Sodden with whisky, the elder Flann O'Brien struggled to keep
his writing in tune with his preternaturally subtle ear. His first great novel
At Swim-Two-Birds and a long-standing column in the Irish Times had long
established hims as the prime wit of a generation of Dublin intellectuals
disillusioned by the sham romanticism that clung to Irish letters after the
Celtic Revival. As a comedian of the learned, O'Brien's humor was more bookish
than pedestrian, more ironic than patriotic. Along with an ambiguous dedication
to the tenets of High Modernism, O'Brien's best work showed a creative
imagination torn between Roman Catholicism on the one hand, and a corrosive,
almost nihilistic cynicism on the other.
Such writing found its audience in a particular Dublin crowd. His
books never had much likelihood of becoming bestsellers, and so the writer
shouldn't have been surprised that a publisher might balk at bringing one of
them out. Here, however, was one of O'Brien's weaknesses. In an
uncharacteristic bit of naivete, he seems always to have hoped for lucrative
deals and a wide readership. That his work was often compared to that of James
Joyce wasn't enough. Comments here and there in his letters even suggest he
felt the oft-repeated comparisons to be a lifelong annoyance.
O'Brien's mother tongue was not English. In fact this master of
English prose spoke only Gaelic until age six, and began picking up English
almost despite his family's designs. The father's desire that his sons be
educated in Gaelic at a good Gaelic-language school meant that the boys were
kept out of school altogether for years longer than was normal. A good Gaelic
school couldn't be found near any of the places the family lived as O'Brien
grew up. There were also attempts to keep the boys away from English-speaking
playmates, which ensured for them a rather isolated childhood. O'Brien and his
brothers would only start learning English after the family had moved to
Strabane in 1917, picking up the tongue of the conqueror while hanging around a
grocery store owned by an uncle. Although he'd later write a comic novel in
Gaelic entitled An Beal Bocht (translated as The Poor Mouth), O'Brien never did end up
studying in any Gaelic school. His father eventually gave in and sent him to a
Christian Brothers school where the language of instruction was English.
A family anecdote recounts the moment when, well before his son's
attendance at the Christian Brothers school, the father had to face the fact
that his son's reading in English was undermining the family's Irish-only
policy. The two were working together in the house, laying linoleum near an
open window. Outside were a group of people conversing in Gaelic, but it was
Gaelic with a heavy Offaly accent, which the son immediately began to mimic.
The father, in Gaelic, told him to pipe down: "Bi do thosc. Clainfhidh
siad thu." ("Be quiet. They'll hear you.") The nine-year-old
O'Brien turned to his father: "And as for you, sir," he replied in
English, "if you do not conduct yourself I will do you a mischief."
According to the story, this was the first time any of the boys had dared
address their father in English. That the sentence was mock-formal, and had a
nasty barb in its tip, was characteristic of what would come later from the boy
in question.
It would be years later in fact, as a freshman at University College,
Dublin, that O'Brien would first begin to recognize the full destructive and
purgative potential of his linguistic abilities. This recognition didn't come
through the medium of writing, however, but, as is not too surprising for an
Irishman of the 1930s, through oratory. The university's Literary and
Historical Society held their meetings in the upstairs lecture theater of an
old Georgian mansion. The semi-circular hall held around two-hundred people,
but normally around six-hundred attended. Those without seats, typically the
rowdier bunch, would congregate in a lobby adjoining the hall. At
Swim-Two-Birds
has a passage that probably evokes O'Brien's first impressions of this scene as
an incoming freshman:
Outside the theatre there was
a spacious lobby or ante-room and it was here that the rough boys would gather
and make their noises. One gas jet was the means of affording light in the
lobby and when a paroxysm of fighting and roaring would be at its height, the
light would by extinguished as if by a supernatural or diabolical agency and
the effect of the darkness in such circumstances afforded me many moments of
physical and spiritual anxiety, for it seemed to me that the majority of the
persons present were possessed by unclean spirits. The lighted rectangle of the
doorway to the debate-hall was regarded by many persons not only as a
receptacle for the foul and discordant speeches which they addressed to it, but
also for many objects of a worthless nature--for example, spent cigarette ends,
old shoes, the hats of friends, parcels of damp horse dung, wads of soiled
sacking and discarded articles of ladies' clothing not infrequently the worse
for wear.
