Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien (Irish Literature) (18 page)

Mr. Cullen again looked to each of us.

“I stood up with the ‘Irish Times’ in my hand,” he said, “and did two minutes worth of very hard thinking. I took the situation in at a glance. Unless something drastic was done and done quickly, we were all bitched. Downstairs the hall-door was being hammered till the house shook.”

“A delicate situation,” I interposed.

“There was one chance. I took charge immediately. I put up my hand for silence [
and spoke quickly
] [although there was plenty of it there without being asked for]. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘we’re in a tight corner but there’s one chance if we keep our heads.
This is a kip
,’ says I, ‘
and you
,’ says I to Mrs. Hogan, ‘
you’re in charge of it. We’re all respectable married men having an evening out
.’”

Mr. Murtagh smiled and wiped the counter with round meditative swipes.

“Well I wouldn’t doubt you, Martin,” he said. “If you have to think of a story at all, you’ll think of a good one. How did our ladyship take the news?”

Mr. Cullen put his finger again on the water-jug.

“[First] She went the colour of that [
first
], [look]” he said, “and then she went as red as a turkey-cock. I think she lost the power of speech. Only temporarily, of course. We all stood there looking at her [like a lot of dumb clucks].”

“A delicate situation,” I put in again.

“Delicate? You could [
nearly
] hear the hair growing on your head. Poor Mrs. Hogan—you could see her telling herself that it would have to be done for Ireland and then finding it hard to believe what she had told herself. And all the time the hammering that was going on downstairs would put the fear of God in you.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Murtagh [
delicately
] [finely], “if the intention was pure and no pleasure was taken, there would be no question of mortal sin.”

“Is that so?” said Mr. Cullen.

“I think that is the official Church view.”

“I see. Well, to make a long story short, my bold woman marches down the stairs and throws open the door. I sneaked down to the landing to hear what was [
said
] [going on]. I could hear two voices—high-class officers’ voices, you know—asking her were there any men in the house and no question of please or thank-you. I nearly dropped dead when I heard her answering them. She took off the accent of a fish-woman to a T. She said there were a few men in the house certainly[.][
w
][W]hy wouldn’t there be[?] She was sniggering and using plenty of personality with the two officers.”

“Well dear knows,” said Mr. Murtagh, smiling [as if against his will].

“One of the officers gave a bit of a laugh and said something about human nature and then I heard the other gentleman speaking in a low voice and there were several more laughs, some of them from Mrs. Hogan. This went on for five minutes. Then I heard the two boyos coming into the house and going into a room off the hall. They were inside for twenty minutes and then they came out and went away.”

“By God there’s a story there somewhere,” said Mr. Murtagh warmly. “If you wrote down the inside story of what happened there you would make a fortune in America. Did you ever read a book called ‘Ten Nights of Life and Love’ by Charles Paris?”

“I did not,” said Mr. Cullen.

“Well by God that was the business,” said Mr. Murtagh.

“Is that the end of the story about Mrs. Hogan?” I inquired.

“It’s the end of that story,” said Mr. Cullen, “but there was what is called a sequel. At the end of a certain length of time there was a question of a baby. It was kept very dark, of course, and a yarn was put out about an orphan arriving from the country. The new arrival got the name of Hogan and it was this same particular young gentleman that cut the nose off me in the street not half an hour ago. What do you think of that?”

Mr. Murtagh shook his head and smiled.

“It would be the mercy of Providence,” he said, “if somebody told that proud Irish gentleman who his two fathers were. Eh, Ned?” [He laughed hollowly.]

“And why is he so proud?” I asked, “why does he walk as if he[
r
] owned the earth? [Why did he not answer when you saluted?]”

“Do you not see it?” cried Mr. Cullen. “Thousands and thousands of men have died for Ireland. Some of them have been hanged, some shot and some of them were roasted. The men of Ninety-Eight were strapped [with their face out] to the wheels of carts and flogged on the belly till their bowels came right out of them. That was a nice cup of tea to drink for Ireland. They were all good patriots [, good [???] are rare].”

