17

Flann O’Brien, At Swim-two-Birds (1939)

Brian Nolan, Brian O Nualláin, Myles na gCopaleen, Myles na Gopaleen, Flann O’Brien and several other monickers or noms de plume were personae contained in the small body of one extraordinary man, perhaps Ireland’s greatest satiric writer since Swift. Flann O’Brien is a reversal of Brian O’Linn, a famous comic figure of nineteenth-century Irish popular culture, and the hero of a well-known comic ballad with dozens of verses almost certainly improvised by many amateur songsters:

Brian O’Linn had a house with no door,

The sky for a roof and the bog for a floor.

A way to jump out and a way to swim in,

‘Tis a fine habitation,’ said Brian O’Linn!

Flann also suggests royal blood, as does the surname O’Brien; the clan supplied the kings of Thomond (north Munster, County Clare) at one time. Flann O’Brien is the self-declared comic King of Ireland, much as Leopold Bloom in his reveries is the comic King of Dublin where he is to build his New Bloomusalem.

Nolan was not alone in satirising Irish society, politics and political culture. In the early part of the century, satire certainly flourished. Flann/Myles was preceded, of course, by the granddaddy of them all, James Joyce, whose great book Ulysses is, among other things, a huge and outrageously funny satire on Dublin life and Irish writing as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Again, Myles had a John the Baptist in the form of the now almost forgotten Eimar O’Duffy, whose main output was in the 1920s: Asses in Clover and The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street among others. Again, the playwright Denis Johnston belongs in this honourable crew, particularly for his 1929 masterpiece play, The Old Lady Says No.

Johnston is perhaps the most obvious user of a device common to all these writers: the juxtaposition of a romantic and heroic, or romanticised and heroised version of that past with the grubby realities of the present. A ham actor playing Robert Emmet after the failure of the rising of 1803 declares his love to Sarah Curran above in Rathfarnham, when he is accosted by Major Sirr’s secret police, and hit over the head with a musket by a soldier. He falls down, and all of the actors fall out of role (Jayzuz I’ve killed him, etc.). ‘Sirr,’ the actor calls plaintively to the audience in a ‘real’ Dublin accent, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ A ‘doctor’ planted in the audience walks up and tends to the ‘injured’ actor, replacing his boots with slippers. The curtains close. When they open again, ‘Emmet’ the actor is still lying at centre stage, but gets up, and starts raving in romantic nationalist Manganesque verse. He walks through the streets of the modern Dublin of 1929, dressed in a green uniform and wearing the slippers of comedy rather than the high boots of tragedy, meeting examples of modern Ireland (young fellows on their way to Irish language classes for the civil service, young flappers talking about jazz and ‘fellas’, etc.). He encounters a foulmouthed old woman in Moore Street who is, of course, the Shan Van Vocht, and the old sow who eateth her nine farrow etc. but who also is the young girl with the walk of a queen. The same actress appears in both guises. Independent Ireland is seen as a failure, or at least a great disappointment. He has a long conversation with Grattan’s statue. Eventually, he sleeps in peace, and the doctor thanks the audience for its patience. The play is a precedent for O’Brien’s masterpiece of ten years later.

At Swim-two-Birds was, to put it mildly, tragically unfortunate in its timing, coming out as it did in September 1939.1 To add insult to injury, most of the Longmans print run was destroyed in the bombing of the London docks by the Luftwaffe. It was not to be reprinted until 1960, when it became a much delayed hit. At Swim-two-Birds perpetrates the usual series of comic collisions between Irish pasts and Irish presents. The title itself is a literal and therefore ‘wrong’ translation of snámh dhá éin; snámh (‘swim’) meaning a near-ford or shallow bit of the river, where a man could walk across up to his waist in water while permitting his horse to paddle or swim with him to the other side. The ‘frame story’ is about the narrator, an unnamed UCD student who apparently spends all his time in bed ‘retiring within the kingdom [of his] mind’, but who is writing a book about a writer, Orlick Trellis, whose characters seek to revenge themselves on the writer when he is asleep and off his guard. Their mode of attack is to write another book about Trellis within a book within a book, in which he is tortured in various horrible ways by his own characters and a few extra characters invented by his own characters. Trellis, I think, lives above a thinly disguised version of Hartigan’s pub on Leeson Street; the address was transferred to Peter Place where there was no pub. Hartigan’s was a famous University College Dublin pub of that era where Brian O’Nolan probably spent a good deal of his spare time. Trellis is pithily described as ‘a man of average stature but his person was flabby and unattractive, partly a result of his having remained in bed for twenty years’. The characters themselves represent present and past Irish comic archetypes.

The book is about sin and its consequences, and the characters are forced by the tyrannical author to undergo terrible injustices or to commit unnamed terrible injustices which they would, if they had free will, certainly abjure.

