At Swim-Two-Birds — Commentary

In brief

An unnamed student at a Dublin university lives with his uncle, drinks stout with his friends, avoids lectures and writes a book. He objects to “one beginning and one ending for a book”, so he offers three: the Pooka MacPhellimey, “a member of the devil class”; John Furriskey, born fully grown; and the legendary giant Finn MacCool. They all end up attached to Dermot Trellis, the novelist in the student’s novel, who keeps his characters under his own roof at the Red Swan Hotel. They keep him asleep and encourage his son to write a novel in which Trellis is tried and tortured. Brian O’Nolan, a young civil servant, published this under the name Flann O’Brien in March 1939, and hardly anyone bought it.

The argument

At Swim-Two-Birds is usually sold as a joke about fiction: the characters rise up against their author. That joke is there, and it is good. O’Brien’s student states the theory with a straight face: “The novel, in the hands of an unscrupulous writer, could be despotic.” A proper novel should be “a self-evident sham”, and existing literature should serve as “a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters”. Then “The modern novel should be largely a work of reference”, which saves the trouble of inventing anybody.

The student’s theory is a young man’s bar talk, and the book knows it. What makes the novel more than a clever game is that the theory also describes the real position of an Irish writer in the 1930s. Behind O’Nolan stood a medieval literature in Irish that he could read and that few of his readers could. Beside him stood Joyce, who had apparently used up the modern novel. Around him was the speech of clerks and publicans, which no epic had any use for. Rather than choosing among these inheritances, he hired them all, put them in one hotel and watched them fail to get along. Borrowing is the book’s method and its honest answer to the question of what was left to do.

My one quarrel with the common reading is over freedom. The characters do not win. Their revolt is itself a book, written by a character, inside a book, written by a student, and it ends when a maid burns some pages because the student has passed his exams and needs to stop. The rebels are ended by the laziest device available, and the novel lets you see that. Every level of authorship turns out to be as despotic as the one below it complained of.

The nested books

The novel runs by level rather than by chapter, and the levels leak into one another. Wikipedia has a fuller plot summary.

The student’s life. This is the frame, delivered in sections the narrator labels “biographical reminiscences”: the uncle, the friends, the bed, the examinations.
The student’s book. His manuscript concerns Trellis, who stays in bed in the Red Swan Hotel writing a moral work about sin.
Trellis’s book. Trellis creates some characters and hires others from existing fiction and legend. The cowboys Slug Willard and Shorty Andrews come from the Westerns of a William Tracy, whom O’Brien made up for the purpose, and they hunt rustlers around Ringsend. Finn is hired for his venerable appearance.
The legends. Finn recites, at length and in translation, the story of mad King Sweeny from the Middle Irish Buile Suibhne, while the Dubliners around him interrupt.
Orlick’s book. Trellis’s son, born grown up with a gift for prose, writes his father into a story of trial and torment, under the direction of the people Trellis invented.
The endings. There are three, matching the three beginnings only loosely. The last concerns a German devoted to the number three. The phrase “truth is an odd number”, which O’Nolan once proposed as a title, belongs to the same closing joke.

Thomas C. Foster’s introduction for Dalkey Archive has the best one-line account of all this: it is a brilliant novel made of defective narratives, since neither internal story comes near completion.

The voice

O’Brien’s prose is an impersonation act. The student writes with the over-explained formality of a clever undergraduate. Finn’s passages swell into the catalogues of the Irish sagas, with the same comic inflation Joyce used in the “Cyclops” episode. The found documents are presented straight, including a racing tipster’s letter and a “Conspectus of the Arts and Sciences”.

The finest ear in the book is for the pub and the boarding house. Furriskey, Shanahan and Lamont converse in received opinions and solemn agreement. The novelist Anthony Cronin, who read it at seventeen, praised the deadly accuracy of its ear for lower-middle-class Dublin speech. In the same line of comedy is the workers’ poet Jem Casey, whose refrain, “A pint of plain is your only man”, is the novel’s best-known line.