Interesting here is the
association of this scene of student disorder with some "diabolical
agency". Whether these students were demon-infested or not, O'Brien would
eventually become their spokesman, standing at the entrance to the meeting hall
proper and interjecting loud remarks more or less on their behalf. The applause
gained by his initial wisecracks emboldened him toward actually giving speeches
from his post at the door, speeches both part of the proceedings and not, in
that their goal was to puncture the phony legalism and would-be sophistication
of the Society meetings. O'Brien soon found himself in the position of a kind
of student leader.
We can see that the young O'Brien as orator instinctively sided
more with the "diabolical" crowd than with the attempts at dignity
being staged by the "more serious" group inside. This choice can be
recognized as a figure for his eventual poetics, or even for his thinking about
the world and man's place in it. A Catholic all his life, O'Brien had a
deep-seated conviction of the corruption inherent in all human institutions.
This conviction went beyond that of most Catholics, in that O'Brien's
Catholicism at times verged on Manichaeism, a leaning which presents itself in
his writing in the form of pointed questions about the ultimate justice of the
universe. For example: Wasn't it perhaps the case that the human world was as
it was because the Devil was more in control of it than God? Or was it maybe
true instead that God and the Devil were equally powerful beings and that the
world was a kind of battlefield? If so, how was the battle being waged? Was the
outcome truly already decided? How could one reliably distinguish between good
and evil when the world was so thoroughly shot through with both? Such
"Manichaen" questions are everywhere implicit in O'Brien's work,
comic though that work may be. Regardless of their often outrageous outer
forms, it's obvious O'Brien took these questions very seriously. They were one
of the intellectual driving forces of his work.
Sensitive as he was to the pervasiveness of the diabolical in
human affairs, O'Brien was especially keen to attack the hypocrisy of those in
society who tried to put themselves above the general malaise. His desire to
undermine the meetings of the Literary and Historical Society can be seen in
this light: the chaotic and rowdy behavior of the students in the lobby was
closer to the truth of our state than any official society program could ever
be. O'Brien's work, its persistent satirical bite, can be understood on the
basis of his constant need to remind readers just where things really stand
here and now after the Fall. The teeming scene of history is certainly not one
of progress, but rather of our degraded state repeatedly making itself obvious.
Only liars and fools could pretend otherwise. O'Brien's deep yearning for
truth--for a certain side of the truth--is what made him such a trenchant
satirist, so adept at ridiculing such a wide range of institutions and types.
He didn't become a rabble rouser because he was an apostle of disorder or a
mere cynic, but rather because he couldn't abide pretensions about the nature
of things. He would continue to show this intolerance to the end.
O'Brien's masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds found its origins in the
same University College experience. It too is situated in a kind of no man's
land between learned discourse, chaotic play and fated depravity. A work very
similar to At Swim-Two-Birds was written up during his student years. Called Scenes in a
Novel (Probably Posthumous) by Brother Barnabas, the work has many of the
structural elements and some of the prototype characters of the later work. It
presents us with a writer, Brother Barnabas, who as part of his projected novel
creates a character named Carruthers McDaid, a man meant to be "a
worthless scoundrel, a betrayer of women and a secret drinker." Some writers,
Barnabas explains
have started with a good and
noble hero and traced his weakening, his degradation and his eventual downfall;
others have introduced a degenerate villain to be ennobled and uplifted to the
tune of twenty-two chapters, usually at the hands of a woman--'She was not
beautiful, but a shortened nose, a slightly crooked mouth and eyes that seemed
brimful of a simple complexity seemed to spell a curious attraction and an
inexplicable charm.' In my own case, McDaid, starting off as a rank waster and a
rotter, was meant to sink slowly to absolutely the last extremities of human
degradation. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was to be too low for him, the
wheaten headed hound....
