Writers

Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, Brian Ó Nualláin (O'Nolan)

At Swim Two Birds (1939) Dublin

'I was sitting on a stool in an intoxicated condition in Grogan’s licensed premises. Adjacent stools bore the forms of Brinsley and Kelly, my two true friends. The three of us were occupied in putting glasses of stout into the interior of our bodies and expressing by fine disputation the resulting sense of physical and mental well-being [. . . ] The stout was of superior quality, soft against the tongue but sharp upon the orifice of the throat, softly efficient in its magical circulation through the conduits of the body.'

TIMELINE

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Lifepath
Flann O’Brien, was born Brian O’Nolan (Ó Nualláin) in the County Tyrone town of  Strabane on 11 October 1911. After a series of promotions, his father Michael,  a civil servant, relocated to Dublin, and the family eventually settled in the southern suburb of Blackrock. O’Brien’s ear for representing spoken dialogue in At Swim Two Birds it can be presumed, was finely tuned due to growing up in a bilingual household: ‘he heard little English spoken for a number of years. His childhood reading was necessarily done mostly in English-language books, while his family conversations were conducted in Irish’ (1). 

In 1929 O’Brien entered University College Dublin, and  in 1932 he passed his B.A. examination in German, English and Irish with second-class honours. At university O’Brien and his peers acted as revolving editors of a satirical student periodical named Comhthrom Feinne,  which often took aim at Catholic middle-class values promoted by the mainstream campus publication National Student. As editor, O’Brien employed ‘a myriad of pseudonymous personalities in the interest of pure destruction’ (2), and his writing ‘often mocked the members of a society called Pro-Fide. It was a Catholic social study group which debated social issues and sought for a solution to contemporary problems’ (3).

In contrast, Comhthrom Feinne reflected modernist and European perspectives of a post-independence cohort  of  students, wary of the constructions of identity shaped by the literati of the Free State’s founding generation. O’Brien and his peers comprised ‘a sort of intellectual mafia, which strongly influenced the cultural and social life of the University College, and controlled through rather dubious electoral ruses – most of the College clubs and societies concerned with the arts’ (4), including the university’s influential  Literary and Historical  Debating Society.  In 1934 along with a cohort of his peers, O’Brien published a short-lived satirical periodical named Blather. In its opening editorial he declared a manifesto for his generation:

  
'In regards to politics, all our rat-like cunning will be directed towards making Ireland fit for the depraved readers of Blather to live in [. . .] We probably have said enough, perhaps too much. Anyhow, you have got a rough idea of the desperate class of men you are up against. Maybe you don’t like us? A lot we care what you think' (5).

After completing a B.A. degree, O’Brien pursued postgraduate  study of Gaelic nature poetry. In 1935 after acquiring his M.A. degree,  he followed in the footsteps of his father and joined the Irish civil service. His first novel At Swim Two Birds, was published in 1938, and was followed by the novels  The Third Policeman (1940) and An Béal Bocht (1941) and three plays, Thirst, Faustus Kelly  and The Insect Play which were each staged in 1943.  On 4 October 1940 O’Brien began writing a colum for the Irish Times under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen, which lasted through the 1940s and 50s. Ironically, given the setting of  his first novel At Swim Two Birds, his career eventually led him to work in an urban planning department with a local government authority in the 1950s.

Sources

Flann O’Brien’s 1939 novel At Swim Two Birds, concerns the day to day life of a university student, who resides in Dublin and is writing a book about an erstwhile author and publican named Trellis.  O’Brien’ novel  generates  a multiplicity of  narrative spaces and creates a surreal map of Saorstát Éireann’s capital in which characters from Celtic mythology and American pulp-fiction Westerns and cinema intersect with the streetscapes and social geographies of petite bourgeois and working class Dublin to create  and ever-changing mélange of place. O’Brien’s novel anticipates Guy Debord and the Internationale Situationniste’s  concept of  urban drifting known as   ‘dérive  (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters),’ (1)  which can produce psychogeographies defined as  ‘the sudden change of ambience in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres.’ (2)

In the novel,  the Student Narrator and his pal  Kelly perform acts of dérive as they drift through the streets and neighborhoods of South Dublin;  the composite Psychogeographie  of  At Swim Two Birds, plotted upon the digitized 1931 Ordnance Survey Map  above,  was charted using techniques of hermeneutic analysis and cartographic bricolage. This type of mapping illustrates  the ability of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to perform ‘a kind of multidimensional emplotment’  (3)  and tell  ‘a single story organized from multiple and heterogeneous elements.’ (4)