Sweeny and the old literature

O’Nolan grew up in an Irish-speaking home, wrote his M.A. thesis on nature poetry in Irish, and knew enough Old Irish to compose in it. The novel draws on some fourteen sources in early and medieval Irish literature. Its largest debt is the Sweeny story, in which a king of ancient Ulster attacks Saint Ronan and is cursed to live mad in the trees as something like a bird. Foster traces how often O’Brien uses it: once in Finn’s faithful telling, once when Sweeny crashes into Trellis’s book, and once in Orlick’s story, when Trellis outrages a cleric as Sweeny did and is thrown from a window.

Most of Sweeny’s verse is adapted from J. G. O’Keeffe’s standard translation, with small touches for comic effect, as when “the bell of saints before saints” becomes “the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints”. Yet the poetry largely survives. Declan Kiberd’s view is that Sweeny’s verse is the one thing in the novel not seriously satirised, and I think that is right. The Dubliners are bored by it, Shorty wants to shoot him, and the lays go on regardless. It is the novel’s only sound of something that cost its speaker anything. The title itself comes from there: Snámh dá Éan, a ford on the Shannon between Clonmacnoise and Shannonbridge, reportedly visited by Sweeny.

The people

The student narrator

The student is unnamed, idle and pleased with himself, and he much resembles O’Nolan at University College Dublin. Foster calls the story a young novelist playing with all his toys. His friend Brinsley, modelled on Niall Sheridan, serves as the book’s first critic. The uncle, a Guinness clerk the student despises, is the book’s only real surprise, because near the end the student suddenly feels remorse about him.

Dermot Trellis

Trellis is slothful, prurient and moralising. He reads only books with green covers, intends a sermon against sin, and uses it as a pretext for writing as much sin as he can. He creates Sheila Lamont, assaults her, and so fathers Orlick; she dies in the birth. The novel plays this as farce, and it is the point where a reader may stop laughing.

John Furriskey

Furriskey springs into life fully grown, with memories but no experience to account for them and teeth already stained by tobacco. He is designed as a villain, meant to ruin the servant Peggy, and he marries her instead. He and his friends Shanahan and Lamont just want quiet domestic evenings while their author sleeps. That is the book’s neatest joke: given freedom, fictional characters choose the suburbs.

Finn MacCool

Finn arrives in the third opening as the giant of oral tradition, with a backside wide enough to play handball against. O’Brien keeps the scale and takes away the honour: hired as Peggy’s father for his dignified look, he behaves disgracefully. He is also the novel’s tireless reciter, an old storyteller who has outlived his audience.

Sweeny

Sweeny is shabby, homeless and frightened, and he alone does what his source says he should. He hardly notices the other characters.

The Pooka and the Good Fairy

The Pooka MacPhellimey comes from Irish folklore as a shape-shifter and appears here as a courteous, philosophical devil. The Good Fairy, who is invisible, lives in his pocket and has a foul temper. On the road to Orlick’s birth they gamble for the child’s soul, the Fairy cheats, and the Pooka wins. His courtesy lasts until he helps to torture Trellis.

How it was made

O’Nolan first tried the idea in “Scenes in a Novel”, a 1934 story for the University College magazine Comhthrom Féinne, under the name Brother Barnabas. He typed the novel in a bedroom he shared with his brother. He took his material where he found it: a friend supplied the tipster’s letter, and the painter Cecil Salkeld the “Conspectus”. By Sheridan’s own account, he cut a fifth of the manuscript. His father’s sudden death in 1937 may lie behind the unexpected tenderness toward the uncle.

Graham Greene, then reading for Longmans, recommended it. His report placed the book “in the line of Tristram Shandy and Ulysses”, said O’Nolan took Pirandello and Gide “a long way further”, and saw behind the high spirits a serious attempt to present all the literary traditions of Ireland at once. O’Nolan chose the name Flann O’Brien in negotiation with the publisher, then got cold feet about both name and title. It appeared on 13 March 1939.

