“[At Swim-Two-Birds is] just the book to give to your sister, if she is a dirty, boozey girl.” – Dylan Thomas

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, Flann O’Brien

Happy birthday to the great and the weird Flann O’Brien (aka Myles na gCopleen, aka Brian O’Nolan). This whole book, this whole author is woven into my childhood, my relationship with my Dad, memories, dreams, reflections.

Flann O’Brien’s most well-known novel is probably At Swim-Two-Birds – which I read in college, but I had grown up with that book already. In the O’Malley family At Swim-Two-Birds was ubiquitous around the house – and I have written before about the allowance ritual in my family (well, you’d have to buy The Sewanee Review, their Irish issue from 2006 to read it – scroll down and you can see that I was excerpted on the back cover. Me and William Trevor on the same page? A major moment) where my father assigned each of us kids Irish authors, and we had to memorize their book titles in order to get, oh, 75 cents. Siobhan was assigned Flann O’Brien, so to hear her, at 4 years old, rattle off “At Swim-Two-Birds” is a potent family memory.

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

It is one thing to wrestle with your influences. Most writers have to do that. It is another thing to give them room to breathe and speak and declare themselves in the work you are writing (which is what O’Brien does in At Swim-Two-Birds). The Irish people have an overwhelming sense of their own pained history (“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” says Stephen Dedalus, famously, in Ulysses), and Flann O’Brien brings all of that to life in his book. He faces it head on. Remember, too, that this was the man who pitilessly described a lecture on Irish culture as “a virulent eruption of paddyism.” He took no prisoners. The Irish have a reputation for sentimentality, but if you sit around with a bunch of Irishmen – try making a soft-hearted comment, try making a vulnerable statement of misty-eyed nostalgia. See how well it goes over.

O’Brien was a contemporary of James Joyce and Sam Beckett. Those two cast a huge intimidating shadow that persists to this day, but imagine trying to publish novels in the 30s and 40s, immediately post-Ulysses. At Swim-Two-Birds is a crazy book. It defies description. If you sit down to read it, and you have not read it before, just tell yourself to relax, don’t judge, and enjoy. It’s a romp. It prefigures books like The Catcher in the Rye, or even later than that. Dave Eggers, for example, is in the Flann O’Brien continuum, especially with Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, with its meta-commentary, its self-involvement, its obnoxious self-regard. It comments on itself. It’s a book that admits it’s a book. It’s hilarious, doesn’t take itself too seriously and yet somehow it seems to encapsulate all of the insanity of Irish history, its Cúchulainn myths and legends incorporated into the narrative (hell, they take over the narrative) … and yet it’s also about an aimless Irish youth, lying in his room, smoking cigarettes, and pondering the great novel he wants to write. Young writers often write about young writers. It’s a common theme. At Swim-Two-Birds shows you how it’s done. The novelist has lost control of his own book. He tries to control his characters, wrestling with them, essentially: “No! I am in charge here – not you!” But once let loose, it’s very hard to get control again.

John Updike wrote a wonderful essay on Flann O’Brien in The New Yorker. Updike has this to say 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 (all of these have now been collected), and Flann O’Brien was used for his novels. He wrote poetry, essays, op-ed columns, books, short stories, and liked to play around with all of those pseudonyms. He would write complaining letters to The Irish Times about an op-ed column HE had written under another name. Hysterical. He was a member of the Irish Civil Service so his more inflammatory pieces could have gotten him into trouble. He rarely used his real name. Everyone knew that Flann/Brian/Myles were the same man. But it was a game being played, a performance-art cloud of plausible deniability, which set the writer free. Recently, Roy Blount, Jr. said, “It’s a rare writer who deserves to be compared to himself favorably.”

He went to UCD, and immediately threw himself into the writing scene there. He and his friends created a magazine called Blather, devoted to satire and humor, and they declared that 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 the voice of Flann:

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. Flann O’Brien’s obsession with James Joyce was his main reason for going to UCD (Joyce’s alma mater), and yet was also frustrated at the dominance of Joyce.

“I declare to God if I hear that name Joyce one more time I will surely froth at the gob.”

