The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien is the ideal bog book. Congratulations to its editor Maebh Long for putting together this voluminous (nearly 600 pages) and occasionally hilarious compilation. There are plenty of tedious letters, especially in the later stages of his life, but here and there you’ll come upon a gem. The abiding tone is curmudgeonly – with a fair few downright abusive ones. There are also an inordinate number of letters apologizing for delays caused by sickness or accident. You suspect a lot of the accidents may have been drink related.
A couple of letters concerning the planned jacket design for The Hard Life caught my eye recently. By the time Flann O’Brien got around to writing this later novel the cumulative effects of his dedicated drinking had eroded much of his talent. It seems the weakest of all his books. The humor is strained (Fr. Kurt Fahrt is a character) and the narrative grows tedious. Prior to the publication of The Hard Life he had prevailed on his friend and drinking buddy Sean O’Sullivan to do an illustration for the cover. O’Sullivan had been the most in-demand portrait painter in Dublin and so would add some cachet to the project. However he had grown unreliable due to his alcoholism and O’Brien recounts the problems of getting the finished art work from him. In a letter (dated 29 June 1961) to O’Keefe his publisher O’Brien complains: “When I went to O’Sullivan to get the rough he had promised, I found he was on the piss. He did it, someone else saw it, and when we went to look for it all over his littered studio, it could not be found anywhere. He has promised to do it again tomorrow.” In a subsequent letter dated the 8 August the saga continues: “As regards the cover, it was finished last week by S. O’S but the bugger incorporated the title in the design as HARD TIMES. After I made it plain that my name was not Dickens, he said he could easily make it right. I hope to post it this week.”
Regarding Sean O’Sullivan, his biographical notes in the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography refers rather primly to the fact that “His later work was adversely affected by heavy drinking”. The same sadly could be said of Flann O’Brien – The Hard Life is hard evidence of this.