It sold about 244 copies in its first months. In 1940 a German raid destroyed Longmans’ London premises and nearly all the unsold stock. O’Nolan’s next novel, The Third Policeman, was rejected and stayed in a drawer until after his death. By then he was famous in Ireland for something else, the “Cruiskeen Lawn” column he wrote for the Irish Times as Myles na gCopaleen from 1940 until 1966. Timothy O’Keeffe of MacGibbon & Kee persuaded him to allow a reissue, which came out in 1960.

Readers and critics

Early reviews were cool. The Times Literary Supplement saw only a “schoolboy brand of mild vulgarity”, and Seán Ó Faoláin, a target of O’Nolan’s newspaper hoaxes, smelled “a general odour of spilt Joyce”. Writers did better. Borges reviewed it the year it appeared, calling it the most complex of the verbal labyrinths he knew, though his summary is loose. Dylan Thomas gave it a line later used on dust-jackets: “This is just the book to give your sister”, provided she was “a loud, dirty, boozy girl”.

The famous endorsement is second hand. Niall Sheridan brought Joyce a copy in 1939. Joyce is reported to have called O’Brien a “real writer” with “the true comic spirit”, and to have tried to get it noticed in French periodicals; it is thought to be the last novel he read. The testimonial reached print on the 1962 Four Square paperback, and according to Anthony Cronin’s biography it rests on a letter from Sheridan to the publisher, as Peter Chrisp sets out in a careful account with O’Nolan’s letter of May 1939. Sheridan’s versions differ on whether Joyce had already read it. Chrisp also reports, via Beckett’s letter to James Knowlson, that Joyce paired the novel with Murphy, calling one “Jean qui rit” and the other “Jean qui pleure”. Joyce’s words are hearsay from a loyal friend, though plausible. O’Nolan himself grew sick of the comparison and said that if he heard the name again he would “froth at the gob”.

Later criticism has mostly been eager to claim the book. Vivian Mercier called it “the most fantastic novel written by an Irishman in the twentieth century”, leaving aside Finnegans Wake. Keith Hopper reads it as a transitional text and gives the real experimental honours to The Third Policeman, which I find hard to dispute. Kiberd’s postcolonial reading sees an author “less anxious to say something new than to find a self” able to say anything, and it is the most useful thing written about the book.

Afterlives

Rüdiger Imhof has traced explicit references in B. S. Johnson, Gilbert Sorrentino, Alasdair Gray and John Fowles. Time put it on its list of the best English-language novels since 1923, and Anthony Burgess on his Ninety-Nine Novels. The Abbey commissioned a stage version from Audrey Welsh in 1971 and staged another by Alex Johnston in 1998; Ridiculusmus toured a three-man version in 1994 and 1995; BBC Radio 3 broadcast Eric Ewens’s adaptation in 1979, and Kurt Palm made an Austrian film in 1997. Brendan Gleeson worked for years on a film of his own, and in 2011 said he had the money and a script in its fourteenth draft.

What is free, and where

The novel is in copyright where this page’s reader is sitting, and no full text is linked here. O’Nolan died on 1 April 1966. The EU term, followed by the Czech Republic and Ireland, is the author’s life plus seventy years, counted to the end of the calendar year, so the text remains protected through 2036 and comes free on 1 January 2037. In the United States a book of 1939 gets 95 years from publication and comes free on 1 January 2035, as Standard Ebooks notes while waiting for it. So an American reader gets it two years before a Czech one. Canada’s older life-plus-fifty term let Faded Page publish a transcription for readers there, which does not make a download lawful from Europe.

What you can read free now is the context: Wikipedia’s article, and Foster’s introduction. The novel’s own words are quoted here only in short phrases, as given in published accounts.

How to read it

Buy a paperback. Penguin Modern Classics and Dalkey Archive both keep it in print, and it is cheap. Everyman’s Complete Novels adds the rest.
Do not try to keep the levels straight. They are built to slip. Note which voice you are hearing, not who is officially writing it.
Do not skip the Sweeny pages. Read them as the book’s bass line, then go to Heaney’s version.
Read the Dublin talk aloud. Furriskey, Shanahan and Lamont are much funnier heard.
Allow for the cruelty. The Trellis plot treats assault as comedy. It is better noticed than excused, since the novel’s theme is what authors do with the power they have.