What kind of reader are you? I like sentences so I tend to read word for word, have to force myself to skim. My Beloved looks for content. In print, she refuses to allow cleverness or grace to detour her, though she appreciates good lines in drama, as well as deep thoughts. Who reads, now?
Besides the mental intake of books-on-CD in the car, two or three newspapers a day and a round of Web news sites, I have three books open. Two, actually, as, I just finished Roger Angell’s memoir Let Me Finish. I just began Miller Williams’ new essay collection, Making a Poem. These writers love the flow of words as much as their meanings. Here’s the first title of Miller’s: “Nobody Plays the Piano, but We Like to Keep It in the House.” Doesn’t that tempt you?
The remaining book was a “find” on a Billions of Books in Barn bargain shelf, name publisher (St. Martin’s) and recent and hardbound but yes obscure: The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman, by the late Irish novelist and columnist Flann O’Brien. This is a column collection. I have two others. O’Brien was one of two main pen names for Brian O’Nolan; for The Irish Times he used Myles na Gopaleen.
The collections I already had were terrifically hard to get through. It’s more than Americans and British being “separated by a common language” because this was a Dublin man who easily dipped in and out of his native Irish tongue but also healthy handfuls of Latin.
The new book adds French to the mix. We Americans are so stupid now. O’Brien was writing for working class Irish in the mid-20th century, and many must’ve understood, appreciated and enjoyed his work or he wouldn’t have had a two-decade run in a newspaper.
By Keats, O’Brien means the poet, Chapman was a translator of Homer and the like. They did not know each other and probably lived in different eras, but O’Brien imagined them into a comedy team that wanders through Europe getting into adventures, rescued only by one saying to the other some wise saying, twisted through odd spellings into a pun.
French, Latin, Irish and English — all in the service of elaborate puns. Every column is a shaggy-dog pun. (He wrote somewhat more conventional sorts of columns, which are in the other collections.) Jamie O’Neill’s forward is very helpful here. Sure, it says, you can drop to the punch line, and you’d go, huh or groan. It’s the journey, though, that contains the magic.
O’Neill notes such puns also are called “clenches,” and cites Johnson, Pope and Shakespeare as creators of them. This form of clench is not to be found in Webster’s New World or Bartleby.com. A Google search says pun and clench are interchangeable, or perhaps clench is the worst sort of pun.
I have read only one or two Keats and Chapman stories at a time, not because snobs might call puns obvious or easy or low but because these 250- to 400-word roundabout sillies are not obvious, easy or low. Nearly all fly above me, and the ones I get — I admire. -30-
