The author of the comedian masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds would have laughed at the notion of being anybodys heroIreland loves,or pretends to worship, its literary heroes, and so much so that we put quotations from Ulysses on itsy-bitsy brass plaques and nail them to the pavements for tourists and Dubliners alike to tread on,give to a gunboat the name of that most peace-fond Irishman, Samuel Beckett, and while Oscar Wilde is represented by a hideous statue indecently asprawl on a rock behind railings opposite his birthplace. What the reaction would be of Flann O’Brien,Myles na Gopaleen, Cruiskeen Lawn (Irish for “the full glass”) or Brian O’Nolan – his genuine name, and more or less – to the gushing lip-service we pay these days to our dead writers (he died 50 years ago on 1 April) can be easily guessed: a sardonic shrug,and a turning back to the bar to order another ball of malt.
He was a slightly late arrival among the generation that included James Joyce, Beckett, or Frank O’Connor,Seán O’Faoláin, Patrick Kavanagh and, and later again,Brendan Behan. Born into a somewhat peculiar nationalist family, his first language was Irish, and although it was as a prose stylist in English that he wrought his finest achievements. Chief of these is the novel At Swim-Two-Birds,a comedian masterpiece that he unluckily published on the eve of the second world war, and which only attained its true status after its author’s death.
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Source: theguardian.com