Truth is an odd number, and Death is a full stop. Flann O'Brien - Ireland's comic Genius

Author: Robert Looby

 

Tim Pat Coogan describes interviewing Flann O’Brien in 1964 after the publication of The Dalkey Archive. The interview was carefully planned. Apart from getting him to talk, there was one other main objective: to keep O’Brien away from the drink. It was to take place at 8.30 on a Saturday morning so that he could be returned home before the pubs opened. But the wily O’Brien escaped the television crew’s vigilance. Disappearing to the toilet in his house when the camera man called for him, he was hauled out some twenty five minutes later, drunk as a lord. He had hidden a bottle of whisky in the cistern and downed the lot while the crew were eating breakfast. Somehow the interview went ahead – O’Brien demanding more drink as he rambled on – with the result that on the only surviving recording of his voice we hear a man slurring his words, obviously drunk. Praised by the producer as one of the “classics of Irish broadcasting,” it was unbroadcastable in 1960s Ireland and is hardly a fitting tribute to its subject.

Flann O’Brien’s real name was Brian O’Nolan. His English novels appeared under the name of O’Brien, while his great Irish novel and his newspaper column (which appeared from 1940 to1966) were signed Myles na gCopaleen or Myles na Gopaleen. He was born in 1911 in Strabane, County Tyrone, and studied Irish in University College Dublin, before joining the civil service in Dublin. His writing career started while he was still in college and for a brief space in the 1930s he edited a magazine called “Blather,” most of which he wrote himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest Irish writers of the twentieth century and his death, on April 1st 1966, is remembered in the city he lived in with a “Festival of Fools.”

At Swim-Two-Birds

At Swim-Two-Birds, his first novel, was published in 1939, selling just 244 copies before the London warehouse in which it was stored was destroyed in the blitz. Not a good beginning for a book which famously boasts three beginnings itself. The novel shows a great command of language, with dozens of different styles represented and, true to its own injunction that the modern novel should be “largely a work of reference,” it contains over 40 extracts from other works. A braver critic than I has given the following barest of bare plot outlines: it is “a book (by Flann O’Brien) about a man writing a book (a student narrator) about a man writing a book (Dermot Trellis)” (Hopper). Within this complicated structure, characters cross over from different narrative levels, mixing with their own authors, mythical characters and stock figures from trashy literature and films. In this world authors hire out characters to other authors for the day or week. It is a fantastically complicated book, but O’Brien is not wilfully obscure. He places helpful pointers for the reader along the way, including several “summaries of what has gone before.” Despite all this postmodern trickery (it predates Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night by several decades) the book remains very readable. You read on in a desire to find out what happened next: how and where does it all end? Can such a complex book have a satisfactory ending? The book, in fact, has three endings, as might be expected from the three beginnings, but at the most basic level of narration (i.e. the words put on paper by Brian O’Nolan, alias Flann O’Brien) there is only one ending – and a surprisingly touching one at that.

The following may give a taste of the intricacy of the plot:

Paul Shanahan and Antony Lamont meet with Finn Mac Cool a figure from Gaelic legend (all three are characters in a novel being written by Dermot Trellis, though Mac Cool is also a “real” legend). Mac Cool tells them the story of Sweeny, another figure from Gaelic legend. At several points they interrupt him, one time telling him about Jem Casey, the “Poet of the Pick,” and reciting his poem “Workman’s Friend.” Yet some time later we see Jem Casey meeting with Sweeny.

The mixture of styles, which is a hallmark of the book, produces some fine comic moments, as when a verse in the style of ancient Irish mythology is ineptly added to Jem Casey’s poem, “Workman’s Friend:”

“When money’s tight and is hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt –
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
……….
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!”

O’Brien’s ear for Dublin speech is used to great effect in this novel as well as in his newspaper column. Not only does he have great sensitivity to a particular kind of speech, he also has a great affinity for a certain kind of intellect, one which is second rate, inferior but not downright stupid. Consider this exchange on the nature of death:

“… Death by fire, you know, by God it’s no joke.
They tell me drowning is worse, Lamont said.
Do you know what it is, said Furriskey, you can drown me three times before you
roast me. Yes, by God and six. Put your finger in a basin of water. What do you feel?
Next to nothing. But put your finger in the fire!”

These characters firmly and solemnly believe in old wives’ tales and conventional wisdom, their tastes are solidly low brow, their opinions always resoundingly affirmed by their friends, with never a critical note to spoil the harmony. They are serene in their good opinions of themselves as “decent skins.” While helping (actually hindering) an author (Orlick) to write a book they pause to survey their work so far:

“Do you know we’re doing well. We’re doing very well.”

