Flann OBriens Lies

Colm Tibn
Vol. 34 No. 1 5 January 2012, pages 32-36
There were three cities; each of them had known a certain glory. In each of
them, there was a sense that the glory was absent or ghostly, that the real
world was elsewhere, that the cities in which there was excitement, or cultural
completeness, or publishers and readers, were elsewhere. All three cities
remained untouched by the Second World War; they were not bombed, nor
were they transformed by reconstruction when the war ended. Even in the
1980s and 1990s it was possible to walk around many parts of these cities and
notice that nothing much had changed for many, many decades.
These were three capital cities in which politics and culture could be best
treated as a joke, or a game between dull factions, in which one faction would
remain dominant in a dormant or an indecent sort of way for many years.
These were difficult cities for young men with literary ambitions; they were
places in which both the present and the future seemed like a hundred years of
solitude. These three cities, in which three geniuses felt trapped, isolated and
dismayed, made their way slowly, inevitably into the essence of the writers
work. The cities both disabled them and gave them an immense imaginative
power, poisoned them and nourished them, made their spirits playful but made
two of them lock away some of their best work, allow it to gather dust.
The sense that there was no one much to read the work these writers were
producing ate its way into the tone and structure of the work itself. Their books
did not come from the world, their books became the world; in the beginning
was the word, but there was often nothing except the word and its hollow
echoes, and this gave their playful spirits an edge that was often melancholy,

often manic. The fact that these cities were the capital cities of ostensibly
Catholic countries did nothing to help. Yet out of the emptiness, out of the nonsacramental, at the heart of where they were, the three writers found words
and literary forms, old ones and hybrid ones, fascinating. Some dream impelled
them towards work, towards producing work which would eventually make
them famous.
The idea for them of what lay between the old and the hybrid, however,
was a problem; a great tradition in fiction in which characters had choices and
chances and possessions, and destinies to fulfil, was for them a great joke, a
locomotive in a siding whose engine was all rust. They began by dismantling
the escape routes and then removing the wheels. For them the notion of
character, and even identity, was to be undermined, or driven over. Then they
set out to undermine not only choice and chance and destiny, but the idea of
time and indeed space infinity and eternity would fascinate them and the
idea of form. It was not an accident that these three men had no children, that
they did not write about women, or, in the case of two of them, indulged in a
rare to medium-rare misogyny. When two of them married it came as a great
surprise to their friends; they seemed more at home (or more happily
desperate) as uneasy bachelors than fathers or husbands. All three, indeed, if
this is any of our business, may have died virgins. One of them took the view
that I have no ambitions and no desires. To be a poet is not my ambition, its
my way of being alone.
The cities in which they were alone were Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Dublin. The
writers were Fernando Pessoa, born 1888, died 1935; Jorge Luis Borges, born
1899, died 1986; Flann OBrien, born 1911, died 1966. Each of them was
brought up not only in a shadow country and city, or a place that felt as though

it lived now in the shade, but also with two or more languages and with an
often disruptive relationship between the languages. Language for them was
not nature, it was culture, it was strange and strained, it meant displacement,
unsettlement. They came into manhood trapped in a sour memory of a Tower
of Babel where there had once been ease. The idea of a mother tongue was a
sort of joke. All three of them were, for a time, educated at home or in libraries,
away from the company of other boys and the influence of teachers. They
made up their own world through their dreams and their displacements. Pessoa
lived in Durban in South Africa between the ages of seven and 17, returned to
Lisbon speaking English better than Portuguese; he wrote poems in English.
Borges had an English grandmother who lived with the family, and was brought
up speaking English and Spanish; he lived in Geneva between the ages of 15
and 22, speaking English, French and Spanish. OBrien spoke only Irish until the
age of nine or ten, when he began to speak English as well; he wrote in both
English and Irish.
Each of these writers made up new names for himself. Pessoa became,
among others, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Bernardo
Soares; Borges became, among others, B. Suarez Lynch and H. Bustos Domecq;
OBriens real name was Brian Nuallin and he also wrote under the name
Myles na gCopaleen. All three of them at various times worked out strategies to
present a fresh persona to the world as well as fiction in which they invented
further personae and indeed further worlds.
Borges was acutely conscious that the world he and Flann OBrien came
from, the narrow, isolated and hybrid culture which gave rise to them and in
which they struggled, was both restricting and liberating. In a lecture from
1951 called The Argentine Writer and Tradition, he discussed the energy and