In the book, the past is represented by ‘Finn Mac Cool … a legendary hero of old Ireland’:

Though not mentally robust, he was a man of superb physique and development. Each of his thighs was as thick as a horse’s belly, narrowing to a calf as thick as the belly of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was large enough to halt the march of men through a mountain pass.

The past is also represented by the Pooka MacPhellimey, ‘a member of the devil class’, who ends up as the main torturer of Trellis in the book written by the characters as vengeance against Trellis, himself a creation of the UCD student.

The present is represented by the student, his uncle and the uncle’s ridiculous friends, and his own friend Kelly, another impecunious student. Their conversation is in part a parody of Stephen Dedalus and his friend Clancy in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

I was walking through the Stephen’s Green on a summer evening with a man called Kelly, then a student, hitherto a member of the farming class and now a private in the armed forces of the King. He was addicted to unclean expressions in ordinary conversation and spat continually, always fouling the flowerbeds on his way through the green with a mucous deposit dislodged with a low grunting from the interior of his windpipe. In some respects he was a coarse man, but he was lacking in malice or ill-humour. He purported to be a medical student but he had failed at least once to satisfy a body of examiners charged with regulating admission to the faculty.

The present is also represented by the vengeful characters in Trellis’s book, Furriskey, Shanahan and Lamont, who urge on the fictional writer the most horrible punishments of Trellis. They are caricatures of Dublin working men and clerks, with their love of cliché and admiration for the doggerel works of Jem Casey, the workers’ poet, apparently an indirect dig at Seán O’Casey, championing the Irish working class from Great British exile:

When stags appear on the mountain high,

With flanks the colour of bran,

When a badger bold can say goodbye,

A pint of plain is your only man.

When not writing the book about the book about the anti-book, the student and his pal are concerned with literary discourse, alcohol, sure tips on horses, and the pursuit and embracing of young virgins. At all of these activities, they are ineffective in an entertaining way, rather like dogs chasing cars without any idea what to do with them if they were ever to catch one.

An Béal Bocht (Dublin, 1941) is an Irish-language satire on the Gaelic League, and its attempts to revive the Irish language.2 O’Nolan uses a different pseudonym, (‘Myles na gCopaleen’) as author. Instead of poor, ragged Irish-speakers begging in bad English for work outside the Gaelteacht, we have rich, posh English speakers speaking bad Irish to the lowest of the low in the Gaelteachtaí. Real Irish speakers in the Gaelteachtaí are completely bewildered by this sudden reversal of traditional roles. The novel begins with a ferocious parody of the actual Englishing of Irish surnames that occurred in the period between 1690 to 1900, resulting in an entire class of bewildered small boys being officially renamed James O’Donnell by a comically brutal schoolmaster. As the novel goes on it becomes increasingly surreal and somewhat frightening. It also begins to show signs of the otherworldly fantasy to be fully realised in the third novel, allegedly lost by O’Nolan after a drunken night in the Dolphin Hotel by being dropped in the Liffey, but actually found whole and entire in his papers after his death, and published posthumously.

The Third Policeman, authored this time by ‘Flann O’Brien’ is set in a strange and unfamiliar landscape. The narrator is again unnamed, and realises suddenly that he himself does not know his own name. He wishes to commit a murder, and eventually realises that he has already committed it. He has a romantic ride on the most beautiful and loving bicycle in the world. It disappears, and he goes to a police station to inform the police that he has lost his American gold watch. The member in charge asks him would it be about a bicycle, and did his watch have a bell on it.

The police station is sited inside the walls of another house, and you could live in the other house all your life without being aware that it was surrounded, penetrated and even infested by a police station inhabited by supernatural policemen who are in charge of Omnium, the primal substance of the universe. This the policemen use for trivial purposes such as putting butter on bread under the jam when jam has been spread on it absent-mindedly, papering the walls of the station without taking down the bull and dog licence application forms and getting off the dirt from one’s unpolished boots after they have been repolished. Eventually the narrator realises that he is dead. The narrative is interspersed with an account of the insane universal theories of an imaginary scientist named de Selby, written in a parody of the learned journal literature of the time. The echoes of Twenty Years A-Growing are obvious.

These are three extraordinary books, written in a dozen different styles of English or Irish, and were his reputation to rest on these alone, it would be a very significant one. However, as ‘any fule kno’, for over quarter of a century he wrote a column in the Irish Times, which apparently was occasionally ghosted by Niall Montgomery. He wrote several lesser comic novels in the years after the war. He also wrote thrillers for the British market under a pseudonym. The column Cruiskeen Lawn was uneven, but on its good days was brilliant. Characters like the Brother, the Justice and the Defendant became part of Dublin folklore and still live on in exchanges such as:

You know what it is I’m goin to tell you?

I do not.

The Brother can’t look at an egg.

