This article examines the intellectual exchange and literary collaboration between John Garvin and Brian O’Nolan, exploring the dynamics of their relationship on three different levels. Professionally, Garvin was O’Nolan’s superior when O’Nolan joined the Irish Civil Service in 1935, and he remained an influential senior figure in their department until O’Nolan left in 1953. On a literary level, Garvin read an early draft of the
This article demonstrates that John Garvin (1904–86) and Brian O’Nolan (1911–66) shared the same intellectual coterie and examines their collaboration on three levels. Professionally, Garvin was O’Nolan’s superior when O’Nolan joined the Irish Civil Service in 1935, and he remained an influential senior figure in their department until O’Nolan left in 1953. On a literary level, Garvin read an early draft of the manuscript for
Garvin was born in Sligo in 1904 and was less than seven years older than O’Nolan. Their early lives followed a similar course, although Garvin’s was marked by a clear passion and aptitude for public administration which led to the flowering of his career for decades after O’Nolan had been compelled to resign from the civil service. Garvin was educated at University College Galway and University College Dublin. He graduated in arts and commerce at the former and in law at the latter before being called to the bar.
The title of Doctor of Literature (much coveted by O’Nolan) was conferred on Garvin by the National University of Ireland in 1972, and he turned his later years over to Joyce. He gave a lecture in Dublin entitled ‘Joyce and The Church’ on 5 December 1975, and another, ‘Argonaut to Katharica,’ on 4 November 1976.
John McCourt is one of the few critics who has discussed Garvin’s interventions into Joyce scholarship as ‘Andrew Cass.’
a brilliant civil servant, possibly, indeed, the ablest of the younger men in the public pay. But he is something more than that, I am now in a position to reveal […], he is one of the greatest living authorities (I suppose there are some dead ones) on the works of that incomparable, and incomparably abstruse genius, James Joyce. I am informed that he has solved the riddle of
A few months later, Smyllie’s ‘Irishman’s Diary’ column on 24 May 1947 credits ‘Andrew Cass’s intimate study of
Critical accounts of Garvin’s relationship with O’Nolan began early owing to the publication of Garvin’s memorial essay about O’Nolan, ‘Sweetscented Manuscripts,’ in
Cronin describes O’Nolan’s recurring criticism of Garvin in
A Portrait
I take the following from the London Paper,
‘THE Secretary Bird is in a class by himself. […] At the back of his head hangs a bunch of feathers which he can raise at will and when he does so they look like a lot of quill pens stuck behind his ear. Hence his name.
Snakes of all kinds, from small, harmless ones to dangerous cobras, fall prey to the Secretary Bird. His method of attack is to spring at the snakes and give them vicious kicks with one of his long, strong legs. He then jumps back to a safe distance himself, and after a moment repeats the attack. […] As soon as the victim is no longer dangerous, the bird eats it […] then wanders off to some quiet spot where he stands with hunched shoulders, dreamily digesting, often for hours on end.’
Why does that bring the Higher Civil Servant to
Garvin is the ‘Higher Civil Servant’ targeted in this parody. O’Nolan’s ‘portrait’ of the Secretary Bird satirises the management style of senior civil servants who were able to attack subordinates and then retreat to a safe distance, but his own attack on Garvin is also made from a safe distance, veiled by the reference to senior civil servants in general.
The attacks on Garvin seem to have continued, even if the evidence for them is now lost. Jack White, who was
Garvin and O’Nolan’s literary collaboration begins with
In ‘Sweetscented Manuscripts,’ Garvin explains that the epigraph is an excerpt from a Euripides play, in which Hercules (Heracles) questions the existence of his father, Zeus, and murders his own children in a fit of madness. The line is uttered as part of a speech made by Amphitryon, Heracles’s earthly father, to his wife Megara as they await Heracles’s return from the underworld, trying to shelter at the altar to Zeus from the usurping king Lycus who wants to kill them. The play is an anti-epic. It inverts the normal chronology of the Heracles story to present Heracles murdering his wife and three sons in a fit of madness
Euripides’s
Newman, who was Trinity scholar in classics, enquired where [O’Nolan] got the Greek quotation […]: ‘I mean to say it’s unusual, you know, finding a classical quotation used as an epigraph with no indication of its source.’ ‘There’s the source, so far as I’m concerned,’ Brian said, indicating me. ‘Don’t heed him,’ I said, ‘he got it from his friends Timothy Danaos and Dona Ferentes, the two Greek characters in his book.’ ‘But seriously, John,’ Alec said, ‘why make a mystery of the thing? A thing, you know, that should be on record.’