“I see that,” said Mr. Murtagh.

“But Hogan wasn’t one of that crowd.
He
was
born
for Ireland!”

He looked to each of us in triumph, finished his drink swiftly and walked to the door, waving his farewell with one hand and wiping his mouth with the back of the other.

“Die-for-Ireland how are you,” he called. [END]
²

Mr. Murtagh wiped his counter carefully [and then looked down at it for a while].

“Well Holy God,” he said [to me] at last, “if you wrote that story down you would make a queer penny from American copyrights. ‘The Man That Was Born For Ireland,’ eh? By God whether it’s good or bad it’s new. Or ‘The Woman That Sinned To Save Her Country’s Wrong.’ She was a queer woman, there is no doubt about it. Not that it is for you or me to sit in judgment, of course. Holy God Almighty.”

“To the pure all things are pure,” I muttered.

“That is the official Church view, of course. But Lord save us, the poor unfortunate son must have been a queer cranky article. What did he look like?”

“O he looked the same as you or me,” I said.

I left Mr. Murtagh soon after for I did not wish to be pressed for the young man’s description. This was because I knew the young man. [
He was extremely short-sighted.
] [He was neither supercilious nor shy merely short-sighted]. He was studying for the priesthood in Rome and was evidently home on [
leave
] [holiday]. [
His second
name was Murtagh.
] [He was Mr. Murtagh’s second son.] [I left the shop and went away, preoccupied with the strange personality of my friend Mr. Cullen.]

¹
Editors’ Note: This previously unpublished typescript is an early draft version of “The Martyr’s Crown” (1950): Brian O’Nolan / Flann O’Brien, “[For] Ireland Home and Beauty” (1940), Series 2: Manuscripts, Box 4, Folder 10, Brian O’Nolan papers, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. The twelve-page typescript contains some handwritten emendations by O’Nolan. The typed words which he crossed out in pen are reproduced in square brackets with a line through them [
like so
]; his handwritten emendations are reproduced in square brackets [like so]; illegible words are marked as [???]; [
//
] denotes a deleted paragraph break.

²
Editors’ Note: All the remaining lines after O’Nolan’s handwritten note ‘
END
’ have been lightly crossed out in pen.

Appendix II

E
DITORS
’ N
OTE
: As indicated in our Introduction, we include the following story, “Naval Control,” first published when O’Brien was just twenty-one years old, as a speculative gesture designed to generate further discussion and discovery. Such a gesture ultimately requires a full critical examination, but some initial rationale for including a hitherto unknown pen name and story is briefly offered here.

The story was first brought to our attention by Jack Fennell, who as well as being a fine translator of Gaelic texts is also a leading authority on Irish science fiction. Jack noted how Everett F. Bleiler, in his exhaustive bibliography of every pulp science fiction story published by Hugo Gernsback from 1926 to 1936, includes a reference to a short story by a mysterious “John Shamus O’Donnell.” Unfortunately, while Bleiler has biographies for almost every other author in his index, no information is provided for O’Donnell. “John Shamus,” whoever he was, does not seem to have published anything else. Bleiler’s description, synopsis, and rather blithe critical judgment of “Naval Control” runs as follows:

Short-short story.

Place
: the San Francisco area.

The narrator, who seems to have been a missionary, laments the death of his wife Florence Minerva, who, he says, clad half the natives of Peru in Mother Hubbards and converted them as Baptists. But his friend the renowned Irish scientist Egan will construct for him an android that is the exact image of Florence Minerva.

Florence Minerva the Second, who is operated by electricity, is all she should be in appearance, but there are behavioral problems. Atmospheric electricity sets her off; sitting on an iron bench drains her magnetism; and proximity to a certain sailor with a silver plate in his head induces telepathic communication (singing ribald sailor songs) and erotic feelings. At the last, as the sailor ships out to sea, Florence Minerva the Second wades out into the water after him and is lost.