sense of innovation that came from the margins. He believed, he wrote, that
the Argentine tradition is the whole of Western culture, and I also believe we
have a right to this tradition, a greater right than that which the inhabitants of
one Western nation or another may have. He went on to consider an essay by
Thorstein Veblen on the intellectual pre-eminence of Jews in Western culture.
Veblen wondered, Borges wrote,
if this pre-eminence authorises us to posit an innate Jewish superiority and
answers that it does not; he says that Jews are prominent in Western culture
because they act within that culture and at the same time do not feel bound to
it by any special devotion; therefore, he says, it will always be easier for a Jew
than a non-Jew to make innovations in Western culture.
Borges then considered the position of Irish writers in this context. We can
say the same of the Irish in English culture, he wrote.
Where the Irish are concerned, we have no reason to suppose that the
profusion of Irish names in British literature and philosophy is due to any social
pre-eminence, because many of these illustrious Irishmen (Shaw, Berkeley,
Swift) were the descendants of Englishmen, men with no Celtic blood;
nevertheless, the fact of feeling themselves to be Irish, to be different, was
enough to enable them to make innovations in English culture. I believe that
the Argentines, and South Americans in general, are in an analogous situation;
we can take on all the European subjects, take them on without superstition
and with an irreverence that can have, and already has had, fortunate
consequences.
The theory that modernism in literature was the invention of writers who
were Irish or Jewish or South American (or indeed homosexuals or expatriates)
did not begin as a theory, but as a practice; it did not begin as a plan, it began

as though by necessity, because for many writers there seemed to be no

choice. The tone of Borgess early stories and OBriens first novel, At SwimTwo-Birds, arose in the way an oasis, and the vegetation around it, will spring
up only in a desert. An oasis will not appear in a fertile plain. It is impossible to
write fiction filled with choices and chances and continuities in a society where
these things are thinly spread. In a society where there is no body of readers, it
is not easy to write with a reader in mind, a reader who wants a story in which
time is represented in a straight line and in which characters are filled with
feelings and longings, and in which plot satisfies some large set of rules which
insist on completion, and in which words represent what the dictionary states
they represent, and in which language is natural and part of a shared culture. It
is much easier to make a story or a novel in which the reader is already built-in
and which wrong-foots or even usurps the idea of reading. While novelists who
wrote in formed, settled and multi-layered societies held a mirror up to those
societies in all their variety or to the vicissitudes of the human heart, Borges
and OBrien and Pessoa held instead a mirage up to an oasis, the strange place
they came from which gave them their first taste of thirst. It is not an accident
or a mere whim on the part of writers that there is no Irish novel that ends in a
wedding. For OBrien, it was not even a question of how to end or begin a
novel, it was a question of an urgent need to put the kibosh on the novels
pained demands, put the tricks the novelist uses out of their misery by
exposing them and all their messy entrails.
As they worked, a spectre haunted both Borges and OBrien, the spectre of
a man who had faced the problem of setting a novel in a society which did not
have the possibility of progress, or where a young person could not easily face
his or her destiny without many obstacles, some of them comic, others to do

