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" Readers of the blog no doubt are familiar by now with its devotion to the work of Flann O&amp;#039;Brien, aka Myles naGopaleen, ne Brian O&amp;#039;Nolan, writer, columnist, civil servant, and author of the greatest novel in the history of man or Pooka, At Swim-Two-Birds. We are not the largest literary cult in the world, but we are a mighty one, as befits a man who concocted so many lives for himself that he rates an aka and a ne in the same topic sententiousness. (Among out blogospheric members is Thers from Whiskey Fire). We greet ourselves upon happy meetings with a stanza or two of &amp;quot;The Workman&amp;#039;s Friend&amp;quot;, the iconic work of Jem Casey, the poet of the pick, far be he from the evil one! When things go wrong and will not come right, Though you do the best you can, When life looks black as the hour of night - A pint of plain is your only man.  So any day in which Himself is in the news is a good day for us. As the &amp;quot;allegeds&amp;quot; in the foregoing sentence may indicate, a great deal of mystery still surrounds this anonymous, undated interview: it was first published in full in A James Joyce Yearbook , 1949, edited by Joyce&amp;#039;s friend Maria Jolas. Mrs Jolas later wrote that she found the interview among Joyce&amp;#039;s papers when she sorted them in 1949. It was seized on and used by many Joyce scholars. But there has long been a rumour that the interview was a hoax, the invention of Flann O&amp;#039;Brien. Naturally concerned about this allegation, Joyce&amp;#039;s biographer Richard Ellmann asked O&amp;#039;Brien&amp;#039;s friend, Niall Sheridan, about the issue. (He never did ask O&amp;#039;Brien, though he knew about this claim for a long time.) Sheridan, rather amazingly, confirmed to Ellmann (and also to O&amp;#039;Brien&amp;#039;s biographer, Anthony Cronin) that he and O&amp;#039;Brien had indeed called on Joyce senior in late 1930 or early 1931. He added, however, that neither wrote down anything about it and that the published interview did not reflect what transpired on their visit. Himself&amp;#039;s relationship with Joyce was complicated, which probably accounts for Joyce&amp;#039;s appearance as a barman in The Dalkey Archive, a novel in which we earlier encounter a very Irish, very frank St. Augustine, but have to go underwater to do it. It seems from the article that the interview may in fact be genuine in one way or another, but the presence of Himself in the mix lends to the whole business at least the possibility of a hoax, a half-hoax, or something in between. As the narrator of ASTB cautions us, truth is an odd number. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18190/flann-obrien-and-james-joyce/>