The Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien Read online

  Del. Gra. Er. Omn. Rex. Fid. Def. Eng.-Scot. Imp.

  *

  Dear Friend,

  My son is being obliged to spend most of his time at school learning this “Compulsory English,” instead of studying poetry or magic. What will he gain from English when he leaves the country? Not one note is spoken in Scotland other than Gaelic, and the Kingdom of the Saxons is full of nobody but violent, ignorant savages; Gaelic is spoken throughout two thirds of the world—or are we to believe that there are other countries somewhere out there? Bah!

  —Yours,

  “Anti-Humbug.”

  *

  Good Master,

  When are the King’s Guards going do something about the gurriers that are constantly throwing stones in Almhain-slim-na-sleaghséim? The skins on two of my windows were punctured a couple of days ago.

  —Pro Bono Publico,

  Latin Scribe.

  P.S. My card is enclosed.

  *

  Honest exemplar,

  I have an excellent violin, and there is delicate writing inside it saying “A. Stradivarius fecit 381 A.D.” Can any reader out there tell me whether this violin is worth five hundred bags of flour?

  —Bacrach Draoi

  *

  My good man,

  I would like to let the public know through your valuable column that there is no connection between myself and the man named Feidhlimidh Fuar na Feamnaighe arrested by the King’s Guards for stealing potatoes in beautiful Almhain. Thanking you in advance,

  With great respect,

  Feidhlimidh Fuar na Feamnaighe.

  * * *

  1 Translator’s Note: This refers to the poem “Lon Doire an Chairn” by the eighteenth-century poet Peadar Ó Doirnín, translated as “The Blackbird of Derrycairn” (1943) by Austin Clarke.

  2 The original text is in Gaelic uncial script, except for this section which is in Roman.

  The Tale of Black Peter (1933)

  by Brian Ó Nualláin

  Black Peter was born in a little white cottage in the middle of the Bog between the mountains and the sea; the kind of cottage you would see if you took the road back from Cheap a’ Mhadaidh and you heading for Alt a’ Chait—a lovely little lime-washed house, sitting comfortably by itself in the centre of the valley. To be sure, there is no valley at Cheap a’ Mhadaidh, nor at Cúl an Bhobaire or Chros-bealaigh or Cúig nGeach either; there’s nothing there but Bog.1 Regardless, this was the kind of house a true Gaeilgeoir always sees in a mountain glen and he taking the road back.

  There was no blind old storyteller living there (as there should have been), but, as I said above, only Black Peter and his mother, a widow with a good span of years behind her.

  One morning, as the infant Peter was playing among the ashes and slowly coming into full possession of his faculties and speech, he gathered his courage, sped across the floor and stared out onto his native land. He saw the surly dun Bog stretching back to where the sky met the earth.

  “God help us,” Peter said, “the world is brown.”

  The seasons came and went, and the day arrived when Peter stood on his own two feet. He would often head out piling and gathering on the Bog around his cottage; he would pick up a hard, prickly sod of turf here, a soft wet one there, and he knocked great sport out of this collecting. Strange little flowers, too, and sticks and big lumps of Bog pine. He would bring the whole lot back to his mother, and indeed there was often a beating waiting for him instead of thanks for his labours.

  Several times his mother set him on her knee, when the gloomy black clouds of the night were drawing down their mantle, and the salty spray of the sea blowing melancholy clouds of fog in across the Bog.

  “Peter,” she would say, “always be friendly to the Bog, be good to it and be charitable. If you are a friend to it, there won’t be a jot of treachery waiting for you out there, and it will do no harm to you for the whole of your life. But may the saints in Heaven help you should you ever lose the Bog’s friendship. That which could be your best friend, can also be your worst enemy. The Bog has a long memory. . . .”

  *

  The years went by and Black Peter grew up. He left the doorstep behind and walked the main road that twisted and turned around the Bog. He experienced new things in the wider world: bare rocks; watchful, authoritative men with big black hats on them; other cottages and public houses; the seashore and waves and fishing. . . . It was not long before he was as bold and loud-mouthed as any of the natives.