McDaid, Barnabas' literary
creation, doesn't stay in character however. Barnabas learns that his
"worthless scoundrel" has turned to religion and refuses to continue
following the requirements of the projected plot. The other characters in the
novel also begin to lead lives of their own, and soon the depressed author has
reason to suspect that his characters have hatched a plot to murder him. Much
of the structure and atmosphere of At Swim-Two-Birds are already here in this
earlier student work.
During these university years O'Brien also contributed to a
student magazine called Comthrom Feinne as well as to other student periodicals. He
received his B.A. from University College, Dublin in 1932, then went on to get
an M.A. with a thesis on "Nature in Irish Poetry". All his life he'd
refer back to his M.A. thesis as a joke and to his entire university education
as a kind of fraud:
I paid no attention
whatsoever to books or study and regarded lectures as a joke which, in fact,
they were if you discern anything funny in mawkish, obtuse mumblings on subjects
any intelligent person could master single-handed in a few months. The exams I
found childish and in fact the whole University concept I found to be a sham.
The only result my father got for his money was the certainty that his son had
laid faultlessly the foundation of a system of heavy drinking and could always
be relied upon to make a break of at least 25 even with a bad cue. I sincerely
believe that if University education were universally available and availed of,
the country would collapse in one generation.
To say nothing of billiards,
O'Brien's heavy drinking would become more and more "systematic" as
the years went on. As for the inconsequentiality of his M.A. thesis, that seems
in part his own fault. His own brother Kevin, who became a lecturer at
University College, later pointed out that O'Brien intentionally chose a
pushover as thesis advisor, one Agnes O'Farrelly, rather than Osborn Bergin,
who was one of the great authorities on early Irish poetry and who would have
been the "really serious man."
Leaving university, O'Brien had to make a choice of career. In
what was in some respects an obvious choice, he applied for the Civil Service.
Posts in the Civil Service were particularly sought after in Ireland at that
time, since the benefits were decent and the positions secure. What's more,
O'Brien's father had been a successful civil servant. The year O'Brien applied
there were several hundred applicants competing for three available posts. One
required exam tested for general knowledge, another for ability in spoken
Gaelic. The set-up could hardly have been better for O'Brien, whose Gaelic was
excellent and whose mind had a marked encyclopedic bent (the encyclopedism of a
budding Joycean satirist no less). He was given one of the three posts.
Official reports show that O'Brien did well during his first
months in the service, successfully taming his acerbic wit and learning to
write the colorless memos and letters required in a position where it was
strictly forbidden to show any personal opinion of government policies or of
the service that was to carry them out. In July of 1937, O'Brien was duly
informed that he'd passed through the probationary period and was being made an
established civil servant.
It looked to O'Brien as if his career was set, and that at least
as far as his economic situation was concerned it would be relatively smooth
sailing from there on out. On the night of the very same day he was
established, however, his father suffered a fatal stroke. Given the status of
the family fortune, O'Brien suddenly found himself responsible for supporting
ten siblings and his mother. Ironically, one older brother, Ciaran, was still
unemployed, and spent his days in the family home working on a novel in Gaelic.
The younger literary genius had to sweat his hours away as breadwinner, while
the older brother lived off his earnings in order to write a novel of scant
importance.
Almost simultaneously with entry of the Civil Service came the
beginning of serious work on At Swim-Two-Birds. The novel about the
long-suffering novelist Dermott Trellis was written on a table O'Brien had
carpented from pieces of an actual trellis--also long-suffering and frequently
repaired--that had stood in the family's back yard. The plot of At
Swim-Two-Birds
has been well summarized by one of the book's first readers, Graham Greene:
We have had books inside
books before but [O'Brien] takes Pirandello and Gide a long way further. The
screw is turned until you have (a) a book about a man called Trellis who is (b)
writing a book about certain characters who (c) are turning the tables on
Trellis by writing about him.
