Books

If Flann O'Brien had not existed, it would have been necessary for Brian O'Nolan (born in County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1911 or 12, depending on your source) to invent him.

SCOTT LAUMANN/Special Contributor

In fact, he did, along with Brian Ua Nuallain (his name in Gaelic), Brother Barnabas (his pen name for the school paper at University College, Dublin) and Myles na gCopaleen (pronounced na-gop-a-leen, translated into English by the author as "Myles of the ponies," the significance of which has been lost to history).

But never mind. You need to know that the man championed by some of the greatest writers of the 20th century as one of the funniest writers who ever lived has just had all of his novels, previously available only individually from the Dalkey Archive Press, collected in one handy volume by Everyman's Library.

Such a thing would have staggered O'Brien, who regarded his literary career as an abysmal failure. Some critics agreed with him. As Hugh Kenner put it in A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers, "So much promise has seldom accomplished so little." By the end of his life, which came in 1966, "A great future lay behind him."

Surely the drink didn't help. Dennis Donoghue described him as "a natural alcoholic;" Nuala O'Faolain, in her 1966 memoir Are You Somebody?, noted that "I saw Myles na gCopaleen urinate against the counter in Neary's one night."

But the testimony of James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, William H. Gass and Graham Greene (on the strength of whose recommendation O'Brien's first novel, At-Swim-Two-Birds, was published) would argue against the accusation of having accomplished little.

Only a fool would attempt to make sense of O'Brien's novels. So here goes.

At Swim-Two-Birds was praised by Dylan Thomas as "Just the book to give to your sister, if she is a dirty, boozey girl." The plot, if such a word can be used, regards an unnamed narrator who is writing a book about a writer named Dermot Trellis who, it so happens, is also writing a book. But Trellis' characters want to be left alone and conspire to keep Trellis asleep. Trellis stays awake long enough to create a female character, Sheila Lamont, who bears his child.

To be honest, I kind of lost the thread at this point. I can testify that the story involves two American cowboys; the great Irish hero Finn McCool (who may be Sheila Lamont's father); the Pooka Fergus MacPhellimey, a species of human Irish devil endowed with magical powers; and "a cellar full of leprechauns." It is a truly fine, funny book.

The novel flopped, at least in part because damage from German planes destroyed some of the British publisher's printing materials. But then, that story may have been propagated by O'Brien himself. (After its 1939 release, it was out of print until 1960.)

The book that should have established O'Brien's reputation, The Third Policeman, was rejected by a publisher in 1940 and remained in his desk for the rest of his life. A kind of phantasmagorical crime story, The Third Policeman concerns a petty thief and murderer who finds himself trapped in a cosmic police station where he learns about atomic theory and the intertwined destinies of men and bicycles. The narrator, who is also the murderer, is himself dead through much of the story (not a spoiler).

The Hard Life (published in 1961) and The Dalkey Archive (1964) made it into print before he died. The latter features characters no less eminent than St. Augustine and James Joyce. (O'Brien's Joyce maintains that Ulysses was written in Paris by a committee of pimps and thugs.) The Poor Mouth, which O'Brien, in a perverse mood, wrote in Gaelic, was published in 1941 but not translated into English until 1973. It's a parody of typical hardscrabble Irish autobiographies: "The house was narrow, upon me soul, 'twas a tight troublesome situation we were in when the night came. My grandfather slept with the cows and I myself sleep with the horse, Charlie, a quiet, gentle animal. The sheep used often start fighting and many times I went without a wink of sleep ..."

Writing of The Third Policeman, V.S. Pritchett noted that O'Brien's conceit "reminds one of Borges and of those figures who multiply in a series of reflections or retreating mirrors. In O'Brien, the object is a box that contains a box containing boxes getting infinitely smaller, until they are invisible."

He might have added that in each box there is a joke funnier than the one before it, even if the punch lines are sometimes as enigmatic as a Gaelic pun.

Allen Barra is a contributing editor for American Heritage.

With introduction by Keith Donohue

(Everyman's Library, $29.55)

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