The man who was myles behind

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, February 22, 1998

Page: F4

Section: Books

O'Brien (as he will be dubbed henceforth) was a virtuoso of elastic and nimble language, his wit growing out of the architecture of speech itself. He was raised speaking only Irish, his father being a supporter of the movement to revive it as the national tongue. Still, he spent hours of his youth reading books in English and listening to conversations in that language in the shop run by his uncle. His first recorded English words, uttered when he was a boy, were characteristic of his fascination with the highflown phrase and, indeed, of his predilection for outrage: ``And as for you, sir,'' he said, rounding on his father, who had scolded him, ``if you do not conduct yourself I will do you a mischief.'' Later, as a writer, his style -- or at least one of them -- was bemused and distanced, its oddness and meticulousness reflecting, as Cronin puts it, something like ``surprise that such a language as English exists and can be made to express facts or describe appearances and feelings.''

O'Brien's mastery of comic pomposity, pedantry, and pastiche arose, no doubt, from his removed stance, the outsider's skeptical angle. It was, in any case, manifest in all of his work. In addition to a couple of plays, some bits and pieces here and there, and his column (the most celebrated in the history of the Irish press), he wrote five novels as Flann O'Brien. Three of them -- ``At Swim-Two-Birds,'' ``An Beal Bocht'' (translated from the Irish after his death as ``The Poor Mouth''), and ``The Third Policeman'' -- are brilliant black comedies. One, ``The Hard Life'' has passages of truly inspired humor and is, in fact, an excellent romp. Even the least of them, ``The Dalkey Archive,'' will always find readers if only because his writing fires devotion. (All five are in print.)

O'Brien was born in Strabane, on the border of counties Tyrone and Donegal, in 1911. After graduating from University College Dublin, where he had made a name for himself in the famous Literary and Historical Society, he followed his father's steps and won a position in the civil service. He hoped to juggle this occupation with his true vocation, that of the writer.

For a while it worked; he wrote his masterpiece, ``At Swim-Two-Birds,'' in his first two years as a civil servant. Then disaster struck: His father died, and O'Brien was suddenly lumbered with the responsibility of supporting his mother, four of his sisters, and all seven brothers. Cronin sees this as crucially important, for in taking on his familial burdens, O'Brien divorced himself from the lofty view that duty to art takes precedence over any other in the life of an artist. There is much to commend in O'Brien's course of action. But Cronin also suggests that, in the end, he was destroyed as an artist in embracing the manner of life, and often the opinions, of a comfortable philistine.

O'Brien's weakness (if so it be) for respectability, for being a man not likely to be found cadging drinks on the strength of his genius, made up a large element in the various personae that inhabited his work. In addition to being the man of nonsensical science and abstruse wisdom, the cunning fellow and the astonished reporter, he appeared as the person of offended sensibilities, the last civilized creature, the put-upon ratepayer, and, in a grander manner, the lord of all he surveys, a captain of industry, the benevolent magnate and benefactor of humanity. Whoever he is, he is always taken aback by the world, by its crudeness and badness, and skeptical of official explanation. He puts himself forward as the man to rely on, prepared to put everything to rights -- by setting things squarely on their heads, modestly, yes, and with decorous anarchism. But as Cronin shrewdly observes, for all his invention and flouting of givens, O'Brien had no real intellectual curiosity and was a simple Manichaean at heart.

``What prompts a sane inoffensive man to write?'' he asked in one column. ``What vast yeasty eructation of egotism drives a man to address simultaneously a mass of people he has never met and who may resent being pestered with his `thoughts'?'' Cronin shows that while O'Brien certainly aspired to literary fame, he wrote for money first of all, and hoped -- indeed, really expected -- to become a rich, popular author. It is sad to read here of his applying to a certain Ethel Mannin, a best-selling author of the day, asking for her comments on ``At Swim-Two-Birds'' (she was not impressed) and dreaming of a success like ``Gone with the Wind.''

Cronin, who knew O'Brien and made up part of the same Dublin literary coterie, perfectly renders the man and his milieu. This is a tragic story of waste, of an ingenious writer crippled by the inability to recover from rejection, ruined by drink and by hours squandered in ``licensed tabernacles.'' He was possessed of aspirations that were both unworthy of his talent and unrealistic in themselves. Unwilling to take the leap of faith that art demands, Flann O'Brien was a genius shackled to the soul of a provincial.