A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  Although At Swim-Two-Birds has the form of a classic frame tale, the four books (B1:O’Brien’s; B2:N’s; B3:Trellis’s; B4:the son’s) are not hermetically sealed from one another as these designations seem to indicate. Like salvage from the sea, flotsam from this or that wrecked narrative washes up on foreign shores. How, you ask? While seated inside B1, Brinsley a friend of B2, parodies a passage from B2’s B3 in the style of B4. If authors write, as they surely must, mostly from their own experience, narrow and uninteresting as it may be, then we should not be surprised to find fictional authors doing the same thing. (What sort of experience can they have had?) O’Brien’s unnamed collegian spends a good bit of his time in bed, to the annoyance of his uncle, though not in order to annoy him; so when we encounter Dermot Trellis, we are not surprised, as I said we should not be, to read him described as “flabby and unattractive, partly a result of his having remained in bed for a period of twenty years.”

  In this book, each plot is a digression, chaos overcomes order in a most orderly way, allusions are so plentiful, like reflections that dematerialize their mirror, who knows what belongs to what, and the narrative thread is lost in its own tangle. Anne Clissman’s pathmaking study, Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction, numbers forty-two extracts in thirty-six different styles.

  Among them, American readers will recognize the Paul Bunyan style, triggered by the common question: Just how cold/tall/loud/ swift was the hero, the amazon, the forest critter? with its customary Rabelaisian answer: just as tall and loud as its subject—thus, if it’s the sun, then brighter than; if about drink, consumption shall be measured in tuns; if on manly heroics, then of those mightier than ten thousand, of those deadlier than adders, more pitiless than bronze, especially when flung.

  Here is Flann O’Brien’s Finn Mac Cool:

  With that he rose to a full tree-high standing, the sable cat-guts which held his bog-cloth drawers to the hems of his jacket of pleated fustian clanging together in melodious discourse.

  Now to compare this with the unmentionable rival, Jarl von Hoother, from Finnegans Wake:

  For like the campbells acoming with a fork lance of lightning, Jarl von Hoother Boanerges himself, the old terror of the dames, came hip hop handihap out through the pikeopened arkway of his three shuttoned castles, in his broadginger hat and his civic chollar and his allabuff hemmed and his bullbraggin soxandgloves and his ladbroke breeks and his cattegut bandolair and his furframed panuncular cumbottes like a rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman in his violet indigonation, to the whole longth of the strongth of his bowman’s bill.

  And back to Mac Cool:

  The knees and calves to him, swealed and swathed with soogawns and Thommond weed-ropes, were smutted with dungs and dirt-daubs of every hue and pigment, hardened by staining of mead and trickles of metheglin and all the drib-blings and drippings of his medher, for it was the custom of Finn to drink nightly with his people.

  This is prose meant to be put in the mouth, then chewed, then washed about, then swallowed, the swallow followed by a wide smile.

  Parody is what this writing is frequently called, but it is parody with a difference, because most parody, though its original is readily recognized, does not outdo the object of its ridicule, surpass its excellence in any way; for normally parody grotesquely exaggerates the outstanding and most annoying features of its victim, like a cartoon enlarging the nose, multiplying the number of nose hairs, weighing on the flesh of the face so that its jowls, cheeks, and eyelids droop like curtain drapes, furrowing the brow as if to make it ready for soon-to-be-sown seed; moreover mimicking the movement of the original in the most mocking fashion, and making it quite impossible for real quality to be found in either cat or copy; however, Flann O’Brien not only mimics the salient features and fustian of heroic Gaelic tales but supersedes them, suggesting to the reader that this, his Finn, is more splendidly gigantic and mythically outrageous than the storied original.

  … where is the living human man who could beat Finn at the making of generous cheese, at the spearing of ganders, at the magic of thumb-suck, at the shaving of hog-hair, or at the unleashing of long hounds from a gold thong in the full chase, sweet-fingered corn-yellow Finn, Finn that could carry an armed host from Almha to Slieve Luachra in the craw of his gut-hung knickers.

  Good for telling, said Conan.

  Good indeed. Where will you find—these days—as joyous a throat, so that saying the song to yourself, if not daring its full singing, will make you happier than a sniff would? Or even a check arriving in the mail?

