Rhapsody in Stephen's Green/The Insect Play Read online

  RHAPSODY

  IN STEPHEN’S GREEN

  THE INSECT PLAY

  Flann O’Brien

  (Myles na gCopaleen)

  Edited, with introduction and notes

  by Robert Tracy

  THE LILLIPUT PRESS

  MMXI

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  PROLOGUE

  ACT I: THE BEES

  ACT II: CREEPERS, CRAWLERS AND SWIMMERS

  ACT III: THE ANTS

  EPILOGUE: DAWN THE NEXT DAY IN STEPHEN’S GREEN

  NOTES

  ‘From the Dung Heap of History’ by Peter Lennon

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

  This series called ETCH, Essays and Texts in Cultural History, fills the gap between short articles in obscure journals and lengthy books at inflated prices. The field is the cultural history of Ireland in the broadest sense, including work both in Gaelic and English, non-literary material and foreign commentary. It includes essays, commissioned reprints of valuable items from the past, translations … any kind of material which can increase our awareness of cultural history as it affects Ireland.

  When the ETCH series published a selection of brief texts by Daniil Kharms, comparison was made between the absurd world of the Russian absurdist and that of the Irish novelist, Flann O’Brien. Not everyone was pleased by the implied similarity, as if the comparative method robbed the local boy of some of his distinction. The present number in the series answers any provincialism of that kind by making available O’Brien’s idiosyncratic version of a famous play by the Czech dramatist, Karel Čapek. The two authors shared the experience of witnessing the coming into being of an independent state (the Czech republic, the Irish Free State) in the aftermath of the Great War. If further mediation between them were required one has only to consider the novels of Franz Kafka, in which a logic as inescapable and elusive as that of The Third Policeman had earlier been confronted in The Trial and The Castle. The world of central European urban alienation may seem remote from O’Brien’s parodic, raucous provincials, and yet Kafka had been introduced to the English-speaking world by a translator (Edwin Muir) born in the Orkney Islands. Relations between the various epicentres of literary modernism cannot be measured in miles or kilometres, and Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green proceeds in the irreverent confidence that the setting had been claimed by Joyce’s alter ego as ‘my green’ even before the Great War began. In Robert Tracy the dramatic side of O’Brien has found a suitably polyglot advocate, one who is at home in the Slavic languages and who is no respecter of parish boundaries.

  INTRODUCTION

  Aristotle’s remarks on comedy. Books XI-XX and XLVI-CXLII of Livy’s History. The later books of The Faerie Queene. Byron’s memoirs. The first version of Carlyle’s French Revolution. Parts 2 and 3 of Dead Souls. The last six numbers of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. These are among the most celebrated items in the tantalizing Alexandrian library of unread texts, that mysterious depository of lost works. Until now, Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green (The Insect Play) by Myles na gCopaleen has been listed among them. Myles’s critics and biographers have mentioned the play, describing it as an adaptation from an earlier work by Karel and Josef Čapek. They have speculated about its content, drawing on reviews and recollections of the 1943 Dublin production, and on the fortunate survival of Act I among the Myles Papers now owned by the University of Southern Illinois.1

  As it happens, the rest of the play has also survived, thanks to Hilton Edwards and Michéal MacLiammóir, who carefully preserved scripts and drawings during their fifty years (1928–78) together operating Dublin’s Gate Theatre, and to librarians at Northwestern University, Illinois, who purchased the Gate Theatre archive. My own interest in the Edwards-MacLiammóir years at the Gate, and especially their productions of Chekhov, led me to the Northwestern collection’s catalogue, where, with the excitement of James’s ‘publishing scoundrel’ hovering over the desk that might contain Jeffrey Aspern’s letters, or of Colonel Isham about to open the croquet box at Malahide Castle, I spotted The Insect Play. Would it be only the already published Act I? An obliging brother-in-law went to see. The Gate archive contains a typescript of the complete play, marked with stage directions and deletions by Hilton Edwards, and evidently used as the prompt copy.

