The Snug: A Blog

With my brain still stuck in the Flann O'Brien groove, a chronic condition that threatens to become permanent, I unearthed this intriguing bit of Flann-related gossip from the Irish Times archives. For a long time an interview, purporting to be genuine, with James Joyce's father John Stanislaus (above) by none other than Flann Brian O'Brien O'Nolan, had been floating about the Dublin literary world, and alternately dismissed or endorsed. This article inclines toward the latter view:
"In a recent Irishman’s Diary Frank McNally wrote about Brian O’Nolan’s (Flann O’Brien’s) role as secretary of the commission which produced a notoriously inadequate report into the Cavan orphanage fire of 1943, a very rare case of O’Brien’s “day job” taking on a public dimension. This brought to mind another of O’Brien’s more unusual incarnations, his alleged role as author of an allegedly fake interview with John Stanislaus Joyce, father of James Joyce.

"As the 'allegeds' in the foregoing sentence may indicate, a great deal of mystery still surrounds this anonymous, undated interview: it was first published in full in A James Joyce Yearbook , 1949, edited by Joyce’s friend Maria Jolas. Mrs Jolas later wrote that she found the interview among Joyce’s papers when she sorted them in 1949. It was seized on and used by many Joyce scholars. But there has long been a rumour that the interview was a hoax, the invention of Flann O’Brien. Naturally concerned about this allegation, Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann asked O’Brien’s friend, Niall Sheridan, about the issue. (He never did ask O’Brien, though he knew about this claim for a long time.)

"Sheridan, rather amazingly, confirmed to Ellmann (and also to O’Brien’s biographer, Anthony Cronin) that he and O’Brien had indeed called on Joyce senior in late 1930 or early 1931. He added, however, that neither wrote down anything about it and that the published interview did not reflect what transpired on their visit."

 Read the rest here.

From The Adorations:
And so began Stefanie’s life as a Viennese. Vienna, emotionally, became her deepest home, no matter where else she might reside: Wien, Wien, noch du allein! For the first four years she lived in the cozy mansion at No. 101 Johannesgasse, in a third-floor attic room with a mansard window and a view over the Stadtpark, famous for its autumn roses, a view that took on an indefinable melancholy on winter evenings when the lamps came on and the strollers were shades in a misty never-land. Throughout her sojourn Stefanie got along surprisingly well with her aunt and uncle, the parvenu nobles—riding on a fortune created from wood-pulp and newsprint—and even did quite well with cheeky cousin Fritzl. Of course, cousin Fritzl was three years older than she, and he was engaged to the daughter of a wealthy Bavarian landowner. These facts kept flirtation and cousinly teasing to a minimum; moreover, Fritzl was a harmless youth whose ambitions were circumscribed by average intelligence and total lack of malice. Both of these would become irrelevant when he married his rich Catholic princess from Bavaria and thereby furthered the process of assimilation, not that Fritzl, blond and blue-eyed as he was, had very far to go. His father the Baron had Austrianized, or de-Judaized, himself to such an extent as to be quite unrecognizable as a Son of Israel (except, as Fritzl would point out at moments of ire, for his nose); bluff and grandiose, an aficionado of the opera and the hunt, an admirer of fine brandies and (when Aunt Liesl was elsewhere) of pretty women, Baron Ernst, né Isidor Kahane in Kallicht, Bohemia, was much like Stefanie’s father, indeed much like a dozen Austrian Pappis she could name. As with those others, ostentatious civility reigned, and the Baron was never less than courteous in his dealings with his niece. With others he could be less accommodating, as befit a man of business and wood-pulp millionaire. He remained a dandy, but over the four years of Stefanie’s sojourn his neck turned ropy, his hearing deteriorated and the once-silken tones of his voice aged into a husky blare made huskier by his incessant smoking of Egyptian cigarettes and loud prolonged sinus-clearing hoots.

            “I must move out of this city,” he was wont to say, in spurious despair. “Hüüüüm! How can anyone live in such a climate?”

