In Flann O’Brien’s first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, the unnamed narrator explains that his bedroom contains

most of the things I deemed essential for existence – my bed, a chair which was rarely used, a table and a washstand. The washstand had a ledge upon which I had arranged a number of books. Each of them was generally regarded as indispensable to all who aspire to an appreciation of the nature of contemporary literature and my small collection contained works ranging from those of Mr Joyce to the widely read books of Mr A. Huxley, the eminent English writer.¹

When O’Brien says that the works of Huxley were required reading by serious students of modern literature, he was almost certainly hinting at something else. That is, far from being widely read, Huxley’s books were in fact widely unavailable at that time, at least in Ireland, with five of his books already banned by the time the author was writing At Swim. Indeed, O’Brien’s choice of those two authors in particular was obviously due to their controversial reputations in Ireland: Huxley for having his books banned, and Joyce for the public perception of him as a writer of objectionable books.

This note considers the works of Flann O’Brien within the context of the history of book banning by the new Irish Free State government in the first half of the twentieth century. There are two key sources that I will employ: firstly, the first of seven handwritten journals compiled by the Censorship of Publications Board. These journals contain the record the Board kept of the titles as they were being banned, with the first providing all the details of the first 2000 books, covering the period between 9 May 1930 and 9 May 1947. Secondly, I draw on a 1961 volume published by the Censorship Board (Image 1), listing all the books still banned at that time – in excess of 9,000 in all – in alphabetical order by title.

Image 1: Cover & Title Page, Register of Prohibited Publications (The Stationery Office, 1961).

The 1920s and 1930s was a productive period for O’Brien, as he was writing for Comhthrom Féinne, University College Dublin’s (henceforth UCD) college magazine, followed by his own short-lived publication Blather, and had his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, published by Longmans. At roughly the same time, the recently formed Irish Free State enacted and prosecuted its Censorship of Publications Act, thereby making most of Huxley’s novels – among others – unavailable for purchase in the 26 counties of the new Irish state.

Prior to 1922, Ireland was subject to the United Kingdom’s Obscene Publications Act 1857. Despite Minister for Justice Kevin O’Higgins telling Dáil Éireann in October 1925 that these laws were sufficient for their needs, it was perhaps inevitable that this would not be enough for a majority Catholic country which was very strongly influenced by the Catholic Church. In February 1926, O’Higgins appointed a consultative body, the memorably titled ‘Committee on Evil Literature,’ which consisted of three laymen and two clergymen, to ‘consider and report whether it is necessary or advisable in the interest of the public morality to extend the existing powers of the State to prohibit or restrict the sale and circulation of printed matter.’² The committee reported its findings in December 1926, and the Censorship of Publications Act 1929 was enacted in July 1929. Under the auspices of the Act the Censorship of Publications Board was appointed by the Minister for Justice, again consisting of five members, whose task it was to consider complaints made to the Minister and determine if ‘a book or a particular edition of a book is indecent or obscene or advocates the unnatural prevention of conception or the procurement of abortion or miscarriage or the use of any method, treatment or appliance for the purpose of such prevention or such procurement.’³ The act stated that ‘the word “indecent” shall be construed as including suggestive of, or inciting to sexual immorality or unnatural vice or likely in any other similar way to corrupt or deprave.’⁴ This differed from the earlier Obscene Publications Act 1857, which chose not to define the word ‘obscene,’ rather leaving it up to the courts to decide, if necessary.

The Act allowed the board to consider a number of factors when making their determinations, including the literary, artistic, scientific or historic merit or importance and the general tenor of the book, as well as the class of reader which, in the opinion of the Board, may reasonably be expected to read such a book. To record all of their decisions, the committee listed the books in a series of handwritten journals, with space for 2000 titles per volume, with columns for all the relevant details, including the registered number, the name of the book, the author’s name, the name and address of the publisher, the date of the prohibition order and the date on which the prohibition order was listed in Iris Oifigiúil, the official gazette of the government of Ireland, whose notices were often reproduced in the newspapers of the day. There were two other columns, one for ‘Particulars of any Amending or Revoking Order,’ and the other for the details of the editions the prohibition order related to.

The Censorship Board published the titles of the first group of banned books on 9 May 1930. There were thirteen titles in all, that day. The first of these listed was Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928)⁵ and the last was Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). Of the other eleven, ten were non-fiction books in and around the subject of family planning, with four each by Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger. The board would ban two more books by Huxley in 1930: his 1923 novel Antic Hay, and the short story collection Brief Candles (Image 2). Over the course of the next twenty-five years the board would ban nine of Huxley’s twelve novels.