  ‘One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with,’ declares the narrator of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939); ‘A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and interrelated only in the prescience of the author… O’Brien proceeds to demonstrate the principle, and to make great play with triads throughout that extraordinary novel. But he also employed the principle in life, at least in his literary life. Flann O’Brien was born on 13 March 1939, on the title page of At Swim-Two-Birds, and went on to write three more novels: The Hard Life (1961); The Dalkey Archive (1964); and The Third Policeman, apparently written around 1940, but not published until 1967.

  But Flann O’Brien was also Myles na gCopaleen and Brian O’Nolan, occasionally assuming yet other identities. Myles na gCopaleen, Myles of the Little Horses, or, as he himself was to insist, Myles of the Ponies, was born in 1829, as the resourceful and loquacious horse-trader in Gerald Griffin’s melodramatic novel The Collegians. He was born again three times: as the leading character in Dion Boucicault’s play The Colleen Bawn (1860), freely adapted from Griffin’s novel; as a tenor role in Sir Julius Benedict’s opera The Lily of Killarney (1862), adapted from Griffin and Boucicault; and finally, yet again, in October 1940, when Brian O’Nolan borrowed his identity to write a column for The Irish Times. It is appropriate that this ‘lost’ play should have been written by a man who did not exist.

  As for Brian O’Nolan, who spent many years in Ireland’s Civil Service,2 the Registrar of Births, Deaths, and Marriages records his birth — as Brian Nolan — at Strabane, County Tyrone, on 1 October 1911, his marriage in Dublin in 1948, and his death in 1966 — on April Fools’ Day. The shamrock, after all, triple-leaved, three-in-one, is Ireland’s emblem.

  From the commencement of his Irish Times column, Myles became a familiar presence in Dublin. Originally written in Irish, usually in English after 1944, but sometimes in Latin or French, the column grew in popularity and notoriety, as did its recurring characters and motifs: the aristocratic Sir Myles na gCopaleen (the da); Keats and Chapman; the Brother (‘The Brother says the seals near Dublin do often come up out of the water at nighttime and do be sittin above in the trams …’); the Myles na gCopaleen Central Research Bureau; the Cruiskeen Court of Voluntary Jurisdiction; the District Court; Myles’s concerns about the maintenance and treatment of locomotives belonging to the Great Northern Railway.

  But the central concern was always language, its use and misuse, even when Myles was only amusing himself by parading technical terms from The Steam Boiler Year Book and Manual. His commitment to the integrity of language, and disdain for its misuse — especially by politicians — invites comparison with another great journalist, the Viennese Karl Kraus (1874–1936). Myles’s column began as a sardonic commentary on the official Irish that had become compulsory in schools and in the Civil Service after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. The son of an Irish-speaking household at a time when, in one of his own favorite phrases, the Irish language ‘was neither profitable nor popular’, he scorned the stiff Civil Service Irish that came into use, and was quick to spot the frequent mistakes made by new users of the language. Promoters
of ‘Revival Irish’ tended to spend time in rural areas that were still, more or less, Irish-speaking, but were also places of great poverty. Being a peasant, being miserably poor, and speaking Irish became equivalents, supposedly defining those who were truly representative of the Irish nation and its values — those who had what Abbey Theatre actors came to call P.Q., peasant quality. The only novel he published as Myles na gCopaleen, An Béal Bocht (1941), written in Irish, parodies revered peasant autobiographies: Tomás O Criomhthain’s An tOileánach (1929; The Islandman); Peig Sayers’s Peig (1939); and Muiris O Súilleabháin’s Fiche Blian ag Fás (1933; Twenty Years a-Growing). These autobiographies describe the poverty-stricken and sometimes dangerous lives of their authors on the remote western seaboard. In Ireland an béal bocht, the poor mouth, describes someone who is always talking about his own miserable circumstances, but Myles also used the phrase to remind his readers that the poorest of their fellow citizens, living in great squalor, were those native speakers of Irish so admired by well-fed and well-housed middle-class enthusiasts for the revival of the Irish language — lá breá, fine day, as they were derisively called, from their habit of shouting out that phrase to laboring men and women as they sauntered about the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area) in summer. Myles loved the Irish language, but had little respect for Gaelic League enthusiasts.

