Standard-Speaker from Hazleton, Pennsylvania • Page 37

Hazleton Standard-Speaker, Monday, December 4, 1 989 37 Author saw relief as only worthy human right By ROBERT BARR Associated Press Writer DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) -Flann O'Brien was a comically anarchic novelist. Myles na gCopaleen was the toast of literary Dublin for his columns in The Irish Times. Brian O'Nolan, ex-civil servant, was an embittered drunk. Each was an aspect of one man whose appearance, in the words of biographer Anthony Cronin, combined "elements of the priest, the baby-faced Chicago gangster, the petty bourgeois malt drinker and the Dublin literary gent." In the recently published "No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien," Cronin fleshes out a profile sketched 13 years ago in "Dead as Doornails," a chronicle of literary Dublin and the alcoholic corrosion of geniuses such as O'Nolan, Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. Brian O'Nolan was the real name, but Cronin put Flann O'Brien in the title because this brilliance.

O'Nolan, who sneered at penniless bohemians and was scrupulous about buying his round, growled about Kavanagh as "the Monaghan toucher." The times of Flann O'Brien, in Cronin's view, were dreary years in a newly independent nation governed by politicians still mouthing the pieties of nationalism and revolution. "It was also precisely because of the official hypocrisy and the narrowness and awfulness of the official outlook there was a good deal of anarchism in which one could luxuriate. We were 'agin' everything. But everything. And we were rightly 'agin everything," said Cronin, now so respectable that Prime Minister Charles Haughey attended the publication party.

O'Nolan's father was a British civil servant but an Irish nationalist who spoke only Gaelic at home. O'Nolan and his brothers were educated at home until he was 11, when he was subjected to the bruising discipline of a Chris- trip to Paris to visit Joyce. "I found him fascinating, but then I don't separate the man from the work in that way that other people with less sense of the work find themselves able to do." "I wasn't able to separate that feeling from being in the physical presence of the man." On his only appearance on television, in 1963, O'Nolan brusquely refused to talk about "At Swim-Two-Birds," and began expounding on his current obsession with the notion that St. Augustine might have been black. "He was not sober," Cronin said, "but this might not have mattered except that he had half a bottle of whiskey carelessly stuffed into the pocket of his jacket and at a certain point the neck of this began to protrude, so we were cut off rather hurriedly." O'Nolan died on April 1, 1966.

A month earlier, he wrote in his column that anyone who "has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect." Two Birds' O'Nolan's best book, but everyone, even the author, saw the influence of James Joyce. "Joyce was a hell of a problem to him," Cronin said, because Joyce had used all of O'Nolan's life material, "the very streets through which he walked, the institutions he attended, the kind of people he was brought up among, the Catholic religion. O'Nolan was eager to have the great exile read "At-Swim-Two-Birds" but dismissive when told of Joyce's praise. In 1954, O'Nolan organized the first Bloomsday tour of all the places mentioned in "Ulysses." And on the same day, Myles na gCopaleen attacked Joyce as an illiterate whose "every foreign language quotation was incorrect." The republication of "At-Swim-Two-Birds" in 1960 brought O'Nolan international acclaim, but by then he had lost his job, his columns were increasingly bitter and he was customarily sozzled for the day by 3 p.m. His life story was clouded with lies about the number of books he had written, about a tragically brief marriage in Germany or a jt ttt Ml 3 ta S3 5 3 Deli Special VEAL PATTY tian Brothers school in Dublin -an encounter that Cronin believes left lasting scars.

"Though they were not by any means uniformly savage, the worst of them were scarcely human at all," O'Nolan wrote of his teachers years later. He became a published author at age 28 with "At-Swim-Two-Birds," a novel within a novel in which the characters attempt to murder the author. Perhaps 250 copies were sold before stocks were wiped out by German bombs on publishers' row in London. O'Nolan's second novel, "The Third Policeman," was rejected, and there were no more Flann O'Brien books until "The Hard Life" in 1961. O'Nolan entertained wholly unwarranted hopes that "The Hard Life" would be banned in Ireland "the mere name of Father Kurt Fahrt, S.J., will justify the thunderclap," he told a friend.