with race rather than class, or violence rather than love. The spectre of a man
who had used silence, exile and cunning as a way of dealing with social
paralysis and national demands. They were both haunted by the spectre of
James Joyce. Borges was, he proudly wrote in 1925, the first traveller from the
Hispanic world to set foot upon the shores of Ulysses. But this is not entirely
true. Instead he was, as he admitted, one of the first of the hordes who had
read the novel, but not personally. I confess, he wrote, that I have not cleared
a path through all seven hundred pages. I confess to having examined only bits
and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty
with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been
rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes. Since he never
wrote anything long himself, perhaps he can be forgiven for never reading
anything long either. And he was writing only three years after the publication
of Ulysses. He knew what he was looking for when he read certain chapters of
the book a way of breaking with standard narrative in fiction, a subject which
would preoccupy him greatly all his life. He saw this as part of an Irish tradition,
mentioning Swift and Sterne and Shaw. James Joyce is Irish, he wrote.
The Irish have always been famous for being the iconoclasts of the British
Isles. Less sensitive to verbal decorum than their detested lords, less inclined
to pour their eyes upon the smooth moon or to decipher the impermanence of
rivers in long free-verse laments, they made deep incursions into the territory
of English letters, pruning all rhetorical exuberance with frank impiety.
He needed Joyce to be Irish; he needed a mentor to be remote from the
centre and thus to be a writer who would, by necessity, break moulds; it could
somehow justify Argentina and its terrible distance from where life or letters
began.

Flann OBriens newspaper column was called Cruiskeen Lawn; it was

written for the Irish Times between 1940 and his death in 1966. In it there are
nearly a hundred references to Joyce. As a student at University College Dublin,
where Joyce had also gone, OBrien was given a copy of Ulysses by a poet
called Donagh MacDonagh, otherwise known as the national orphan, since his
father, Thomas MacDonagh, had been executed by the British for his part in the
1916 Rebellion. Later OBrien paid a visit to Joyces father, then living in
Drumcondra, where the best English is spoken, who was partly bedridden and
expressed the view that his son James should have pursued a singing career.
Towards the end of his life OBrien told an interviewer that Joyce was not a
shrine at which to kneel, though a man to be praised, also referring to him as a
toucher and a man who used to bum off people. Then he went on: I met him
in Paris several times. He was a morose, completely self-contained little man. I
was curious about him. I admired certain aspects of his work. He told another
interviewer that he had letters from Joyce, who asked me some years ago to
make some confidential inquiries on business and related matters I dont
think it would be proper to exhibit them publicly.
The statement that he had met Joyce several times in Paris was
completely untrue. OBrien never in his life met Joyce; nor did he ever receive
any letters from Joyce. Instead, naturally, he maintained an uneasy relationship
with him, since Joyce was the figure to whom he was most compared and who
had mattered to him enormously when he began as a writer, and thus the
figure whom he most wanted to get rid of, shrug off, half dismiss, or insist on
having had intimacy with, and mislead interviewers about. That is, after all,
what interviewers are for. That is also why we have lies (lying is simply the
souls ideal language, Pessoa wrote); lies are more honest ways of telling the

truth, especially if you are a novelist in Dublin and your first book, which was a
masterpiece, sold only 244 copies before the warehouse where the rest were
kept was destroyed by a German bomb 18 months after its publication. Under
these circumstances, the truth is never easy.
When At Swim-Two-Birds was published in 1939, OBrien discovered that a
friend, who knew Joyce, was travelling to Paris. He went to the boat with his
friend and at the gangway shyly handed him a copy of his book and asked him
to deliver it to Joyce. It was inscribed: To James Joyce from the author Brian
ONolan with plenty of whats on page 305. On page 305, the phrase
diffidence of the author was underlined. When Joyce was told about the book,
he remarked that Samuel Beckett had already read it and had praised it very
highly. When he then read the book, which was the last novel he read in his life,
Joyce said: Thats a real writer, with a true comic spirit. A really funny book.
He spoke to a French critic about having it reviewed.
OBrien remained grateful enough to Joyce to bite his hand at regular
intervals over the next three and a half decades. Beckett remembered meeting
OBrien in Dublin and telling him again that Joyce had read his book and liked
it. In 1967, when asked about OBriens reply, Beckett remarked that it was
best forgotten, but he told the novelist Aidan Higgins what OBrien had said
with what Higgins called emphatic distaste. OBrien, aware presumably that
Joyces wife had been a maid in a hotel, had called Joyce that refurbisher of
skivvies stories. As OBriens biographer Anthony Cronin rightly pointed out, it
is charitable to assume that ONolan had already begun to hear too much
about Joyces influence on his book from his readers in Dublin, whether friends
or enemies. In 1961 OBrien wrote to his editor: If I hear that word Joyce
again, I will surely froth at the gob. In his column he often referred to poor

