, on sale March 10.

The book includes imagery and the story behind the design of the first definitive and first commemorative stamps, from the beginning of Queen Elizabeth II's reign. Royal Mail Stamps advertising and promotions manager Giles Fin-nemore said, "The Prestige Stamp book notches up a number of firsts for Royal Mail, including the reissue of a pre-decimal stamp with current day values." Three new stamps are included in the book, 20p, 26p and 37p Dorothy Wilding stamps, with the value of the stamp spelled out in words. Royal Mail philatelist John Hol-man said, "Many stamp collectors will welcome the return of the Wilding design. I look forward to receiving them on letters and using them on my mail. It will be a good excuse to indulge in nostalgia." "The Definitive Portrait" is the first in a series of three books to celebrate the stamps of Queen Elizabeth II and Stamp Show 2000 at Earls Court, London, in May 2000.

The show promises to be the philatelic exhibition of the decade, if not the century. second book, "Profile on Print," will be issued in 1999 and will explore the print processes used on stamps. The third book, "Special by Design Jto be issued in 2000, will look at slamp design processes. The stamp book is available from the British Philatelic Bureau, It in- Chess on the beach By Harold B.Dondis SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE The Bermuda International Open began in the early 1980s, when several interested members of the p. Bermuda Chess ness Club thought that they would like to have a taste of international chess.

The chief movers of the tournament are Nick Faulks and Nigel Freeman, amiable hosts who play in it and help finance it. Faulks's two youngsters, Rebecca and William, play as well. A reception party precedes the tourney, and an awards banquet follows it. This year, to take advantage of better terms, the tourney was moved from the Hamilton Princess, which was liked by visitors because it was near the center of Hamilton (the island's shopping district), to the unaffiliated Southampton Princess, a magnificent, spacious hotel perched on a hill at the other end of the island. This hotel has talking elevators (for the blind), extraordinary, lifelike bronze statuary by Desmond Fon-tain, and beanbags for doorstops.

There were 84 players in the tournament this year, but because of preceeding tourneys, the caliber of the entrants was extraordinarily high. Among the entrants were Alexander Shabalov of Pennsylvania, winner of the major, prior round-robin tourney; Tony Miles of England, a former English champion; Joel Benjamin, American champion; Alex Baburin, a Russian now living in Ireland, who writes a column on the endgame in the magazine Inside Chess; Alexander Ivanov, top-rated player of New England; and Julian Hodgson of England, who has just published a book on the Trom-powsky Opening. Carol Jarecki of New Jersey was the director. In the last round, D. Fridman of Latvia defeated American player Dean Ippolito, and Alexander Ivaniv won his game against Karssten Mueller of Germany.

Joel Benjamin drew with Tony Miles. The result was a three-way tie, with a score of 4V for first among Fridman, Ivanov, and Benjamin. For a free trip to next year's tourney, Fridman initially won what was thought to be a one-round playoff. After some confusion, Chess answer s.ii '3iue3 pua UB ou s(n Ik 7t tl'L Q3 rs of a new series of stamps. stamps.

First day of issue postmarks: Two pictorial first day of issue post-' marks are available, one from the British Philatelic Bureau and one from the Special Handstamp Centre, Royal Mail, Mount Pleasant, London, EC1A IBB. First day cover. First day cover envelopes will be available from March 3, priced 25p, from the Brit- ish Philatelic Bureau. Orders must be received by the British Philatelic Bureau by March 10 for the special cover, with the mixed pane and pictorial label. Technical details: The stamp book has been printed by Walsall Security Printers.

The book was designed by Dew Gibbons Design Group, and the lettering on the stamps by Mike Pratley. East dealer N-S vulnerable NORTH QJ86 OAK6 AJ7 WEST 10942 V82 1072 48432 EAST AK53 973 OQJ95 KQ10 SOUTH 7 10964 0843 4965 East South West North INT Pass Pass Dbl Pass. 27 Pas 3NT Pass 47 All Pass Opening; lead S10 1 998. Lm Anjtkn Tom SynAcau IB Wisdom hi By Frank Stewart -9 It's that time of year Pitchers and catchers report, and the ubiquitous wisdom of Yogi Berra Sheinwold's BndgB you can observe a lot by watch'- ing: good advice in today's deal. South covered the 10 of spades with dummy's jack, and East took the king and shifted to the king of clubs.

