Flann O'Brien was one of the funniest writers who ever put pen to paper. Yes, he set the English novel ablaze with experimental fireworks that still dazzle. He was a brilliant linguist, who wrote Irish and Latin with witty fluency. He was a gifted playwright, who, if the Abbey and the Gate had been more receptive, might have gone on to rival O'Casey and Shaw. He was a legendary drinker whose great dictum—"A pint of plain is your only man"—has become the motto of the drinking classes around the world. He was an uncompromising satirist who subjected the pretensions and idiocies of his Irish compatriots to daily mockery in an incomparable Irish Times column. Yet more than anything else he was sublimely funny.

The Everyman's Library edition of the complete novels should gain many new readers for the work of an author who is still not as well known as he deserves to be. Born in Strabane, County Tyrone in 1911, the fifth of twelve children, Brian O'Nolan studied English, Irish, and German at University College Dublin before joining the Irish Civil service in 1935 where he was Private Secretary to successive Ministers for Local Government until 1953. In 1940, under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen, he began his famous column for the Irish Times, "Cruiskeen Lawn," which, translated back from the Irish, means "The Little Brimming Jug." His five novels—for this purpose he was Flann O'Brien—included At-Swim-Two-Birds (1939), which Graham Greene persuaded Longman to publish; The Third Policeman (1940), which Longman rejected (it wasn't published until 1967); The Poor Mouth (1941), which was originally written in Irish as An Béal Bocht; The Hard Life (1961); and The Dalkey Archive (1964). He died in 1966.

Flann O'Brien is often paired with Joyce. Both were masters of English prose, both looked askance at the pretensions of Irish nationalism (Joyce insisted on keeping his British passport, not only after the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922 but after the founding of Eire in 1937), both had an uneasy relationship with Irish Catholicism (O'Brien as a believer, Joyce as a proud apostate) but saw the reality of hell with the sensual vividness of Breughel and Bosch, both shared a fondness for the sort of elaborate leg-pull perfected by Swift and Sterne in the 18th century. Yet what both were supremely good at was capturing the music of Dubliners talking. When a character in Joyce's "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" recommends that the Irish welcome a visit from Edward VII, another objects: "Why should we welcome the King of England? Didn't Parnell himself …

—Parnell … is dead. Now, here's the way I look at it. Here's this chap come to the throne after his old mother keeping him out of it till the man was grey. He's a man of the world, and he means well by us. He's a jolly fine decent fellow, if you ask me, and no damn nonsense about him. He just says to himself: The old one never went to see these wild Irish. By Christ, I'll go myself and see what they're like. And are we going to insult the man when he comes over here on a friendly visit? …
—But after all … King Edward's life, you know, is not the very …
—Let bygones be bygones.

The Irish might have turned on Parnell after they discovered his affair with Kitty O'Shea, but they were willing enough to welcome the adulterous Edward VII once it became clear that his visit would "mean an influx of money into this country." For Joyce, the Irish were never above exchanging principle for pelf; betrayal was in their genes. But for O'Brien, the lesson of the master was different: to understand the Irish you had to listen to their blather.

In At-Swim-Two-Birds, O'Brien's first masterpiece, blather reigns supreme. One can hear it in the "voice-play" of Byrne and Kerrigan, friends of the book's student narrator, who is writing the book about the book he is writing about an author who is also writing a book:

You're a terrible man for the blankets, said Kerrigan. I'm not ashamed to admit that I love my bed, said Byrne. She was my first friend, my foster-mother, my dearest comforter … . Her warmth kept me alive when my mother bore me. She still nurtures me, yielding without stint the parturition of her cozy womb. She will nurse me gently in my last hour and faithfully hold my cold body when I am dead. She will look bereaved when I am gone.

Joyce makes a similar observation in Finnegans Wake: "the nice little smellar squalls in his crydle what the dirty old bigger'll be squealing through his coughin." The Irishman's attachment to his bed is driven by more than crapulence: it is an attachment to history, to matriarchy, to death itself. Between swigs of Guinness, Byrne reaffirms the ancestral necrophilia.

In another passage, aggrieved characters of the author Dermot Trellis speculate on how to speed their tyrannical employer to an early grave. "Steam rollers are expensive … what about a needle in the knee?" No, another recommends, "A cut of a razor behind the knee" would do the job better. This leads to a consideration of the nature of torture. "The refinements of physical agony … are limited by an ingenious arrangement of the cerebral mechanism and the sensory nerves … . Reason will not permit of the apprehension of sensations of reckless or prodigal intensity. Give me an agony within reason, says Reason, and I will take it, analyze it, and cause the issue of vocal admission that it has been duly received … . But go beyond the statutory limit, says Reason, and I won't be there at all. I'll put out the light and pull down the blinds. I will close the shop." Here O'Brien's blather reveals a fascination with savagery that gives this 1939 novel an oddly prophetic quality. Soon after its publication, Europe would devote itself to "the refinements of physical agony" as never before.