Joyce or poor Jimmy Joyce, and on the 50th anniversary of Bloomsday he

wrote that Joyces few sallies at Greek are wrong, and his few attempts at a
Gaelic phrase absolutely monstrous. Nonetheless, in a later column he
praised Ulysses and insisted that for an understanding of the book all that was
needed was intelligence, maturity and some knowledge of life as well as
letters.
In an essay in 1951, OBrien displayed his passionate lifelong ambiguous
feelings aboutUlysses and its author, the man who, unlike OBrien, had
escaped. Perhaps the true fascination of Joyce lies in his secretiveness, his
ambiguity (his polyguity perhaps?), his leg-pulling, his dishonesties, his
technical skill, his attraction for Americans. He went on to say that Joyces
revolt against Irish Catholicism, while noble in itself, carried him away. And
then he wrote about one of the aspects of Joyce that mattered to him most, his
capacity for humour. Humour, he wrote,
the handmaid of sorrow and fear, creeps out endlessly in all Joyces work.
He uses the thing, in the same way as Shakespeare does but less formally, to
attenuate the fear of those who have belief and who genuinely think that they
will be in hell or in heaven shortly, and possibly very shortly. With laughs he
palliates the sense of doom that is the heritage of the Irish Catholic. True
humour needs this background urgency.
In his last novel, The Dalkey Archive, OBrien sought to bring Joyce back to
life, finding him work as a barman in Dalkey. Ive had it in for that bugger for a
long time, he wrote to his editor in London.
In an interview and, according to Anthony Cronin, often in conversation
OBrien cited a particular passage in Ulysses which gave him immense pleasure
and he knew by heart. It occurs when the caretaker of Glasnevin cemetery tells

the mourners at Paddy Dignams funeral about the two drunks who arrived at
the cemetery looking for the grave of their friend Terence Mulcahy from the
Coombe. Having blundered about in the fog, the two drunks finally found the
grave and were able to make out the name of their deceased friend inscribed
on the headstone. Then they looked at the statue over the grave, a statue of
Jesus. Having gazed at it for a while, one of the drunks commented: Not a
bloody bit like the man. Thats not Mulcahy, whoever done it.
This type of humour, irreverence moving towards the blasphemous, two
men managing to undermine art and death and holiness in one sharp, dry and
strangely poetic comment, made its way into At Swim-Two-Birds. It was not as
though it was stolen from Joyce and Joyce alone; it was the sort of humour that
belonged to the city. The story of the two drunks was the sort of tale that lived
a long and oft-told life in the streets and pubs of Dublin. Joyce had adapted it
for his own peculiar use, and now OBrien adapted it to his. Many of the jokes
in Ulysses are told by people who know that they are jokes (most of the time
they are too smart for things to be otherwise); but in a story in Dubliners such
as Grace the jokes arise because the reader knows they are jokes but the
characters in the story dont, they are too foolish for that. In one passage in
Grace, the men are sitting around the bed of one of their friends when Mr
Power remarks of Pope Leo XIII:
I often heard he was one of the most intellectual men in Europe. I mean
apart from his being Pope.
So he was, said Mr Cunningham, if not the most so. His motto, you know,
as Pope, was Lux upon Lux Light upon Light.
No, no, said Mr Fogarty eagerly. I think youre wrong there. It was Lux in
Tenebris, I think Light in Darkness.

Oh yes, said Mr McCoy, Tenebrae.

