Flann O'Brien Part II

Flann O’Brien was one of the few serious writers who lived in Ireland, but he made his living partly through journalism and his regular job in the Civil Service. (In fact he rarely went away from his native land even on holiday). 

He was an odd mixture of conformism and a certain cynical rebellion. He was too intelligent to believe that the Gaels were a superior people… he was only too well aware of the country’s poverty and the fact that without the safety valve of emigration, the state would struggle to run with some degree of efficiency.  He himself was a fluent Irish speaker, but knew that the politicians, who claimed to be devoted to the Irish language, often only knew a few words.  It was a burden on schoolchildren who had to learn it, even though it was of little practical use to them.

His newspaper column was often mocking politicians and public servants generally.  He liked to attack inefficiency, hypocrisy and corruption. However in general he was apolitical and conservative in attitude, feeling that human nature was irredeemably flawed and not expecting much of it.  He seemed to accept the isolationist narrow attitudes of many Irish people of the time when he might have been expected to rebel against them. 

He was always a heavy drinker, eventually descending into full blown alcoholism.  This affected his ability to hold down his civil service post, in later years and to write.  It may be one reason why he wrote less as he grew older and his work was less than successful.

He retired early from the service, due to increasingly poor health and having some arguments with the Service bosses about his journalism.  Having only a small pension, and a wife to support, he had to become a full time writer.  However he was having more trouble with producing newspaper columns and while he tried to write fiction, his health problems and his drinking slowed him down.

He had been committed to financially supporting his widowed mother and his siblings for many years. As his brothers and sisters grew up and were off his hands, he finally reached a point where he was free to marry. He married Evelyn McDonnell, a typist in the Civil service. The marriage seemed happy. However his alcoholism made him a difficult husband at times. Also, like many men in Ireland at the time, he was inexperienced with women, living mostly in male bachelor company, as a young man.

He grew up with a very distant father, who was affectionate but far from “hands on”, and he and his brothers were initially educated at home. Flann’s father Michael O’Nolan was a highly intelligent man and an Irish speaker, and they were well taught.  However they were then sent to school and found that they were teased and bullied for being different, a small united group of brothers who clung together.  Also discipline at the Christian Brothers schools and other religious schools was often extremely harsh. In some of his writing, he attacked the viciously cruel attitude of many of the religious teachers who took out their sadistic impulses on their pupils.

Possibly the sudden change from learning at home, with sympathetic family around him, to the harsh atmosphere of a school had a bad effect on him mentally.

Unlike James Joyce, who rejected the narrowness of Ireland in the last years before independence; Flann O’Brien seems to have been unwilling to rebel.  Joyce’s father was not very reliable and it may have been easier for the young James to reject the values of his foolish father and the puritanically Catholic Ireland, than it was for O’Brien to criticise the culture of his well loved father.  Michael O’Nolan, O’Brien’s father was a passionate supporter of Irish independence and of the Catholic Church and the Gaelic Language

Flann criticised the more nonsensical aspects of the language revival, but he was a fluent Irish speaker himself, and was a Catholic...

. Like many Irishmen of the time, he had little contact with women, and married late. He was somewhat misogynistic, and seems to have had almost no women friends, which wasn’t uncommon at the time.  

His life was stressful, and his dependence on alcohol was the only way he could relieve it.  After leaving the Civil Service, in the early 50s, his drinking grew heavier.  Now, he was in and out of hospital trying to dry out, or to recover form illnesses.

He perhaps had indeed peaked too early with At Swim Two Birds, and none of his other novels had been as good… As his drinking problem got worse, he felt that he had dissipated his talent in journalism and had not been able to concentrate on his creative work.  Had the war not happened, he might have made more money and had greater success with the first book and been able to work his way towards becoming a full time writer and producing more and better books.

His marriage seems to have been reasonably happy, though little is known about it, but it is hard to say if marital problems played a part in pushing him to drink more and more. By the 1960’s his alcoholism was a serious problem and he developed cancer, possibly caused by drinking and smoking heavily. He died, on 1^st April 1966..