  It’s no great matter to say that he spent every other night staying up late, watching the seanchaí-man in the corner and he throwing his two flat feet into the embers, lighting his pipe, clearing his throat, and starting into stories of the Fianna. There was no better storyteller than him from east to west, and he was renowned from the heavens to Aran. Sometimes there would be a céilidhe, the mighty, spirited men dancing with the neat, laughing girls; and those who weren’t dancing were secretly drinking poitín behind a wall in the dusk. The poitín would always be kept in a five-naggin bottle, and that bottle would be kept in a hole in the wall. Once a week without fail, two men would come over from Bárr na Blagaide,2 one of them trying to propose marriage to Máire, the daughter of the publican. Máire would always be asleep, but when her father and the visitors had downed a couple of glasses of poitín in her honour, he would call for her —Wake up, Máire —Who’s below —Paddy Mickey and Mickey Paddy —I wouldn’t take him if he was the last man in Ireland —He’s a decent, kind man, and he has a fine parcel of land —I don’t care —Get dressed and come down here at once, my love . . . and Máire would come down and take him as a husband, after a lot of negotiation.

  Other nights, Peter would go walking along the beach. In summer or in winter, it was always a stormy night when Peter went out walking, and the poor fishermen out on the choppy mouth of the bay, in the throes of death. Their mothers and wives would be crying and wailing on the shore, soaked to the marrow with the spray of the sea, looking on in torment at the unfortunate men out among the seaweed, their boats broken in the water, and they trying to come ashore. Peter saw the same bold man go into the sea with the same cable to help the fishermen, the same women trying to talk sense into him and keening that another poor man was lost. . . . Other times, he would go waking the dead (or people would die suddenly and frequently all over the Bog), he would pray, take a pinch of snuff, and drink poitín, and hear the revelry and the tumult of voices next door.

  “DAMN IT!” said Peter, in loud and clear voice.

  He said that often.

  A day came when Peter arose early in the morning and put on his Aran jumper and his woollen rags. He ate a bowl of stirabout and twelve nettles, lovely nourishing nettles of the kind that do be on the Bog. He said a mouthful of his regular prayers. Then he leaped vigorously over the half-door and raced across the Bog in a raging temper, and he did not break his stride until he reached the house of Father Séamus. He woke the priest.

  “God and Mary and Patrick be with you this morning.”

  “God and Mary and Patrick and Brigid be with you,” Peter replied. “I have an important question for you. Tell me this much: WHO CREATED ME AND THIS MISERABLE COUNTRY?”

  “God didn’t create it,” the priest answered. “It was Parthalán Mac an Dubhdha, author, and Feidhlimídh Ó Casaidhe, poet—both natives of Dublin. . . .”

  Peter did not say another word, but grabbed a fine heavy double-barrelled shotgun that was hanging on the wall, secreted it under his coat and departed without delay. He headed south as the day was dawning, and disappeared into the mists of the Bog.

  He was never heard from again, but it was said that there was some bad business done in Dublin.

  *

  The Bog is still there, but the ‘b’ is small now. Father Séamus says it’s not as brown as it used to be, and that it’s going black in some places, but there is grass growing on it now, and barley and potatoes and peas as well. The storyteller is silent, the fishermen are sa
fe, and the women are on top of the business of keeping the embers and ashes in the fireplace. Máire is married and dissatisfied.

  As well as that, there are shops on the bog now, selling bus-tickets and cigarettes and the Daily Mail.3 There are ordinary people on the bog today, who have never heard the tale of Black Peter.

  * * *

  1 Translator’s Note: The place-names, in order, translate as “The Dog’s Lawn,” “The Cat’s Ravine,” “The Back of the Trickster,” “Cross-road,” and “The Five Geese.”

  2 “Bárr na Blagaide” means “Bald Man’s Peak.”

  3 “Bus-ticket,” “cigarette” and “daily mail” [sic] all appear in English in the original text. In other early short works, Ó Nualláin would contrast the two languages by making use of two different typefaces—uncial for Gaelic, and Roman for English. This story, however, was originally published entirely in Roman type, detracting from the recurring joke.