Allow me, said Mr Cunningham positively, it was Lux upon Lux. And Pius
IX, his predecessors motto, was Crux upon Crux, that is, Cross upon Cross to
show the difference between their two pontificates.
It is easy to find a sociological or historical root for this sort of comedy in a
city where many could not afford an education; where many, because of the
Church, knew the rudiments of Latin, enough to sound as if they knew more; in
a city where, more important, no one knew their place; where no one much had
money; where the status offered by class was not respected; where the upper
classes were mocked and despised rather than respected; where book-learning
or knowledge of the intricacies of the Catholic religion suggested the
beginnings of respectability; where swagger and mockery and half-informed
wisdoms wandered hand-in-hand as a way of amusing and entertaining the rest
of us.
In his novel, OBrien adapted some of the systems Joyce had put to good
use in Ulysses, such as the dry, official language of the newspaper report, full
of pompous fact, carried too far or reduced to absurdity: We are in a position to
announce that a happy event has taken place at the Red Swan Hotel, where
the proprietor, Mr Dermot Trellis, has succeeded in encompassing the birth of a
man called Furriskey. Or the use of questions and answers soon afterwards,
which reflects the shaping system of the Ithaca chapter inUlysses.
In what manner was he born?
He woke as if from sleep.
His sensations?
Bewilderment, perplexity.
So, too, there are echoes from The Dead, from the scene when Freddy

Mallins insists that a negro chieftain singing at the Gaiety Theatre has one of
the finest tenor voices hes ever heard, in the account in At Swim-Two-Birds of
Sergeant Craddock, the best man in Ireland at the long jump:
That was always one thing, said Shanahan wisely, that the Irish race was
always noted for, one place where the world had to give us best. With all his
faults and by God he has plenty, the Irishman can jump. By God, he can jump.
Thats the one thing the Irish race is honoured for no matter where it goes or
where you find it jumping. The world looks up to us there.
The discussion of the mottoes of the pope in Grace, filled with confident
learning and complete nonsense, has echoes also in the scene in At Swim-TwoBirds where the characters discuss the fiddle. Mr Lamont says: The fiddle is the
man for me look at the masterpieces of musical art you have on the fiddle!
Did you ever hear the immortal strains of the Crutch Sonata now, the whole
four strings playing there together, with plenty of plucking and scales and runs
and a lilt that would make you tap the shoe-leather off your foot? They go on
to discuss the piano and Furriskey announces: You have only half the story
when you say piano and half the notes as well. The word is pianofurty The
furty stands for the deep notes on your left-hand side. Piano, of course, means
our friends on the right. From there, our wits go on to discuss the Emperor
Nero:
The biggest ruffian of the lot Now that fellow was a thorough bags, say
what you like When the city of Rome the holy city and the centre and the
heart of the Catholic world was a mass of flames, with people roasting there in
the streets by the God Almighty dozen, here is my man as cool as you please in
his palace with his fiddle at his jaw. There were people there roasting alive
not a dozen yards from his door, men, women and children getting the worst

death of the bloody lot, Holy God can you imagine it Oh he was a terrible
drink of water.
So, too, the use of giant figures in At Swim-Two-Birds echoes moments in
the Cyclops episode of Ulysses, as indeed does the use of lists for comic effect.
Joyces centre of paralysis in Dubliners, filled with dampness and
melancholy, becomes OBriens centre of pure, bloody-minded, deliberate,
proud and oddly frenetic inertia. The only things that move are imaginative
constructs and language; most of the rest of the world can stay in bed or talk in
clichs. At Swim-Two-Birds takes elements from A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man the student as artist, for example. Both books include the lazy
student at the same university, with the same sort of friends; and both include
his life with a verbose older relative (the fathers job in A Portrait was
something in a distillery and the uncles job in At Swim-Two-Birds was holder
of Guinness clerkship the third class).
Ulysses and At Swim-Two-Birds also had in common a general interest in
exalting the inconsequential, letting it loose for a page or more, as you might
let a stray dog loose, for no clear purpose other than to cause pure amusement
or bewilderment in the reader or havoc in the narrative. Both books also took
on the business of myth and set about dismantling it and mocking it. Thus
the Odyssey was reduced in Ulysses to a days perambulations in a half-baked
city, its hero Bloom made, in a feat of genius, both anti-heroic and oddly heroic
at the same time, both small in his gestures and circumstances and oddly large
in the quality of what he notices and remembers, his imaginative footprint in
the world more real and powerful than any mythological hero. In At Swim-TwoBirds, ancient Irish mythology and the way it has been translated into English
(by people who barely knew how to speak Irish) is mocked, allowed to make a

