Böcker av Anthony Cronin

Dead as Doornails, first published in 1976, brings back into print a true classic of Irish memoir. Anthony Cronin’s account of life in post-war literary Dublin is as funny and colorful as one would expect from an intimate of Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh l, and Myles na Gopaleen (aka Flann O’Brien); but it is also a clear-eyed and bracing antidote to the kitsch that passes for literary history and memory in the Dublin of today. Cronin writes with remarkable subtlety of the frustrations and pathologies of this generation: the excess of drink, the shortage of sex, the insecurity and begrudgery, the painful limitations of cultural life, and the bittersweet pull of exile. We read of a comical sojourn in France with Behan, and of Cronin’s years in London as a literary editor and a friend of the writer Julian Maclaren-Ross and the painters Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun. The generation chronicled by Cronin was one of wasted promise. That waste is redressed through the shimmering prose of Dead as Doornails, earning its place in Irish literary history alongside the best works of Behan, Kavanagh, and Myles.

During his all-too-brief lifetime, Flann O'Brien was read by a small but fanatically faithful coterie of readers, including James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene, and William Saroyan. He is one of the most difficult writers to pin down, partly or primarily as a result of his having carefully carved himself into three people, all of whom he used, when necessary, to hide behind. As Flann O'Brien he wrote several novels that for their technical precocity, exuberant prose, and sparking invention, have been proclaimed among the finest of the modern period; as Myles na Gopaleen ("Miles of the Little Ponies") he wrote for twenty-five years a wildly imaginative newspaper column for The Irish Times called Cruiskeen Lawn; as Brian O'Nolan, the name on his birth certificate, he held down a responsible job in the bureaucracy of the Irish Government. No Laughing Matter is the first full-length biography of this remarkable man.

Cronin profiles the life and literary career of the Irish writer.