Fitz-James O’Brien was a mid-19th Century Irish writer who, typically of the time, wrote across multiple genres and in a number of forms, including prose, poetry and playwriting. Over time, however, being a devotee of Edgar Allan Poe, and influenced by writers such as Washington Irving, Thomas De Quincey and Nathaniel Hawthorne, O’Brien began to focus more on short stories and developed a keen interest in writing fiction of a more macabre and supernatural nature.
With Swan River Press’ publication of An Arabian Night-mare, The Diamond Lens, and What Was it?, noted Fitz-James O’Brien scholar John P. Irish brings together for the first time a comprehensive presentation of O’Brien’s fantastic literary output. Across these three volumes we get to experience a large variety of short stories, poems and a play, laid out in chronological order by publication date, and we can see how O’Brien developed into a masterful storyteller.
The dozen or so poems included in these volumes are greatly influenced the Romantic era poets and share their love of nature and a fascination with death as an integral aspect of the cycle of life. They also exhibit a distrust of humankind’s attempted conquest of nature and of scientific progress. Of the poems, those that impressed me most were ‘Forest Thoughts’, The Lonely Oak’, ‘Pallida’, and ‘Madness’, which clearly shows the influence of Poe. The one play included, in volume one, An Arabian Night-mare, is ‘The Gory Gnome’, a story involving the rescue of a distressed heroine from a fire-breathing villain who lives in a volcano and, for all its intense drama, is essentially a whimsical tale.
The majority of the pieces in these volumes are short stories, a form in which O’Brien excelled. In ‘The Old Boy’, a young teenager awakes in his boarding-school dormitory convinced he has lived ten years of life while he was asleep. During these ten dreamed years he had become a successful author and gained a level of maturity beyond his actual years. As the story unfolds, we see him apply this ‘experience’ to his current circumstances to dramatic effect. ‘One Event’ tells the story of John Vespar, a man living in a remote country house who brings a very young beggar girl into the household and tries to mould her into a sophisticated young lady who will eventually become his wife. Reminiscent of Shaw’s Pygmalion, and predating it, Vespar’s project reaches a very different conclusion. In ‘The King of Nodland and His Dwarf’, we’re treated to the initially whimsical story of the lazy citizens of Nodland and their disinterested king. However, as the story progresses with the imposition by the king’s right hand man, the eponymous dwarf, of steeper and increasingly bizarre taxes on Nodland’s citizens, we are drawn in to a gripping tale of slavery and oppression.
Several stories stand out across all three volumes, and in particular in the third volume, What Was It? ‘From Hand to Mouth’, involving a writer trapped in the hotel of a supposed benefactor, displays O’Brien’s ability to engage in wild flights of fancy and inventiveness. ‘The Lost Room’, in which the protagonist leaves his rented room on a hot humid night for a stroll in the back garden to cool off and returns to a room totally alien to him, demonstrates O’Brien’s penchant for vivid and fantastical imagery. ‘Three for a Trade’ tells the sad story of two children who are homeless and consigned to huddling in a doorway on a cold and snowy night. And in ‘The Wondersmith’, we witness the dastardly machinations of Herr Hippe and learn of his plans to murder all the Christian children in his town on New Year’s Eve.
Other stories of note include ‘Duke Humphrey’s Dinner’, about a destitute couple in a freezing cold apartment eating an entirely fictitious meal in an effort to raise their spirits (I saw an excellent theatrical version of this story a few years ago in Dublin), ‘The Pot of Tulips’, a classic ghost story involving a lost inheritance, and ‘The Diamond Lens’, an early foray into science fiction worthy of H. G. Wells. A number of stories across these volumes deploy the classic it-was-all-a-dream ending that was common at the time. However, this does not at all detract from O’Brien’s verve as a writer, and one wonders what he would have gone on to write if his life had not been tragically cut short in 1862 by his involvement in the American Civil War.
Irish has done us a great service in gathering these pieces together in these handsome hardback editions and his excellent introductions to each volume, examining O’Brien’s life and work and placing them in the context of the times, show us a man of stellar imagination who deserves greater recognition. Hopefully these three collections will help bring the man and his work to a wider audience.
An Arabian Night-mare, The Diamond Lens, and What Was It? by Fitz-James O’Brien (Swan River Press, hb, 241pp, 237pp, and 221pp, €120.00 for the set)
John Kenny 
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