When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.
— At Swim-Two-Birds
Happy birthday to the great Flann O’Brien (aka Myles na gCopleen, aka Brian O’Nolan). He – and this book – is woven into my childhood, my relationship with my Dad, my very first published piece (which was called “Two Birds”, not uncoincidentally.)
My first published piece was in the 2006 Irish Letters edition of the storied The Sewanee Review – please pinch me. Pinch me more: My piece was excerpted on the back cover, next to an excerpt from a piece by William Trevor, also included. Me and William Trevor, yeah, side by side. Not too shabby for right out of the gate. Not only is it the first piece of mine that was published, it was the first piece I ever sent OUT to be published, and I ONLY sent it to The Sewanee Review. The essay is about the “allowance ritual” my dad put us through as children. We were each assigned an Irish author, and we had to memorize the titles of their books to get 75 cents or whatever. There were other hoops we had to jump. We had to memorize WB Yeats’ epitaph (Cast a cold eye, on life on death, horseman pass by). My younger sister Siobhan was assigned Flann O’Brien, and so please picture a 4 year old rattling off the words “At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman.
I mean to say, whether a yarn is tall or small I like to hear it well told. I like to meet a man that can take in hand to tell a story and not make a balls of it while he’s at it. I like to know where I am, do you know. Everything has a beginning and an end.
— Flann O’Brien
Most writers have to wrestle with their influences. It is another thing to give them room to breathe and speak and declare themselves in the work you are writing (this is what O’Brien does in At Swim-Two-Birds). The Irish people are overwhelmed by their own history (“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” says Stephen Dedalus, famously, in Ulysses). O’Brien faces this head on. This was the man who pitilessly described a lecture on Irish culture as “a virulent eruption of paddyism.” He took no prisoners.
O’Brien was a contemporary of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. They cast looming intimidating shadows. Imagine trying to publish novels in the 30s and 40s, post-Ulysses. The thing about arriving early – like At Swim-Two-Birds did – is people might read it and find it derivative, or quaint, or like so many other things – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, for example – and all its imitators – when, no, At Swim Two Birds came first. Way too early. The world needed to catch up. defies description. It admits it’s a book. It’s hilarious. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and yet it “platforms” all of Irish history, its Cúchulainn myths and legends taking over. Young writers often write about young writers. At Swim-Two-Birds shows you how it’s done. The novelist loses control of his own book.
John Updike wrote a wonderful essay on Flann O’Brien in The New Yorker, saying this about O’Brien’s third novel An Béal Bocht, written in Gaelic:
O’Brien, who spoke Irish Gaelic in his childhood home, wrote his next extended fiction, “An Béal Bocht,” in Gaelic, in 1941; in 1973, it was translated, by Patrick C. Power, into a spirited imitation of O’Brien’s English as “The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story About the Hard Life.” Less than a hundred pages long, the tale has the advantage of a relatively clear, if extravagant, story line and a distinct satiric point—i.e., that the Irish Republic’s official cherishing of the nearly extinct Gaelic language ignores the miserable poverty of its surviving speakers, the rain-battered peasantry of the countryside. In one episode, government orators at a Gaelic feis parrot and praise the venerable language while in their audience “many Gaels collapsed from hunger and from the strain of listening.” In another, a folklorist from Dublin, visiting O’Brien’s fictional Gaeltacht area of Corkadoragha, and frustrated by the drunken taciturnity of an assembly of local males, records the muttering of a pig under the impression that it is Gaelic: “He understood that good Gaelic is difficult but that the best Gaelic of all is well-nigh unintelligible.” Parodying sentimental novels and memoirs in modern Gaelic by such authors as Tomás Ó Criomhthainn and Séamas Ó Grianna, O’Brien protests on behalf of a depressed Irish population: “In one way or another, life was passing us by and we were suffering misery, sometimes having a potato and at other times having nothing in our mouths but sweet words of Gaelic.”
Updike writes:
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.
Born Brian Ó Nualláin in 1911, he wrote under a couple of different names. Myles na gCopaleen was the name he used for his satirical columns in The Irish Times, and Flann O’Brien was used for his novels. He wrote poetry, essays, op-ed columns, books, short stories, playing around with pseudonyms. He would write complaining letters to The Irish Times about an op-ed column HE wrote under another name. Hysterical! He was a member of the Irish Civil Service so he rarely used his own name. His inflammatory pieces could have gotten him into trouble. Everyone knew that Flann/Brian/Myles were the same man. But it was a game being played, a performance-art cloud of plausible deniability.