  Short Stories in English (1934–67)

  Scenes in a Novel (1934)

  by Brother Barnabas

  (Probably Posthumous)

  I am penning these lines, dear reader, under conditions of great emotional stress, being engaged, as I am, in the composition of a posthumous article. The great blots of sweat which gather on my brow are instantly decanted into a big red handkerchief, though I know the practice is ruinous to the complexion, having regard to the open pores and the poisonous vegetable dyes that are used nowadays in the Japanese sweat-shops. By the time these lines are in neat rows of print, with no damn over-lapping at the edges, the writer will be in Kingdom Come.* (See Gaelic quotation in 8-point footnote.) I have rented Trotsky’s villa in Paris, though there are four defects in the lease (three reckoning by British law) and the drains are—what shall I say?—just a leetle bit Gallic. Last week, I set about the melancholy task of selling up my little home. Auction followed auction. Priceless books went for a mere song, and invaluable songs, many of them of my own composition, were ruthlessly exchanged for loads of books. Stomach-pumps and stallions went for next to nothing, whilst my ingenious home-made typewriter, in perfect order except for two faulty characters, was knocked down for four and tuppence. I was finally stripped of all my possessions, except for a few old articles of clothing upon which I had waggishly placed an enormous reserve price. I was in some doubt about a dappled dressing-gown of red fustian, bordered with a pleasing grey piping. I finally decided to present it to the Nation. The Nation, however, acting through one of its accredited Sanitary Inspectors, declined the gift—rather churlishly I thought—and pleading certain statutory prerogatives, caused the thing to be burnt in a yard off Chatham Street within a stone’s throw of the house where the Brothers Sheares played their last game of taiplis [draughts]. Think of that! When such things come to pass, as Walt Whitman says, you re-examine philosophies and religions. Suggestions as to compensation were pooh-poohed and sallies were made touching on the compulsory acquisition of slum property. You see? If a great mind is to be rotted and deranged, no meanness or no outrage is too despicable, no maggot of officialdom is too contemptible to perpetrate it . . . the ash of my dressing-gown, a sickly wheaten colour, and indeed, the whole incident reminded me forcibly of Carruthers McDaid.† Carruthers McDaid is a man I created one night when I had swallowed nine stouts and felt vaguely blasphemous. I gave him a good but worn-out mother and an industrious father, and coolly negativing fifty years of eugenics, made him a worthless scoundrel, a betrayer of women and a secret drinker. He had a sickly wheaten head, the watery blue eyes of the weakling. For if the truth must be told I had started to compose a novel and McDaid was the kernel or the fulcrum of it. Some writers have started with a good and noble hero and traced his weakening, his degradation and his eventual downfall; others have introduced a degenerate villain to be ennobled and uplifted to the tune of twenty-two chapters, usually at the hands of a woman—“She was not beautiful, but a shortened nose, a slightly crooked mouth and eyes that seemed brimful of a simple complexity seemed to spell a curious attraction, an inexplicable charm.” In my own case, McDaid, starting off as a rank waster and a rotter, was meant to sink slowly to absolutely the last extremities of human degradation. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was to be too low for him, the wheaten-headed hound. . . .

  I shall never forget the Thursday when the thing happened. I retired to my room at about six o’clock, fortified with a pony of porter and two threepenny cigars, and manfully addressed myself to the achievement of Chapter Five. McDaid, who for a whole week had been living precariously by selling kittens to foolish old ladies and who could be said to be existing on the immoral earnings of his cat, was required to rob a poor-box in a church. But no! Plot or no plot, it was not to be.

  “Sorry, old chap,” he said, “but I absolutely can’t do it.”

  “What’s this, Mac,” said I, “getting squeamish in your old age?”

  “Not squeamish exactly,” he replied, “but I bar poor-boxes. Dammit, you can’t call me squeamish. Think of that bedroom business in Chapter Two, you old dog.”

  “Not another word,” said I sternly, “you remember that new shaving brush you bought?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well, you burst the poor-box or it’s anthrax in two days.”

  “But, I say, old chap, that’s a bit thick.”

  “You think so? Well, I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that your opinions don’t matter.”