nuisance of itself as it flies like Sweeney from place to place. It is allowed to lift
the novel from any possibility of realism, but it is mocked nonetheless for its
own dull foolishness and the clich-ridden terms in which it was rendered into
English by such as Standish OGrady, Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde, who
became president of Ireland at the time the book was being completed.
But it is too easy to make these connections between Joyce and OBrien
and too easy also to misread OBriens regular assaults on Joyce as an aspect of
his bitterness or his Dublin wit. In fact, At Swim-Two-Birds can be read as an
assault on Joyces ambitions, an attempt by a talented young writer to destroy
Joyces synthesising process, to dismantle the great controlling ambition and
mapped-out plenitude of Ulysses. The aim of Joyces book was not to destroy
the novel but to re-create it and make it larger, more inclusive, more faithful to
life and lifes complexities. The aim of At Swim-Two-Birdswas to lose control, to
take the pieces and refuse to reconcile them, to insist that it was too late for
such trickery. OBrien refused to believe that the writer re-creates the world,
but instead he set out to show that the world re-creates the writer, and that
both the writer and the world are, or might be, a set of illusions, highly
implausible, not even worth mistrusting, and that all we have fully to mistrust
are pages and the words on them. His radical mistrust has a way of making the
book seem at times desperate, melancholy, unsatisfactory, incomplete, a piece
of juvenilia. The critic Bernard Benstock, for one, feels that it displays a serious
lack of commitment in any direction on the authors part and what he called,
without it seems any irony, an irony without a centre of gravity.
The story of At Swim-Two-Birds is simple. An undergraduate at University
College Dublin who lives with his uncle is writing a novel about a novelist called
Dermot Trellis (OBriens contempt for artifice, or his faith in it, may be adduced

from the fact that the table he used for the purpose of writing his book was
made partly from a piece of garden trellising) whose characters come to life
and have to be accommodated in his hotel. When he is asleep (and both he
and the author the student, that is spend a great deal of time in bed; Trellis
is often drugged by his own characters) the characters come to life and he has
no control over them. The characters include some cowboys left over from a
Western novel, some Dublin characters, some figures from Irish mythology
including Mad Sweeney, whose lyrics have a spare, melancholy and at times
startling beauty as they appear on the page (at other times, there is a terrible
banality about the poetry in the book) and Trelliss son Orlick, who is also
writing a novel about his father. Eventually, part of Trelliss novel is burned by a
servant and Trellis is put on trial by the characters; in any case the characters
who emerged from those pages are no longer, by the end of the book, alive,
and Orlicks novel within the novel his father is writing within the novel the
student is writing within the novel Flann OBrien is writing also comes to an
end. This end is a great loss for literature, rivalled only perhaps by the burning
of the library of Alexandria or the arrival of the man from Porlock.
In an essay on At Swim-Two-Birds, John Cronin quotes a crucial passage in
Henry Jamess The Art of Fiction in an effort to find a context for the offences
the book commits against both art and, indeed, fiction. James wrote:
Certain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves away
which must often bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction
seriously. I was lately struck, in reading over many pages of Anthony Trollope,
with his want of discretion in this particular. In a digression, a parenthesis or an
aside, he concedes to the reader that he and his trusting friend are only
making believe. He admits that the events he narrates have not really

happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best.
Such a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime It
implies that the novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth than the
historian, and in doing so it deprives him at a stroke of all his standing room.
As Cronin pointed out, in his fiction OBrien committed this terrible crime
with enormous glee again and again. One might add that he did so with full
knowledge and full consent and, even afterwards, had no firm purpose of
amendment. Early in the novel, OBrien made his intentions clear:
A satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader
could regulate at will the degree of his credulity. It was undemocratic to compel
characters to be uniformly good or bad or poor or rich. Each should be allowed
a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living The entire
corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which
discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when
they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should largely
be a work of reference A wealth of references to existing works would
acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would
obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks,
upstarts,

thimbleriggers

and

persons

of

inferior

education

from

an

understanding of contemporary literature.

