Irish Stew

THE HARD LIFE (179 pp.)--Flann O'Brien--Pantheon ($3.50).

Dog-eared formula for Irish comic fiction: to one seedy slice of life from an impoverished Irish boyhood add one outrageous old character who swears a blue streak, acts like a freak, and is lovable as all get out. Stir in plenty of Irish whisky, a peck of troubles, assorted downtrodden womenfolk, a hard-drinking priest, plenty of disputatious talk about the church.

Sprinkle liberally with unintelligible Irish words ("boxty," "plawmaus," "looderamawn"*)--and don't forget to lam into Ireland as you go along.

In The Hard Life, Flann O'Brien, a lionized Dublin novelist, columnist and licensed literary legpuller, has served all this brew with a difference. In place of the spice of hot rage (at Irish meanness) or the sticky sauce of garrulous sentiment (about Irish foible) that so often dress up the dish, he uses deadpan understatement.

Instead of trying to get rich on the formula, he is making fun of it.

Plied with Whisky. The Hard Life's crazy old man is Mr. Collopy, a sixtyish sack of Biblical malapropisms whose ruling passion is a campaign to get the Dublin City Corporation to install public rest rooms for women. The book's narrator--a boy named Finnbar-- and his older brother Manus come to live with the old man as orphans aged five and ten. In nightly colloquy at Collopy's, the boys listen as a forbearing Jesuit priest, Father Fahrt, is plied with Kilbeggan whisky and tried by his host's assaults on the Society of Jesus. "The Order," grunts Collopy, "was some class of an East India company. Heavenly imperialism but with plenty of money in the bank . . . Give me your damned glass."

Mixing mild parody with whirlwind farce, O'Brien quickly has Manus (referred to simply as "The Brother") escape to England and there grow rich by founding a bogus correspondence academy. Sample subjects: Egyptology, Cure of Boils, Panpendarism, Sausage Making in the Home. Collopy, dying from a dosage of one of The Brother's patent medicines, embarks on the inevitable pilgramage to Rome. His grotesquely comic death there after a burlesque papal audience is the kind of thing that even the late Ole Olsen and Chick Johnson could hardly have coped with.

Seething a Kid. Much of this has the makings of dreadful humor. In The Brother, O'Brien has turned loose a memorably monstrous archetypal entrepreneur who, if he could turn a pennyworth of profit, would not only seethe a kid in its mother's milk but invite the dam to dine on it. What in the end spoils the fun is that O'Brien does not keep the goings on entirely in the cartoon world of outrageous literary parody and exaggeration where death, as Brendan Behan puts it, has lost its "sting-aling-aling." Grimy realism crops up occasionally. In Finnbar, fleeting touches of gentleness and humane disgust at the proceedings undercut the parody and encourage the reader to take him seriously as a man rather than a manikin. Even at that, O'Brien has made a point: burlesqued or not, life in Dublin is no bed of Four Roses.

*A potato pancake, flattery, a lazy lout.

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