Whiskey Ashes

Censorship and Books

Righteous Bubba asked for some Flann O'Brien. That sort of ties into the thing I was talking about below, about the "voice." Aaaarhg. I'm faced with a knot. Bear with me. The specific knot I'm trying to unravel is partially to do with F O'B's second novel, The Third Policeman -- widely regarded as his second masterpiece, along with the earlier At Swim-two-Birds. F O'B is one strand in the knot.

The entanglement here is the place and function of creative literature in the Irish Republic, 1941-1942. Below I link to the great debate in the Irish Senate of that year over censorship.

Now, pay attention. While this public furor was furor-ing, just the previous year had seen probably the second most famous act of literary self censorship in Irish literary history. That is, F O'B's decision to stuff The Third Policeman into his desk drawer and not try to publish it. See, his first book, At Swim had been published, to dismal sales (the war had a lot to do with that, also, the book was just plain weird), but his publisher turned down T3P on the grounds that it was even more bizarre. F O'B could not handle the rejection, went into a tailspin, assumed his book was rubbish, hid it, lived about 30 more years, died, and than had the book found and hailed as utterly brilliant. Which it is. Poor bastard.

Now, why did he hide it? That was hardly Joyce's response, or Sean O'Casey's, to rejection. Why the failure of artistic nerve? A lot of people consider themselves artistic failures, and you know, most of them are right. But this was a guy who really DID sit on a masterpiece. Why?

Well, biography helps... The thing about F O'B that a lot of people don't get is that he was really a depressed, cynical bastard with a major drink problem. This is not especially uncommon among comic geniuses, as he undoubtedly was. But his depression I think was clearly tied to his ambivalent social position. On the one hand, he relished the freedom and the prestige of being a writer in a place and time where that had a lot of value -- in the right circles. On the other hand, he had a profound bourgeois suspicion of "artists," a suspicion that derived from a lot of sources... This left him in rebellion against everything but with a profound unwillingness to actually risk anything significant in his struggle. He was a career civil servant. A cruel but perhaps accurate assessment would be to say that he is very much like Little Chandler in Joyce's "A Little Cloud," but much smarter and far more gifted so he knew it and hated himself for it. Anthony Cronin's biography, No Laughing Matter of F O'B is worth reading on this if you have any illusions about the man's life. (Cronin was a friend of F O'B's, and of Patrick Kavanagh's, and is a fascinating poet in his own right. And if you have not read his book about Ireland's literary scene in the mid-20th century, Dead as Doornails, do it when you can, as it's a great fucking book.)

All right. So here we have a masterpiece buried. But on the other hand... we have another one censored in plain sight at the same time. That would be Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices. (no relation, of course).

What you have here are two of the greatest novels in mid-century Irish literature, both of them subjected to different forms of censorship. One is public, the other private. And both of these novels have to do with sex, in very bizarre ways...

Anyway, I think it's interesting that these two books are quite literally never spoken about as being at all related.

Also, every censored work of literature contains within it the story of its own censorship. That much is clear.