This summary should indicate
the novel's partial descent from the above-mentioned student work Scenes in
a Novel by Brother Barnabas. In that novel, as we've seen, the characters also turn tables on
their author.
At Swim-Two-Birds became quite a different matter from O'Brien's earlier work,
however. It is not merely a case of the earlier work on a grander scale.
Besides destabilization of relations between author and characters, At
Swim-Two-Birds
also effects a destabilization of genre. The novel orchestrates a panoply of
genres and milieus, from popular cowboy novel to drawing room farce to
Bildungsroman to ancient Bardic lyric. And this list is far from complete. On
the first page already O'Brien introduces various genres, one of them featuring
the legendary Irish hero Finn MacCool, a bragging and voluble character who
wreaks no small generic havoc in the pages to come. Following are some of Finn
MacCool's words as he denies a story which told of him flattering a threatening
stranger come to Erin:
Who has heard honey-talk from
Finn before strangers, Finn that is wind-quick, Finn that is a better man than
God? Or who has seen the like of Finn or seen the living semblance of him
standing in the world, Finn that could best God at ball-throw or wrestling or
pig-trailing or at the honeyed discourse of sweet Irish with jewels and gold
for bards, or at the listening of distant harpers in a black hole at evening?
Or where is the living human man who could beat Finn at the making of generous
cheese, at the spearing of ganders, at the magic of thumb-suck, at the shaving
of hog-hair, or at the unleashing of long hounds from a golden thong in the
full chase, sweet-fingered corn-yellow Finn, Finn that could carry an armed
host from Almha to Slieve Luachra in the craw of his gut-hung knickers.
We learn later that Finn is
only present in this novel because the foolish novelist Trellis was impressed
by his venerable appearance and decided to take him on. The other,
twentieth-century characters have to get along with him as best they can.
Generic clashes, collisions of different worlds and different
manners of speech, rather than hampering the movement of plot, actually work
like teeth in the gears of the novel's progress. Made of wildly disparate
pieces, it miraculously still holds together: it is still a novel. O'Brien's
work somehow manages to be both more realistic and more outlandish than Joyce's
Ulysses,
the work to which it's most often compared.
When At Swim-Two-Birds was published by Longman's in 1939, O'Brien got a copy to the
master in Paris. Joyce, although nearly blind by this time, read the book and
came out in its favor: "That's a real writer with a true comic
spirit," runs the quote. "A really funny book." At
Swim-Two-Birds
was in fact the last novel James Joyce read. He went to some trouble to help
O'Brien promote it on the continent, but died before his efforts could bear
fruit.
Around a year after the publication of At Swim-Two-Birds O'Brien had already finished
his next novel, The Third Policeman. The novel is a murder mystery situated mainly in and around a
police station located in an unlikely corner of Hell. That this particular plot
of Hell resembles Ireland manages to throw off the novel's narrator to such an
extent that he doesn't even know he's already dead. The narrator's dialogues
with the policemen in charge of the station are treasures of offbeat quackery.
The policemen, he finds, are obsessed with bicycles and bicycle theft--this to
the exclusion of nearly all other crimes; they're masters of a sort of
barometric or metaphysical balance in the environment which, according to their
discourse, seems in constant threat of falling into chaos; and they're
determined eventually to hang him for a crime they've framed him for, a
frame-up they openly admit.
The narrator of The Third Policeman introduces us to other
crackbrained worlds besides just this absurdist Irish Hell. During his life
he'd been an obsessive scholar of a writer named de Selby, about whom we learn
from the narrator's frequent musings and the novel's hilarious footnotes. De
Selby stands as one of O'Brien's great fictional creations, a polymath with
elements of Des Esseintes and something of the trappings of Jules Verne. The
great man's eccentric theories (concerning everything from night to the
illusory nature of travel to the unused potential of water) are regularly
brought forward by the narrator as he struggles to understand the impossible
things encountered in the policemen's nightmarish little precinct.