Image 2: Books banned in Ireland numbers 1 to 47, Register of Prohibited Publications, 1961.

It is not difficult to see why Huxley’s books were banned. For example, on the very first page of Point Counter Point we meet Marjorie Carling who has left her husband to live with Walter Bidlake, a young journalist, by whom she is now pregnant. Bidlake, meanwhile, is rapidly growing tired of Marjorie, now being infatuated with another woman, Lucy Tantamount, who is herself married, although she also has sexual affairs with other men.

It is fair to say that all of this was far beyond the pale of what the Censorship of Publications Act 1929 considered acceptable. From the point of view of the morally conservative and staunchly Catholic Ireland of the 1930s, Point Counter Point would undoubtedly have qualified for censorship. And, indeed, even a cursory look at Huxley’s other works would leave little doubt that much the same reasoning applied to his other books that were banned at that time in Ireland. Aldous Huxley’s liberal worldview was diametrically opposed to the conservative views of the emerging Irish state.

By the end of January 1938, the time O’Brien first contacted literary agents A. M. Heath about At Swim-Two-Birds, 931 books had been banned in Ireland. Amongst the authors banned in the first volume of 2000 titles were William Faulkner, Herman Hesse, D. H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, John Steinbeck, H. G. Wells, and many more who are now accepted as important literary figures. An entire family of Australian writers, father Norman Lindsay and his sons Jack and Philip, had twenty-nine books banned between them. And there were Irish writers, too. Two Irish winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw, each had a book banned. So did James Joyce, although not for Ulysses, but for the posthumously published Stephen Hero, banned in 1944, the same year that Penguin’s Modern Irish Short Stories joined the list (Image 3). Austin Clarke, Kate O’Brien, and Seán Ó Faoláin had two books each banned. Sean O’Casey had three banned, and Joyce Cary had five. Liam O’Flaherty had six of his books banned between 1930 and 1946, making him possibly the most banned of all Irish writers at that time.

Image 3: Modern Irish Short Stories (Penguin Books, 1943), banned in 1944.

There were, however, various loopholes. Some of the entries specified ‘All English editions’ in the column containing the details of the prohibited editions. There are 197 books marked that way in the first volume of 2000 books, just short of 10% of the total, which includes eight books by Austrian writer Vicki Baum, seven books by French author Colette, and nine books by another French writer, Maurice Dekobra. There was a clear bias at work here, as English translations of works by Colette, for example, were banned while the French originals were not. This means that those fortunate enough to have learnt another language (particularly French) were presumably deemed to be less likely to be adversely affected by what they read than those who did not have that advantage.

O’Brien was born in 1911, so would have been 18 years old when the act was published and the first of those books were banned. As a person who was obviously interested in literature, and indeed in the world around him, he was undoubtedly aware of the Censorship Board. It seems he soon decided that he could weaponise the censorship legislation to his own ends. His first attempt to stir up some controversy happened when the Irish Press published a notice in their University Notes in January 1939, saying that Brian O Nualláin, MA, would have his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, published by Longmans in the spring of that year (Image 4).⁶ O’Brien, using his own name of Brian Ó Nualláin, wrote to them to say:

I have been shown an entry in your College Notes in Monday’s “Irish Press” in which the authorship of a book called “Swim Two Birds” is attributed to me. Your information apparently derives from a rumour spread by two gentlemen called Sheridan and O’Brien who charge me with the authorship of a book of this name or something similar. The cream of this elaborate “joke” is that the supposed book is anti-clerical, blasphemous and licentious and various lengthy extracts from it have been concocted to show the obscenity of the work. I have joined in the joke to some extent myself but I naturally take strong exception to the publicity given by your paragraph, which associates me by name with something which is objectionable, even if non-existent. I must therefore ask you to withdraw the statement. I would be satisfied if you merely mentioned that a graduate mentioned in your last Notes is not the author of the book mentioned and has in fact no intention of publishing any book.⁷

Image 4: At Swim-Two-Birds, Longmans, Green and Co., 1939. Facsimile dust jacket from Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC (dustjackets.com).

