Leprechauns & Logorrhea

AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS by Flann O'Brien. 315 pages. Walker. $4.95.

It may be that Irishmen write stories at great speed because they are afraid of being interrupted by another Irishman with an even taller story. Logorrhea may be a Greek word, but the Irish are the most egregious at it.

A master of the many-splendored art of Irish malarkey was Flann O'Brien, pseudonymous author of At Swim-Two-Birds. Flann O'Brien was one of the pen names of Brian O'Nolan, wit, playwright and civil servant. Under the name of Myles na gCopaleen, he wrote a satirical column for the Irish Times; he died in Dublin on April 1. But in all three identities, he was a great kidder. At Swim, first published in London in 1939 and twelve years later in New York, has since gathered a subterranean reputation--and thus this new edition--as possibly the most maddeningly complicated book ever written. It is also funny, once the reader gets used to the suspicion that the biggest joke is on him.

Irish Garrulity. It is not a book the way a rose is a rose. It is a book about a book about a man writing a book about characters who write a book about him. Under cover of this preposterous stratagem, O'Brien parodies, satirizes and otherwise spoofs a number of Irish social and literary conventions. Among them: the realistic novel, the bardic gigantism of Celtic literature, the circumlocutions of Irish journalism, the Irish anecdote, Irish prudery, and, in its wonderfully garrulous way, Irish garrulity itself.

O'Brien's anarchic foray against the foolishness of fact begins with a university student who is trying to write a realistic novel between courses at the National University. It is a glum, pompously polysyllabic work which gets out of hand because the main character is Dermot Trellis, described as "an eccentric author," a publican who has "conceived the project of writing a salutary book on the consequences that follow wrongdoing." Trellis' characters, in turn, include Fergus MacPhellimey, a "pooka," which is some sort of leprechaun, and John Furriskey, whose task it is to attack women and behave at all times in an "indecent manner."

Sow Neurosis. These bogles, unlike most fancy-free elves, are not bores; malice and eloquence save them from that un-Irish condition. All of them turn on Trellis, afflict him with more boils (64) than Job's, and provoke him to a robust curse: "You hog of hell, you leper's death-puke!" A bleak, black coda to the book-within-a-book says enigmatically: "Evil is even, truth is an odd number and death is a full stop." Was Trellis mad? It is hard to say. Was he a victim of hallucinations? Professor Unternehmer, the German neurologist, allows Trellis "an inverted sow neurosis, wherein the farrow eats their dam."

It is easy to dismiss this sort of thing as irresponsible fantasy, but it should be recalled that this last little apparently sick mick joke is directed against James Joyce, who made one of his characters rage against Ireland as "the old sow that eats her own farrow."

Flann O'Brien, the man with three names, might have enjoyed a last posthumous joke in the last paragraph of his brilliant book. He cites a German who was hung up on the number three: "He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular vein with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife goodbye, goodbye, good-bye." Even the Irish don't joke about the Trinity except in dead unearnest.

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