When The Third Policeman was finished, O'Brien sent the manuscript off
to Longman's. In what was to prove a fateful blow to Irish letters and
(perhaps) to the writer himself, Longman's rejected it. O'Brien's agent A.M.
Heath claimed to have tried other publishers, but with no luck. O'Brien then
sent the manuscript to a different agent, who wrote back saying the book was
good but that it was "impossible to place." These rejections proved
fateful because of the writer's reaction to them. Rather than shrug them off
and keep trying, O'Brien got his manuscript back and set it on a little-used
sideboard in the family home, where it would more or less remain for the next
twenty-seven years. He then began telling Dublin acquaintances that the
manuscript had gone missing. In one version he'd left it on a train; in another
he'd taken it to the Dolphin Hotel to show to someone, then gone home without
it. "I'm after going down there," he's quoted as saying, "had
them beat the whole bloody building and sight or light of it's not to be
found." This story of the "lost manuscript" became part of
Dublin literary legend.
The motives behind O'Brien's reaction are probably various. On the
one hand, there must have been an element of scorn. Didn't Longman's and the
other clowns realize that he, Flann O'Brien, was the writer of At
Swim-Two-Birds,
the man, in short, who'd just published the major work of Irish prose
after Ulysses? Didn't they realize what this meant? In other words: If Flann
O'Brien sent them his Third Policeman there should have been no question as to
whether or not they'd publish it. O'Brien was a major writer, as they should
have known. They ought to have been grateful.
Along with this scorn, however, came another and in some respects
contrary feeling: Wasn't it maybe true that the second novel wasn't quite of
the same stature as the first? O'Brien must have known so. He must have
realized that At Swim-Two-Birds was an accomplishment he'd never get beyond. At Swim-Two-Birds, one is tempted to say, was
the full and absolute embodiment of O'Brien's character. It covered all the
styles and modes, held nothing in reserve; it sang snatches or more than
snatches of all the tunes he'd ever need to know. If his second novel, then,
had been rejected, O'Brien felt or at least began to suspect that it might be
because its readers at the publishing house had seen it as a weak successor to
the masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds.
A writer is never wrong to doubt the value of his work. This is
because the writer can never quite see his own work with the eyes of the
reader. It's a question of distance. Good writers know they are too close to
their own work to detect flaws that may jump immediately to a good reader's
eye. Just such a wise pinch of self-doubt probably led O'Brien to abandon The
Third Policeman to oblivion. This is unfortunate though, because The Third
Policeman is
part of O'Brien's essential achievement. Along with At Swim-Two-Birds and selections of the Irish
Times
column, it is the very best of his writing.
The rejection of The Third Policeman had a lasting effect on
O'Brien's sense of his work, on his sense of where it could go. The rejection
brought a feeling of futility and self-doubt that hadn't been there previously.
The bitterness of the early satire would henceforth be joined by a more
self-inclusive bitterness. O'Brien began to face up to a new fear that his
career as an artist might be limited to the one major triumph of At
Swim-Two-Birds.
And that major triumph was itself often presented as a kind of
second-generation Joyceanism, a mere youthful offshoot of the Master's earlier
achievement.
The Times column was called "Cruiskeen Lawn," not, as one might
guess, a place name, but a Gaelic phrase meaning "little brimming
jug". Gaelic name or not, the column was nearly always in English. O'Brien
wrote it under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen ("Myles of the Little
Horses"). During the writer's life, this persona Myles na Gopaleen was
certainly better known in Ireland than the name Flann O'Brien. The writer's
crackbrained, lighthearted newspaper columns naturally gained a wider
readership than his crackbrained but often bleak modernist novels.
