A Quare One

I sensed him looking at me as I sat in the tobacco fug of the Palace Bar in Dublin’s Fleet Street back in the ’60s engrossed in Joyce’s Dubliners. His scrutiny from the adjacent bar stool was unsettling. Suddenly, without apology, he tapped his finger on the page and nodded at me, signalling silent approval of my choice of book. Fixing my eye, he asked: ‘Did you ever hear of O’Brien?’ I shook my head. ‘Now there’s a hard man who runs Joyce close,’ he said. Then, pausing for dramatic effect, he added portentously: ‘And it was in this very bar he’d be drinking.’ Flann O’Brien, who loved to parody pub conversations, would have relished the bathetic conclusion. But I owe to that chance acquaintance a great debt. Over the next hour, he introduced me to the writing of a drunk and waspish comic genius who stretched the boundaries of literary invention and became a legend of Irish letters.

Flann O’Brien was the nom de plume of Brian O’Nolan, an Irish civil servant born in Tyrone in 1911. In his suit, overcoat and broad-brimmed hat (it was joked that he wore the same clothes for forty years) he cut an unremarkable figure in the peat-fumed streets of the grey backwater that was then Dublin. There was nothing of the bohemian about him; no Behanesque swashbuckling, no Wildean flamboyance. But O’Nolan’s conventional appearance masked a bizarrely fecund imagination that was fuelled by his prodigious knowledge of Irish and European literature as well as Celtic folklore and legend, leading his friend the literary critic Niall Montgomery to describe him as an ‘Aristophanic sorcerer’. Piling lunacy upon lunacy, he created beautifully written edifices of the absurd in which fictional characters create other fictional characters who come alive, bicycles take on human characteristics and vice versa, St Augustine appears in an underwater cave, and a crazed savant believes that night is an ‘unsanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air’. He has been bracketed with Joyce and Samuel Beckett (admirers, along with Jorge Luis Borges). But he is much funnier and maybe his work is better compared to Laurence Sterne’s idiosyncratic Tristram Shandy. O’Nolan was the third child in a family of twelve born to gentle and cultured Agnes Gormley and her customs officer husband Michael Nolan. He studied German, Irish and English at Dublin’s University College and won a reputation as a brilliant wit and impromptu speaker. His flair for outrageous comedy flowered in the college paper under the pen name Brother Barnabus. His fondness for drink flowered in the students’ favourite pub, Grogan’s in Lower Leeson Street. In 1935, O’Nolan entered the Department of Local Government where he worked for the next nineteen years before being dismissed. Increasingly acerbic attacks in his satirical newspaper column ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, which he had been writing under the Irish name of Myles na gCopaleen (Myles of the Ponies) since 1940, played a part. So, too, did his startling consumption of alcohol. That O’Nolan retained his job for so long is a credit to his employer’s tolerance. He excelled at the post, yet it bored and frustrated him. As his biographers Peter Costello and Peter van de Kamp point out, he would arrive at his office in the morning and complete in 90 minutes the amount of work his colleagues did in a full day. Then, leaving his hat and coat on a stand (that old trick), he would set out on a tour of the Dublin pubs: the Palace Bar and now vanished Scotch House on Burgh Quay were among his favourites. With commendable discipline, he usually stopped in time to peel through his front door by 4 p.m. O’Nolan completed his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, in the year he joined the Civil Service and when he was resubmitting his university thesis on ‘Nature in Irish Poetry’. Drawing on multiple strands of Irish literary history, and at times on his thesis, the book purports to be a novel by an indolent and boozy student of literature. But the student warns us at the start: ‘I reflected on the subject of my spare time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and interrelated only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.’ We are given three potential beginnings. The first concerns the Pooka McPhelimy, a ‘member of the devil class’ who we find sitting in his hut in the middle of a wood, ‘meditating on the nature of numerals. . . and toying with a snuffbox of perfect rotundity’. In the second John Furriskey is born at 25 with a memory ‘but without a personal experience to account for it’. The protagonist of the third is Finn McCool, a hero of old Ireland so large that ‘each of his thighs was as thick as a horse’s belly, narrowing to a calf as thick as the belly of a foal’. From this point, apparent chaos sets in as characters multiply and interweave to form stories within stories in a fantastical labyrinthine blend. Furriskey is the creation of the writer Dermot Trellis whose characters come alive when he sleeps. Furriskey befriends Trellis’s further inventions of Paul Shanahan and Anthony Lamont, contemporary archetypes of lower middle-class Dublin. Resenting the author’s authority over their lives, the three characters plot revenge. They are helped by the Pooka and by Trellis’s bastard child Orlick, born as an adult after Trellis was so blinded by the beauty of his mother – his own fictional creation – he assaulted her. Are you still with me? Meanwhile, famed Finn morosely recites in the background the sufferings of mad Sweeney, King of Dal Araidhe, who suffers unspeakable physical torments, is turned into a bird and lives off watercress. Occasionally we are brought back to the present as the student develops his ‘plot’ in discursive ruminations with his friends Kelly and Brinsley, drink lubricating their discussions. This is madness, but it is seamless madness in which the reader is captivated and almost overwhelmed by the erupting stories. In all, the sheer fertility of O’Nolan’s surreal invention is matched by his masterful use of language and, particularly, his gift for rendering Dublin speech. Here is Shanahan telling Furriskey and Lamont of the poet Jem Casey whose finest achievement is ‘Workman’s Friend’, a doggerel paean to porter.

