Television: Writers' lives and deaths

Two great Irish writers were well remembered this week on TV. Flann O'Brien's 40th anniversary was featured in Lives of Brian, while an Arts Lives documentary was re-run on the eve of McGahern's funeral. By Dermot BolgerIn this week when I expected to write about one great Irish writer I sadly find myself writing about two. One pressing concern of the Garda sergeant in The Third Policeman is the moral danger of bicycles in affording ordinary people too much freedom. A notion that seems as farcical as his molecular theory, until you read Fearghal McGarry's biography of Eoin O'Duffy and realise just how much that first Garda Commissioner saw his force as not just a bulwark against lawless crime (much of it concerning lights on bicycles) but a bulwark against any moral or spiritual deviation.
Nobody epitomised O'Duffy's tight guardianship of all that moved better than the father of the late John McGahern, whom McGahern describes in Memoir as stopping cars on a bridge for flimsy technical transgressions purely to show passers-by his absolute authority.
This week John McGahern was buried on April Fool's day, the 40th anniversary of the death of Brian O'Nolan. Both were possessed of genius and were uniquely Irish, but it is hard to imagine two lives that were so different. They were remembered in two superb Arts Lives documentaries, the scheduled The Lives of Brian (RTÉ 1, Tuesday, 10.15pm) and the hastily rescheduled Arts Life: John McGahern (RTÉ 1, Friday, 11.50pm).
When John McGahern won the Macaulay Fellowship in the 1960s, he travelled outside Ireland, marrying a Finnish woman in a registry office in the process. That fact – with “the tongues of Irish girls hanging out for a husband” – as much if not more than the alleged obscenity of his second novel, The Dark, lost him his job as a teacher. McGahern was among the most reticent of Irish novelists and not always the most forthcoming of interviewees. Arts Lives was a triumph for director Pat Collins in allowing McGahern the space to tell his own story at his own pace. It was slow television, yet every word McGahern said was measured, intelligent and worthy of repeated quotation. Has there ever been a better definition of Irish society as consisting of thousands of little Republics called families making up manners as they go along? This was a superb documentary and a worthy tribute to its subject.
It is hard to imagine a more different and tragic interview with a writer than the only existing television footage of Brian O'Nolan talking to a young Tim Pat Coogan. In 1960, after 20 years without a novel, At-Swim-Two-Birds was re-issued and its author embarked on a belatedly renewed career as a novelist with The Hard Life, which lacked the power of his debut, and the masterly follow up, The Third Policeman, that remained unpublished and ignored among his papers.
O'Nolan needed the courage found in a whiskey bottle before facing the television camera and the resultant footage is like a sad caricature of a cantankerous drunken bore. There was so much more than this to the man and The Lives of Brian delved into this complex figure with particularly brilliant contributions by his friend Anthony Cronin and fine contributions by figures as diverse as his brother Michael Ó Nualláin and the comedian Tommy Tiernan.
His career was so bizarre that it resembled the sort of black comedy he would write himself. Few people have produced a debut as brilliant as At-Swim-Two-Birds and then seen the entire stock destroyed in the first air raids over London, when the book had still only sold less than 300 copies. His in-house reader and supporter Graham Greene had moved on from Longmans by the time he submitted the follow-up, The Third Policeman, which was rejected.
Its rejection and the fact that he never had the confidence to send it out again (claiming that the manuscript had blown away in the open boot on a car on route to Donegal) made him the patron saint of brilliant failures in the pubs of Dublin when they were packed with self-confessed brilliant failures.
His column was acclaimed, giving him instant recognition, but in his own life time he was more successful as an Irish language novelist than with the books that now make him a cult hero, mentioned even in Lost. Narrated by Brendan Gleeson and superbly directed by Maurice Sweeney, with Tom Hickey playing Myles Na Gopaleen, The Lives of Brian was a piece of brilliant and bittersweet television.