Then of course there is the Jumping Irishman:

Go where you like in the wide world, you will always find that the Irishman is looked up to for his jumping.
Right enough … the name of Ireland is honored for that.
Go to Russia … go to China, go to France. Everywhere and all the time it is hats off and a gra-ma-cree to the Jumping Irishman.

Readers intrigued by what could justify this boast will have to buy the Everyman edition to find out for themselves. Paraphrasing Flann O'Brien is not advisable—though requiring creative writing students to produce a Cliff Notes version of At-Swim-Two-Birds might be good fun. The first chapter introduces William Tracy, an author of cowboy books, all set in the Ringsend district of Dublin. Tracy is the first man in Europe to exhibit twenty-nine lions in a cage at the same time. Shorty Andrews and Slug Willard, two of his more popular characters, are described cantering up Mountjoy Square with their cowboy hats tilted back and their gun-butts swinging at their holsters. When not rounding up steers, these colorful cowpunchers gather in their Dublin bunkhouse where they smoke cigarettes and drink porter. Then there is a character called the Pooka MacPhellimey, described by O'Brien as "a member of the devil class." And so on.

O'Brien's second masterpiece, The Third Policeman, is only slightly less unparaphrasable, including as it does a detective story, a portrait of law enforcement in rural Ireland, a touching tale of unrequited love between a man and his bicycle, and the animadversions of de Selby, the visionary polymath, who, among many other distinctions, designs alternatives to Dublin's row houses. One design

had the conventional slated roof but no walls save one, which was to be erected in the quarter of the prevailing wind; around the other sides were the inevitable tarpaulins loosely wound on rollers suspended from the gutters of the roof, the whole structure being surrounded by a diminutive moat or pit bearing some resemblance to military latrines. In the light of present-day theories of housing and hygiene, there can be no doubt that de Selby was much mistaken in these ideas but in his own remote day more than one sick person lost his life in an ill-advised quest for health in these fantastic dwellings.

In The Dalkey Archive, James Joyce repents of his apostasy by mending the underclothing of Jesuits. The shrewd critic in O'Brien describes the darling of the academy seeing the light only after "the lonely exertion of keeping pace with a contrived reputation … finally put the delicate poise of his head out of balance." In The Hard Life the blather turns to games:

—Were you a hurler?
—In my part of the country …
we went in for football … .
—That's good. The native games for the native people. My dad and I see young thullabawns of fellows got out in baggy drawers playing this new golf out beyond on the Bull Island. For pity's sake sure that isn't a game at all.

The Poor Mouth is in a class by itself, a parody of Gaelic reminiscences, like Tomas Ó Criomhthain's The Islandman (1937), originally written in Gaelic. In Corkadoragha, O'Brien's Gaelic inferno, the ingenuous narrator asks his grandfather: "Do you think … that there will ever be good conditions for the Gaels or will we always have nothing for ever but hardship, famine, [and] nocturnal rain?" To which the old man replies, "We'll have it all … and day-rain with it." The target of the satire was not the Gaeltacht or the Gaelic language, for both of which O'Brien had profound respect, but the town-bred jackanapes who claimed to revere both without knowing anything about them. If hell in The Third Policeman has a phantasmal quality, in the rain-sodden wastes of Corkadoragha it is relentlessly down-to-earth, though now that the nouveaux riches of the Celtic Tiger find themselves in an altogether stranger hell, they might begin to look back on this more primitive variety with a kind of nostalgia.

After Longman rejected The Third Policeman, O'Brien largely devoted himself to his column, which was a setback for comic fiction (the later novels, whatever their charms, don't begin to compare to the first two) but a boon for readers of the Irish Times.Admirers of the work of Flann O'Brien can only hope that Knopf Everyman will mine the rich hoard of non-fictional writings that this brilliant man left behind for a second and equally handsome omnibus edition—one which, I hope (for I do hope), does not omit this bleak little gem:

I met a poor man who was a stranger to these parts who asked me to direct him somewhere … . Then he pointed to a big building and said what's that. I said that's the Bank of Ireland. He said what do they be doing in there. Well, I said, banks lend money, you know. He looked wistfully at the Old House and said I wonder would they lend me ten bob. Why not try I said. Begor I think I will, he answered, a yellowish suffusion of worthless diluted blood mounting through his second-hand face, a symbol that the last thing to die in each of us is hope. Grey carrion soul-mincing hope, the one quality above all others that makes the human creature ridiculous and pathetic.

Edward Short's book about Cardinal Newman and his contemporaries will be published in June 2010 by Continuum.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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