Repetition accompanies nearly everything they say. When Shanahan takes offence at being described by Orlick as a “raconteur” Furriskey explains:

“What’s wrong with you man, he asked. What’s the matter? Isn’t it all right? Isn’t it
high praise? Do you know the meaning of that last word?
It’s from the French, of course, said Shanahan.
Then I’ll tell you what it means. It means you’re all right. Do you understand me? I’ve
met this man. I know him. I think he’s all right. Do you see it now?”

And yet despite their love of Jem Casey for his unpretentious “pomes,” they do not regard themselves as average people, but are convinced they possess great artistic sensitivity. Discussing the book they are collaborating on with Orlick, Shanahan says:

“… you have to remember the man in the street. I may understand you, Mr Lamont
may understand you, Mr Furriskey may understand you – but the man in the street?
Oh, by God you have to go very very slow if you want him to follow you.”

This brief sketch can only give a faint idea of the book. When asked what War and Peace was about Tolstoy replied that to explain it he would have to read the whole thing out. Much the same could be said of At Swim-Two-Birds.

The Third Policeman

The Third Policeman, O’Brien’s second novel in English, was not published until after his death. It was rejected by one publisher during his lifetime and O’Brien, a very shy man, never tried to publish it elsewhere, even telling friends that he had lost the manuscript. He later reworked parts of it into The Dalkey Archive. In a letter to William Saroyan he wrote “it is supposed to be a funny book but I don’t know about that…” Certainly it does not have the hilarity of At Swim or some of his newspaper columns. It strikes out in a different direction and does not rely so much on Dublin speech patterns, though there are the occasional hints of Cruiskeen Lawn in the narrator’s dialogue with his own conscience (whom he names Joe).

The Third Policeman is also a very unusual book, but where At Swim plays with narrative, it tends towards pure fantasy. (Though this is not to say that The Third Policeman is without surprises in that department too.) It contains exchanges to baffle any translator, such as, “‘What is your cog?’ ‘My cog?’ ‘You surmoun’,” and puzzles like “‘This is not today, this is yesterday’.” It is the story, told in the first person, of a murderer and his attempts to get his hands on the money for which he killed a neighbour, Phillip Mathers. The narrator, though he is just three hours walk from his home, finds himself in a very strange and unfamiliar part of the world, dealing with bicycles that turn into people, bands of one-legged men, and three policemen of monstrous proportions.

Play with proportions and perspectives comes up again and again in the book. For instance, when the narrator enters Mathers’s house it is through a window which seemed too small for him, and across an extraordinarily deep window sill. Another house he encounters has no breadth or depth. Elsewhere the narrator looks at thirteen chests, each identical but smaller than the next and says: “they looked to me as if they were all the same size but invested with some crazy perspective.” Policeman MacCruiskeen has a mangle which converts light into sound by stretching the light out of its normal proportions. At another point the narrator says he weighs 500,000 tons, while the sergeant’s bike seems small due to its perfect proportions but is actually huge. The narrator finds himself in a place whose dimensions are “most unusual;” the ceiling is “extraordinarily high,” the floor is narrow and the stair steps are square. If At Swim-Two-Birds conflates narrative levels, The Third Policeman conflates dimensions: the Sergeant looks into the middle of the day, which is five miles away.

This kind of strange proportionality is mirrored in the use of footnotes. As well as being a murderer the narrator is also a student of de Selby, a scientist who believes, for example, that the earth is not round, but sausage shaped. The book contains numerous footnotes and references to the works of commentators on de Selby. They grow beyond all the normal proportions of footnotes. The longest is four pages and contains in it a story all of its own and completely unrelated to the main narrative thread of the novel. Not only that, but all of de Selby’s theories are nonsensical and recognised as such by the commentators and yet a disproportionate amount of attention is given to these insane ideas. It is hinted that de Selby has other, reasonable theories, which presumably made his name, but these are never described or discussed by the narrator. We are left not knowing whether the narrator is unreliable, selecting only those ideas and discoveries that discredit de Selby, or if de Selby is simply insane, i.e. has no theories or inventions that would do him credit.

Just as, according to O’Brien, a lifetime spent in the saddle of a bike drives the rider’s personality into the bike and vice versa so that they come to resemble one another so do the footnotes start to resemble a novel proper. The longest footnote is an adventure story full of incident and excitement and involving two of de Selby’s commentators. Similarly, the novel proper is “contaminated” by de Selby, with several chapters beginning with the narrator musing on, for example, de Selby’s experiments with water, before returning to the plot of the novel.

But is the world presented in The Third Policeman really so strange? The policemen have a light which works by saving up shouts and hammering and other loud noises, and later converting them into light when needed. Rusi Taleyarkhan, a researcher in the US, has been working on “sonofusion” since 2001. This consists in attempting to release energy from liquids by bombarding the liquid with waves of ultrasound… And are the footnotes to de Selby so peculiar? They usually deal not so much with de Selby as with his admirers and detractors – a satire, in other words, on the acolytes of academia. De Selby himself, like a Derrida, rises above the babble of critics.

