The news that an Irishman is overseeing the Vatican pending the election of a new pope would have been of great interest to Brian O’Nolan, aka Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, formerly of this parish.
Before he wrote any of the books or columns that made his name, O’Nolan conceived a plan for the Great Irish Novel – still to be written by the 1930s, he thought, despite Joyce’s best efforts – which would include the election of a first-ever Irish pope.
It would be a three-generation saga, following emigrants across the Atlantic and back, a framework adopted by later blockbusters.
And with further contemporary relevance, it was also to culminate in the death of a pope, albeit in rather unusual circumstances: from a stress-induced heart attack while attending an All-Ireland Football Final.
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Like many unwritten masterpieces, the book was born and died in a Dublin pub: the since defunct Grogan’s on Leeson Street (not to be confused with the still thriving Grogan’s of Castle Market, although as we’ve pointed out here before, that pub’s website does indeed confuse the two).
There, in the late 1930s, O’Nolan used to drink with old college friends including Niall Sheridan, later to be a racing tipster for The Irish Times, as well as Donagh McDonagh, who became a judge, and Denis Devlin, the poet and diplomat.
All were supposed to contribute to what O’Nolan envisaged as a revolutionary, collaborative exercise. But the acronym of the Great Irish Novel is perhaps apt (even if gin was never one of O’Nolan’s favoured drinks). And in this case, the sheer cynicism of the project may also have doomed it from the start.
As recalled by Sheridan in an essay for the 1973 anthology Portraits of Brian O’Nolan, the novel had the working title Children of Destiny.
It was to follow the fortunes of an Irish family over almost a century, starting in 1840, with themes including “the Famine years, faction fights, evictions, lecherous landlords and modest maidens, emigration, the horrors of the coffin ships, etc”.
In America, the family would rise though ward politics, eventually producing the first Catholic to win the presidency.
This seems to have anticipated JFK, except that in Children of Destiny, the family’s first potential US president would take time out to return home and fight in the GPO in 1916, where he would be the last man to leave the burning ruins, before dying gloriously. On his sacrifice, another son would rise to take the White House.
The book’s religious sub-theme, which O’Nolan himself was to write, involved a different son of the family who, going where not even the Kennedys had, would become a clergyman and, breaking the Italians’ long stranglehold on the job, be elected supreme pontiff.
With great foresight, O’Nolan also planned to have an Irish cleric in charge of the Vatican’s famous smoke signals.
But comedy getting the better of him, as usual, he envisioned this patriotic monsignor smuggling two sods of turf into the Sistine Chapel, so that as the world outside watched the white smoke rising, “the unmistakable tang of the bog, wafting out over the Bernini colonnades, [told] his waiting countrymen that a decision (and the right one) had been reached”.
According to Sheridan, O’Nolan foresaw a vast potential market for the novel on both sides of the Atlantic, because: “Compulsory education had produced millions of semi-literates, who were partial to ‘a good read’.”
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So the book had to be big, “weighing at least two-and-a-half pounds” and offer “length without depth, splendour without style”.
Anticipating AI, almost a century in advance, O’Nolan proposed that “existing works would be plundered wholesale for material” to produce a potboiler full of “violence, patriotism, sex, religion, politics, and the pursuit of money and power”.
All of this would nevertheless be revolutionary, inaugurating a new literary movement: “the first masterpiece of the Ready-Made or Reach-Me-Down” school of literature.
The book’s sporting climax, which Sheridan was detailed to write, was to centre on an All-Ireland Football Final between Cavan and Kildare (that part was a lot more plausible in the 1930s).
For this, the now 87-year-old pontiff would return to his native land, where the papal flag flew proudly next to the Tricolour in Croke Park.
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Alas, the game would be a heart-straining thriller, with Cavan leading by a point before a Kildare player launched a “high, dropping ball across the bar from 40 yards out for the equalizing point”.
The excitement causes the pope to die, literally in the arms of his countrymen, an event that inspires the singing of Faith of our Fathers from “80,000 Irish Throats”.
If this was indeed the plot, it is no surprise the book was never finished. The surprise is that it was ever begun. Sheridan insists it was: “There was a short period of hectic activity, but the Great Irish Novel never materialized.”
Instead, soon afterwards, O’Nolan told him he had started to write a book on his own. That one was to have the postmodern plot of an author writing about characters who in turn were writing about him. The finished novel became Flann O’Brien’s real debut, At Swim-Two-Birds.