  Irish nationalists and Irish writers have been preoccupied with basic questions about language, at least since Douglas Hyde’s 1892 manifesto, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland.’ A year later Hyde founded the Gaelic League, dedicated to maintaining Irish as a spoken language. Subsequently, while some language activists envisaged the ultimate replacement of English by Irish, official statements avoided, or saw no reason for, a clear definition of the overall linguistic goal. For most Irish writers the demand that they abandon the language they habitually speak and write, English, has been a provocative challenge rather than an imperative. French writers do not have to consider whether or not they should write in French, nor do German writers need to ponder their right to use German. Some Irish writers did and do write in Irish, like the great novelist Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906–1970), or the poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Most writers follow Yeats by continuing to write in English, sometimes, as with Synge and Lady Gregory, adapting English words to Irish grammatical structures. Joyce records Stephen Dedalus’s uneasiness as he talks with the English-born Dean of Studies in Portrait; Joyce solved the English/Irish problem for himself by inventing his own polyglot language in Finnegans Wake, Beckett chose to write in French, and revered silence. Most Irish writers, then, have responded to the controversy about what language they should use by becoming self-conscious about language, and often making language itself their theme, almost their protagonist. Myles does so in Acts I and III of Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green.

  Though Myles began at The Irish Times by parodying and ridiculing those who misused Irish, he was soon considering misuses and abuses of English as well. A dictionary of clichés became a regular feature of his column:

  Is man ever hurt in a motor smash?

  No. He sustains an injury.

  Does such a man ever die from his injuries?

  No. He succumbs to them.

  Of what was any deceased citizen you like to mention typical?

  Of all that is best in Irish life.

  Correct. With what qualities did he endear himself to all

  who knew him?

  His charm of manner and unfailing kindness.

  Till what great dairy-farm re-union may you sit and talk there?

  Till the cows come home.

  De quibus non curat lex?

  Minimis.

  Quideat emptor?

  Cave.3

  In one memorable column Myles compared the English and Irish texts of the Irish Constitution, claiming that ‘Some of the English is bad and most of the Irish is disgracefully bad. More, the two languages frequently express dissimilar and mutually repugnant meanings in stating what purports to be the same Article. If we fail to make the most of such little English as we now remember,’ he wrote on another occasion, ‘it may bode ill for us … There are still tribes old-fashioned enough to take the view that intelligible talk is one way by which one can distinguish humanity …’4 Like Joyce, whose ‘Epiphanies’ recorded exchanges or remarks overheard in the streets of Dublin, Myles liked to present the banalities of ‘the plain people of Ireland’. His Keats and Chapman pieces were carefully constructed to culminate in an atrocious pun on some often-repeated phrase. A short story, ‘The Martyr’s Crown’, is about a woman who became pregnant because she went to bed with a British officer in 1916, thus preventing him from searching her house and finding the rebels hiding upstairs. The story ends with a glimpse of the son of that union, and the inevitable but unexpected inversion: ‘thousands … of Irish men and women have died for Ireland … But that young man was born for Ireland.’5

  Flann O’Brien was the author of novels only. Myles na gCopaleen wrote The Irish Times column, but was also the author of three plays. Thirst, in one act, was written for inclusion in Jack-in-the-Box, the Gate Theatre’s 1942 Christmas entertainment. Faustus Kelly, in three acts, opened at the Abbey on 25 January 1943 and ran for two weeks. Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green, commissioned by Hilton Edwards, was performed by the Gate Company at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre from 22 March to 27 March 1943. Later Myles wrote four plays, and a fifteen-episode television series, for RTE, the Irish television company.