In his reply to Newman, Garvin subtly refers to the names of Trellis’s mute lawyers, ‘Timothy Danaos and Dona Ferentes’ from the court scene in
Garvin’s monograph on Joyce was published as
The dialogue between state administration and the modernism of Joyce, a writer who exiled himself from the Irish state in its formative years, is perhaps the major extant content of the Garvin-O’Nolan relationship within the Palace Bar milieu of aspiring writers in the civil service and journalists for
Joyce, as is well-known, made Dublin his literary property. Garvin was an administrative manager for Dublin and eventually became city commissioner. In other words, Joyce had the run of Dublin in a literary sense, Garvin and O’Nolan ran it in a literal sense. Their relationship to Dublin is one aspect of the broader set of connections between the project of Joycean modernism and the modernisation of Irish infrastructure explored by Michael Rubenstein in
O’Brien’s new office job becomes rather astonishing for its fidelity to the Joycean text […]. It was precisely at that intersection of taxation, finance, and urban infrastructure that Joyce in
Liam Lanigan echoes Rubenstein’s claim about civic fictionalisation, arguing that
The pervasiveness of this aesthetic modernism is matched by Garvin’s bureaucratic meticulousness. For instance, Garvin uses his bureaucratic perspective on the history of the city’s streets, as they were developing, to make bold claims about Joyce’s writing. He argues that ‘walking to meet’ Nora, Joyce ‘could descry the name of the first house in Leinster Street inscribed high up on its redbrick gable in large, white capital letters, FINN’S HOTEL,’ and Garvin suggests these sights inspired Joyce to choose the name
The intellectuals’ double bind consisted, first, of ‘being a beneficiary of a nationalist revolution which you had largely come to despise’ while at the same time ‘it was unthinkable that you could regret the passing of British rule’ and, second, of being ‘a passive or active upholder of a faith [Catholicism] which you often found abhorrent either in its beliefs or, at the very least, its public attitudes.’ These factors led such intellectuals-cum-bureaucrats into ‘a curious kind of latter-day aestheticism,’ in which ‘you were in an ambiguous, not to say dishonest position, morally, socially and intellectually. You were a conformist among other conformists in terms of the most important social or philosophical questions you could face. But yet you knew about modern art and literature. You had read most of the great moderns and, above all, you had read James Joyce. That was what marked you out as different, the joke you shared against the rabblement of which you were otherwise a part.’
Rubenstein turns to Garvin when he writes that ‘Garvin and O’Brien, like many other civil servants, would have absorbed Joyce’s worldly vision and then found themselves constrained to the provinciality of the state’s conservatism and isolationism, thus engendering their split personality and their multiply lettered lives of civil pseudonymity.’
A direct illustration of this relationship is the strange case of Garvin’s apparently reluctant argument for the identification of Shaun the Post with de Valera in
apparently considered that I was unnecessarily cautious in my identification which he thought should be pronounced positively and unambiguously. The fact is, of course, that Shaun represents a number of other characters in varying contexts.
Explaining the failure to correct the unwanted insertion when the article was republished in John Ryan’s
The artist is doomed to be for ever at variance with his brother, the Irish politician, and so to remain an Irish Exile. When the politician came into his kingdom and could invite his exiled brother to return to Ireland, would he be brought back and crowned with laurel to celebrate his literary triumphs? Not, as we have shown, if his objective was to set the Liffey on fire.
Although we have only Garvin’s account, the apparent disagreement between Garvin and O’Nolan on the strength with which Shaun the Post should be identified with de Valera indicates that they shared the basic thesis and hence suggests that O’Nolan collaborated with Garvin – unhappily, perhaps, in the case of the unwanted insertion – on a political interpretation of Joyce. In turn, Garvin absorbed O’Nolan’s literary method of representing life imitating art, which constitutes an inversion of the Joycean method. Garvin writes:
What exercised Nolan’s mind in my account of Best was that, by importing real persons into
Garvin pinpoints the way that
Thus Bloom is created at the age of thirty-eight and he and Stephen are rigged out to carry their own personalities through the epic events of one day as well as the symbolic
One can compare Garvin’s reading that Bloom is created ‘at the age of thirty-eight’ to the parodic announcement of the ‘birth’ of John Furriskey in
There is also material which suggests that Garvin is the source of the strange conceit of Joyce as a reclusive Jesuit in
the only ‘joke’ which I had ever tried to perpetrate on the Joyce canon was a rejection of the findings in
It is ironic that Newman phoned Garvin to verify these details, given that when
As McCourt has noted, there seems to be a lot of co-thinking in the circle about
We have argued in favour of reconnecting Garvin and O’Nolan on the basis that understanding their shared bureaucratic poetics helps us to recover a way of reading O’Nolan’s texts alongside his civil service work which has long been neglected. Their interactions in print also afford us with a better understanding of Garvin’s place within O’Nolan’s circle, which previously had been limited only to their work together and the epigraph Garvin provided.