His wars on pretentious writing and his lampooning of boilerplate journalist’s cliché in the ‘Myles na Gopaleen Catechism of Cliché’ are still remembered. Myles didn’t confine himself to English cliché but also attacked their Irish equivalent, sometimes using English phonology to comic effect: baigh Deaid, Am a raibh Gael in Eirinn beo. He didn’t even leave lordly Latin in peace: Quid est hoc? Hoc est quid. Like many another inveterate punster of that era, he could be accused of dogging a fled horse. He disliked intensely Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, arguing that no Irish person had ever spoken like the characters in the play. It could be argued against him that Synge was well aware of that and that the fake dialect was itself part of the comedy.

Brian O’Nolan was born in 1910 and the family moved when he was a child from Tyrone to Dublin, the father working in the revenue at that time. Brian grew up in Blackrock and attended Blackrock College. He had a brilliant undergraduate and successful postgraduate career in UCD and went on to be an Administrative Officer in the Department of Local Government in the Custom House. There, one of his best pals was John Garvin, who did his best to protect his irrepressible younger friend from official retaliation for his public lampoons of public officials and powerful figures in the Fianna Fáil party.

O’Nolan seems to have had an early emotional crisis.3 In 1942, there was a fire in an orphanage in County Cavan, and the good nuns had chained the fire doors shut in case the girls would get out into the open in their nighties and get up to all kinds of unimaginable behaviour or otherwise scandalise the locals. The little girls were burned to death. O’Nolan happened to be the Department of Local Government inspector assigned to determine the cause of the tragedy (an overturned space heater, apparently). This seems to have left a permanent mark on him, as his beloved Church seemed to have been criminally negligent. On top of the apparent failure of his books and the frustrations of living in an isolated wartime country, he seems to have retreated to journalism and the pub in rather a big way. He was apparently a terribly disappointed man, the disappointment sharpened by his own intelligence and awareness of evil around him.

His absences without leave became notorious. However, he was also a brilliant civil servant, and his file work which survives is impressive. He bearded a bishop and a bunch of doctors in 1944 when there was an attempt to take over the health service under the cloak of ‘vocationalism’, pointing out that people’s taxes paid for that service, and had to be accounted for democratically. He made gallant attempts to get the Irish state to commit itself to a modern road system in the post-war years, but to little avail. Eventually events caught up with him. In the early 1950s, wearing his Myles na Gopaleen hat, he lampooned repeatedly a well-known political figure, Andy Clarkin, for not fixing his public clock, and Minister Patrick Smith called John Garvin into his office some time in, I think, late 1952. Garvin, Secretary of the department, was ordered to fire O Nualláin. Garvin assented obediently and wondered what to do about his old friend. News got out quickly around the Custom House that the Gop was for the Hop, and the Medical Officer called him up, suggesting that Myles’s firing might be postponed for a few months:

‘I think I can stall it for three months.’

‘John, the Americans have invented a new illness. If we wait three months, the Gop can retire due to ill-health and keep his pension with ex misericordiam consideration. As it is, he goes out destitute.’

‘Explain: what is this new illness?’

‘Alcoholism.’

‘Alcoholism? I always thought that it was an addiction, not a disease.’

‘That’s the beauty of it, John. If it’s addictive, it’s involuntary and therefore a disease.’

Garvin told the Minister that Myles’s specialised knowledge of some building project or other necessitated postponing his dismissal for the requisite period, and got a reluctant nod from the old Cavan gunman. The dismissal letter, reluctantly signed by Garvin, survives in the Irish Archive in the Burns Library in Boston College, together with some letters from Myles to John displaying a moving mixture of resentment and affection. However, the friendship was at an end.4

Myles retired on a small pension in early 1953. He had just about enough to live on with his books and his journalism. In 1966 he died of cancer of the oesophagus probably caused by the classic mix of tobacco smoke and whiskey. He was, at the end of his life, clearly a literary success, but probably didn’t fully appreciate this himself. That was his real tragedy.

His work lived on triumphantly and a cult of it still flourishes in Ireland and elsewhere. He certainly informed, directly or indirectly, Irish humorous and satirical writers and actors since; Frank Kelly, Eamon Morrissey, Roddy Doyle and Dermot Morgan springing particularly to mind. At Swim has inspired a German-language film (Schwimmen-Zwei-Vögel), the title itself sounding very much like something out of de Selby. His much-resented ability to lampoon feared power-holders in the state was something of an innovation at the time, and has created many descendants. Myles lives on.

TG

Notes

1Flann O’Brien, At Swim-two-Birds (London: Longmans, 1939).

2‘Myles na gCopaleen’, An Béal Bocht (Dublin: Three Candles Press, 1945 2nd edition).

3This is a suggestion of Professor Robert O’Mahony of the Catholic University of America.

4Personal information (TG).