The map  imbues  ‘a spatial totality,’  (5) on the intersection between the metaphysical and the quotidian narratives  in At Swim Two Birds.  It has been observed  that ‘literary texts represent social spaces, but social space shapes literary forms,’ (6) including  ‘typography and the layout on the page;  the space of the metaphor . . . the shifting between different senses of space . . . or the very shape of narrative forms.’ (7) The Wordle Boxes popping up in the GIS map interface face above  illustrate  five  passages or instances of psychogeographie from At Swim Two Birds listed below, and  illuminate the interplay between site depiction in O’Brien’s narrative and the actual places which might have shaped his text.  The map above charts a possible route which the Student Narrator and his friend Kelly’s urban drifting or dérive,  might have taken:   

1. Nassau & Kildare Streets:
Kelly and the Student Narrator are nocturnal flâneurs who parade through the districts of south Dublin, where  petite bourgeois  and working class neighborhoods are situated cheek by jowl in a patchwork of villages constituting the sprawling corpus of the city:
Three nights later at about eight o’clock I was alone in Nassau Street, a district frequented by the prostitute class, when I perceived a ramrod in a cloth cap on the watch at the corner of Kildare Street. As I passed I saw that the man was Kelly.
[. . .]
How is the boy! I said.
My hard man, he answered.
[. . . ]
Anything going?
O God no, he said. Not at all man. Come away for a talk somewhere.
I agreed. Purporting to be an immoral character, I accompanied him on a long walk through the environs of Irishtown, Sandymount and Sydney Parade, returning by Haddington Road and the banks of the canal.
Purpose of walk: Discovery and embracing of virgins. (8)

2. Palace Cinema (The Academy on Pearse Street)
The Academy building illustrates the morphology of  Dublin’s popular culture, as it evolved from   the site of an early nineteenth century musical theatre,  to a cinematic space  during the early decades of the  twentieth century:
. . . in a large hall not unlike the Antient Concert Rooms in Brunswick Street (now Pearse Street) [. . . ]  That place is a picture-house now, of course, said Shanahan’s voice as it cut through the pattern of the story, plenty of cowboy stuff there. The Palace Cinema, Pearse Street. Oh, many a good hour I spent there too. (9)

3. Ringsend, Irishtown and Sandymount Districts
The story of the ‘Circle N’  Ranch is told by  Shanahan, who relates the tale of his adventures in the saddle: ‘but wasn’t the half of our steers rustled across the border in Irishtown by Red Kiersay’s gang of thieving ruffians,’ (10)  and a battle with Red Indians and rustlers, who take refuge behind the Number 3 tram: ‘We broke every pane of glass in the tram, raked the roadway with a death dealing rain of six-gun shrapnel and took the tip off an enemy cowboy’s ear, by God.’ (11) O'Brien writes:
Relevant excerpt from the Press: The Circle N is reputed to be the most venerable of Dublin’s older ranches. The main building is a gothic structure [. . . ] On the land adjacent, grazing is available for 10, 000 steers and 2,000 horses, thanks to the public spirit of Mr William Tracy, the indefatigable novelist, who had 8,912 dangerous houses demolished in the environs of Irishtown and Sandymount to make the enterprise possible. Visitors can readily reach the ranch by taking the Number 3 tram. (12)

However in the quotidian space of 1930s  Dublin, O’Brien’s novel’s places the blame for the mayhem in the Ringsend district  upon working-class hooligans:
Relevant excerpt from the Press: A number of men, stated to be labourers, was arraigned before Mr Lamphall in the District Court yesterday morning on charges of riotous assembly and malicious damage. Accused were described by Superintendent Clohessy as a gang of corner-boys whose horseplay in the streets was the curse of the Ringsend district [. . .] On the occasion of the last escapade, two windows were broken in a tram-car the property of the Dublin United Tramway Company. (13)

4. Red Swan Hotel (Lower Leeson Street)
According to an examination of  Thom’s Official Directory for the years 1930-1939, an establishment listed as the Eastwood Hotel, with a W. J. Cumming as proprietor, occupied the address  91-92 Leeson Street, just half a block south-east of Grogan’s Public House. O’Brien seems to have situated his fictional Red Swan Hotel upon the location of the Eastwood,  and  the site is a spatial palimpsest which reveals the sedimentary layers of Dublin’s history, dating back to the pre-Georgian era: 
A terminus of the Cornelscourt coach in the seventeenth century, the hotel was rebuilt in 1712 and after wards fired by the yeomanry for reasons which must be sought in the quiet of its ruined garden, on the three-perch stretch that goes by Croppies’ Acre. Today it is a large building of four storeys. (14)