South refused the trick, and East then led a trump. South ran all but one of his trumps, throwing a diamond and a spade from dummy and observing East's discards carefully. With six cards left, East had to save two spades; else, South would ruff a spade to drop the ace. East also had to keep two clubs; hence he threw two diamonds. South led a diamond to ruffed a spade with his last trump, and led another diamond to dummy.

He next led the queen of spades and discarded a diamond on East's ace! At Trick 12, East had to lead a club to dummy's ace-jack, and South made his contract. "Hard work," South compliment ed himself. "It didn't have to be," North re: marked. South can get home without a complex end play if he notices the eight and six of spades in dummy and his own seven. When East leads a trump at the third trick, South draws trumps ending in dummy, and leads the queen of spades.

i South ruffs East's ace, returns a club to dummy, and leads the eight of spades, discarding his last club. West takes the nine, but dummy's six is good for South's 10th trick. ofYogi PHOTO IRISH TIMES Brian O'Nolan in the 1950s. no doubt, from his removed stance, the outsider's skeptical angle. It was, in any case, manifest in all of his work.

In addition to a couple of plays, some bits and pieces here and there, and his column (the most celebrated in the history of the Irish press), he wrote five novels as Flann O'Brien. Three of them "At Swim-Two-Birds," "An Beal Bocht" (translated from the Irish after his death as "The Poor and "The Third Policeman" are brilliant black comedies. One, "The Hard Life" has passages of truly inspired humor and is, in fact, an excellent romp. Even the least of them, "The Dalkey Archive," will always find readers if only because his writing fires devotion. (All five are in print.) O'Brien was born in Strabane, on the border of counties Tyrone and Donegal, in 1911.

After graduating from University College Dublin, where he had made a name for himself in the famous Literary and Historical Society, he followed his father's steps and won a position in the civil service. He hoped to juggle this occupation with his true vocation, that of the writer. For a while it worked; he wrote his masterpiece, "At Swim-Two-Birds," in his first two years as a civil servant. Then disaster struck: His father died, and O'Brien was suddenly lumbered with the responsibility of supporting his mother, four of his sisters, and all seven brothers. Cronin sees this as crucially important, for in taking on his familial burdens, O'Brien divorced himself from the lofty view that duty to art takes precedence over any other in the life of an artist.

There is much to commend in O'Brien's course of action. But Cronin also suggests that, in the end, he was destroyed as an artist in habitually accord the elder generation, but the extent to which the author quietly allows black and white memories to contradict one another is the greatest strength of this book. "I think most of the slave owners were responsible, good people," one aged relative remembers. "The Balls would have been very upset if there were any beatings of Negroes," she adds. But plantation records betray payments the Balls made to the Charlestown Work House, a brick prison where local authorities administered expert floggings for a small fee.

A notice in the South Carolina Gazette tells an even more bloody story. Red Cap, a habitual runaway, was hindered in his attempt to escape the Cooper River region by the fact that "Two Toes upon each Foot seem as if they were cut off." The second Elias Ball, it appears, practiced amputation. By comparison, the Ball papers reveal little about African rituals such as the wedding ceremonies that took place along the Cooper. Until just after the Revolution, few bond-persons around Charleston as it was renamed after American Independence in an attempt to disguise its kingly appellation were Christians, and their masters could neither be bothered to understand nor record their family arrangements. But Ball family members stubbornly remember their ancestors practicing sound family values.

"I know that time and time again the Balls refused to separate families," 90-year-old Dorothy Dame Gibbs insisted. Black Carolinians recall their past somewhat differently. "Interbreeding was something that happened in those days," sighed Leon Smalls. "These guys rode around as if they were kings during the daylight hours, and at night they did their share of slipping around in the slave quarters Sales receipts in the state archives also support the recol The ties that bound and loosed Chudnowky Martin Chudmmky Mirth WMU Black White Mack 1 e4 e6 ii. Rdl c5 2 H3 1A) d5 12.

Ne4 Qc7 3. Nd2 Nf6 13. Bf4 Rd8 (E) 4. Ngf3 Be7 14. Rd2 Bc6 5- g3 dxe4 15.

Radi Qb7 6. dxe4 0-0 16. Nel Nc7 (F) 7 Bg2 b6 17. Rxd7l Rxd7 8.0-0 Bb7 18. Rxd7 Qb8(GI 9.Qe2B) Nbd7(C) 19.

Re7(H) Nd5 10. e5 Ne8(D) 20. Nt6 Resigns (I) BALL Continued from Page Fl the river from New York City to attend a family reunion. As a rented sightseeing boat pushed up the Cooper River, Edward Ball determined to explore his family's involvement in the peculiar institution. Ignoring his father's early injunction against talking "about the Negroes," as well as older kinsmen's furious objections to dredging up a tangled and unhappy past, Ball began a journey of discovery.

