castle of illusion

Flann O’Brien was an Irish journalist, Gaelic scholar and dedicated drinker whose real name was Brian O’Nolan. Of his very few books, The Hard Life and The Dalkey Archive are slight but funny, and The Third Policeman is a vision of hell which does not quite come off, but At Swim-Two-Birds is probably a masterpiece. Philip Toynbee, the novelist and critic, once said: “If I were cultural dictator… I would make At Swim-Two-Birds compulsory reading in all our universities.” Joyce said of Flann O’Brien: “There’s a real writer with the true comic spirit.” This book owes something to Joyce, but this may mean merely that both Joyce and O’Brien were Irish.

The book is sometimes difficult, but it is no literary heavyweight. It is even, which Joyce’s work is not, whimsical. The narrator is an Irish student who, when not lying in bed or pub-crawling, is writing a novel about a man named Trellis who is writing a book about his enemies who, in revenge, are writing a book about him. The book is a book about writing a book about writing a book. This is very modern (compare the Argentine Borges) in that it does not pretend that literature is reality. The student-narrator is interested not merely in literature but in Irish mythology, which enables him to bring in Finn MacCool (Joyce’s Finnegan) and indulge in comic-heroic language which sounds as though it is translated from the Erse: “The knees and calves to him, swealed and swathed with soogawns and Thomond weed-ropes, were smutted with dungs and dirt-daubs…”

Flann O’Brien discovered a way of counterpointing myth, fiction and actuality through the device of a sort of writer’s commonplace-book. There is no sense of recession, of one order of reality — myth or novel or narration — lying behind another: all are on the same level of importance, and this is what gives the contrapuntal effect. The scope of fiction is both extended and limited — limited as to action (not much happens, though plenty is heard about) but extended as to technique. It is a very Irish book and very funny. But it still awaits the popularity it deserves. (from Anthony Burgess’ 99 Novels)

Ballard is known as a writer of science fiction, a term which perhaps has no real validity. If science fiction constitutes a separate genre it demands new rules of appraisal. These not being available, it is proper to think of works like The Invisible Man, The Time Machine and The Unlimited Dream Company as belonging to no new category. They stand or fall as novels. This is perhaps the best novel that Ballard has written. We are in contemporary England. A young man who does not fit well into conformist society steals an aircraft and, not having flown a plane before, crash-lands on the Thames near Shepperton. We do not know whether or not he survives the crash: what follows may be a death or afterlife vision. He is rescued from drowning by a group who have been foretold of his coming as a kind of messianic redeemer. He discovers supernatural powers in himself which lead him to a total transformation of the town. This is isolated from the rest of the world and becomes a place of miraculous happenings — the spontaneous flowering of tropical vegetation, the appearance of strange wild animals. There are pagan fertility festivals and an uninhibited attitude to sexual congress, which is practised openly. “Shepperton had become a life engine.” The outside world tries to break in but cannot: “A fireman with a heavy axe began to hack a path through the stout bamboo. Within a dozen steps he was surrounded by fresh shoots and wrist-thick lianas that laced him into the bars of a jungle cage from which he was released only by the winches of the exhausted police.” The writing is distinguished and is in the service of an Edenic vision which has its intrusive snakes. When Blake, the hero, feels despair he floods the town with it: Shepperton is an extension of himself. At length the townsfolk take to the air — “fathers, mothers, and their children — our ascending flights swaying across the surface of the earth, benign tornados hanging from the canopy of the universe, celebrating the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead.” It is an apocalyptic book but also very much a novel. (from Anthony Burgess’ 99 Novels)

This novel probably confirmed Bellow’s fitness for the Nobel Prize. It is in competition with Herzog as the best of Bellow’s extended fiction, but it has less self-pity in it and is much funnier. The hero-narrator is Charlie Citrine (a name apparently taken, like Moses Herzog, from Joyce’s Ulysses), a successful but impractical Chicago writer who was a friend of the dead failed poet Von Humboldt Fleisher (probably based on Delmore Schwartz). The gift of the title is a film scenario which, after long incubation, emerges from nowhere and makes Citrine improbably rich. Bellow seems to know little about the film world, but no matter. He knows Chicago very well and much of the book concerns Citrine’s comic misfortunes, and rarer triumphs, in that city. He is in trouble with a small vicious gangster improbably named Cantabile, who is drawn to Citrine because of his very apparent inability to cope with the real tough world. He is in trouble with his divorced wife, who demands more alimony. His girl friend, the gorgeous animal Renata, talks of turning into Persephone and marrying a king of the dead, a successful mortician. The story moves slowly, but we do not mind. The richness with which Bellow presents the physical world, into which he allows Citrine’s moral and metaphysical speculations to intrude at length, is a great joy. Cirtine’s much qualified success as a writer (Pulitzer Prize, ribbon of the Légion d’honneur) is contrasted with the decay of Humboldt, who, though dead, will not lie down. The distinction of the book lies, as always with Bellow, in its presentation of character. We do not much care whether his personages labour at furthering the plot: they are a pleasure to contemplate in themselves. Citrine’s wealthy capitalist brother, for instance, does nothing except delay Citrine’s flight for Spain (Renata does not wait for him there: she goes off with her mortician), but we are happy to be presented with him in depth and breadth. Bellow may be considered not altogether a natural novelist — he rarely moves from Chicago; much of his material is autobiographical — but he excels at animating a distinguished prose style with the pulse of life. (from Anthony Burgess’ 99 Novels)

Saul Bellow in New York in 1975, the year “Humboldt’s Gift,” about a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, was published.