Amateurish, but occasionally amusing.
¹

To date, no archival material has been found to verify the story’s provenance. Electronic concordancing and corpus linguistics may be of some value here, but we leave that investigation for another time. For the moment, though, we would just like to point out a few basic elements in the story which, for us, mark it out as the work of Flann O’Brien.

First, there is the thematic fascination with trains, doubles, and strange names, all reminiscent of stories such as “John Duffy’s Brother” and “Donabate” as well as novels like
The Third Policeman
and
At Swim-Two-Birds
. Second, there is the typically playful use of the epistolary mode, where letters serve to splinter the text into multiple voices (something that O’Brien uses to great effect elsewhere). Third, the parodic use of science—or science reformulated as farce—is particularly characteristic of O’Brien. Note, for instance, the comic consequences of the mechanical Florence Minerva’s wiring malfunctions and the mock-serious tone of the pseudo-scientific jargon, as in the description of the the electrical sympathy between her “fissures and sulci” and the “silver-pated” sailor. (A rather misogynistic view of women is another, less attractive, O’Brien characteristic.) Fourth, the family resemblance between the mad Irish scientist Professor J. Egan and one of O’Brien’s great creations, the idiot savant de Selby, is striking, even if Egan is a less refined version. Fifth, and while the Irishness of the Professor is noteworthy, even more striking is the pen name “John Shamus O’Donnell,” which seems to prefigure the parodic name “Jams O’Donnell” in
The Poor Mouth
(Jams and Shamus are derived from the same name, James). Sixth, and more speculatively, perhaps, much of “Naval Control” is based in “Beal Gulch,” California––a variation, possibly, on Bear Gulch Road in Oakland, California—although the word “Béal” is also the Gaelic for mouth.

Throughout “Naval Control,” significant intertextual and intratextual connections with other O’Brien works are also evident. For example, at one point we are told that Florence “burst forth in a ribald sailor’s song, which would have been proper in a Singapore drinking dive,” echoing a phrase used in
The Third Policeman
, in relation to Policeman MacCruiskeen’s chest: “It was a brown chest like those owned by seafaring men or lascars from Singapore.” (Eagleeyed readers will already have noted that Singapore is mentioned twice in
Slattery’s Sago Saga
.)

A much more compelling connection, though, lies in the closure to the story: “With the spiritual poise of a Lady of the Lake walking towards her Jurgen, she walked toward the ship and the sunset, till, through my tears, I saw her sun-bonnet disappear beneath the waves!” This slightly elliptical denouement mirrors the enigmatic ending of “John Duffy’s Brother,” with its resonant—but unspecified—allusion to John Keats’s sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816): “Never once did the strange malady return. But to this day John Duffy’s brother starts at the rumble of a train in the Liffey tunnel and stands rooted to the road when he comes suddenly on a level-crossing—silent, so to speak, upon a peak in Darien.”
²
More specifically, the intertextual invocation at the end of “Naval Control” is to James Branch Cabell’s
Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice
(1919), in which the eponymous hero counts among his amorous conquests a mysterious “Lady of the Lake.” (Our Lady of the Lake is also mentioned, of course, in
Slattery’s Sago Saga
.) As various scholars have pointed out, Cabell’s novels were an acknowledged influence on
At Swim-Two-Birds
, or as Anthony Cronin has noted:

The novel within a novel had been used by at least two authors whose books Brian O’Nolan had read. One of these was the now almost forgotten American, James Branch Cabell, whose novels,
Jurgen
and
The Cream of the Jest
, had been passed from hand to hand among O’Nolan’s contemporaries at UCD and who was subsequently to be referred to as James Joyce Cabell in “Cruiskeen Lawn”.
³

Overall, and while we think this makes a compelling case for O’Brien’s authorship, we leave that final judgment to others. In the meantime, here’s the story: enjoy!

Why, some of our readers have asked, do we take science fiction so seriously? Is there no humor in it? We think there is. But we want to hear from more of our readers about this story, which we are using as an experiment. We think it is very ingenious and cleverly worked out
.

—Original Headnote to “Naval Control,”
Amazing Stories Quarterly
, 1932
⁴