The result is a gripping account in which antiquity rests easily beside the present. Vignettes on Carolina history elegantly give way to the author's interviews with aged Ball relations as well as some of the 12,000 descendants of, the slaves who labored for the Balls along the Cooper. Historians and: the general public alike will find it fascinating reading; there is simply nothing quite like it in print. A former columnist for The Village Voice, Ball based his study on oral corroborated by birth, marriage, and death records in public archives as well as on an impressive mastery of the voluminous secondary literature. Elias and his children maintained detailed records, allowing Ball to construct not an impressive family tree of Eljas's progeny, but also family chrts for slave matriarchs Angola Ally (purchased by Elias in 1736) an? Priscilla (sold away from the English colony of Sierra Leone in 17ffi).

In eloquent testimony to how thf American drama reaches into thmodern day, a reproduction of a 178 advertisement placed by Elias Bat Jr. for a runaway bondman named Tom adjoins a triumphant photograph of Chiemeka Egwu, whp is a recent Miss Junior ROTC ana a ninth-generation descendant of Tom. Ball treats all of his subjects with tie enormous restiect Southerners lection that the Ball patriarchs sold African-Americans away from their spouses and parents. Memories clash most sharply when each family recalls the War Between the States. Like most Southern planters, William Ball harbored few doubts regarding the loyalty of his bond "servants," even as his records indicated a precipitous decline in harvests on his five plantations.

His slaves, impenetrable as always, simply began to labor more slowly. A number of Balls served in the Confederate armies. William's youngest son, another Elias, enlisted at 16 in the Stono Scouts. John Ball wore a shrapnel scar on his cheek throughout his life. William's brother-in-law, Isaac Gibbs, died fighting in Virginia.

Shortly before his death, the once-lordly Isaac scribbled a prophetic entry into his journal that foreshadowed the strange new world soon to come: "Begged for the first time for a meal." The final chapter finds the author on Bunce Island, off the coast of Sierra Leone, whence 10-year-old Priscilla shipped out in 1756, and to where Ann Ball's self-emancipated slave Boston King returned following his escape during the Revolution. Edward Ball's patience won him an interview with Chief Modu, whose royal ancestors sold Priscilla and countless other Africans into the Americas. The chief conceded the involvement of his forefathers in the Atlantic trade, but instructed Ball that the dead watch over and affect, for better or worse, those still walking the earth, yet another reminder that the past lives on in the present. That old Elias Ball and Angola Amy yet command the fates of the descendants of those who labored and loved and warred along the Cooper River is a most satisfying conclusion to this uniquely Ameripn of sagas. (A) Playable against many black openings, notably the French and Sicilian.

IB) ECO has 9. eS Nld7 10. Qe2 Nc6 11. Rdl Qc8 with a small white plus. (C) Taking away the f-knight's retreat square.

9 c5 andor 9 Nc6 are better. (D) Black's cramp is equally bad after 10. Nd5 11. a3c5 12. c4 Nc7.

(E) Things have gone terribly wrong for Black, four of his pieces have one move between them. (F) Cramped positions produce errrors! Black was reduced to marking time. (Gl Black tries to trap the rook since 18 Bxd7 19. Nf6 drops his queen. (H) Two pieces ahead will win but 19.

Nf6-t Bxf6 20. Bxc6 Is the mundane way. (II The finish might be 20 gxf6 21. Bxd5 Bxd5 22. el6 winning the queen or mating.

Annotations by John Curdo Feb. 28-Mar. 1 2 2nd Queen Crty Ope Holiday Inn Center of New Hampshire, 700 Elm Manchester, N.H. (Granite Street exit off 1-293). 603-625-1000.

Entry fee: Open-35: Premier, open to Classic, open to Reserve, open to Novice, open to (fees must be received by Feb. 26: $6 more at site). Regristration: a.m. Rounds: 10-3-8, One bye rounds 1-3, if requested with entry. Make checks payable to NHCA.

Entry: Hal Terrie, 377 Huse Rd No. 23, Manchester, NH 03103. For the record Correction: Because of a reporting error, information in the Personal Computing column in the Feb. 15 Sunday Globe was incorrect. The phone number to order Packard Bell computer products is 888-474-6772.

However, the Packard Bell S700 computer can be purchased only through retail outlets..