Hoyt Axton

Hoyt Axton was born in Oklahoma in 1938, to a father who was an officer in the American Navy, and a mother  (Mae Axton) who was famous for writing the Elvis hit, Heartbreak Hotel.  (She also introduced Elvis to Col Tom Parker).  Hoyt was brought up for some time in Florida.  He was in the American Navy for a time and then in the early 60s, he started out singing folk songs, in San Francisco.  

The Folk revival in the 1960s, which led the Irish Clancy brothers to fame, has been portrayed in the film Inside Llewyn Davies..  

 Axton had a warm personality and a deep and sweet country voice, and he started to act in movies and TV, as well as singing.  He had a part in Bonanza, and many other TV shows.

He wrote many songs that were made famous by other singers, but one his best is the well-known “Della and the Dealer”…

He struggled with cocaine addiction for many years, but eventually had a stroke and died, sadly at the far too early age of 61.  I remember Hoyt particular in Dukes of Hazzard, where he annoys Boss Hogg with the song he sings when caught in Roscoe’s Speed Trap.  The song he chooses is called “I’m the cop in a little Southern town”, about a corrupt sheriff

Flann O'Brien and his life part I

Flann O’Brien’s novels were some of my favourites in my 20s and when I got married, my partner got into them too.  He hadn’t heard of him before but when he did read a few - he felt that there was some influence on the British writer Robert Rankin.  (Given that many of Rankin’s novels have bizarre events and a pub somewhere in them!).

My husband and I loved to “swap information” on writers and TV programmes we liked.  He got me to watch Morse; I got him to like O’Brien.  

I recently re-read “An Beal Bocht” which is one of Flann O’Brien’s funniest works… and I have been reading a biography of him, by Anthony Cronin, a fellow writer.

Because he was a very private man, Cronin found it hard to analyse him.  Perhaps there will be a more in depth biography at a later date.

He was certainly an interesting character... Possibly, according to some critics, he “peaked too early” as a novelist and never wrote anything again to equal his first book “At Swim Two Birds”.
This is a “meta fiction” which derives much of its humour from mocking the conventions of fiction.  

The “hero” Dermot Trellis, is a student as Flann was – at University College Dublin. Trellis spends a lot of his time in bed, wasting time and refusing to study – and drinking. James Joyce attended the same university, and his hero Stephen, is also a student at UCD… Trellis is writing a novel but his characters rebel against him.  They write novels too, and attempt to kill him off.

O’Brien admired Joyce but was somewhat hostile to him because of his pretentiousness... He also felt that his own work was sometimes seen as “inferior Joyce”.  “At Swim Two Birds” later attracted a lot of critical attention, but it was published at the beginning of World War II and suffered from that. Paper shortages meant that newspapers were smaller and had less space to bestow on literary criticism. There was a lot going on in the world and a peculiar off beat novel like O’Brien’s was likely to fall by the wayside.

In addition, southern Ireland had adopted a position of neutrality in WWII and this greatly affected people in the country at the time.  In fact, all in all, during the first 40 years of independence, Ireland – having severed its connexion with the British Empire - seemed to  develop a condition of “being isolated form the rest of the world”. 

This involved emphasising that the new “Free State” (and the Republic as it became later) was purer, more religious and moral, more “Catholic” than the rest of the world, particularly England.  It also involved keeping the world at bay and refusing to get mixed up in its affairs.  When World War II broke out, the Irish polity refused to get involved in it, because they did not want to support England and some sympathised with Nazi Germany.  
 In truth, the country was desperately poor, and only survived by keeping the population small.  People emigrated, because there were no jobs, and because the narrow economy simply could not support the people who were there.  In addition, the restrictive and puritanical conformism of the culture stifled people.  Those who were willing to be open to the world, or who didn’t accept the prevailing orthodoxy, took the emigrant ship and took their “non conformity” elsewhere.  Literature was one of the casualties resulting from this attitude.  Most serious Irish writers had at least one of their works “banned” by the Censorship Board; most of them lived abroad part of the time because in any case, such a small impoverished and narrow community couldn’t support writers.