In 1940, O'Nolan began writing the "Cruiskeen Lawn" column in The Irish Times as Myles na gCopaleen before the capital being the eclipsis which the genitive case demands," Cronin helpfully explains), later streamlined to na Gopaleen. The same pseudonym was used for his only book in Gaelic, "An Beal Bocht" Poor published in 1941. Cronin considers "At-Swim- 'Future IP blasts ahead of original 49 On A Roll I NOW Assorted Bulk Candy and Nuts (Vita's Bakery Deli Screenwriter Bob Gale does a good job, though, at keeping everything consistent, making sense out of the intracacies of time travel. By the way, at the end of the movie we get to see previews for the already-underway Back to the Future III in which Marty and Doc head back to the Old West. There are some glazed over lessons as well in "Future such as greed can only get you trouble and don't mess with your future.

But the emphasis here is entertainment value, and it's provided throughout. "Back to the Future is rated PG. Movies are rated on a scale from one to five stars, with five being best. 3 3t SS 3 3 IS 3 K3 455-3700 8 I I 455-3711 BUILD YOUR OWN BASKETS WUr it, WSTwAWt 4 IQUWOS 37 E. Broad Street, Hazleton I I I Monday thru Friday 8-4 Saturday 8-6 Closed Sundays HOLIDAY GIFT IDEAS! GIFT Manv items to choose ported Items, Citterio Boar's Head Products, Jellies, Bakery Products, Etc.

was the internationally famous author of a few dazzling books: "At-Swim-Two-Birds," "The Third Policeman," "The Hard Life" and "The Dalkey Archive." To his drinking companions, O'Nolan was always Myles, the columnist who spun elaborate set-ups to puns such as "dogging a fled horse," conversed with the Plain People of Ireland and devised the Book Handling Service to provide lovingly thumbed volumes for the pretentious illiterate. Taking on the thooleramawns, gawshkogues, pultogues, thullabawns and turnip-snaggers he detected in the body politic, na gCopaleen once devoted the best part of a year to berating the Lord Mayor for the stopped clock above his shop, and attacked a tourism promotion as a plot to litter Ireland with "the scruff and sweepings of Britain and America." To Patrick Kavanagh, he was "that poor little na gCopaleen," a genius who had just missed could have imagined. Yeah, this movie is awful plot-heavy. But that's OK, because there's enough slick gags, good acting and innovative writing and directing to make Back to the Future Ua hot movie. Marty and Doc find a future laden with such great gadgets as flying skateboards and gigantic, electronic billboards that flash such startling messages as "Cubs win World Series." There's more.

Cars zip through the air and video games are so advanced that a couple of kids chastize Marty when he plays a video game where he actually has to use his hands. At the future McFly household, there are gadgets like multiscreen televisions that change channels by voice command and a dehydrated pizza that comes to life in a few seconds. Highway gridlock is overcome by flying cars. Restaurant R. 615 E.

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Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd return as time travelers whose self-appointed mission is to ensure that certain historical events go off as planned. Unlike the original "Future," Fox, as Marty McFly, and Lloyd, as Dr. Emmett Brown, actually do visit the future, where Marty has married his high school sweetheart and has two kids. They blast ahead to 2015, where Marty's wimpy son is on his way to imprisonment after he is forced to join a gang.

They have to replace Marty Jr. with Marty who tells the gang he isn't going to help them rob a store. A simple enough task, and all goes off well. However, Marty Sr. gets greedy and buys a sports almanac that tells the winners of every sporting event from 1950 to 2000.

He figures he'll bring it back to 1985 and make a fortune. However, that plan goes awry when the pair is figured out by the aged Biff Tannen, the enemy of Marty's father, George McFly. 'Tannen steals Doc's time machineDeLorean, goes back to 1955, and gives the almanac to his younger self. Marty and Doc then have to return to 1955 to make sure the old Biff doesn't give the almanac to the young Biff. What follows is an alternate reality more horrible than Marty AREA PREMIERE! 7:10 9:15 WEST HAZLETON 454-4821 Christmas Vacation mini tern Today's Specials 12 LB.

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