"Cruiskeen Lawn"'s first appearance was October 4th, 1940, about the
same time O'Brien was having difficulty placing The Third Policeman. Considering the energy he'd
put into the column over the next decades, there's good reason to see in it a
shift. Despairing over the future of his work as a novelist, O'Brien decided to
change his strategy. He'd move some of his creative forces into the daily
press. His offensive on the world's folly would be continued in short bursts of
newspaper fire rather than in the more sustained, but recently shunned, prose
of his novels.
The testimony of witnesses shows that O'Brien wrote these columns
rather quickly, usually in one sitting at a typewriter. Sometimes when he was
too drunk to type he'd drag a drinking comrade to his house to do the typing
while he dictated. The subject of the column varied widely over the years, some
devoted to the introduction of Myles' ersatz scientific inventions, others to a
series of spurious stories about Keats and Chapman. (My personal favorite are
the columns which present "the Brother," a paranoiac Dubliner who
manages to lord it over his naive housemates through sheer force of his own
self-importance. The Brother is a milder and, alas, more carefully articulated
version of a character whose exploits I wrote in the early 1990s, a man by the
name of Cosmo di Madison.)
Over the years O'Brien and the Irish Times got into frequent spats over
the content of his columns. Though the writer rarely used the names of his
victims, there were occasionally reasons to fear possible libel actions. And
the column was not without its effect on O'Brien's civil service career either.
On entering the service O'Brien had had to submit to its particular rules and
regulations, among which was the warning not to express political opinions that
may be seen as biased toward or against any party. The civil servant had to
remain strictly neutral. O'Brien's column occasionally broke this rule, and the
fact that he wrote it under a pseudonym finally wasn't enough to protect him.
It was common knowledge in the Service that Myles na Gopaleen was one of their
own. When problems with work attendence and other problems stemming from
alcoholism started to win O'Brien enemies in the hierarchy, the newspaper
column was brought forward as grounds for getting rid of him. O'Brien was
forcibly retired from the Service for "health reasons," and lived
thereafter on the modest pension he'd secured and the scant income he got over
the following years from his writing.
O'Brien published a moderate body of work over the latter years of
his life, but none of it, aside from some of the work published in
"Cruiskeen Lawn," attains to what was achieved early on. It is in
fact the early English novels that make O'Brien a major writer. As I've hinted
above, this sense of an early accomplishment that would not be surpassed seems
to have been shared by O'Brien himself. The aura of failure and disappointment
that hangs over much of his later life shouldn't, however, take away from the
genius of O'Brien's best work. It is satiric genius of the highest order.
In this essay the writer is referred to consistently as Flann
O'Brien. I've done this for convenience. Flann O'Brien is in fact a pseudonym,
and the writer's real name was Brian O'Nolan or, in the Gaelic spelling, O Nuallain.
Brian O'Nolan's published works include those mentioned above, namely: the
novel At Swim-Two-Birds, the novel The Third Policeman, and the long-running column
in the Irish Times, "Cruiskeen Lawn". Other works published, many of which
are still in print, include: The Dalkey Archive and The Hard Life, both novels in English; An
Beal Bocht,
a novel in Gaelic (translated into English by Patrick C. Power and available as
The Poor Mouth); and various stories and plays (among which the play Faustus
Kelly).
Many of the quotations in this essay and all of the biographical
information came from Anthony Cronin's No Laughing Matter: The Life and
Times of Flann O'Brien. Cronin's is the standard biography, and any who'd like a more
detailed knowledge of O'Brien's Ireland are well advised to consult it.
Four volumes that make for a solid beginning O'Brien collection
can be ordered from Amazon through the links below.
Eric Mader-Lin
July, 2001
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Earlier review of O'Brien's *At Swim-Two-Birds*
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Gaelically
Gaelic: O'Brien's *The Poor Mouth*
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Order
it direct from Amazon.com.
Order
it direct from Amazon.com.
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Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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http://www.necessaryprose.com/
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