  O’Brien showed the manuscript of At Swim to his friend Niall Sheridan, who found it far too long, and who, according to Anthony Cronin’s biography, No Laughing Matter, was subsequently given the job of cutting its locks and shaving its beard. Clean-cheeked, its weight less by a third, and presumably more presentable, the manuscript began to make its way through the offices of publishers, but, with uncommon good luck, soon came under the fine eye of Graham Greene, who was then a reader at Longman’s, and who energetically supported its publication. The author was eagerly agreeable when it came to making changes his editor asked for, removing some “coarseness” (unwisely replacing “all balls” with “all my bum”), clarifying some scenes, and suggesting a number of alternative titles (all awful). More important were the general revisions O’Brien made on his own account, now that the book was nearing an actual existence. At Swim’s appearance was rewarded with the reviewers’ required stupidity, but was praised by Beckett and Joyce (oops, that man again), who, eyesight failing, read it with a magnifying glass.

  Beckett, Joyce, Graham Greene, a few friends, later the imposter William Saroyan: Who else should be needed to satisfy the soul’s hunger for support and praise? But many authors secretly disbelieve their friends or even equals, for they know how often they’ve lied themselves; and anyway, one’s colleagues are often as unknown and pauper-bound as one’s self. No. I don’t blame Flann O’Brien (who wrote this wise and riotous work), but shame on Brian O’Nolan, who wanted to be a rich, famous, and widely popular author, in the very culture his book exposes as so much Irish hokum. O’Nolan, it’s clear, was a conservative, anti-intellectual, provincial barfly, and pool shark, while Flann O’Brien was a Swift-eyed revolutionary, who overturned conventions the way O’Nolan turned over his poker cards, and who read every rattle in the dice cup as a menacing omen.

  If I begin a book by imagining a young man (such as meself) writing a book, then who is writing the book he is writing? ’Tis still “I,” of course—who else could it be? But it is not the “I” I am, with my beliefs and degrees; it is one of my other selves, who has always thought it would be fun to be generous instead of stingy, friendly and open instead of suspicious, a bit of a believer instead of a snarly skeptic. I enjoy double anonymity, having invented the author of my book as well as the author in it.

  To Brian O’Nolan, for example, the theories of Albert Einstein, then being bandied about, were dark indeed, but a bit of bent light made the same things seem clear as day to Myles na Gopaleen.

  His biographer, Anthony Cronin, whom we could even call a crony, quotes O’Nolan on the value of this strategy:

  Apart from a thorough education of the widest kind, a contender in this field [writing] must have an equable yet versatile temperament, and the compartmentation of his personality for the purpose of literary utterance ensures that the fundamental individual will not be credited with a certain way of thinking, fixed attitudes, irreversible techniques of expression. No author should write under his own name nor under one permanent pen-name; a male writer should include in his impostures a female pen-name, and possibly vice versa. (No Laughing Matter. New York: Fromm International, 1998.)

  And if, down the road, some of a writer’s characters were to rebel against their immediate maker, they would do so at the writer’s request; and if their names were consumed by flames fanned in their own fiction, they would forever remain in the lifeline they were given: twenty-eight when they
first appeared, forty-two when cindered. Moreover, any one of them (at age thirty, for instance) could make an appearance in the operatic and movie versions of their burned-out case; posters depicting their foul-smelling faces might be tacked to dormitory walls; they would be free to lend their names to psychological complexes or even hotels or museums, to participate in discussions of their natures and functions, the futures they might have had; consequently growing more real, mention by mention, until masochism becomes as common as phlox and Sacher-Masoch as forgotten as Phil Spitalny.

  Suppose I were to have a life no longer than a page; if it were the right sort of page, I might immortally reside there, frozen at five months, bawling like the baby I shall always be, bawling monumentally, bawling for all babies in all time, climes, and countries—if my bawl is bawled by an astonishing phrase.

  Who remembers with fondness, or even a stretch of vivacity, one Prufrock who owned a furniture store in St. Louis?

