Probably 99% of the ideas one has in the pub in the middle of the third pint will be dismissed as rubbish when considered in the cold light of a hangover. Occasionally however, a gem might emerge – or at least the germ of a feasible idea.

Thus it was when my colleague Andrew Sherlock and I found ourselves sitting in the Fly in the Loaf on Hardman Street in Liverpool one evening in the early months of 2019, discussing our thoughts about the newly published Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, and considering what might be our contribution to that summer’s international Flann O’Brien conference in Dublin.

Maeve Long had done a brilliant job with the collected letters, and the material included in the volume will no doubt be invaluable to the ever-growing field of O’Brien Studies for decades to come. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to deny that the letters make for a curiously mundane read when compared to the exhilaration many readers experience when exposed to other elements of the Mylesian canon. Who can forget their first reading of At Swim-Two-Birds or The Third Policeman, and the dawning realisation that the literary equivalent of Kansas had been left far behind?

The prevailing prosaicness of much of the correspondence is all the more interesting when considered in relation to someone who clearly possessed an intuitive grasp of the letter’s radically complex and unstable nature. Despite (or perhaps because of) its seminal role in the history of civilisation, the letter remains a troublesome literary form. Even as it confirms our status as an ineluctably literate species, time and again we observe the letter’s ability to unsettle received notions of time, space and identity. We remember, also, that some of O’Brien’s earliest literary experiments were conducted in the Letters Pages of the Irish Times where, among other ruses and gambits, he employed invented personae to attack his own work!

Our simple idea on that evening in Liverpool was to conceive and compose a series of letters not by Flann but to him – such letters to be ‘written’ by various international public figures in response to enquiries and ideas that they had in turn received from Flann himself. The real O’Brien never wrote (so far as we know) to Albert Einstein – but what if he had? What would he have said, and how would the great scientist have responded? This format had extensive comic potential, we believed, for not only might the reader discern Flann’s characteristic voice filtered through the responses; the ‘real’ writer in the present could also have fun ventriloquising the voice of the imaginary letter-writer from the past. 

So, the idea was, firstly, to imagine scenarios in which O’Brien might plausibly communicate with a variety of figures whose lives and careers and interests might overlap with his to some degree. Given the eclectic nature of his interests, that includes just about everybody who lived (and some who didn’t) during the twentieth century. Secondly, we had to concoct a plausible scenario in which these ‘lost’ letters might be discovered and brought into public view.

I composed ten letters for the Dublin event, where they were read during the conference fringe by various delegates, including the late John Wyse Jackson whose enthusiasm and early support was encouraging. Fun was had, hundreds of thighs were slapped in paroxysms of mirth; but on returning to Liverpool we agreed there was more mileage in the idea. After some discussion (and more pints) we decided on a format: a book comprised of 100 letters written by Flann fans from around the world – academics, writers, artists, politicians, musicians and media personalities, as well as ‘normal’ people. ‘The volume’, I wrote in my invitational letter to potential contributors, ‘will amount to about 45,000 words, and should stand as a nice occasional book to cross over between the academic and general reading communities. The content of the letters’, I went on 

is down to the individual contributor, but in general they should be funny, while also engaging in some way or other with Flannish themes, especially as these are refracted through a more modern sensibility. Each letter should also emerge from or relate to a specific ‘occasion’ or ‘moment’ – some point of contact between the biographies of Flann and the fictional correspondent. This may require a little research.

The first invitations went out in September 2019. Aside from a brilliant early contribution from Anne Enright, it was not a particularly lively start to the project. I think many people had trouble envisaging a viable project: how would it come together? And, if it ever did, who apart from a few Flannoraks would be interested in it?

That was certainly the attitude of all the mid-to-large Irish publishing houses we approached, none of whom showed the remotest interest in supporting the idea – some of whom, indeed, were so busy that they couldn’t find time to reply to a polite and sincere query. (After twenty-five years and a dozen books you’d think I’d be over this by now!) We did get some interest from a couple of small independents, but the prospect of an initial capital outlay for such an apparently niche project frightened them off. Eventually we were left with no option but to go it alone: we found a small publishing concern on Merseyside run by a pen and pencil specialist who, besides bringing decades of technical expertise and industry experience to the project, was steeped in the lore of letter-writing. Equally important, he was willing to take a financial risk in the name of literary pleasure.

In the meantime, letters continued to arrive in dribs and drabs. With the appearance of the pandemic and the commencement of lockdown in March 2020, however, things started to change. More people began to accept the invitation to contribute, many of them citing the opportunity that such an exercise would afford to escape the pervasive gloom and to enter, albeit temporarily, an alternative reality in which the absurd nature of reality was itself one of the abiding themes. 

The editorial process has been one of the more pleasurable activities I have undertaken in nearly thirty years of academia. It included: researching and maintaining a list of potential correspondents; researching and maintaining a list of potential contributors; keeping track of hundreds of e-mails; negotiating between contributors over ‘ownership’ of particular correspondents; finding a printer; working with the co-editor and the designer on issues to do with layout, font, structure, cover imagery, print run, and so forth; staving off pandemic panic.

A curious thing occurred as the letters continued to pour in: the collection began to assume a coherence above and beyond its constituent parts – almost as if the letter-writers were aware of each other and were composing with the implicit knowledge of the contents of all the other letters. Many early readers have discerned a cohesion which was never in fact part of the initial plan. Granted, this is an illusion created by the recurrence of certain themes, devices and personalities within O’Brien’s work, but it’s no less intriguing for that. References to Joyce and to bicycles abound, for example, but the fact is that they mean more when considered in relation to each other than they do independently.

There were some abortive efforts, some promises which could not be kept; nevertheless, in the end the book featured 107 letters from contributors in over twenty countries worldwide. The list includes three Booker Prize winners, a Pulitzer Prize winner, an Oscar nominee, a two-time Carnegie Medal winner, a Costa Book Prize winner, a Guardian Fiction Prize winner, the co-creator of the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics, and a host of distinguished writers and academics from around the world. Despite this, some of my favourite letters are by non-specialists – ordinary people who simply like Flann’s writing and who relished the opportunity to visit his world while their own was enduring the ravages of Covid.

In fact, the pandemic came to feature as the pretext for the discovery of the letters. We took the idea from novels such as Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964) and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), each featuring an ‘introduction’ in which a somewhat haughty scholar describes their accidental discovery of the research gold which follows in the main body of the text. If nothing else, the introduction dates The Lost Letters of Flann O’Brien pretty firmly, and might help to convey to future readers something of the enormity through which we have all lived this past year.

The volume was published in the first week of January, as if to signal the hope that a New Year might bring. In keeping with its prevailing subject, and despite the digital culture which enabled its production at every stage (those hundreds of emails, as well as an online launch), the character of our book is at least aspirationally ‘Gutenberg’. This means no Amazon and no E-copy; no agent and no distributor; no outsourcing and no marketing; no citation index and no RAE ‘window’. The culture attending the book connotes, rather, word of mouth, personal recommendation, loan of personal copies, bespoke orders for friends and family – in short, a more intimate relationship with the entire process, the affirmation of a community of readers, and an implicit confirmation of the humanity which informs and underpins all cultural activity. Despite his misanthropic bent, I like to think that this may be a legacy with which Brian O’Nolan would not have been unhappy.

The Lost Letters of Flann O’Brien (Wirral: PenandPencil Gallery Press, 2021), £10.00 plus P&P, available only from Gerrygaroid@aol.com