Having emphasised his attitude towards the art of fiction, OBrien also
needed to make clear that, even if he wished to create credible and original
characters, he would not be able to. In his efforts to describe the birth of
Trelliss son, he has to let us know that words fail him, that it was entirely
beyond my powers. This latter statement follows my decision to abandon a
passage extending over the length of 11 pages touching on the arrival of the

son and his sad dialogue with his wan mother on the subject of his father, the
passage being, by general agreement, a piece of undoubted mediocrity.
OBrien and his student novelist, and indeed Trellis, both father and son, all
suggest that chess pieces, or such mechanisms in a game, would have more
reality than characters in a novel: at least chess pieces are governed by rules
and have an aim in life. What OBrien calls the calm sorcery of chess has more
felt life in it than the self-evident sham known as the novel. And chess pieces
know their place. The characters in At Swim-Two-Birds do not.
In the first story of Borgess Fictions, the narrator discovers that his friend
Bioy Casares is in possession of a very special edition of the Anglo-American
Cyclopedia in which God, or a printer, or indeed someone in between in the
same business as gods and printers of making worlds come into being, had
created a special territory called Uqbar. So, too, in one of his Irish
Times columns written under the name of Myles na gCopaleen, OBrien offered
a service to readers who owned books but did not open them. For a fee, books
would be handled, with passages underlined or spines damaged or words such
as Rubbish or Yes, but cf Homer, Od. iii, 151 or I remember poor Joyce
saying the same thing to me written in the margins. Or inscriptions on the title
page such as From your devoted friend and follower, K. Marx. He even offered
his readers membership of the Myles na gCopaleen Book Club. You join this,
he wrote, and are spared the nerve-racking bother of choosing your own
books. We do the choosing for you, and, when you get the book, it is readyrubbed, i.e. subjected free of charge to our expert handlers.
Just as novelists of the 19th century had made a fetish of the world of
things (or words) like love, or destiny, or marriage, or money Borges, Pessoa
and OBrien made a fetish of the book. The solitary hero of Balzac and

Stendhal, the figure in Henry James confronting her destiny, Madame Bovary or
David Copperfield or even Moby Dick now became the unread or the unwritten
book or the newly discovered passage, or the section where the author has lost
control, or given up. In Pessoas The Book of Disquiet our hero muses: Why
should I care that no one reads what I write? I write to forget about life, and I
publish because thats one of the rules of the game. If tomorrow all my writings
were lost, Id be sorry, but I doubt Id be violently and frantically sorry. Later,
he writes: Perhaps the novel is a more perfect life and reality, which God
creates through us. Perhaps we live only to create it. Later, he refers to life as
the plotless novel. Borgess The Library of Babel begins: The universe
(which others call the Library).
The business of the book as an object which contains the world and
therefore does not require readers because it also contains its readers, since
they are merely part of the world, settles ironically, mysteriously and
sometimes savagely around OBrien. Mysteriously, because one of the 244
copies which were sold of At Swim-Two-Birdsbefore the warehouse was bombed
made its way to Argentina. This was 1939. Ireland, Portugal and Argentina were
about to become even more marginalised; Dublin, Lisbon and Buenos Aires
were about to become even stranger. Yet two months after its publication,
Borges

in

Buenos

Aires

reviewed At

Swim-Two-Birds in

Spanish

in

the

magazine El Hogar. He wrote:

