Master of letters

It is tempting to compare two highly intelligent, learned and gifted young Dublin writers, suffering under the burdensome, Oedipal influence of James Joyce, struggling to have their first novels published in the late 1930s. Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, whose central character is an extremely idiosyncratic young man in the grip of profound indolence, was published in 1938; Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, whose central character is an extremely idiosyncratic young man etc., in 1939. Murphy is great fun, but its author went on to purify and yet somehow at the same time enrich his prose style, and would win the Nobel; At Swim-Two-Birds (and its successor, The Third Policeman, written immediately afterwards, but never published in its author’s lifetime) is considered by many to be the high point of O’Brien’s output, and its author died, basically of drink (and inept medical treatment), in 1966, 23 years before Beckett, who was five years his senior. In 1961, O’Brien called AS2B (his preferred acronym for the book) ‘juvenile trash’.

Comparing Beckett and O’Brien is perhaps invidious, but it does raise at least one question: where, for O’Brien, did it all go wrong? ‘In a bottle’ is the short answer, but there are further clues in this collection of his letters.

For a start, let’s take that word ‘his’. In O’Brien’s case, the third person pronoun becomes slippery. Born Brian O’Nolan, he had possibly an uncountable number of pseudonyms, but the ones best known to us are Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, the Brother; other pen-names come here, such as Lir O’Connor, whom O’Brien, writing as O’Brien, would castigate in the correspondence columns of the Irish Times. (‘Sir, — I see that Mr O’Connor has written another letter to your paper without giving any clue as to whether he intends himself to be taken seriously.’) O’Connor, in his turn, would castigate O’Brien.