Helen Dore Boylston

Helen was born in 1894 in New Hampshire and died, after years of ill health in 1984, at a nursing home in New England.

She was the daughter of Joseph and Fannie Dore Boylston.   She was a lively girl and her nickname in the family was "Troub" as short for Trouble!
 She trained as a nurse, having considered being a doctor like her father.  She studied at the famous Massachusetts General hospital in Boston.
After her training, she joined a medical unit which supported the British army, and went to Europe.  She worked hard during World War One and found the work satisfying – more so than hospital work.  Then she spent some time, when the war was over, working with the Red Cross in Poland but found the work was done in an isolated fashion. She missed the companionship of war work.

She returned to Boston and Massachusetts General, where she taught anaesthesia, (an interest she gave to one of her characters, Connie).  She had met Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, of “Little House on the Prairie” fame when she was abroad.   Rose was working in the literary and newspaper world and she read Helen’s war diary and had it published.

In the 1920s she returned to Europe and the Red Cross again, for a few years - and dabbled in writing, using the various kinds of nursing that she had experienced. In 1926, she and Rose Wilder travelled to Albania in an old car and lived there for a time, both of them writing.  She loved adventure and her work and wondered if, it had not been for the War, she would have settled for the feminine path of getting married and giving up her nursing. But her wartime service had created an appetite for “living life” and adventure in her, and she clearly felt that she could not give it up, to settle into conventional marriage.

I haven’t been able to find a biography of Helen Boylston, but I have loved her “Sue” books from childhood. If I weren’t so squeamish, I might have considered nursing or medicine.

but I’d love also to know more about her than the few internet articles that I’ve traced.

After Albania, she returned to America with Rose, and they shared a house for a time. Helen had inherited some money and wanted to devote herself to writing.

Rose was also a writer who edited her mother’s tales of life on the prairie…and was a political journalist.

Helen had been partly financially independent but she lost money in the Crash and had to return to nursing for a time.

Then in the 1930s, she began her series of “young adult” nursing novels about “Sue Barton”.  They were a hit... very popular with girls who were interested in a nursing career. At the time, few women became doctors but nursing had a shorter training, and many girls were keen on the idea.  The idea of being “angels” looking after the sick or “Florence Nightingale” was very popular among young girls, but Helen’s novels were realistic about nursing and about growing up (within the limits of the young adult fiction genre).

 

Sue is not a rabidly ambitious career girl… yet she wants to work, for a few years once she qualifies as a nurse.  So she insists on going to New York to nurse in the Henry St settlement, among the poor. She wants to “help her husband” in his work when he plans to become a country doctor.  She works with him as hospital superintendent in his new country hospital for the first three years of her marriage but then gives up for some years, to have children.  However, when Bill Barry, her husband, becomes ill, and has to go to a Sanatorium, Sue returns to work as a staff nurse. For the time, she is a good role model for women wanting to go on working after marriage.  She gives up her staff nurse job again, when Bill recovers... Still she often helps out as a substitute district nurse, and it seems likely that (like Nurse Pat Glennon in the last book) she will return to work when her children are older.

Boylston also wrote a series of “Girls career novels” about acting, when she had gotten Sue “married off and having a baby”...  

For this series, she created Carol Page, a budding actress, getting information about acting training from a friend, Eve Le Gallienne. Later she returned to the Barton series and wrote her two last Sue novels, Neighbourhood Nurse and “Staff Nurse”.

I have only managed to find one of the Carol novels, and it’s not as much fun somehow as the Barton ones.  However it is enjoyable and again realistic.

I’d love to find out more about Helen Boylston.  She never married and when she died, she had no known relatives and was a very old sick lady. but she had had a wonderful life and created a very popular and well loved heroine in Sue. 

Rough Music available on Amazon

A story set in the 1970s about a country rock band... and its 2 lead singers...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Music-Nadine-Sutton-ebook/dp/B01AEQS0G0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496471341&sr=8-1&keywords=rough+music+nadine+sutton