He went to UCD (because it was Joyce’s alma mater) and immediately threw himself into the writing scene. He and his friends created a magazine called Blather, devoted to satire and humor. They declared it was “The Only Paper Exclusively Dedicated to Clay-Pigeon Shooting in Ireland”.
Here is the Editor’s note to the first edition of Blather. We can assume this is Flann’s voice:
Blather is here. As we advance to make our bow, you will look in vain for signs of servility or of any evidence of a desire to please. We are an arrogant and depraved body of men. We are as proud as bantams and as vain as peacocks.
“Blather doesn’t care.” A sardonic laugh escapes us as we bow, cruel and cynical hounds that we are. It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do you get the smell of porter?
Blather is not to be confused with Ireland’s National Newspaper, still less with Ireland’s Greatest Newspaper. Blather is not an organ of Independent opinion, nor is Ireland more to us than a Republic, Kingdom or Commonwealth. Blather is a publication of the Gutter, the King Rat of the Irish Press, the paper that will achieve entirely new levels in everything that is contemptible, despicable, and unspeakable in contemporary journalism… In regard to politics, all our rat-like cunning will be directed towards making Ireland fit for the depraved readers of Blather to live in.
We have probably said enough, perhaps too much. Anyhow, you have got a rough idea of the desperate class of men you are up against. Maybe you don’t like us? A lot we care what you think.
Blather only lasted for six issues.
O’Brien’s feelings about James Joyce were contradictory. He revered him, he was obsessed, but he was also sick and tired of the man’s dominance, declaring:
“I declare to God if I hear that name Joyce one more time I will surely froth at the gob.”
Here is one of his poems:
THE WORKMAN’S FRIEND
When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night –
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
When money’s tight and 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 health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare –
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
In time of trouble and lousey strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life –
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
At Swim-Two-Birds was published in 1939, following O’Brien’s graduation from UCD. 1939 was not the best year for a satirical meta-fiction narrative about a youth getting wasted with his friends. Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Everyone declared war on Germany. The timing was not ideal and the book was not a success (O’Brien blamed it on the Germans bombing the British publisher, which inhibited its proper release). Incidentally, it was the last book Joyce read before he passed away. He admired it very much. Around the same time as the Two Bird’s publication (which the audience greeted with baffled confusion), O’Brien began writing for The Irish Times under his na gCopaleen pseudonym.
He is not famous for the life he lived, the romances or drunken brawls. He worked well to hide himself and cover his tracks. This was perhaps out of necessity, but also because he seemed to have a lot of fun evading others’ desires to pin him down. One thinks of Benjamin Franklin creating alter egos (male and female), publishing entire books in other “voices”. One of the striking things about At Swim-Two-Birds is it reads as though it was published 20 years later than it was. It is terribly modern, if you compare it to contemporaneous novels, and so it is outside of its own time to an insane degree. This is a POST-modern book, written in 1939. Crazy ahead of its time.
It’s hard, as an O’Malley, to talk about this book in a normal book-report kind of way. I think I sort of believed, as a child, that Flann O’Brien might have been related to us (my grandmother’s maiden name was O’Brien). My father had shelves lined with books by him. Then there was the family allowance ritual. I didn’t even read the book until college but the title – At Swim-Two-Birds – was already in my life and consciousness (forever) by age 4 or 5. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware there was a man named Flann O’Brien and he had written a book with a mysterious title called At Swim-Two-Birds.
At Swim-Two-Birds anticipates the experimental literature of today where the narrator suddenly steps forward, looks right at the reader, and addresses us directly. The young college student lies around in his uncle’s home, smoking, doing nothing, and occasionally going out with his buddies to get wasted. His uncle is so frustrated: why is his nephew SUCH a loser? The novel the narrator dreams of writing is about Fionn mac Cumhaill and also Mad King Sweeney – who turned into a bird – and the narrator keeps writing outlines of what he wants to write. The whole book is broken up into headings and sub-headings, as though it is the outline for another book … one still to be written. At some point, the narrator loses control of his own characters. The characters start to behave in ways the author finds incomprehensible, and he struggles to reel back them in. Once Pandora’s box is opened, Fionn mac Cumhaill and Mad King Sweeney stroll the streets of modern Dublin. They’re out.