5. Grogan’s Public House, adjacent to Stephen’s Green and  University College Dublin at Earlsfort Terrace
O’Brien’s novel  is autobiographical in the sense that it provides ‘a portrait of himself similar to that of the student narrator of At Swim, who attends college very rarely, drinks heavily, watches billiards being played, and manages to get through his course without opening very many books.’ (15) The Student Narrator  along with his friends Brinsley and Kelly become patrons of the south-side Dublin public house which O’Brien frequented while attending University College Dublin at Earlsfort Terrace:
I was sitting on a stool in an intoxicated condition in Grogan’s licensed premises. Adjacent stools bore the forms of Brinsley and Kelly, my two true friends. The three of us were occupied in putting glasses of stout into the interior of our bodies and expressing by fine disputation the resulting sense of physical and mental well-being [. . . ] The stout was of superior quality, soft against the tongue but sharp upon the orifice of the throat, softly efficient in its magical circulation through the conduits of the body.’ (16)

The kaleidoscopic portrait of 1930s Dublin which emerges in At Swim Two Birds  is comprised of a multiple variety of textual spaces,  which range from the quotidian, to the surreal and the meta-physical, and provide a mosaic-like impression of the various histories and geographies  which constitute the city.  Quotidian space in the novel is generated by the narrative of a bored  student who lives with his uncle,  and is writing a book.  He spends the majority of  his time in his room ‘observing the street-scene arranged below,’ (17) and lying on his bed smoking cigarettes. Enrolled at the University College Dublin at Earlsfort Court Terrace, the student drinks in a public house off Stephen’s Green named Grogan’s, with his ‘two true friends,’ (18) Brinsley and Kelly. He also attends the cinema, bets on horses, and takes late evening walks across Dublin, without purpose, save for the aim of   ‘embracing virgins,’ and killing time in the drab and depressing city in which he lives.  

Surreal elements of Dublin emerge in the textual space of book the student is writing. Its narrative concerns a publican named Trellis, an erstwhile author himself, whose characters inhabit the streetscapes and districts of  Lower Leeson Street, Sandymount, Irishtown, Ringsend, and the Palace Cinema on Pearse Street.  Trellis’ characters include the American pulp-fiction cow-boys Shorty Andrews  and Slug Willard, a demonic figure named the Pooka MacPhellimey, and the working class figures of Furriskey, Shanahan and Lamont, who banter with the legendary hero of old Celtic Age Ireland  Finn Mac Cool, about the crazed mythological king Sweeney.

The transposition of Celtic and Medieval Irish mythological figures upon Dublin’s streetscapes illuminates Henri Lefebvre’s contention that ‘history emerges from insignificant tales [du récit anecdotique], annals, and epic poems to talk of this constitution, to tell of the struggles of the city-state.’ (19) O’Brien’s writing linked various urban ‘routes and networks, patterns and interactions’ connecting his knowledge of Dublin,  its ‘places and people’ and   ‘images with reality,’ (20) as he experienced it in the lived space of his imagination.  At Swim Two Birds  illustrates  Lefebvre’s notion of  ‘the hyper-complexity of space’  which embraces ‘individual entities and particularities, relatively fixed points, movements and flows and waves- some interpenetrating, others in conflict.’  (21)

Sources

(1) Ivan Chtcheglov, excerpt from a 1963 letter to Michèle Bernstein and Guy Debord, reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #9, p. 38.

(2) Guy Debord ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’  in Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (eds.) Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings (Praxis (e) Press, 2008) p.  25

(3) D. J. Staley, ‘Finding Narratives of Time and Space’ in  D.S. Sinton & J.J Lund (eds.), Understanding Place:  GIS and Mapping Across the Curriculum (Redlands, 2007) p.  43.

(4) Ibid.

(5) A. Thacker, ‘The Idea of a Critical Literary Geography’,  New Formations  (2005-2006) [56-72],  p. 63.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Ibid.

(8) Flann O’Brien, At Swim Two Birds (London: Penguin, 2001[1939] ) pp. 47-48.

(9) Ibid., 193-195.

(10) Ibid., 54.

(11) Ibid., 58.

(12) Ibid., 55-56.

(13) Ibid., 59.

(14) Ibid., 25-26.

(15) Anne  Clissman, Flann O’Brien: A critical introduction to his writings –The Story-Teller’s Book –Web (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1975) p. 11.

(16) O’Brien, At Swim, 38.

(17) Ibid., 12.

(18) Ibid., 38.

(19) Henri Lefebvre, La fin de l’histoire,  (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuet, 1970)  p. 106.

(20) Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (NY: Routledge, 2006) p. 110.

(21) Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Trans.) Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)  p. 88.