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.