Today (well, yesterday at this point -- I've been busy) was the birthday of the novelist who wrote under the name Flann O'Brien. Born Brian O'Nolan in Strabane, Ireland in 1911, he supported himself as a civil servant. He was always impeccably dressed and was a very productive worker, and no one guessed that he was working on one of the strangest novels ever written. Flann O"Brien was a name he had already used to write hoax letters to the Irish Times.
That novel was At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). The title is a rather loose transition of the Gaelic term for a narrow spot in the River Shannon (Snám dá Én, or "The narrow water of the two birds). It works entirely with borrowed (and stolen) characters from other fiction and legend, on the O'Brien's oft stated belief that there are already far too many existing fictional characters. Accordingly, he borrows characters from cowboy novels, ancient Greece, Charles Dickens, and Irish tradition. It is widely regarded as either one of the most significant modernist novels before 1945, or as an early postmodernist novel.
At Swim-Two-Birds is a novel about a novelist writing a novel. The novelist in question is an unnamed Irish student of literature. The student believes that "one beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with", and he accordingly sets three apparently quite separate stories in motion. The first concerns the Pooka MacPhellimey, "a member of the devil class". The second is about a young man named John Furriskey, who turns out to be a fictional character created by another character, Dermot Trellis, a cynical writer of Westerns. The third consists of the student's adaptations of Irish legends, mostly concerning Finn Mac Cool and Mad King Sweeney.
In the autobiographical frame story, the student recounts details of his life. He lives with his uncle, who works as a clerk in the Guinness Brewery in Dublin. The uncle is a complacent and self-consciously respectable bachelor who suspects that the student does very little studying. This seems to be the case, as by his own account the student spends more time drinking stout with his college friends, lying in bed, and working on his book than he does going to class.
The stories that the student is writing soon become intertwined with each other, leaking across the boundaries. John Furriskey meets and befriends two of Trellis's other characters, Antony Lamont and Paul Shanahan. They each become resentful of Trellis's control over their destinies, and manage to drug him so that he will spend more time asleep, giving them the freedom to lead quiet domestic lives rather than be ruled by the lurid plots of his novels. Meanwhile, Trellis creates Sheila Lamont (Antony Lamont's sister) in order that Furriskey might seduce and betray her, but "blinded by her beauty" Trellis "so far forgets himself as to assault her himself." Sheila, in due course, gives birth to a child named Orlick, who is born as a polite and articulate young man with a gift for writing fiction. The entire group of Trellis's characters, by now including Finn, Sweeney, the urbane Pooka and an invisible and quarrelsome Good Fairy who lives in the Pooka's pocket, convenes in Trellis's fictional Red Swan Hotel where they devise a way to overthrow their author. Encouraged by the others, Orlick starts writing a novel about his father in which Trellis is tried by his own creations, found guilty and viciously tortured. Just as Orlick's novel is about to climax with Trellis' death, the college student passes his exams and reconciles with his uncle. He completes his story by having Trellis's maid accidentally burn the papers sustaining the existence of Furriskey and his friends, freeing Trellis.
The first printing of At Swim-Two-Birds sold a little more than 200 copies and then the Germans bombed the warehouse where the rest were stored. But some of those 200 copies made their way into the hands of some of the most important writers in Europe, including Graham Greene (who recommended it for publication), Dylan Thomas, Aldous Huxley, Jorge Luis Borges, Brendan Behan, J. P. Donleavy, and Soren Kierkegaard. It is reputed to be the last novel that James Joyce ever read.
But among critics, it was not well received, being regarded as an imitation of Jame Joyce writing a parody of Irish tradition. In John O'London's Weekly, a reviewer claimed it "had a general odour of spilt Joyce all over it." As a result, O'Brien was terribly depressed and didn't publish any more fiction for 20 years.
But writers embraced it enthusiastically. Dylan Thomas, in a remark that would be quoted on dust-jackets in later editions of the book, said "This is just the book to give your sister – if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl". Anthony Burgess considered it one of the ninety-nine greatest novels written between 1939 and 1984.
In that 20 years, using the moniker Myles na gCopaleen (also a character borrowed from another writer) wrote a regular column for the Irish Times. For the first year, the columns were in Irish. Then, he alternated columns in Irish with columns in English, but by late 1953 he had settled on English only. These columns showed a manic imagination that still astonishes.
The column has its origins in a series of pseudonymous letters written to The Irish Times, originally intended to mock the publication in that same newspaper of a poem, "Spraying the Potatoes", by the writer Patrick Kavanagh:
"I am no judge of poetry – the only poem I ever wrote was produced when I was body and soul in the gilded harness of Dame Laudanum – but I think Mr Kavanaugh [sic] is on the right track here. Perhaps the Irish Times, timeless champion of our peasantry, will oblige us with a series in this strain covering such rural complexities as inflamed goat-udders, warble-pocked shorthorn, contagious abortion, non-ovoid oviducts and nervous disorders among the gentlemen who pay the rent."
There is also persistent speculation that he wrote some of a very long series of penny dreadful detective novels featuring a protagonist called Sexton Blake under the pseudonym Stephen Blakesley and he may have been the early science fiction writer John Shamus O’Donnell.
O'Brien's next effort after that long gap was The Third Policeman, which was roundly rejected by all publishers in O'Brien's lifetime. The Third Policeman has a fantastic plot of a murderous protagonist let loose on a strange world peopled by fat policemen, played against a satire of academic debate on an eccentric philosopher called De Selby. Sergeant Pluck introduces the atomic theory of the bicycle:
"The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles."
Much of The Third Policeman was recycled almost verbatim in The Dalkey Archive. The Dalkey Archive features a character who encounters a penitent, elderly and apparently unbalanced James Joyce (who dismissively refers to his work by saying 'I have published little' and, furthermore, does not seem aware of having written and published Finnegans Wake) working as an assistant barman or 'curate'—another small joke relating to Joyce's alleged priestly ambitions—in the resort of Skerries. The scientist De Selby seeks to suck all of the air out of the world, and Policeman Pluck learns of the mollycule theory from Sergeant Fottrell.
Although O'Nolan was a well known character in Dublin during his lifetime, relatively little is known about his personal life. He joined the Irish civil service in 1935, working in the Department of Local Government. For a decade or so after his father's death in 1937, he helped support his brothers and sisters, eleven in total, on his income. On 2 December 1948 he married Evelyn McDonnell, a typist in the Department of Local Government. On his marriage he moved from his parental home in Blackrock to nearby Merrion Avenue, living at several further locations in South Dublin before his death.
O'Nolan was an alcoholic for much of his life and suffered from ill health in his later years. He died from a heart attack on the morning of April Fool's Day, 1966. With works like At Swim-Two-Birds, Finnegans Wake, and Endgame, the Irish are almost solely responsible for the weirding up of modern literature, and we are all the better for it.
"What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness."
"Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder."
"Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill."
"My father ...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings."
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