Cruiskeen Lawn

One of The Third Policeman’s many footnotes speculates that Kraus and du Garbandier, two of de Selby’s commentators, were one and the same person. Another de Selby expert, Hatchjaw, we learn, is arrested for impersonating himself and the possibility is mentioned that Hatchjaw was not Hatchjaw at all but “either another person of the same name or an impostor.” This ludicrous situation is one which O’Brien and friends attempted with great success to play out in real life, hijacking the letters page of the Irish Times with a host of letters written under false names. The letters formed a kind of chain, with O’Brien often writing in to sneer at letters he himself had written under a different name. The modern-day Irish Times will not publish pseudonymous letters and requests that writers provide a phone number so that their identities can be verified but the then editor, R. M. Smyllie, encouraged no doubt by the rising circulation, gave O’Brien his own column on the strength of the letters controversy (which he himself even joined in). O’Brien used the pen name Myles na Gopaleen (Myles of the little horses, or – according to himself – Myles of the ponies) and the column came to be known as An Cruiskeen Lawn (Irish for “the little full jug”). His position in the civil service meant that he could not express political opinions under his own name.

Through the pages of the Irish Times, O’Brien introduced us to Keats and Chapman, bores (e.g. the Man Who Has Read It In Manuscript), the Plain People of Ireland, Sir Myles na Gopaleen and too many other memorable characters to attempt to describe here. Keats and Chapman are the names given to two characters who have various adventures all with the purpose of ending the story with a punch line that is usually a bad pun, guaranteed to surprise the reader and yet elicit a groan of recognition. We meet the typical Dublin man, capable of accepting any ill fortune with equanimity, but meeting with outrage anything unprovoked or gratuitous. Relating a string of woes caused him by a visiting relative and including homelessness and bereavement, O’Brien’s Dublin man ends with “and I wouldn’t mind only on the way out he kicked the milk bottle to pieces.” At such times O’Brien will often adopt the neutral politeness of an anthropologist:

“‘Ah, yes, [says the Dublin man] the two is in the one grave.’
Observe the unique Dublin dual number in full flight.”

Many observations are specifically related to language and difficult to appreciate in translation:

“I thought to myself, the chap said, that it was a right place to see wild angimals. I put. meself on a 10 bus last Thursda. We got held up on the way and do you know be
what?
I do not.
Be wild angimals.”

It is difficult to give a taste of the columns here. Comic timing was all-important, and quoting extracts often spoils the carefully built up effect. Anthony Cronin, his biographer, remarks that O’Brien would rehearse his columns in conversation but that there was often a great deal of repetition. Clearly a lot of work went into his monlogues before they appeared in the columns.

Myles na Gopaleen is often a difficult curmudgeon of a character, with his war on cliché, bores, official Ireland, sections of the Irish language movement, and civil servants. Then there are his high-handed insults to his readers. In one column O’Brien refers to them as “you smug, self-righteous swine… self-opinionated sod-minded suet-brained ham-faced mealy-mouthed streptococcus-ridden gang of natural gobdaws!.” One critic writes: “O’Brien had a way of repeating hackneyed expressions until the reader could no longer tolerate them” (Gallagher). And yet his readers loved the column. Anthony Cronin writes that it was often hard to tell whether Dublin speech was the model for the column or if the column at times became a model for Dublin speech.

Cruiskeen Lawn, though its quality was not always consistently high, was not the kind of inconsequential, self-indulgent blather that now goes under the name of opinion columns. O’Brien was an erudite man and did not just dash off columns without doing his homework. They are a far cry from the school essay style meditations on “my summer holidays” or “why women are different from men” that now sully the pages of serious newspapers.

One unfortunate reader wrote to complain about what he thought were several factual inaccuracies in a column. O’Brien printed the letter and meticulously proved the correspondent wrong at every point. Where the correspondent complained that railway trains did not exist in 1800 (the period O’Brien was describing) O’Brien replied testily: “Mr. Hogan questions my reference to railway trains. Here we are back to this incapacity to read. I had no reference whatsoever to railway trains, and no hint whatsoever about steam locomotion… Railways were used by Hannibal.” Strong stuff.

An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth)

An Béal Bocht, published in 1941, is O’Brien’s Irish language triumph. It satirises attitudes to Irish speakers and parodies the literature of the Irish speaking areas. Critics are fond of saying that to appreciate the book one must know the targets of O’Brien’s satire – among them the memoirs of Peig Sayers and Tomás O’Criomhthain, as well as Dubliners who have learned Irish but whose image of the Irish is uncritically romantic.

