Back-chat, Funny Cracks.(Irish writer Flann O'Brien)(Critical essay)

Begob, and the truth would not be played false were a frank man to say that Flann O'Brien, born Brian O'Nolan in Strabane, Ulster, in 1911, and known as Myles na gCopaleen to the readers of his long-standing column "Cruiskeen Lawn" in the Irish Times, when acting as a novelist proffered a mixed bag of blessings and their opposite. Such a pained reflection has been given rise to by a thorough if at intervals dozy reading of "The Complete Novels" by the above-named, as published by Everyman's Library in its fine format, not less than eight hundred pages (counting the front matter) of wee Bembo type bound in glorious red covers with a sewn-in bookmark of golden fabric ($25). On the jacket the author is obscured by his dark hat and his black-rimmed glasses and his own hand at his mouth, and, to be sure, Flann/Brian/Myles, where many an author not only rejoices in his face on his jacket but sets his personal facts in the forefront of his prose, engaged in a significant effort of self-concealment, of pseudonymity lurking behind a prose greatly melodious and garrulous in its confident manner. The front flap of the same jacket states him to be "along with Joyce and Beckett . . . part of the holy trinity of modern Irish literature," which rings strangely of one who disparaged the Holy Trinity, discounting with considerable scholarly fury in his final novel, "The Dalkey Archive," the very notion of the Holy Ghost, as having been heedlessly foisted upon the Christian Creed by the Council of Alexandria in the year 362. The man was ingenious and learned like Jim Joyce and like Sam Beckett gave the reader a sweet dose of hopelessness but unlike either of these worthies did not arrive at what we might call artistic resolution. His novels begin with a swoop and a song but end in an uncomfortable murk and with an air of impatience.

The first, "At Swim-Two-Birds" (1939), is the best known and the most rigorously confusing--confusing even the compendium's introducer, Keith Donohue, who describes it as "a mock-heroic novel about a man named Orlick Trellis," when in fact Orlick is the relatively incidental son of Dermot Trellis, a bedridden author introduced, on page 31, as "writing a book on sin and the wages attaching thereto." In equipping himself for this mighty task he "has bought a ream of ruled foolscap" and "is compelling all his characters to live with him in the Red Swan Hotel so that he can keep an eye on them." Dermot Trellis is enough captivated by the beauty of Sheila Lamont, a character he has invented to illustrate female virtue, "that he so far forgets himself as to assault her himself." Not only assaults: he impregnates her. Their child is Orlick, who, after an education in the home of the Pooka MacPhellimey--one of several figures from Irish legend that have materialized in the narrative--becomes a writer himself, coached by three idlers called Shanahan, Furriskey, and Antony Lamont, the abused woman's brother, all of them intent upon indicting and punishing, by way of Orlick's fledgling fiction, his father's perfidy. The elder Trellis is kept immobilized in his bed by surreptitiously drug-induced sleep while his characters, including a number of American cowboys recruited from the novels of one William Tracy, run wild. At least, that's what I think is happening. The manuscript keeps re-starting itself, repeating whole paragraphs at a time, and the only segments of Irish life that savor of actual experience are the unnamed narrator's passing conversations with his sententious uncle and with his flippant acquaintances at University College, Dublin. It is this unnamed narrator, easily confused with the young Flann O'Brien, who is composing this many-levelled travesty of a novel. Graham Greene called "At Swim-Two-Birds" "one of the best books of our century. A book in a thousand . . . in the line of Ulysses and Tristram Shandy." The Chicago Tribune said, more cagily, that it is "of such staggering originality that it baffles description and very nearly beggars our sense of delight." All of O'Brien's novels of nearly beggared delight convey what Donohue calls his "disdain for certain, clear meaning and interpretation."

Disdainful though it is, "At Swim-Two-Birds" can be wonderfully written, with an offhand lilt that twists the drab ordinary into a peculiar precision:

On wet days there would be an unpleasant odour of dampness, an aroma of overcoats dried by body-heat. Now listen, said Shanahan clearing the way with small coughs. It was an early-morning street, its quiet distances still small secrets shared by night with day.

Like the overbearing master of the Dublin quotidian, James Joyce, O'Brien is not afraid to bore the reader. Pages go by in alcoholic discussion of the relative merits of various musical instruments ("The fiddle is the man, said Shanahan") and the elusive quality of "kangaroolity." A mock-heroic fustian inflates the prose:

A learning and an erudition boundless in its universality, an affection phenomenal in its intensity and a quiet sympathy with the innumerable little failings of our common humanity--these were the sterling qualities that made Mr John Furriskey a man among men and endeared him to the world and his wife.

If this tone was inspired by the many mock-heroic passages in "Ulysses," O'Brien's impudent introduction of Finn MacCool, the Pooka MacPhellimey, and the invisible Good Fairy ("I am like a point in Euclid, explained the Good Fairy, position but no magnitude, you know") into the cast of "At Swim-Two-Birds" may allude to the background of archaic myth in "Finnegans Wake," which was also published in 1939 but, starting in 1924, was heralded by advance excerpts, under the title "Work in Progress," in various French and English-language publications, and was surely known to O'Brien. Joyce cast a heavy shadow on the younger writer's mind, being often invoked in O'Brien's newspaper column and emerging as a character in his last novel.