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..