The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman

The various lives of Keats and Chapman and the Brother

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The great battles have been fought, our humanity was long ago weighed in a sort of Thomist summation. Nothing much needs to be added, save perhaps St Thomas might have underestimated the extent of evil in this world and the fallen state of its inhabitants. Progress is not only illusory but impractical. Knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is no more than intellectual recreation. It has been called Manichaeism, and there is in much of O'Brien's and Myles's writing a sense of the arcane, a cabalistic insistence on number, knowledge as gnosis, as ritual. The truth is Brian O'Nolan remained a Catholic, believing and practising, all his life.

And the Catholic church - surely the most bloated balloon of all - was rarely the butt of his jokes. None of this is to detract from the comedy of the column, the sheer hilarity of its invention.

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But humour is a serious business: Its purpose, for Brian O'Nolan, was to disagree - the prerogative, and perhaps the province, of all writers. Was it severe pressure brought on by ill-health and the thirsty pursuit of too many balls of malt? That, and the rancour of the powers-that-were who would no longer abide a civil servant lambasting them in the daily press.

Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: But the best game of all, played now on websites, is the atrocious, execrable punning of The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman. Quips, quirks, figaries, quodlibetifications; "the frothy quibble" No, the pun is not loved in the English-speaking world. Smollett gives us this couplet:.

Writings – Reviews – The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman

In his dictionary Johnson defines "conundrum" as a low jest; a quibble; a mean conceit. But, in passing, Johnson was no mean hand at the pun himself. Here is my favourite. Two termagants are quarrelling across a lane from tenement windows.

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And there you have the essence of the pun: Too well is it called a clench, for we do feel an involuntary musculation, a clinch of recognition as though our buttocks truly had squeezed. It is perhaps only in Ireland that the pun is given its proper due. Listen to the banter in any Dublin pub: In Ireland we have a playfulness with our English.

The language is not a national treasure. It's a borrowed thing, a loaned vocabulary on an older Gaelic syntax. Picture it and you see peasants cavorting in the Big House, chopping up the Chippendale for low use on the fire. We have a child's delight in vocabulary, as though the novelty has yet to wear off.

There is a certain anarchy, too, in the Irish make-up, a lust for licence, an anti-authoritarianism. And a corresponding love of rules - the better to know how to break them, perhaps. This dazzles in the fireworks of Joyce, even in Wilde. So how do we approach these tall tales?

Well, on first looking into Myles's Keats and Chapman, we're struck by their fantastic, almost Gothic, structure. We find our two heroes in the most unlikely circumstances. They are strolling players in France, explorers on behalf of the Royal Society, they go beer-tippling in the south of England, they supervise the construction of the Zurich tram-car system. They are duellists, biochemists, carnival showmen, amateur physicians, potato factors, economists of the Manchester School.

They attended Greyfriars together. It was called The Third Policeman , and the harried publisher, finding the story odd and disturbing, declined. The author subsequently buried the book in a cupboard, inventing absurd tales to account for its disappearance. Now all of 30, with a government day job to attend as well, he was still 12 months away from having his first play, Faustus Kelly, put on by the Abbey Theatre. A more auspicious, if bumpy, start would be hard to imagine. Lurking among those early successes, though, were the shadows that would soon envelop him.

The lesser shadow, ironically, was the Times column Cruiskeen Lawn , and the persona of Myles na Gopaleen. He liked the attention and acclaim. Cruiskeen Lawn , from which most of The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman is drawn, is one of the great newspaper columns of the last century.

That said, the writing was brilliant for maybe five years and decent for another five. He was then a heavy drinker who had allowed narrow, puritanical Dublin to anoint him a favourite son — the worst fate for an Irish artist of the period. Here is the Brother on philosophy:. I would rather be without it, for there is quare small utility in it.

It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed jars and foreign bacon…it is a quare contraption, very dangerous, a certain death-trap. Is the Brother merely a voice echoing a popular sentiment? Yet one must bear in mind that the Brother is only a voice in a pub, disembodied, with nary a sign of a true identity according to the criminal processing functions of the state: The conclusion is yours for the taking.

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