Garvin certainly had a mercurial knowledge of the Irish Civil Service, and he shared this knowledge with O’Nolan as his mentor. While there is an essential difference between the kinds of writer and civil servant O’Nolan and Garvin were, they were very likely friends. Michael Phelan has noted that Garvin as secretary would have been close to O’Nolan both professionally and personally.
As we have seen, John Garvin’s career as a senior civil servant, writer, and Joycean connects to O’Nolan’s life at several important junctures. Over a period stretching from the completion of O’Nolan’s first novel and beginning of
– Graduates with Arts and Commerce BA from University College Galway.
– Obtains law degree from University College Dublin and is called to the bar.
Garvin’s degrees are listed in the obituary published in the
Garvin’s obituary outlines his various roles within the civil service by year. See ‘Death of Dr John Garvin,’
Myles na gCopaleen,
See the announcement of John Garvin becoming manager of Wicklow in the
See the notice for ‘Joyce and the Church,’ published in the
The biographical note also states that Garvin ‘was Secretary to the Department of Local Government in Ireland from 1948 to 1966. He has been Chairman of the National Library Council, Vice Chairman of the Higher Education Authority, and Dublin City Commissioner (1969–73), running the city in place of the City Council, which had been removed by the Minister for Local Government. Mr Garvin is preparing a book on Joyce.’ See
Thomas ‘John’ Garvin was the father of UCD professor and historian Tom Christopher Garvin (born 1944). Tom Garvin discusses his father’s pseudonym in a letter to
John McCourt, ‘Myles na gCopaleen: A Portrait of the Artist as a Joyce Scholar,’ in
Smyllie’s article praising Garvin was originally published under his pseudonym ‘Nichevo’ in
This article is of great interest to Joyceans because Smyllie also notes that Joyce wrote to compliment
See Anthony Cronin,
Keith Hopper,
John Garvin, ‘Sweetscented Manuscripts,’ in
Niall Sheridan, ‘Brian, Flann, and Myles (The Springtime of Genius),’ in O’Keeffe (ed.),
Cronin,
‘An Irishman’s Diary,’
Myles na Gopaleen,
Jack White, ‘Myles, Flann, and Brian,’ in O’Keeffe (ed.),
Flann O’Brien,
Garvin, ‘Sweetscented Manuscripts,’ 58.
U. S. Dhuga worked through a translation of the classical Greek and discussed
J. C. C. Mays, ‘Brian O’Nolan: Literalist of the Imagination,’ in O’Keeffe (ed.),
Stephen Knight, ‘Forms of Gloom: The Novels of Flann O’Brien,’ in
Ninian Mellamphy, ‘Aestho-Autogamy and the Anarchy of Imagination: Flann O’Brien’s Theory of Fiction in
Roy L. Hunt, ‘Hell Goes Round and Round: Flann O’Brien,’
Garvin, ‘Sweetscented Manuscripts,’ 58.
According to Patrick Long, Newman studied classics at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), ‘graduating in 1927. He was first classical scholar of his year in 1924, and among his extracurricular interests he edited TCD Magazine. On graduating, Newman taught classics at the High School, Harcourt St. He wrote articles for
Garvin, ‘Sweetscented Manuscripts,’ 58.
O’Brien,
Virgil, ‘Aeneidos Lib. II,’ in
Garvin, ‘Sweetscented Manuscripts,’ 58.
Ibid.
Garvin, ‘Sweetscented Manuscripts,’ 54.
John Garvin,
‘Death of Dr John Garvin,’
See Arnold Goldman, ‘Review of “
McCourt,
Garvin,
Letter to George Antheil, 3 January 1931, quoted from
Michael Rubenstein,
Rubenstein,
Ibid, 97.
Liam Lanigan,
Rubenstein,
Garvin,
Rubenstein, 103, citing Cronin, 53–54.
Rubenstein, 103.
The account of the insertion is in Garvin,
Garvin,
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 143.
Ibid., 8.
Sheridan credits Joyce with coining the phrase ‘comic spirit’ in a letter to Timothy O’Keeffe about
Garvin,
O’Brien,
See J. C. C. Mays, ‘Brian O’Nolan and Joyce on Art and on Life,’
Garvin,
‘Publications Received,’
Joyce himself wrote to George Antheil: ‘I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man.’ See James Joyce,
Garvin describes
See ‘Con P. Curran is interviewed about James Joyce by Andrew Cass and Niall Montgomery,’ in the Radió Éireann listing published in the
J. C. C. Mays, ‘Literalist of the Imagination,’ 106.
See Michael Phelan’s interview in ‘Flann O’Brien,’
Michael Phelan, ‘A Watcher in the Wings: A Lingering Look at Myles na gCopaleen,’
The authors have no competing interests to declare.