            “You’ll never move, Uncle,” Stefanie would reply, in a kind of pantomime argument. “And the climate isn’t so bad.”    

                  For her, the climate was perfect; she loved the damp chill of the alluvial plain, the frosty breath on the cheek on an autumn morning (in Vienna even well into late spring a melancholy wisp of winter lurks), the billowing steam-clouds emanating from the kitchens and laundries in the still morning when the tramcars rattled down the Ringstrasse and the delivery horses clip-clopped by, billowing tusks of nose-vapor, and students trudged their thoughtful (or fearful or lovelorn or hungover) way through the city, in Stefanie’s case briskly walking the length of Johannesgasse as far as the Kartnerstrasse and the glorious baroque pile of the Augustiner Church, passing by the somber gray enigma of the Hofburg (where one morning she saw the Archduke again, this time driving himself in an open motorcar, no Sophie at his side) and so down the Herrengasse to the Schottentor and past the slender linden trees of the Schottenring to the entrance to the University, where 32 statues of great men of the ages dominated, with a fustian air of venerable masculinity, the main courtyard, as at a gentleman’s club. Although women were admitted, just (she was once asked at high volume by a steely-eyed veteran doorman for her papers and “a telephone number where your father can be reached”), life in the distaff column was rigorous in the Theology faculty, most masculine sanctum sanctorum of the great institution’s venerable departments. In fact, in the first trimester, Stefanie’s ambition to qualify as a Doctor of Theology was thwarted by mockery and double entendre—and, on one or two occasions, hostility (“A girl should be a wife or a cabaret dancer, nothing else”; “As if we hadn’t enough whores in this town already!”; “Did you make the coffee yet, meine kleine schmetterling?”)—-but Stefanie von Rothenberg was of the mold of greatness, and greatness wavers not. The study of God and His relations with His creatures was Stefanie’s passport to wisdom. In her first trimestrial exams she scored three 10s, top marks grudgingly but respectfully given by the two Ancients, Herrn Doktoren Professoren von Schnitzl and Braun. Indeed, Herr Professor Braun succumbed to the ailment common to aging men: the need, with or without sexual undertones (with, in the professor’s case), to take under their wings female fledglings. Fortunately, confusingly allied as they were with strong feelings of fatherhood, Professor Braun’s urges led nowhere more daring than the Café Landtmann, once, for a kaffee mit schlagober and a slice of Indianer cake. 

San Marcos Mercury: You were raised, I’ve read, in Ireland, France and Switzerland. How has that influenced your literary tastes?

Roger Boylan: I had the privilege of growing up in two languages, English and French, and, living in the cosmopolitan environment of Geneva, becoming somewhat familiar with others: German, Italian, and Russian, mainly. I loved discovering Swiss writers –there are many, some great: Chessex, Ramuz– and great French writers—Proust, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant—in their native tongue. From there it was a short hop to bilingual Beckett, and the rest of modern Irish literature, a discovery that was a profound experience from which I’ve never recovered; indeed, it made me into an Irish novelist.

Mercury: You’ve said that your favorite writers include Nabokov, Joyce, Tolstoy, Beckett and Mark Twain, among others. How does one’s reading matter influence one’s writing do you think?

Boylan: One strives to imitate one’s betters, or should. Eventually, an original style will emerge.

Read the rest of this gripping dialogue here.

Boston Review, that excellent publication based in that excellent city, has allowed me to vent and opinionate in its pages for over 13 years, and I’ve appreciated the opportunity more than I can say. And I’m happy to say our association continues, despite some stumbles on my part. One of their more generous gestures, among many, was to throw open their columns for me to blather on about my novel The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad, still my favorite of my (five) novels, and still seeking the audience it deserves. Well, kudos to BR for letting me wave my little banner, and also to Grove Press for keeping the dear old Olympiad stubbornly in print, because you never know….