He was a poet of the people, said Shanahan. I see, said Furriskey. Now do you understand, said Shanahan. A plain, upstanding labouring man, Mr Furriskey. A black hat or a bloody ribbon, no by God, not on Jem Casey. A hard-working wellmade block of a working man, Mr Lamont, with the handle of a pick in his hand like the rest of us. Now say there was a crowd of men with a ganger laying a length of gas pipe on the road. All right. The men pull off their coats and start shovelling . . . here at one end of the hole you have your men crowded up together in a lump and them working away and smoking their butts and talking about the horses and one thing and another. Do you follow me? I see that. But take a look at the other end of the hole and there is my brave Casey digging away there on his own. Do you understand what I mean, Mr Furriskey? None of your horses or your bloody blather for him. Here is my nabs saying nothing to nobody but working away at a pome in his head with a pick in his hand and the sweat pouring down off his face . . . that’s a quare one.

At Swim was published, largely thanks to a recommendation by Longman’s reader Graham Greene, in 1939. But despite tributes from Dylan Thomas (‘it establishes Mr O’Brien in the forefront of contemporary Irish writing’) and Joyce (‘That’s a real writer with the true comic spirit’), it sold only 244 copies in six months before most of the remaining stock was destroyed when Longman’s London warehouse was bombed. Reissued in 1960, At Swim has since been extolled as a masterpiece of linguistic virtuosity. Discouraged by the lack of sales O’Nolan embarked in 1940 on a second novel, the equally extraordinary The Third Policeman. In its own outlandish way this book, regarded by many as the author’s finest achievement, is more cohesive. It is shorter than At Swim and progresses in what might generously be called a linear fashion. But, good heavens, it is no less loopy. Where to start? A one-legged murderer converses with his dead victim, a man incapable of saying yes. In the company of his own soul, a solicitous presence he names Joe, he journeys in search of the man’s black box which he believes contains huge wealth. His journey takes him through an ‘other’ dimension in which the world is recognizably Irish, yet in which all normal laws are suspended or modified. Arriving at a country barracks, a building which changes its appearance as it is approached, he encounters the formidable figure of police sergeant Pluck. Pluck and his colleague MacCruiskeen believe in the transference of atoms between man and bicycle and occasionally repair to Eternity – reached by a lift – where they take inexplicable readings from a machine. The whole is interspersed with annotated disquisitions, citing a raft of spurious references, on the works of the crazed scientist de Selby. Among other eccentricities, de Selby believes that human existence is ‘a succession of static experiences, each infinitely brief ’, that the earth is sausage-shaped and that sleep is a succession of fainting fits brought on by asphyxiation due to volcanic smuts which form the darkness of night. There is serious intent behind this demented exercise of imagination, however, for at heart this is an exploration of guilt and retribution. The full horror behind our protagonist’s weird dream journey is made clear in the final sentence which reads, apparently inoffensively enough: ‘Would it be about a bicycle?’ O’Nolan was justifiably proud of the book and stunned by its rejection by Longman’s. He subsequently pretended that he had lost the script in a pub. It was finally published to acclaim in 1967, a year after its author had died. At Swim and The Third Policeman represent, I think, O’Nolan at his peak. Yet The Dalkey Archive (1964) – in which both bicycle ‘mollycules’ and de Selby reappear – achieved greater success in his own lifetime and was perhaps for that reason his favourite. His other two novels The Hard Life (1973), an ‘exegesis of squalor’, and The Poor Mouth – a merciless satire of the Gaelic language movement originally published in Gaelic as An Beal Bocht – are today less well regarded. Better to retire to The Best of Myles, a collection of O’Nolan’s ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ columns in the Irish Times, in which parodies and appalling puns jostle with sustained comedy, acute satire and absurd fantasy. It is believed that he wrote letters to the paper complaining about the column. O’Nolan died on April Fool’s Day, 1966. While in hospital, he was visited by friends Hugh Leonard and Phyllis Ryan who brought a bottle of Paddy whiskey. Leonard recalled: ‘He eyed the Paddy and at once rang a bell which summoned a little nun. “Sister,” he told her solemnly, “I have two friends who are constipated and need a dose. Would you bring two glasses?”’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 41 © Patrick Welland 2014