L. L. LEE Western Washington State College The Dublin Cowboys of Flann O’Brien It is a bit difficult to imagine a two-gun cowboy in the Ringsend district of Dublin; and it is a bit more difficult to imagine a western ranch called the Circle N, with enough grazing for 10,000 steers and 2,000 horses, in the neighboring Irishtown and Sandymount districts (8,912 “dangerous houses” had to be demolished to make the room), a ranch, by the way, which reached by “taking the Number 3 tram,” has a “main building that is a gothic structure of red sandstone timbered in the Elizabethan style and supported by corinthian pillars at the posterior” and whose “exquisitely laid out gardens are open for inspection on Thursdays and Fridays.” But then it is yet more difficult to imagine a cowboy’s wanting to shoot a Good Fairy, especially an invisible Good Fairy sitting in the pocket of a Pooka, “a member of the devil class.” However, it’s all true, at least within the covers of Flann O’Brien’s remarkable comic novel At Swim-Two-Birds.1 The Irish man O’Brien (a pseudonym of Brian Nolan—who also wrote as Myles na gCopaleen, that is, Myles of the Little Horses, a fitting appellation for a creator of cowboys who rarely ride horses) was hardly a writer of westerns, and certainly he was not an American. Yet it is his use, even if minor, of the cowboy, that archetypal American figure, that most clearly gives one of the major meanings of his novel: Adam has been thrown out of the Garden. But of course he’s not been thrown very far; he never is in comedy. Or perhaps the Garden itself is a little funny. Anyway, if the cowboy is an archetypal American—and we all admit by now that he is Natty Bumppo in disguise and that Natty is Adam in disguise—so is the theme of Adam in and out of the Garden an archetypal American theme. In short, this Irish book is also an American book, or perhaps it is, like Finnegans Wake, a universal book; certainly the cowboy is a universal symbol by now. (O’Brien him self, as Myles na gCopaleen, apparently gets into Finnegans Wake: “the couple in Myles,” FW 433.10.) 1Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (Viking; New York, 1967). The book was first published in 1939; the first American edition was 1951. 220 Western American Literature A short “retelling” of parts of At Swim-Two-Birds is necessary to give an idea of how it works, how, in other words, the cowboys function. The story (“story” is not the exact word) is told by a young Irish student in Dublin, who, among other things, is writing a novel—with three different beginnings perhaps and why not?— about a man named Dermot Trellis who is writing a novel “on sin and the wages attaching thereto.” To do this, he will have to show sinners sinning—force them to sin, in fact. But of course the reader is not always sure whether it is the “I,” the student, relating or creating or whether it is Trellis or some other character within either of the novels, especially since certain of the characters in Trellis’ book, objecting to the life of sin he plans for them, take to writing a book about him. And yet the “novel” is not confused or confusing; its complications are delightful surprises. Trellis makes his characters live with him in the Red Swan Hotel in Dublin (it is unlikely, but possible, that there is an echo of the Blue Hotel here. Anyway, one should note the cowboy who lives in Room 13). Trellis borrows these characters from other writers, in particular from one William Tracy, the late and “eminent writer of Western romances,” such as Flower o’ the Prairie, Red Flanagan’s Last Throw, and Jake’s Last Ride. Those “lasts” are delicate touches: the last roundup, the end of things, but also the last possible use of the cowboy: he who was once a powerful symbol is now a comic figure. Tracy did not invent all his...