Flann O’Brien’s Lies
Colm Tóibín
There were three cities; each of them had known a certain glory. In each of them, there was a sense that the glory was absent or ghostly, that the real world was elsewhere, that the cities in which there was excitement, or cultural completeness, or publishers and readers, were elsewhere. All three cities remained untouched by the Second World War; they were not bombed, nor were they transformed by reconstruction when the war ended. Even in the 1980s and 1990s it was possible to walk around many parts of these cities and notice that nothing much had changed for many, many decades.
Letters
Vol. 34 No. 2 · 26 January 2012
From Derek Robinson
Colm Tóibín says that Dublin ‘remained untouched by the Second World War’ (LRB, 5 January). In fact the German air force raided neutral Ireland seven times between 26 August 1940 and 24 July 1941; on three of those occasions Dublin was bombed. The intended target was probably Belfast, but Dublin’s blackout was only partial and German pilots must have seen its lights (which were bright enough for German navigators to use them as a landmark). Tóibín mentions that most copies of Flann O’Brien’s first book were ‘destroyed by a German bomb’ in 1941, but not that further bombs that night killed 28 Dubliners, injured 90 and left 400 homeless.
Both sides bombed neutral countries. In September 1939, RAF aircraft looking for German warships hit the Danish town of Esbjerg, 110 miles away; later in the war US air force crews dropped bombs on Switzerland. On 27 May 1940 an RAF bomber, aiming for a German airfield in Holland, flew into a magnetic storm which disabled the compass. Completely lost, the crew identified the Thames as the Rhine and bombed an airfield in Cambridgeshire.
Derek Robinson
Bristol
Vol. 34 No. 3 · 9 February 2012
From Keith Hopper
Derek Robinson is correct when he reminds us that neutral Dublin was bombed during the Second World War, but misses Colm Tóibín’s point about the destruction of Flann O’Brien’s first novel (Letters, 26 January). At Swim-Two-Birds was first published by Longmans Green in London on 13 March 1939. ‘For one glorious week in April’, as Anne Clissmann records, it ‘replaced Gone with the Wind as top of the bestseller list in Dublin’. This was not as impressive as it might sound: after six months it had still sold only 244 copies. In the autumn of 1940 the Longmans warehouse in London was destroyed by German incendiary bombs and the remaining copies were incinerated (although some unbound sheets were recovered). As Myles na gCopaleen later proclaimed, Hitler ‘loathed it so much that he started World War Two in order to torpedo it. In a grim irony that is not without charm, the book survived the war while Hitler did not.’
As Colm Toíbín pointed out in his original piece (5 January), At Swim-Two-Birds had a modest reissue by Pantheon in 1951, but not until the MacGibbon and Kee edition of 1960 did it begin to reach a wider audience. It was published by Penguin in 1967 (a year after O’Brien’s death), and has gradually become one of the most revered works in the Irish literary canon, as well as something of a case study in scholarly debates on metafiction and postmodernism.
Keith Hopper
Kellogg College, Oxford
From Chris Walker
Derek Robinson mentions the bombing of the North Strand in Dublin on 31 May 1941. The Irish Times reported that two houses collapsed spontaneously the following day in Old Bride St, killing three people and injuring 15. The usual suspects blamed the British for the bombing, and it’s possible the direction beams that the Germans followed up the Irish Sea had been altered by British radar experts.
Both my parents joined the British forces. My mother, in the Wrens, recounted to me ad nauseam that when recruiting in Londonderry, she had to take one Catholic for every two Protestants, regardless of ability. My father ended up in an Italian POW camp and its flag was last seen as a bedspread in a cousin’s home. Nazi memorabilia regularly turn up in country house sales in the Republic and there is a flourishing Wehrmacht re-enactment gruppe here. At the moment a pardon is being mooted for the five thousand Irish Army lads who deserted to the Allies. I wonder what happened to the British soldiers who deserted and aided Sinn Fein in 1920.
Chris Walker
Bantry, Co Cork
Vol. 34 No. 4 · 23 February 2012
From Sarah Clark
About the bombing of Dublin during World War Two (Letters, 9 February): I had a friend, Mr C.B.B. Wood, who served in a special unit whose purpose was to deflect the navigation systems of German bombers so that they dropped their bombs in unpopulated areas – i.e. pastures rather than towns or villages. One night, he told me, they miscalculated and instead of sending the Germans to a pasture they sent them to Dublin.
Sarah Clark
Rockport, Massachusetts