But this is to do O’Brien a disservice. An Béal Bocht is not half a book. It is whole and complete and hilarious in itself. Naturally there are intertextual references and in-jokes that the uninitiated will not always recognise, but these jokes are generally funny in themselves. O’Brien’s use of Irish, too, is masterful and native-speaker proficiency is required to fully appreciate all the nuances. But is this not true of any book? The better the reader the better the book. A reader who starts this book knowing nothing of the Irish Revival, the Irish language movement or linguistic politics will finish it knowing a lot more. Indeed, I can think of no better or more entertaining way of learning about this aspect of Irish history than reading this book.

Here, it would be traditional to explain to “outsiders” the background to the book so that they could better appreciate it. In fact, though, An Béal Bocht is itself the explanation of this background. For example, I could explain why it takes the form of a memoir (of one Bónapárt Ó Cúnasa), but once you realise it is a parody you will understand why this is so: it must be because many of the writers he satirises used the memoir form.

Similarly, if you were not aware that Irish language enthusiasts from Dublin could be condescending in their idealisation of the “true Irish” you certainly will be after reading the description of Sitric Ó Sánasa. Ó Sánasa is particularly highly praised for his poverty by the Dubliners, who say they had never seen anyone so poor or true-Irish. One of them even breaks Sitric’s bottle of water because it was spoiling the effect of poverty.

And what is the “outsider” to make of Micheálangaló Ó Cúnasa’s reply to a friend’s remark that the weather looks like it will turn bad: “it is no small thing said that you have said and if it is true for you then it is no lie you have told, but the truth”? Merely that the Irish literary revival idealised the “poetry” of ordinary Irish speakers. This is a technique used by O’Brien elsewhere. In At Swim-Two-Birds we meet the phrase “it is true that I will not” which means “no” in reply to a request. In The Third Policeman the narrator says “Your talk is surely the handiwork of wisdom for not one word of it do I understand.” In An Béal Bocht the Dublin Irish enthusiasts mistake the grunting of a pig for beautiful melodious Irish simply because they cannot understand it.

The book’s nine chapter headings contain brief summaries, consisting of key words, of the contents of the chapters. Only one chapter heading does not contain key words such as: “hardship,” “the bad life,” “black sadness,” “the bad thing chasing me,” “death and ill-fortune,” “hunger and ill-fortune,” “misery and hardship,” and “misery and ill-fortune.” You hardly need to know in advance that Peig Sayers’s memoir dwelled on misery and hardship to appreciate the humour here.

Having insisted that An Béal Bocht is a book open to all and trying to encourage anyone and everyone to read it, regardless of their knowledge of the social and literary background, I must finish by saying that it is worth learning Irish to read this masterpiece in the original.

Conclusion

It could be argued that O’Brien never realised his full potential. At Swim-Two-Birds, which in later years O’Brien denigrated, only achieved notable success in 1960 (it had been republished in America in 1951, but had not sold very well). The rejection of The Third Policeman was a terrible blow to his literary career though his drinking cannot have helped his development as a novelist either. When he retired early from the civil service on grounds of ill health (though it was actually because of something he had written about a government minister) rather than take the opportunity to concentrate on writing a novel he continued to spin money with newspaper columns in various newspapers under different pen names. None of them had the quality of his Cruiskeen Lawn column, which he continued to write. He was aware that the drink was keeping him from the long term effort needed to produce a novel (apparently he was usually in bed by early evening, having been drinking since morning). Given his personal circumstances, it is amazing he managed to write the newspaper column (often six days a week, and sometimes, as legend has it, dictated from a drunken stupor) as well as a play, Faustus Kelly (1943), and two novels The Hard Life (1961) and The Dalkey Archive (1964), neither of which, however, are as well regarded as his other novels.

The path marked out by O’Brien is still being followed today, though not always with such success. Private Eye reviews Paul Auster’s Oracle Night with some exasperation: “Here we have a writer writing a story about a writer writing a story, based on a story suggested to him by another writer, who got the idea from a book by yet another writer, which contains within it another story by yet another writer being read by an editor with a view to publication… Yet more stories and ideas for stories run off at tangents or get lost in the serious-looking (but quite unnecessary) footnotes.”

Who knows that if his publisher had not accepted The Third Policeman, or if O’Brien had had the self confidence to try and eventually succeed in placing it elsewhere the course of post war Irish – and world – literature might have been very different.

References:

Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter (London: Grafton 1989)
Monique Gallagher, Flann O’Brien: Myles from Dublin (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1991)
Keith Hopper, Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-modernist (Cork: Cork University Press 1995)
Private Eye, 1101, March 5th – 18th 2004.