Here is a poem written by Flann O’Brien:

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 his graduation from UCD, and just by looking at the date, you can see the challenges the book may have had in finding an audience. The book was not a success and O’Brien blamed it on the Germans bombing the British publisher, inhibiting its proper release. There was probably an element of truth to O’Brien’s complaint. (Incidentally, it was the last book Joyce read before he passed away – he admired it very much.) Around the same time as the publication of this book (which was greeted by baffled confusion), he also began writing for The Irish Times under his na gCopaleen pseudonym, which worked well to obscure his identity (something that lasts, to some degree, to this day). He is not famous for the life he lived. Not much is known about him. He worked well to hide himself. This perhaps was out of necessity (due to his job), but also because he seemed to have a lot of fun with messing with people’s expectations, of never being able to be pinned down. One thinks of Benjamin Franklin who had so much fun with creating alter egos and separate identities (male and female) and publishing entire books in other “voices”. One of the striking things about At Swim-Two-Birds is that it reads as though it were published 20 years later than it was. It is terribly modern, if you compare it to other novels of the day. It is outside of its own time to such a degree that it can almost read “quaint” now, if you don’t know the context. This is a post-modern book, POST-modern, 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 even 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 a man named “Flann O’Brien”. Then there was the family allowance ritual, and “Flann O’Brien” being said every week – there must be SOME personal connection. 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, oh, age 4? I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware that there was a man named Flann O’Brien and he had written a book with a mysterious title called At Swim-Two-Birds. My first published essay was called “Two Birds”. It’s not even a book to me, for God’s sake. It’s basically the story of my family, my childhood, my ancestry, my literary beginnings, the world in which I grew up.

As I mentioned, At Swim-Two-Birds anticipates the experimental meta-literature of today. The narrator that suddenly steps forward, looks right at the reader, and starts addressing us directly. The goofiness, the non-literal structure … things have no real substance, every event is malleable. The book is really about a young Holden Caulfield type narrator – a college student, who lives with his uncle, and basically lies around in his room smoking all day, dreaming up the great novel he will write. And then occasionally he goes out with his buddies and gets absolutely wasted. His uncle is horrified at what a loser his nephew is. he book also, fantastically, becomes about the entire history of Ireland – its myths, legends, old tales come back to life in a modern context. The novel the narrator is writing is about Fionn mac Cumhaill and also Mad King Sweeney – the dude 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 itself is the outline for another book … and at some point, the narrator loses control of his own characters. (I am reminded of Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction, in which the author gets lost in a parenthetical and cannot come out of it.) The characters start to behave in ways the author finds incomprehensible, they say and do whatever the hell they want – and he struggles to rein back them in. But once Pandora’s box is opened, Fionn mac Cumhaill and Mad King Sweeney stroll the modern streets of Dublin. They’re out. Flann O’Brien also directly references Joyce – especially in one section that is set up exactly like the famous ithaca episode in Ulysses (excerpt here) – with the call-and-response structure. Irish writers struggle to either be compared TO Joyce or defined AGAINST him … Either way, he can’t be ignored. Even when an Irish writer comes out and says, “You know what? I hate Joyce!” – it’s still evidence of the fact that Joyce dominates the landscape still, to this day. Flann O’Brien doesn’t wrestle with Joyce in private, he brings it on out into the open, and puts it all in his book. He doesn’t worry about structure or narrative. He lets Irish history – fanciful and literal – be unleashed. Ireland, so consumed by its own past (one of the things Joyce found so annoying and why he couldn’t live there), but here in At Swim-Two-Birds the past has come to life. It’s not a tale in a dusty book. It’s real people, stepping out of the pages of a manuscript, despite the author’s controlling intentions.

At Swim-Two-Birds is laugh-out-loud funny – although perhaps it’s very specific humor. I would imagine if Catch-22 (excerpt here) made you laugh out loud, At Swim-Two-Birds would, too. There is a laboriousness to some of the descriptions – they just 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 ridiculous. It’s observant. It’s hugely overwritten. You want to say to him, “Oh, get OVER yourself!” Who describes their own behavior that way??

The book’s influence is enormous, and I would imagine some of the hot-shot writers writing today are not even aware Flann O’Brien did it first, and in most cases, he did it better. He is the precursor of the self-conscious looking-in-mirror-at-self literature we see in vogue today.

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.

So happy birthday to Flann/Brian/Myles et al!!