  After six months of life, At Swim-Two-Birds had sold 244 copies. Sales would have to slacken following such an exhilarating start. Especially when the publisher’s building and book stock was destroyed by German incendiary bombs—as the novel itself seems to have foretold. Furthermore, in order to punish the persona who had created characters preferring bar life to a workaday one, and slumber in drunken beds to bars, Brian O’Nolan regularly dragged Flann O’Brien from pub to pub in the afternoon, and then staggered him to sleep in a dung brown bedroom even before nightfall—both worlds without women and soddenly safe—where piles of paper concealed the floor like the litter of a litter box, and an electric fire burned night and day, threatening to overheat and become the cause that would fulfill the calamities envisioned by a fiction.

  It was a big baronial bed, but was it Brian O’Nolan or Flann O’Brien who was drunkenly lying in it? It would have to be the former, for the latter had depicted the banality of bar banter so beautifully as to end it in chagrin. It was Flann who knew most particularly the emptiness of an Irishman’s saloon life, the chaff and chat and ruminations that went wetly nowhere, the liquor necessary to set one’s sexuality on indefinite simmer, dull the sense of failure, fill boredom with bad jokes. Though Flann is simply poking fun, nevertheless the needled balloon bursts and out rushes its bad air.

  When Brian O’Nolan assumed the self of Myles na Gopaleen, he became an occasionally clever journalist and a tart observer of society, but with the journalist’s inevitable lowbrow taste and hang-around culture. The noms de plume did not get on. It was Myles, I think, who used, feared, and disliked Joyce, attacking him persistently in the papers; it was Myles, again, who repeated the old canard that art is communication, although At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman had badly wounded, if not killed, that philistine philosophy. It was Myles who wrote of Joyce what was true of Flann O’Brien: that he “was a great master of the banal in literature. By ‘banal,’ I mean the fusion of uproarious comic stuff and deep tragedy.” On the other hand, it was Brian O’Nolan who made Flann O’Brien famous as a genius and a drunken failure (a popular Irish image of the Irish writer). It was Brian O’Nolan, not the Flann whose name was on the cover, who wrote the badly padded and excessive The Hard Life. It was Brian O’Nolan who, as Myles na Gopaleen, led a rascal’s career, and kept Flann O’Brien’s glory hidden in a darkened Dublin bedroom. As Hugh Kenner tartly remarks, when O’Nolan became “a licensed jester,” a “great future lay behind him.”

  Flann O’Brien’s sentences are always brisk and muscular and go where they are going in the promptest possible way. However, they are slowed in their own book as though held by a sleeve; they are bewildered by forms that enter every avenue like a parade; they are bedeviled by interruptions; sometimes there is a slight elevation to the diction of their pretended prose, at other times a discernable depression; they aren’t often allowed to say much, although they say it directly, and frequently find themselves in heroically pointless conversations or even in the wrong mouth, and when there—in the wrong mouth—are required to speak in the pseudomythical manner the wrong mouth prefers; occasionally, some uncalled-upon critic or scholar will leave like a footprint a textual note, reminding the reader of other readers: All these forthright sentences become sillier by being sane in such precincts; yet—beware—as absurd, we must admit, as the situation often is, the absurdity is no more than a bad light in a closet making difficult one’s deciding the true colors of the clothes (which does not mean the colors of the clothes are all false and dishonest), in example whereof I offer the following: “Do you know, said Orlick, filling the hole in his story with the music of his voice …” and I ask how often, especially in the theater where buckets of mellifluence are kept backstage to put out fires, have we heard song sing, so soulfully, a sense that isn’t there?

  There is … there was … a hole in the story. It is called The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien’s second book, certainly as brilliant as the first, a book about a dead man—blacker, more bitter than decent life, beautiful to a degree unrecognizable—which he completed during the year the work that would eclipse it—At Swim-Two-Birds—was published to nearly unanimous indifference. The Third Policeman—the great stretch of a fresh young genius—was … inconsolably … rejected; and O’Brien appears to have buried it and its dead narrator in a drawer, from whence it would not rise until 1967, when it reached print a year after its author’s demise—his death allowing—nay, encouraging—the rebirth of his work. Shortly after The Third Policeman was turned down (and the bed of death made ready and the brown room painted the color of rye), Myles na Gopaleen began his column for the Irish Times, a project that ate at O’Brien’s life like liquor at his liver.

