NO LAUGHING MATTER by Anthony Cronin (First published by Grafton Books, 1989)
There are certain novels, like Robert Musil’s ‘The Man Without Qualities’, that I find too daunting to even attempt and others, such as Malcolm Lowry’s ‘Under The Volcano’ that I have tried but failed to complete.
‘At Swim-Two-Birds’ by Flann O’Brien was, until this year, gathering dust in my unfinished pile. I have Anthony Cronin’s candid and informative biography of O’Brien to thank for finally completing this short, comic but notoriously challenging novel.
Cronin skillfully puts the work into a literary and historical context while bluntly presenting the man behind it as a sad character.
First published in 1939, ‘At Swim-Two-Birds’ is widely lauded as O’Brien’s finest work even though the Irish author later spoke dismissively of it as a work of “juvenilia, public nose-picking”. It was postmodern before that term even existed and a work of meta-fiction long before this label was freely banded around at literary conventions.
The English novelist Graham Greene succinctly summarized the novel as “(a) a book about a man called Trellis who is (b) writing a book about certain characters who (c) are turning the tables on Trellis by writing a book about him”.
On the very first page the reader is given three separate openings so you know from the outset that this is going to be an unconventional and difficult read. You then have to come to terms with the elaborate and ornate style in which the author describes familiar objects and situations. Here, for example, is how he presents the experience of drinking a pint of beer: “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”.
But when you come upon a perfect sentence like “A smile passed his face without pausing on the way”, you know you are in the company of a real writer. When it’s funny, the novels within novels are hilarious so they reward readers who can put up with the confusing plots and eccentricities of the characters.
Flann O’Brien was born Briain Ó’Nuallàin in 1910, graduated from University College, Dublin, became a civil servant using the anglicized name Brian O’Nolan and gained a modicum of fame and local notoriety as an Irish times columnist under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen.
With all those names it is perhaps not surprising that O’Brien was a conflicted personality who, in his lifetime, never quite achieved the fame and fortune he so desired. He is presented as a shy, even anonymous figure. The writer, and occasional drinking companion, Brendan Behan once said of O’Brien that “You had to look twice to make sure he was there at all”.
Yet, although he gained a reputation as an aloof, unassuming figure, many also commented that “He could be difficult”, a common euphemism for someone who is frequently a pain in the ass. While Cronin never calls him an alcoholic he describes a life dominated, and ultimately diminished by drink.
In many ways O’Brien was man of contrasts. He was an intellectual who scoffed at the world of academia and although he dreamed of achieving mainstream popularity seemed incapable, or unwilling, to write the kind of simple story that would have helped him achieve this.
Cronin obviously has a lot of affection for a man he knew well by reputation and from personal experience. But despite being at pains to acknowledge the man’s obvious talents as a writer, he doesn’t shy away from listing his faults. O’Brien is described as “a man with no intellectual curiosity”; a puritanical philistine with “his own brand of Catholicism, with its dark, deterministic tendencies”.
Cronin believes that what he calls the “innate nihilism of his comic vision” stemmed from O’Brien’s strong Manichaean leanings. In this respect, a comparison can perhaps be drawn with another great Catholic novelist, Flannery O’Connor. Her novels and short stories similarly depict a world in which the balance of good and evil has irrevocably tipped towards evil.
Cronin’s perspective certainly helps make sense of the nightmarish surrealism of ‘The Third Policeman’, an ostensibly comic novel which turns Lewis Carroll’s reassuring notion that “Life is but a dream” firmly on its head. The absurdity of the story initially portrays a looking-glass world depicted as something to laugh at but ultimately his allegory of an inescapable Hell is, by O’Brien’s own account, “interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable”.
‘At Swim-Two-Birds’ is justifiably praised as an original, innovative novel but ‘The Third Policeman’ is, in my view, O’Brien’s true masterpiece. It is a huge ,and even tragic, irony that having failed to find a publisher, the disappointed O’Brien pretended that he had lost the manuscript for this novel which was published posthumously in 1967.
Who knows what might have happened if the brilliance of this work had been recognized at the time. As it was, O’Brien struggled gamely on, resigned to living in the shadow of the more famous Dubliner, James Joyce. The experimental nature of his work and inspired wordplay makes this comparison lazy but inevitable. It was a constant source of irritation to him; “If I hear that word ‘Joyce’ again I will surely froth at the gob” he once wrote to his publisher Timothy O’Keefe.
The frustration, disillusionment and innate nihilism dogged him to the very end of his life. In the month before he died, on April Fools’ Day 1966 , he wrote that anybody who “has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect”. No laughing matter, indeed.