Flann O’Brien directly references Joyce – especially in one section set up exactly like the famous Ithaca episode in Ulysses (excerpt here) – with a call-and-response structure. Irish writers struggle with being compared TO Joyce or defined AGAINST him. Either way, he can’t be ignored. Even when an Irish writer comes out and says, “I hate Joyce!” – it’s still evidence of the fact that Joyce dominates the landscape and has to be dealt with. O’Brien doesn’t wrestle with Joyce in private, he brings it on out into the open, and puts it all in the book. He doesn’t worry about structure or narrative. He unleashes Irish history – fanciful and literal. Ireland is consumed by its own past and here in At Swim-Two-Birds the past is not a tale in a dusty book. It’s real people, stepping out of the pages of a manuscript, despite the author’s attempts to control them.
At Swim-Two-Birds is laugh-out-loud funny. There is a laboriousness to some of the descriptions – they go on forever – and it gets funnier and funnier, the longer it goes on.
Like this:
Notwithstanding this eulogy, I soon found that the mass of plain porter bears an unsatisfactory relation to its toxic content and I became subsequently addicted to brown stout in bottle, a drink which still remains the one that I prefer the most despite the painful and blinding fits of vomiting which a plurality of bottles has often induced in me.
The elaborate sentence goes against what he is talking about, a most base human experience – and that just makes it funnier. There are also about 20 more words in the sentence than there “need” to be, and that just makes it funnier too. This formal intricate sentence basically saying, “I love beer, even though it makes me barf.” And then there’s the even more ridiculous first sentence of the book, which is a masterpiece of self-consciousness:
Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.
See, I’ve read the book a couple of times and that kind of sentence is STILL funny to me. It’s observant. It’s hugely overwritten. It’s so self-conscious you wonder how this person got through the day.
Here’s an excerpt.
That same afternoon I was sitting on a stool in an intoxicated condition in Grogan’s licensed premises. Adjacent stools bore the forms of Brinsley and Kelly, my two true friends. The three of us were occupied in putting glasses of stout into the interior of our bodies and expressing by fine disputation the resulting sense of physical and mental well-being. In my thigh pocket I had eleven and eightpence in a weighty pendulum of mixed coins. Each of the arrayed bottles on the shelves before me, narrow or squat-bellied, bore a dull picture of the gas bracket. Who can tell the stock of a public-house? Many no doubt are dummies, those especially within an arm-reach of the snug. The stout was of superior quality, soft against the tongue but sharp upon the orifice of the throat, softly efficient in its magical circulation through the conduits of the body. Half to myself, I said:
Do not let us forget that I have to buy Die Harzreise. Do not let us forget that.Hazreise, said Brinsley. There is a house in Dalkey called Heartrise.
Brinsley then put his dark chin on the cup of a palm and leaned in thought on the counter, overlooking his drink, gazing beyond the frontier of the world.
What about another jar? said Kelly.
Ah, Lesbia, said Brinsley. The finest thing I ever wrote. How many kisses, Lesbia, you ask, would serve to sate this hungry love of mine? – As many as the Libyan sands that bask along Cyrene’s shore where pine-trees wave, where burning Jupiter’s untended shrine lies near to old King Battus’ sacred grave:
Three stouts, called Kelly.
Let them be endless as the stars at night, that stare upon the lovers in a ditch – so often would love-crazed Catallus bite your burning lips, that prying eyes should not have power to count, nor evil tongues bewitch, the frenzied kisses that you gave and got.
Before we die of thirst, called Kelly, will you bring us three more stouts. God, he said to me, it’s in the desert you’d think we were.
That’s good stuff, you know, I said to Brinsley,
A picture came before my mind of the lovers at their hedge-pleasure in the pale starlight, no sound from them, his fierce mouth burying into hers.
Bloody good stuff, I said.
Kelly, invisible to my left, made a slapping noise.
The best I ever drank, he said.
As I exchanged an eye-message with Brinsley, a wheezing beggar inserted his person at my side and said:
Buy a scapular or a stud, Sir.
This interruption I did not understand. Afterwards, near Lad Lane police station a small man in black fell in with us and tapping me often about the chest, talked to me earnestly on the subject of Rousseau, a member of the French nation. He was animated, his pale features striking in the starlight and his voice going up and falling in the lilt of his argumentum. I did not understand his talk and was personally unacquainted with him. But Kelly was taking in all he said, for he stood near him, his taller head inclined in an attitude of close attention. Kelly then made a low noise and opened his mouth and covered the small man from shoulder to knee with a coating of unpleasant buff-coloured puke. Many other things happened on that night now imperfectly recorded in my memory but that incident is still very clear to me in my mind. Afterwards the small man was some distance from us in the lane, shaking his divested coat and rubbing it along the wall. He is a little man that the name of Rousseau will always recall to me. Conclusion of reminiscence.
Flann O’Brien did it all, and in most cases, he did it better.
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