  It is written that “Evil is even, truth is an odd number and death a full stop.” The Pythagoreans, too, thought evil was even, and truth an odd number, which is perhaps why At Swim begins and ends three times. Through an irony perhaps too broad to be believed, death claimed Brian O’Nolan on the first Fools’ Day of April 1966, a day when Flann O’Brien was absent, participating in the celebration and drinking deep.

  ON HEROES AND TOMBS

  Although Ernesto Sábato’s work is rather well known in Europe, where his first novel (El túnel, 1948) was championed by Camus, and praised by other writers of similar weight (its existential flavor went well with the mood of the day), the book did not earn him much lasting notice in the United States, even though Knopf was the first to translate it (as The Outsider) in 1950, six years ahead of the French. Sobre héroes y tumbas followed in 1961, and Abaddón el exterminador, completed in 1974, won him the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. As if divinely arranged by the muse of prose, the great and astonishing efflorescence of Latin American literature, which the world would become aware of during the 1960s, has been blessed with English translators of exceptional skill, dedication, and literary understanding. Gregory Rabassa has translated Miguel Angel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, José Lezama Lima, and Luisa Valenzuela; Suzanne Jill Levine has done Julio Cortázar, Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy, and Manuel Puig; Margaret Sayers Peden has given us our Fuentes; while many fine writers such as Alejo Carpentier, José Donoso, and Renaldo Arenas have also been made available; yet somehow Ernesto Sábato kept slipping through the net (if any were drawn); but now Helen R. Lane, already known for her translations of Octavio Paz and Mario Vargas Llosa as well as her masterful rendering of the superb and fierce fictions of the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo, has brought On Heroes and Tombs beautifully before us—some recompense for a long delay.

  Even as a sapling, Sábato leaned toward literature like an old tree long in the wind, so it is somewhat surprising to read of him studying mathematics and physics at the National University of La Plata; but one can imagine well enough how the young student, the tenth child in a litter of eleven, sent away to school and now alone for the first time in a strange city, sought clarity, order, security, and calm in the presumably emotionless realm of mathematics. It would certainly not be the first time. His human concerns
, however, required an outlet, and sent him toward the Left—at the very least for comradeship and the security of shared opinions. The anarchist who figures so importantly in On Heroes and Tombs is based on an actual association with the movement. Harley Dean Oberhelman reports another incident of great significance for Sábato’s development (in the Twayne World Authors Series). While attending a Communist Youth Conference in Brussels, and planning to leave there soon for the Soviet Union, he has a violent recurrence of his youthful insecurities, and flees to Paris, where he sinks into a stolen text of mathematical analysis.

  Sábato was twenty-six when he received his doctorate, and he did well enough to be recommended for study at the Curie Laboratory in Paris, where he worked with Irène Joliot-Curie. At that time, his repudiation of science as well as his serious literary efforts began. Fragments of an unfinished novel from this period will find their way into On Heroes and Tombs. Under the influence of André Breton and other Surrealists, Sábato began to explore the psychic as well as the physical world. There is no question that his own illness literally turned him inward. Nevertheless, after a brief stay at MIT, he returned to the National University as a professor of theoretical physics, and remained in this post until 1943, when difficulties with the Perón government, in addition to his increasing desire and determination to write, decided him on resigning.

  I draw this dim little sketch because a factor fundamental to Sábato’s concerns and career as a writer is nevertheless clearly outlined by it. The fact that what it represents is an elementary philosophical mistake would not necessarily matter in the case of most writers—literature is literature, not logic—but it matters a great deal in Sábato’s. Because—as it appears—Sábato had sought refuge himself from a world of anxiety and unkempt passion by entering the field of mathematical physics, subsequently to return to that other—opposite—human field of feeling with a sense of the prodigal, and like one who has been “born again,” even if unsaved; he supposed that science was such a haven for all men, and furthermore that science itself was an elaborate hypocrisy, because its vaunted efficiency and objectivity, its certainties and successes, hid a sterile emptiness; it was a pack of lies designed only to make men comfortable; first, materially, by supplying them with satisfactions and comforts (thereby binding them to pleasure); second, conceptually, by allowing them to believe in a knowable and orderly world, and permitting them to escape any direct confrontation with the self by substituting for it a “custom-made” character and a soil-resistant soul.