After my previous re-reading blog – on P.G. Wodehouse – it would make sense to return to another writer who has given me much pleasure and amusement over the years: Flann O’Brien. The book I’ve been re-reading, The Hard Life, isn’t his best – my choice would be his first novel, At Swim-Two Birds (1939), while other Flannfans might go for his posthumously published The Third Policeman – but it is still full of O’Brien’s deadpan Irish humour.
Published in 1960, The Hard Life is subtitled ‘An exegesis of squalor’ and is dedicated to Graham Greene, ‘whose own forms of gloom I admire’ (Greene had himself praised the earlier At Swim-Two-Birds as ‘A book in a thousand … in the line of Ulysses and Tristram Shandy’, so presumably O’Brien is acknowledging the compliment). Unlike At Swim-Two-Birds, which contains multiple narratives and time-frames, The Hard Life moves in a straight line, so to speak. Narrated in the first person, it covers about 20 years from about the 1890s: Finnbar, the narrator and his older brother Manus (mostly referred to simply as ‘the brother’), are orphans and grow up in the household of Mr Collopy, a distant relation who lives in a nondescript terrace house ‘on the south side of the great city of Dublin’. Collopy, who probably has more dialogue than anyone else in the novel, seems never to stir from the ‘crooked, collapsed sort of cane armchair’ in which we find him early on – until chapter 16 when, thanks to the brother’s efforts, he journeys to Rome to meet the Pope. His travelling companion is the Jesuit Father Fahrt (yes, really) with whom he has been arguing, over glasses of whiskey, throughout the novel. Sample dialogue from chapter 4:
– It is, ah, thoughtlessness, Father Fahrt said in his mildest voice. Perhaps if a strong hint were dropped …
– If a hint were dropped, Mr Collopy exploded. If a hint were dropped. Well the dear knows I think you are trying to destroy my temper, Father, and put me out of my wits and make an unfortunate shaughraun out of me. If a hint were dropped, my hat and parsley! Right well you know that I have the trotters wore off me going up the stairs of that filthy Corporation begging them, telling them, ordering them to do something […] What result have I got? Nothing at all but abuse from cornerboys and jacks in office.
– Has it ever entered your head, Collopy, that perhaps you are not the most tactful of men?
– Tact, is it? Is that the latest? Give me your glass.
It turns out that Mr Collopy is obsessively campaigning for the provision of ladies’ toilets in the city – a knowing allusion to Ulysses, according to O’Brien experts Peter Costello and Peter van de Kamp (in Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography). The Hard Life, they state,‘draws heavily on the Dublin of James Joyce, taking its cue from Mr Bloom’s musings on the lack of ladies’ toilet facilities in the city of Dublin’. They add that, like At Swim-Two-Birds, the later novel ‘contains jokes and references of so personal a kind that they would be quite meaningless to the ordinary reader, however well he [sic] knew Dublin’. Oh.
Here I should perhaps pause to point out to the unwary that Flann O’Brien is a pseudonym. The man behind the name – and other pseudonyms such as Myles na Gopaleen and Stephen Blakesley – was Brian O’Nolan, a Strabane-born but Dublin-based civil servant who was born in 1911. Apart from his novels, his great achievement was a series of columns that he wrote under the title ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ in the Irish Times from 1940 until his death in 1966. A selection from the early columns, published in 1968 as The Best of Myles (Myles na Gopaleen being the pseudonym he adopted), is one of my most well-thumbed volumes. While some of the material in the reprinted columns might appear dated, it’s surprising how much can still be enjoyed: perhaps the most notable – and imitated – is his ‘catechism of cliché’:
What, as to the quality of solidity, imperviousness and firmness, are facts?
Hard.
And as to temperature?
Cold […]
And what is notoriously useless as a means of altering the hard facts of the situation?
All the talk in the world.
More relevantly, one of Myles’s recurring characters, ‘The Brother’, would seem to feed into The Hard Life. The brother of these columns is, I suppose, meant to be a portrait of a certain kind of Dubliner, a know-it-all whose often mistaken opinions and hare-brained plans are reported as reliable sources of information or advice. The brother of The Hard Life is in a similar way a purveyor of fake authority, whose first enterprise, as far as our narrator is aware, is as director of the ‘General Georama Gymnasium’, sending out sixpenny booklets ‘to teach people to walk the high wire’. This leads to further ventures:
He also operated the Zenith School of Journalism, which claimed to be able to explain how to make a fortune with the pen in twelve ‘clear, analytical and precise and unparagoned lessons’. As well he was trying to flood Britain with a treatise on cage birds, published by the Simplex Nature Press, which also issued a guide to gardening, both works obviously composed of material looted from books in the National Library …
From such beginnings the brother moves to London, taking an office in Tooley Street: its location being ‘fairly central and very near the Thames’ means, he says, that if the police were after him, ‘there is a very good chance that I could escape by water’. Soon he is making money as the sole proprietor the London University Academy and sending back to Dublin bottles of ‘Gravid Water’ (‘The miraculous specific for the complete cure within one month of the abominable scourge known as Rheumatoid Arthritis’ – somewhat reminiscent of H.G. Wells’s equally fictional Tono-Bungay), whose effects eventually lead to the above-mentioned journey to Rome.
The plot, such as it is, is hardly the reason for reading The Hard Life, though. It’s the language, and the obvious delight that O’Brien takes in his use of ‘Irishisms’ in his dialogue such as pishrogue, thullabawns and bosthoon. There’s even a word that occurs nowhere else – a true hapax legomenon according to an expert I consulted – as in this conversation from chapter 2:
– Heavenly fathers, he said in a flat voice, but you are very early. Morning, Hanafin.
– Morra, Mr Collopy, Mr Hanafin said.
– Annie here had everything infastatiously in order, Mrs Crotty said, thanks be to God.
I think we should all try to popularise the use of ‘infastatiously’, don’t you?
Old geezer re-reading 