O’Brien never got his retraction, at least in part because the source for the piece, far from being a rumour circulating around UCD, was actually Longmans’ own house publication, First and Last, an issue of which they had prepared for the National Book Fair in Earls Court in London in November 1938 (Image 5). They wrote:

The test of a good deal of true art is that it impresses and excites even before it is understood. So with Mr. O’Nolan’s work. In the end we asked Mr. Graham Greene to advise us about it. And this is what he said: “I have never found it more difficult to report on a book, and never have I been more certain that a book should be published. I read it with continual excitement, amusement, and the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage. … It is in the line of Tristram Shandy and Ulysses […] … I think it is a book in a thousand, and well worth the risk of publication.”⁸

Image 5: First and Last 1, no. 3 (1938).

This was sent out to, along with everyone else, the Irish Press, in which they unequivocally identified the author of the forthcoming work as Brian O’Nolan, thereby spoiling his intentions of concealing his real name even before his pseudonym got its first professional airing. The author had asked Longmans not to send copies of First and Last to any of the Irish newspapers, which they quite sensibly ignored. Nor did the Irish Press take the bait when he described the forthcoming book as ‘anti-clerical, blasphemous and licentious.’ The author had had a number of articles and short stories published by them in the early thirties, so it is entirely possible they knew who they were dealing with, and were familiar with his tactics, even then.

Although O’Brien’s next novel in English, The Hard Life, wouldn’t be published until 1961, twenty-two years after At Swim-Two-Birds, he hadn’t forgotten his idea of trying to stir up what the French call a Succès de Scandale. Writing to Timothy O’Keeffe of publishers MacGibbon & Kee about The Hard Life in September 1961, O’Brien suggested that he could manufacture a situation where the book would be banned, thereby allowing him to take a case against the Censorship of Publications Board. He thought that his use of the name Father Kurt Fahrt, S. J. for one of the characters would cause a ban, which of course it didn’t. In November 1963, he once more wrote to O’Keeffe, this time about The Dalkey Archive, which he also expected to be banned, perhaps because of his use of Saint Augustine. Needless to say, it failed to attract the interest of the Censorship Board.

A 1936 edition of Antic Hay perhaps shows how the reputation afforded to banned books helped boost their sales abroad. On this particular edition, there is a little sticker informing the casual browser that ‘This book is banned in Eire’ (Image 6).

Image 6: Antic Hay cover and ‘banned in Eire’ sticker (Chatto & Windus / Phoenix Library, 1936).

The Censorship Board banned nine of Huxley’s twelve novels between 1930 and 1955, excepting only Crome Yellow (1921), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Island (1962). Point Counter Point had the unusual distinction of being the first book to be banned in Ireland, quickly followed by others at semi-regular intervals. By the time O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds was published in 1939 Huxley already had a substantial body of work published, and more would follow, right up to his death in 1963. Which of Huxley’s books the narrator of At Swim had on his little shelf we shall never know, but there were certainly enough of them legally available to him at that time, even if O’Brien knew that some of his readers would realise that he was probably commenting on the ones that weren’t then available.

By the time the ban on Point Counter Point was revoked on 13 April 1951, under Section 8 of the Censorship of Publications Act 1946, which finally allowed appeals against the bannings on books, it had been banned in Ireland for just over twenty years. Eventually all of Huxley’s books would be made available.

Between 1930 and 1998 the Censorship Board banned 12,492 books, with one more banned in 2016. There is now legislation underway to remove permanently any laws regarding the censorship of books from the Irish statute books. The handwritten volumes containing the details of all the books that were once banned will soon find a permanent home in the National Archive. Despite his best laid plans, Flann O’Brien was never banned in Ireland, although numerous other Irish writers were. A proper study of the books banned in Ireland would cast light on this dark chapter in Ireland’s literary history.

Notes

1. Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (Longmans Green, 1939), 12. [^{^}]
2. Report of the Committee on Evil Literature, Oifig an tSoláthair (1926), 3. [^{^}]
3. Censorship of Publications Act 1929, part 2, section 6, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1929/act/21/enacted/en/print. [^{^}]
4. Censorship of Publications Act 1929, part 1, section 2. [^{^}]
5. Germán Asensio Peral has speculated that Point Counter Point (1928) was banned because of its ‘extreme popularity among intellectuals.’ See ‘“The eminent English writer”: Point Counter Point de Aldous Huxley y At Swim-Two-Birds de Flann O’Brien,’ Complutense Journal of English Studies 26 (2018): 97n6. [^{^}]
6. ‘University Notes,’ Irish Press, 2 January 1939, 6. [^{^}]
7. Letter to the Irish Press, 4 January 1939 in Maebh Long (ed), Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018), 22. [^{^}]
8. ‘Things to Come’, First and Last 1, no. 3 (1938): 30. [^{^}]

References