  Flann O’Brien’s novels have all been successfully adapted for the stage by other hands. Myles had one of the dramatist’s essential gifts, the ability to write dialogue, especially dialogue that is at once banal and entertaining. He had a remarkable ear for local dialects of Irish-English: Trinity College English, Dublin English, Cork English, Belfast English — all of them on display in Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green. But he lacked another essential skill, that of constructing and sustaining a plot and theme. ‘All words and no play makes Faustus Kelly a dull boyo,’ Joseph Holloway complained in his diary, citing a reviewer’s demand that Myles ‘learn the craft of playwriting’. Holloway’s dramatic theories were old-fashioned, but he did recognize that Myles’s talent was for the episodic. This may be an occupational hazard of the daily columnist, as Patrick Kavanagh once suggested.6 Flann O’Brien’s novels are highly episodic, especially At Swim-Two-Birds, which constantly interrupts and interrogates its own narrative and procedures. The Third Policeman is an extended metaphysical joke in which nothing happens, nothing can happen, because time, and therefore narrative, have ceased. Given this tendency toward the episodic, it is not surprising that the brief Thirst was Myles’s most successful play, set, as it is, out of time, in a country pub after time has ended — that is, after the legal closing hour, once signalled by the barman’s cry, ‘Time, please, gents.’ The play’s action, or rather talk, occurs in a pub whose proprietor pretends he is not serving drinks to drinkers who pretend they are not drinking. The play begins with idle bar talk and then becomes a study in the power of language, when the publican describes desert heat and thirst so graphically that the Sergeant, arriving to enforce the law, must himself break the law by drinking the proffered pints.

  Faustus Kelly starts well, with a dumb show prologue in which Kelly sells his soul to the devil, in return, we later learn, for election to the Dáil and success with the widowed Mrs Crockett. Act I works because it is all talk, the meeting of a County Council and the interplay among its members: the wheedling Shawn Kilshaughran, the oleaginous Cullen, the cantankerous Reilly, even the silent Hoop. Myles displays his skill at Irish local accents with Kilshaughran’s ‘thick western brogue’, the Town Clerk’s ‘strong Cork accent’, and Hoop’s ‘pronounced Northern accent’. But Act II introduces a new character and new issues insufficiently connected with those of Act I; III meanders, to end feebly with the devil tearing up the contract Kelly had signed and vowing to have nothing more to do with Irish politicians. The play also suffers from Kelly’s
tendency to address everyone as if he or she were a public meeting, in long turgid election speeches — good enough parodies of contemporary political oratory, no doubt, but tedious rather than amusing. When the devil tears up the contract, we suspect it may be because he realized how boring Hell would be with Faustus Kelly in it.

  Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green succeeds because it does not depend on sustaining a plot or theme. It is appropriately episodic, each act coming to its own resolution, and is in fact a series of one-act plays. Myles did not need to contrive a plot or devise a way to sustain it. He had only to adapt the episodic structure of the Čapek brothers’ Czech original.7 But despite owing its concept, structure, and some incidents to the Čapeks, Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green is essentially an original work by Myles himself. The critical failure of Faustus Kelly may have made this man of many identities look for yet another. Like the poet James Clarence Mangan (1803–49), who often protected himself by describing his own poems as translations from the German, the Hebrew, the Ottoman, Myles may have decided to protect himself by offering Dublin his own version of a play that had succeeded in London and New York — or rather, his own improvization upon aspects of that play.

  The original Insect Play, in Czech Ze života hmyzu (1921), literally ‘from the life of insects’, was written by Karel Čapek (1890–1938), like Myles a novelist and journalist as well as playwright. His collaborator was his brother, Josef Čapek (1887–1945). The first performances were at Brno (3 February 1922) and Prague (8 April 1922).8 Adapted as The World We Live In, by Owen Davis, the play ran for 111 performances at the Jolson Theatre, New York, opening on 31 October 1922. A London production soon followed, at the Regent Theatre (5 May 1923; 42 performances), this time in Paul Selver’s translation, very freely adapted by Nigel Playfair and Clifford Bax.9 At the Regent, a very young John Gielgud played an effete poet-butterfly, Elsa Lanchester was a voracious Larva, and Synge’s beloved Maire O’Neill, who had created the roles of his Pegeen Mike and Deirdre at the Abbey, was Mrs Beetle.