THE VARIOUS LIVES OF KEATS AND CHAPMAN (AND THE BROTHER)

Newspaper columns and a stage adaptation (The Brother) quilted out of O’Brien’s novels make for a merry little patchwork of literary pleasures from the late (d. 1966) comic master (At Swim-Two-Birds, 1939).

Jamie O’Neill (whose own 2002 masterpiece he titled At Swim, Two Boys) explains that in 1940, when London publishers roundly rejected The Third Policeman, O’Brien’s second novel, the author “turned to journalism” and, over the next 20 years, wrote a column for the Irish Times that, to judge by the 85 short selections here, was dedicated often to the construction of a shaggy-dog sort of tiny tale leading up to the most witty, appalling, groan-worthy, intricate, or inventive pun conceivable. O’Brien (writing as Myles na Gopaleen) often employed his pair of fictional friends, Keats and Chapman (who “met” in the Keats ode on Chapman’s Homer), putting them into any variety of situation needed to produce the desired result. Keats, hence, in “Stradivarius,” is a violinist whose dog, named Byrne, gets lost. Keats goes on practicing even so. Chapman, “looking in for an after-supper pipe,” is surprised at Keats’s “composure.” Asks Keats: “And why should I not fiddle . . . while Byrne roams?” The delicacy of the writing and delivery is all: synopsized thus, the reader’s groan will dominate, but along with the light-footed subtlety and pitch-perfect drollery of O’Brien’s setup, even the most awful spoonerism will delight rather than gag, whether “In a pique in Darien,” “Please Byrne when Red,” or “I’m afraid I put my food in it.” In the case of “The Brother,” the long monologue adapted by Eamon Morrissey, what steals the show is the voice of an Irish drinking man, who has his own wandering inventiveness, hyperbole, and fancy: and who, along with his never-seen brother, is in fact being “written,” by someone known only as “your man,” into stories and situations that—well, that are soulful, sad, absurd, hilarious at once, ending both in laughter and in death.

Irish to the gills, a festive delight, and fully aware of what it is—and what it isn’t.