  We left it at that. Each of us firm, outwardly polite, perhaps, but determined to yield not one tittle of our inalienable rights. It was only afterwards that the whole thing came out. Knowing that he was a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, I had sent him to a revivalist prayer-meeting, purely for the purpose of scoffing and showing the reader the blackness of his soul. It appears that he remained to pray. Two days afterwards I caught him sneaking out to Gardiner Street at seven in the morning. Furthermore, a contribution to the funds of a well-known charity, a matter of four-and-sixpence in the name of Miles Caritatis was not, I understand, unconnected with our proselyte. A character ratting on his creator and exchanging the pre-destined hangman’s rope for a halo is something new. It is, however, only one factor in my impending dissolution. Shaun Svoolish, my hero, the composition of whose heroics have cost me many a sleepless day, has formed an alliance with a slavey in Griffith Avenue; and Shiela, his “steady,” an exquisite creature I produced for the sole purpose of loving him and becoming his wife, is apparently to be given the air. You see? My carefully thought-out plot is turned inside out and goodness knows where this individualist flummery is going to end. Imagine sitting down to finish a chapter and running bang into an unexplained slavey at the turn of a page! I reproached Shaun, of course.

  “Frankly, Shaun,” I said, “I don’t like it.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “My brains, my brawn, my hands, my body are willing to work for you, but the heart! Who shall say yea or nay to the timeless passions of a man’s heart? Have you ever been in love? Have you ever—?”

  “What about Shiela, you shameless rotter? I gave her dimples, blue eyes, blonde hair and a beautiful soul. The last time she met you, I rigged her out in a blue swagger outfit, brand new. You now throw the whole lot back in my face. . . . Call it cricket if you like, Shaun, but don’t expect me to agree.”

  “I may be a prig,” he replied, “but I know what I like. Why can’t I marry Bridie and have a shot at the Civil Service?”

  “Railway accidents are fortunately rare,” I said finally, “but when they happen they are horrible. Think it over.”

  “You wouldn’t dare!”

  “O, wouldn’t I? Maybe you’d like a new shaving brush as well.”

  And that was that.

  Treason is equally widespread among the minor characters. I have been confronted with a Burmese shanachy, two corner-boys, a barmaid, and five bus-drivers, none of whom could give a satisfactory explanation of their existence or a plausible account of their movements. They are evidently “friends” of my characters.
The only character to yield me undivided and steadfast allegiance is a drunken hedonist who is destined to be killed with kindness in Chapter Twelve. And he knows it! Not that he is any way lacking in cheek, of course. He started nagging me one evening.

  “I say, about the dust-jacket—”

  “Yes?”

  “No damn vulgarity, mind. Something subtle, refined. If the thing was garish or cheap, I’d die of shame.”

  “Felix,” I snapped, “mind your own business.”

  Just one long round of annoyance and petty persecution. What is troubling me just at the moment, however, is a paper-knife. I introduced it in an early scene to give Father Hennessy something to fiddle with on a parochial call. It is now in the hands of McDaid. It has a dull steel blade, and there is evidently something going on. The book is seething with conspiracy and there have been at least two whispered consultations between all the characters, including two who have not yet been officially created. Posterity taking a hand in the destiny of its ancestors, if you know what I mean. It is too bad. The only objector, I understand, has been Captain Fowler, the drunken hedonist, who insists that there shall be no foul play until Chapter Twelve has been completed; and he has been over-ruled. Candidly, reader, I fear my number’s up.

  * * * * * * *

  I sit at my window thinking, remembering, dreaming. Soon I go to my room to write. A cool breeze has sprung up from the west, a clean wind that plays on men at work, on boys at play and on women who seek to police the corridors, live in Stephen’s Green and feel the heat of buckshee turf. . . .

  It is a strange world, but beautiful. How hard it is, the hour of parting. I cannot call in the Guards, for we authors have our foolish pride. The destiny of Brother Barnabas is sealed, sealed for aye.

  I must write!

  These, dear reader, are my last words. Keep them and cherish them. Never again can you read my deathless prose, for my day that has been a good day is past.