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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Only a fool would attempt to summarize the plot of "At Swim-Two-Birds." Here goes: An unnamed narrator is writing a book about a writer named Dermot Trellis who, it happens, is also writing a book. But Trellis' characters want to be left alone and conspire to keep Trellis asleep as much as possible. Trellis stays awake long enough to create a female character, Sheila Lamont, who bears his child. To be honest, even though I've read the book three times, I kind of lose the thread at this point. I do know that the story involves "the Pooka Fergus MacPhellimey, a species of human Irish devil endowed with magical powers," the great Irish hero Finn McCool (who I think is identified somewhere as Sheila Lamont's father), and "a cellar full of leprechauns."
There are also two American cowboys borrowed from a pulp novel by someone named William Tracy, though I'm pretty sure Tracy was not a real writer at all but another fictional creation of Dermot Trellis -- or maybe of the unnamed narrator. Or maybe of O'Brien himself; it's hard to tell. Trellis, says the narrator, "wants this salutary book to be read by all. He realizes that purely a moralizing tract would not reach the public. Therefore he is putting plenty of smut into his book. There will be no less than seven indecent assaults on young girls and any amount of bad language. There will be whiskey and porter for further orders."
There was also a long "pome" by "the Workman's Friend," Jem Casey, each verse of which ends with the phrase "A Pint of Plain Is Your Only Man." Sample:
"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."
I'm fairly certain this is a parody of something, though I'll be damned if I know of exactly what (of the working-class-hero persona of playwright Sean O'Casey, I would imagine).
If I've gotten off the novel's plot, it's because I don't know how to follow it. Written in a style I can only describe as "stream of self-consciousness," "At Swim-Two-Birds" has been called the successor to "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake" (though O'Brien himself was often infuriated by the comparison: "If I hear of that word 'Joyce' again," he once wrote, "I will surely froth at the gob!"). It has also been called, by Hugh Kenner, "a prolonged college joke." If it is, it's a joke I don't understand but that I find irresistibly funny in the telling. Graham Greene compared "At Swim" favorably with "Tristram Shandy"; I'd say it's what "Tristram Shandy" might have read like if written by a 20th century Irishman fixated on Groucho Marx.
The book that should have established O'Brien's reputation, "The Third Policeman," was rejected by a publisher in 1940. For reasons that have never been made clear, O'Brien did not try another publisher and continued to live his life as a minor civil servant and pseudonymous columnist. "The Third Policeman" is a kind of phantasmagorical crime story in which a petty thief and murderer finds himself trapped in a cosmic police station where he learns about atomic theory and the intertwined destinies of men and bicycles -- yes, I know what you're saying, "That old plot again." In O'Brien's hands, though, it is something entirely original. For one thing, the narrator, who is also the murderer, is himself dead through nearly the entire story. (Trust me, it won't spoil the book for you to know that.) Try and imagine a pre-"Brideshead Revisited" Evelyn Waugh reinvented as an Irishman writing the script for "Carnival of Souls," and you're halfway to understanding what "The Third Policeman" is about. O'Brien would have cackled with glee at the irony that his novel about a dead man would go unpublished until 1967, a year after his death.
For a failure, O'Brien actually left behind quite an oeuvre. Two works of fiction, "The Hard Life" (1961) and "The Dalkey Archive" (1964), made it into print before he died; the latter features no less than St. Augustine and James Joyce himself among its characters. (O'Brien's Joyce maintains that "Ulysses" was written in Paris by a committee of pimps and thugs.) "The Poor Mouth," which O'Brien, in a particularly perverse mood, wrote in Gaelic, was finally translated into English in 1973. You really don't have to know that it is a parody of a typical Gaelic autobiography or even that such a thing exists. I didn't, and I laughed myself sick before I was 20 pages into it. (Actually, by Page 5, where the narrator's mother "took a bucket full of muck, mud, and ashes and hens' droppings from the roadside and spread it around the hearth, gladly in front of me. When everything was arranged, I moved over near the fire and for five hours I became a child in the ashes -- a raw youngster rising up according to the old Gaelic tradition.")
That passage will give you an idea of O'Brien's attitude toward most of the absurdities he saw around him that were accepted as typically Irish. In one of the columns included in "The Best of Myles," the most curmudgeonly satisfying compilation of his newspaper columns, he dismisses a seminar on Irish culture as a "virulent eruption of paddyism." In another collection, "Flann O'Brien at War," he implored readers, "If you are Irish, write and tell me about it. Write frankly, secure in the knowledge that no eye other than my eye will peruse your communication. Explain what it feels like to be Irish. State at what age you first realized you were an Irish person. When did you have your first fight? At what age did you make your first 'Irish' witticism? At what age did you become a drunkard? Please tell me all, because there can be no cure until the pathological background has been explored ... It is in your own interests to tell all. Remember that I too was Irish. Today I am cured. I am no longer Irish. I am merely a person. I cured myself after many years of suffering. I am sure I can help you if only you will have faith in me and write to me in confidence. Mark your envelope Irish in the top left hand corner."
Cured indeed. If you're looking for an antidote to the virulent eruptions of paddyism in your neighborhood, switch off "The Quiet Man" on St. Patrick's Day and curl up with Flann.
