John Garvin and Brian O’Nolan in Civil Service

Abstract

This essay on John Garvin (1904–1986) is an attempt to re-connect Garvin to O’Nolan studies, which will afford a better understanding of Garvin’s place within O’Nolan’s circle, and thus helps to contextualize their collaboration and shared interests. John Garvin was Brian O’Nolan’s immediate superior in the Irish civil service. Garvin read a manuscript copy of At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and furnished O’Nolan with a Greek quotation from Euripides’s Heracles for its epigraph. We contend that Garvin’s reading of At Swim is insightful and places the novel within an anti-epic tradition, as implied by his choice of “for all things go out and give place to one another” (translated by John Garvin, Myles 58). Garvin also wrote James Joyce’s Disunited Kingdom (1976), a monograph that mentions collaborating with O’Nolan and the similarity between Finnegans Wake and Flann O’Brien’s fiction. These textual coordinates support a growing understanding of the social production of the cultural artefact celebrated as “Flann O’Brien” and “Myles na gCopaleen.” Debates with Garvin about fiction and Joycean modernism inside the corridors of the Custom House intersect in O’Nolan’s writing and this essay traces those discussions through Garvin and O’Nolan’s personal correspondence, Garvin’s published works, archival sources and newspaper articles.