Farce, declares the Encyclopædia Britannica, is “a form of the comic in dramatic art, the object of which is to excite laughter by ridiculous situations and incidents.” I would go further: farce is life, only more so. Life, with its disregard for human dignity, may be tragic, comic, majestic, or mundane, or all at once, but farce is always there: la farce, according to the French, who gave us the word (from farcir, to stuff, as a turkey with chestnuts), “est toujours au rendezvous.”

Farce has been acknowledged as a powerful force at least since the time of ancient Greece, when it ruled the satire-dramas of Aristophanes and Menander. The Roman satirists Terence and Plautus had their own stock language of farce that we still recognize today: the glutton, the lecher, the clown. Medieval morality plays often threw in a set of donkey ears, or a swift kick in the britches. The Elizabethan age, with its daily contrasts of splendor and squalor (such contrasts being the essence of farce), was ripe for farcical drama, and Shakespeare embraced the form in The Comedy of Errors, and many other works, including such ostensibly serious plays as Measure for Measure.

And consider the enduring appeal of the 20th century’s farceurs: Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Jacques Tati, Peter Sellers, and Monty Python. The language of things going wrong, identities getting mixed up, pretensions demolished by a pie in the face, the turd in the punch bowl: a universal language indeed. Nor is it just the comics and buffoons who live by farce. Consider Dostoevsky’s towering grandeur that so often turns ludicrous in a moment; the prolonged and quite ridiculous birth of Sterne’sTristram Shandy; Fellini’s alternately rollicking and sentimental dramas of sad clowns, whores, and gluttons; Mahler’s sweeping strings that yield to burlesque hurdy-gurdy tunes: this is farce as great art, but the spirit of farce pervades everyday life. As one of the novelist’s duties is to capture the evanescent in everyday life, capturing the spirit of farce is one way to ensure that posterity will relate, just as today’s playgoers laugh at the buffoon antics in Plautus and Aristophanes.

So, with an (ever hopeful) eye on the future, I subtitled my novel The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad “A Mostly Irish Farce,” just as its predecessor Killoyle was subtitled “An Irish Farce” (the difference is in the immigrants, mostly Indian, in the dramatis personae). Now, the antecedents of Irish farce are ancient indeed, as ancient as the habitation of Ireland. Among modern Irish writers the distinguished firm of Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien, in particular, pays dutiful homage to the forbears of the genre, the myth-makers and shanachies of the great epic age of heroism (Finn MacCool, Cu Chulainn) and farce (mad Sweeney, the pooka). I in turn hope to pay homage to all these, especially to Ireland itself.

Mind you, if Ireland were pure invention—to quote Oscar Wilde’s very Irish comment on Japan: “There is no such country, there are no such people”—it would be a tremendous help to the novelist writing about the place. In The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad, as in Killoyle, I would have had no competition from the “real” world against which my made-up city and county of Killoyle must be ruthlessly judged. (Read the rest here.)

     I was distressed to hear recently from my old friend Mark Halle, who lives near Geneva, that the house I grew up in there had been demolished and replaced by a hideous box-like structure. I was distressed, but not surprised; when my daughter and I visited in ’09, the house was vacant and condemned. You can see it in the photo above, behind my snarling visage. I’m lucky I got to see it one last time, for it occupies a precious place in my memories, a childhood idyll that gets more idyllic with the passage of the years. Here’s an excerpt from my memoir Run Like Blazes.

      Our house in Geneva was called an “English villa.” What made the house English was not so much the fact that an “artistic” Englishwoman had lived and died in it as its English-style garden, with gooseberry bushes, strawberries, raspberries, a couple of cherry trees, an apple tree producing wizened crab apples, and gravel walkways that meandered about and doubled back on themselves, like the ground plan of a maze that was never built. It was a laboratory for kiddie introverts. Bruno Bettelheim, who mandated that children must have magic in their lives or they’d turn nasty later on, would have approved: My garden was a magical Eden where I retreated from the world into the tall grass at a fork in the garden path to read Tintin, or Nordic legends, or D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths, and dream of cars and airplanes and of make-believe places like Norway and Greece and Nepal.     