A student in Dublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public
house, who writes a novel about the habitus of his pub (among them, the
student), who in turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along
with other writers of novels about other novelists. The book consists of the
extremely diverse manuscripts of these real or imagined persons, copiously

annotated by the student. At Swim-Two-Birds is not only a labyrinth: it is a

discussion of the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a repertory of
exercises in prose and verse which illustrate or parody all the styles of Ireland.
The magisterial influence of Joyce (also an architect of labyrinths; also a literary
Proteus) is undeniable but not disproportionate in this manifold book.
Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages
of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through
them at random, to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch
into other books help us sense this oneness.
Thus one copy of the book lived in Buenos Aires, and maybe even another:
because a friend of Borges and Bioys, Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, who moved his
literary enterprise as a poet, novelist and translator from Spanish to Italian in
1951, subsequently did the Italian translation of At Swim-Two-Birds. But no
publisher in the United States would touch it. In September 1939, OBrien wrote
to William Saroyan, who admired the book:
About that book the failure of American publication comes to me as a
distinct expectation. I knew all that. There is a great population in America but
not enough arty-tarty screwballs to go in for stuff like that in satisfactory
numbers. Joyce has the market cornered. Im forgetting about the book. Ive
got no figures but I think it must be a flop over here too. I guess it is a bum
book anyhow. I am writing a very funny book now about bicycles and
policemen and I think it will be perhaps good and earn a little money quietly. If I
finish it, I will instantly send you a copy and then you can pass it to Matson
[Saroyans agent] if you think he would not take offence.
At Swim-Two-Birds was finally published in the United States by Pantheon
Books in 1951 on the recommendation of James Johnson Sweeney. It was

reissued in London in 1960. Slowly, it began to capture readers, who came to

realise that OBrien had managed in 1939 to produce comedy out of a set of
systems which more than thirty years later many high priests and some high
priestesses of post-modernism and high structuralism and deep deconstruction
would win tenure for making serious.
In his book A Colder Eye, Hugh Kenner asked how OBrien dared to try to
suppress his own great book, The Third Policeman, which Kenner thought a
unique mature minor novel (whatever that is) compared to At Swim-Two-Birds,
which he thought a preternaturally gifted undergraduates jape. The Third
Policeman was written quickly after At Swim-Two-Birds. It was turned down by
publishers in 1940 and did not appear in print until 1967, a year after its
authors death. For a book that turns out to be about a dead man, Kenner
wrote, that has an eerie rightness. Once it was turned down, OBrien spread
many false rumours about it. He told one friend that it had been left on a train,
another that it had been mislaid in the Dolphin Hotel in Dublin, and another
that it had been blown page by page out of the car on his way to Donegal.

Its possible to guess, Kenner wrote, that he was somehow scared of it.
OBrien kept the typescript close by him, and mined parts of it for The Dalkey
Archive, which he published in 1964. Even when he needed money and his wife
pointed out to him that he had in his possession an unsold novel, he did not let
anyone see it. He got on with brilliant hackwork and manic drinking. He may
indeed, as Kenner says, especially before 1960, when he had a new
relationship with a London publisher, have been scared of the rejected book,
and have seen no reason why he should wait for it to be rejected once more, as
it probably would have been. But there are other, more interesting reasons for
keeping the book on a sideboard or in a drawer, gathering dust, its contents
known only to the author, who was slowly moving towards death.
I remember the last house he lived in, the modern bungalow in
Waltersland Road in the deep Dublin southside, how pretty and neat it all was,
almost like a toy house. Anthony Cronin writes of his last year:
In Waltersland Road he had appropriated the best room in the house, one
which was bright and sunny and had French doors into the garden. Into this he
moved the double bed which had belonged to his mother and father and here
he spent a great deal of time, sometimes writing in bed, always, except in
warmest weather, with the electric fire on.
Rather than being scared by the proximity of the manuscript of The Third
Policeman as he lay like Dermot Trellis in bed, the idea that the characters
from The Third Policeman had moved a step further towards pure autonomy
than the characters from At Swim-Two-Birds must have given him some
satisfaction as an artist. It is possible that the book did not, in these moments,
worry him, or scare him, but instead filled him with the same great satisfaction
as silence filled Beckett and John Cage, or ideas of eternity or infinity filled

Borges, as ideas of monotony and weariness filled Pessoa. OBriens characters,

as long as he lived, had their own life in black marks on the pages of the book;
day and night they lived there, with only one another for company, redemption
coming only when their creator passed into his final sleep, which he did on April
Fools Day 1966.