Context N°18
by Theodore McDermott
To get to Carbondale from Normal you go south on Main Street and just keep going. Cornfields replace the fast-food restaurants and strip malls. The road is renamed Highway 51. There’s an occasional small town complete with a stoplight, a dilapidated post office, and the small, windowless skyline of a grain elevator. There isn’t a single turn, barely even a bend in the road. Oddly enough, this direct drive will also take you, in four hours, from Flann O’Brien’s oeuvre (at Dalkey Archive Press) to the Flann O’Brien archives (at Southern Illinois University’s Morris Library). While in college and working on a very long thesis about O’Brien, I considered making the much longer trip to the archives from Ann Arbor, but never went. A year later and working at Dalkey Archive Press, I decided I should, because when reading O’Brien’s novels, I have always felt a lingeringsense that something is either missing or so plainly in front of me that I can’t see it. I hoped the eleven boxes (three cubic feet) of his writings would reveal something the published books leave out.
Specifically, I went to see a microfilmed copy of an early manuscript of At Swim-Two-Birds. References online and in O’Brien scholarship suggest that a draft much longer than the published one exists—it seemed likely that it would be the manuscript in Carbondale. There, in the special collections room, I sat at the microfilm machine looking at the doodles on the book’s first page. Don’t tell Terry Eagleton, but the name “Engels” was scrawled around the title—we wouldn’t want a Marxist reading to jeopardize O’Brien’s genius, to see the theme of three in At Swim as an example of dialectical materialism (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) at play. Maybe this Engels is other than Marx’s sidekick? A Gaelic figure? A friend? Who knows?
And there were, indeed, as I got past the first page, some differences between this early manuscript and the one published. Some different ordering (mostly at the beginning), some extra material—“Memoir of Dermot Trellis, his youth, being an extract from A Conspectus of the Arts and Natural Sciences on the subject of Dr. Beatty, now in heaven, by the reverend Alexander Dyce, but found on examination to be singularly referable to the life of Trellis. Serial volume in the Conspectus, the Thirty-seventh,” for example—and other slight variations (Finn having a conversation with Trellis, which might well be of note to the careful At Swim scholar) comprise the most notable changes from the un- to the published versions. On the whole, the manuscript seemed not to warrant what I hoped it might: publication. The differences simply aren’t substantive enough. In theory, there exists somewhere a manuscript that’s one-third longer than the published one—but this, unfortunately, wasn’t it. Best I could tell, it was a revision of something already sent once to the publisher. The substantively longer version was apparently given to a friend, then revised, and only then sent out.
With the rest of my time, I went through as much of the eleven boxes of O’Brien material as I could. I didn’t make it that far, but was enthralled by what I did get through. I saw the Third Policeman manuscript that sat for so long in his desk drawer. I saw his notebooks—ledgers and datebooks scrawled with notes and doodles and random words and business-related jottings.
Most of my time, however, was spent sifting through, photocopying, and reading the more than two boxes of correspondence. These were divided into three groups—Letters to Brian O’Nolan (his real name, of course), Letters by Brian O’Nolan, Letters about Brian O’Nolan—and arranged alphabetically within each category. Time was limited and the letters so numerous that I only made it (reading quickly) through one folder of letters to him, very quickly through all of the letters by him, and didn’t even get to those about him—the librarians had to go home.
O’Brien is, to put it mildly, an indiscernible and intriguing writer—these are probably interrelated adjectives. Tony Cronin’s biography, while a valiant effort and an important book, doesn’t—for me—exactly clear up O’Brien’s life or his fiction. The letters don’t either. What they do is make the problem of his opaqueness discernibly one of personality, rather than one of incomplete biography. I mean, there is no switch that backlights and illuminates his personality or his books. The letters show that no such switch could exist: that the project of biography or explication is made impossible not by insufficient research but by O’Brien’s own personality and life. Typically collections of letters act as unofficial autobiography. In O’Brien’s case they act as the unofficial autobiography of someone whose life and personality defy the very notions of autobiography, biography, even description. You might say that the fractured, chaotic, contradictory, illusive way of his books is, in his case, frighteningly natural, normal, and, I think the letters show, even mimetic.
This, I would say from a quick reading, is the macro picture drawn by the letters. That said, there are a lot of important revelations contained therein, and, more importantly, new questions raised.
After getting fifty dollars from William Saroyan, he writes, “It’s paid on a crazy bet and I wouldn’t be happy if I bought booze with it in the ordinary way. Now I’ve had an idea. I’m buying Irish Sweep tickets with it, the 30 pounds to be divided between myself and Bill with maybe a cut for yourselves in the ordinary way of business.” To Pat Duggan, he writes, “The other day, in a moment of personal irresponsibility, I sent you off a parcel containing a long story about policemen and two short stories. I think I’ve made rather a mess of the long story and did not in fact mean to send it anywhere until I had changed the oil and put new pistons in. For one thing I intended to kill completely a certain repulsive and intrusive character called Joe. I think the general idea is good, however, and I dumped a dirty flimsy copy of the thing in with two short stories just for good measure.” He says, “shortly I am going to write a good book,” this after At Swim and the “dirty flimsy” Third Policeman! Plus, where are those stories? To someone who rejects At Swim, he writes, “As a genius, I do not expect to be readily understood but you may be surprised to know that my book is a definite milestone in literature, completely revolutionises the English novel and puts the shallow pedestrian English writers in their place. Of course I know you are prejudiced against me on account of the IRA bombings. To be serious, I can’t quite understand your attitude to stuff like this. It is not a pale-faced sincere attempt to hold the mirror up and has nothing in the world to do with James Joyce . . . so, please do not send me any more sneers at my art.” There is a brief essay on Beckett called “Old Hat Re-Blocked,” about a new edition of Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination of Work In Progress. The essay begins, “The exhumation—or is it a regurgitation?—of this étude (no English word seems to suit) will startle those of us who saw it when it first appeared in 1929. . . . The material is so bad that it does not merit analysis in detail. . . . This reissue . . . is inexcusable . . .”
I’m getting carried away, but there are lots of interesting things in these letters. Closer reading will probably bear even more. But even these samples outline the larger question: When is he being serious, when not? When is he being self-deprecating, when genuinely dissatisfied with his work (he HATES At Swim)? As soon as he begins to explain something about himself or his work, he contradicts it. There are no love letters—nothing of that sort. Nothing that I saw was about anything very personal—except mentions of his near constant illness and injuries. There are a lot of letters to and from publishers. There are a lot between O’Brien and Hugh Leonard (who adapted The Dalkey Archive for the stage). The letters are nearly all from either the very beginning of his career (the late ’30s to the mid-’40s), or the end (the mid-’50s to the mid-’60s) with a gap between. Maybe I skimmed over something, but I saw nothing from those ten missing years in between.
To know exactly what can or should be done with these letters—if anything—would require a longer, more concerted look. The idea of publishing what O’Brien never intended to publish is, I think, something that would require a lot of care and forethought.
That said, from what I saw, these letters are not only interesting, but also valuable documents. They do what all scholarship tries to do: illuminate the author’s work. And they also do what good biography does: illuminate the author’s life. If the letters are opaque, it is because O’Brien was; we will have to do without much illumination, without a light switch. Evidence of this, as you dig deeper, only accumulates.
Finally and completely off topic, Paducah, Kentucky, is a surprisingly nice town.
