| Popis: |
This article examines the intellectual exchange and literary collaboration between John Garvin and Brian O’Nolan, exploring the dynamics of their relationship on three different levels. Professionally, Garvin was O’Nolan’s superior when O’Nolan joined the Irish Civil Service in 1935, and he remained an influential senior figure in their department until O’Nolan left in 1953. On a literary level, Garvin read an early draft of the At Swim-Two-Birds manuscript and provided its epigraph (sourced from Euripides’s Heracles), receiving editorial input from O’Nolan on his published writing on James Joyce in return. Socially, Garvin and O’Nolan belonged to an intellectual circle (including R. M. Smyllie, Alec Newman, Donagh MacDonagh, and Niall Montgomery) which brought together journalists, writers, and other Dublin professionals in the Palace Bar. This article argues for the significance of these collaborations by using first-hand accounts, letters, journalism, and critical work, including Garvin’s 1976 book, James Joyce’s Disunited Kingdom and the Irish Dimension. In doing so, the article reconstructs a dialogue that took place between bureaucratic methods of state administration and the aesthetic strategies of modernism, with Joyce at its centre, an exchange that shaped O’Nolan’s poetics and exerted influence over his circle. |
