OBrien - At Swim-Two-Birds

PENGUIN BOOKS

Flann OBrien is the pseudonym of Brian Nuallin, who was born in 1911. After a brilliant student career at University College, Dublin, he did linguistic research in Germany and then joined the Irish civil service. He seems to have been greatly influenced by James Joyce, a fellow countryman, as can be traced in the experimental blend of satire, fantasy and farce in At Swim-Two-Birds. His other books and plays include An Bal Bocht, a work written in Irish, The Third Policeman (1940), Faustus Kelly (1943), The Hard Life (1960), and The Dalkey Archive, which was produced on the Dublin stage in 1965. As Myles na Gopaleen he was a well-known satirical columnist for the Irish Times. A legendary figure amongst Irish writers, he lived with his wife in Dublin until his death in 1966.

He has been called a wonderfully witty writer. Reviewing OBriens work in the New Yorker one critic wrote: His puppetlike figures do not suffer as individuals in any ordinary sense; they suffer for everyone in some general amusement park of the soul while confronting their unexpected fates. In OBriens Hell, guilt is a moral implication, not a matter of psychological anguish, and intimidation is the major terror, not humiliation. OBrien mines and transforms[his work] is as strangely emotionally affecting as it is funny.

FLANN OBRIEN

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First published by Longmans Green 1939

This edition published by MacGibbon & Kee 1960

Published in Penguin Books 1967

Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2001

Copyright 1939 by Brian ONolan

Copyright Brian ONolan, 1960

Copyright Evelyn ONolan, 1967

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-195637-4

All the characters represented in this book,

including the first person singular,

are entirely fictitious and bear no relation

to any person living or dead.

HAVING placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

Examples of three separate openings the first: The Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class, sat in his hut in the middle of a firwood meditating on the nature of the numerals and segregating in his mind the odd ones from the even. He was seated at his diptych or ancient two-leaved hinged writing-table with inner sides waxed. His rough long-nailed fingers toyed with a snuff-box of perfect rotundity and through a gap in his teeth he whistled a civil cavatina. He was a courtly man and received honour by reason of the generous treatment he gave his wife, one of the Corrigans of Carlow.

The second opening: There was nothing unusual in the appearance of Mr John Furriskey but actually he had one distinction that is rarely encountered he was born at the age of twenty-five and entered the world with a memory but without a personal experience to account for it. His teeth were well-formed but stained by tobacco, with two molars filled and a cavity threatened in the left canine. His knowledge of physics was moderate and extended to Boyles Law and the Parallelogram of Forces.

The third opening: Finn Mac Cool was a legendary hero of old Ireland. Though not mentally robust, he was a man of superb physique and development. Each of his thighs was as thick as a horses belly, narrowing to a calf as thick as the belly of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was large enough to halt the march of men through a mountain-pass.

I hurt a tooth in the corner of my jaw with a lump of the crust I was eating. This recalled me to the perception of my surroundings.

It is a great pity, observed my uncle, that you dont apply yourself more to your studies. The dear knows your father worked hard enough for the money he is laying out on your education. Tell me this, do you ever open a book at all?

I surveyed my uncle in a sullen manner. He speared a portion of cooked rasher against a crust on the prongs of his fork and poised the whole at the opening of his mouth in a token of continued interrogation.

Description of my uncle: Red-faced, bead-eyed, ball-bellied. Fleshy about the shoulders with long swinging arms giving ape-like effect to gait. Large moustache. Holder of Guinness clerkship the third class.

I do, I replied.

He put the point of his fork into the interior of his mouth and withdrew it again, chewing in a coarse manner.

Quality of rasher in use in household: Inferior, one and two the pound.

Well faith, he said, I never see you at it. I never see you at your studies at all.

I work in my bedroom, I answered.

Whether in or out, I always kept the door of my bedroom locked. This made my movements a matter of some secrecy and enabled me to spend an inclement day in bed without disturbing my uncles assumption that I had gone to the College to attend to my studies. A contemplative life has always been suitable to my disposition. I was accustomed to stretch myself for many hours upon my bed, thinking and smoking there. I rarely undressed and my inexpensive suit was not the better for the use I gave it, but I found that a brisk application with a coarse brush before going out would redeem it somewhat without quite dispelling the curious bedroom smell which clung to my person and which was frequently the subject of humorous or other comment on the part of my friends and acquaintances.

Arent you very fond of your bedroom now, my uncle continued. Why dont you study in the dining-room here where the ink is and where there is a good book-case for your books? Boys but you make a great secret about your studies.