    Overlooking me during those dreamy moments, at the top of a short, steep slope that was perfect for a short, sweet sled ride in a snowy winter, beneath a precipitous roof designed so that snow would slide off in such winters, was the house itself, of gray stucco, with two floors, an attic, and a balcony. An apricot bush swarmed up the side and in the spring yielded soft, pulpy, sweet fruit. (The bush was sturdy enough for me to use as a ladder to the living room window. I did this with annoying frequency until Mum had the bush trimmed back.) Upstairs, beneath the eaves, were: My parents’ room; my bedroom/sanctum; a long, low-ceilinged, well-lit bathroom, containing a clawfooted bathtub in which I soaked for many a long dreamy hour; and a narrow attic with skylights that opened out onto the roof.

      Downstairs was the living room, containing a soot-blackened fireplace and a well-stocked bookcase (all Mum’s books, heavy on Waugh, Galsworthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, very light on the French, except Simone de Beauvoir and Camus). The living room was furnished in—to put it politely—a shabby-genteel style that grew shabbier and less genteel as the years went by: a wing chair, for example, that stayed in the family long after its inner stuffing started dribbling out through a rip in the side; and a sofa with collapsed springs that sagged like a hammock when sat upon. Through French doors from the living room one entered the dining room furnished in the same lackadaisical style, including a scuffed-up dining table at which, when we were a family, we ate together, watched by our Siamese cat, Pete Toy, from the windowsill. Mum, who was a good cook in a heavy-sauce-and-cream way typical of the American ‘40s, made our meals on a stove of similar vintage in the antiquated and dimly lit kitchen, a cozy place. The small, cold, mysteriously flushing toilet next door was not, and it acquired a special place in my nightmares…speaking of which, the door next to the spectral toilet opened onto a steep staircase that spiraled downward into an unused cellar strongly redolent of the olfactory ghosts of long-dead apples grown by the artistic Englishwoman, and possibly inhabited on and off by her ghost or others,’ too.

From Run Like Blazes, © 2011 by Roger Boylan.

He Digesteth Hard Yron

Although the aepyornis   

or roc that lived in Madagascar, and the moa are extinct, the camel-sparrow, linked   

with them in size--the large sparrow Xenophon saw walking by a stream--was and is a symbol of justice.    

This bird watches his chicks with   

a maternal concentration-and he's been mothering the eggs at night six weeks--his legs   

their only weapon of defense.

He is swifter than a horse; he has a foot hard as a hoof; the leopard    

is not more suspicious. 

How could he, prized for plumes and eggs and young used even as a riding beast, respect men   

hiding actor-like in ostrich skins, with the right hand

making the neck move as if alive and from a bag

the left hand strewing grain, that ostriches    

might be decoyed and killed! 

Yes, this is he whose plume was anciently the plume of justice;

he whose comic duckling head on its great neck revolves with compass-needle nervousness when he stands guard,    

in S-like foragings as he is   

preening the down on his leaden-skinned back. The egg piously shown as Leda's very own   

from which Castor and Pollux hatched, was an ostrich-egg. 

And what could have been more fit for the Chinese lawn it    

Grazed on as a gift to an   

emperor who admired strange birds, than

this one, who builds his mud-made nest in dust yet will wade   

in lake or sea till only the head shows.   . . . . . . .    

Six hundred ostrich-brains served   

at one banquet, the ostrich-plume-tipped tent and desert spear, jewel- gorgeous ugly egg-shell   

goblets, eight pairs of ostriches in harness, dramatize a meaning always missed by the externalist.    

The power of the visible   

is the invisible; as even where no tree of freedom grows, so-called brute courage knows.   

Heroism is exhausting, yet it contradicts a greed that did not wisely spare the harmless solitaire    

or great auk in its grandeur;   

unsolicitude having swallowed up all giant birds but an alert gargantuan   

little-winged, magnificently speedy running-bird. This one remaining rebel is the sparrow-camel.