At Swim-Two-Birds - Genesis and Composition

Genesis and Composition

O'Nolan first explored the idea of fictional characters rebelling against their creator in a short story titled "Scenes in a novel", published in the UCD literary magazine Comhthrom Féinne (Ir., "Fair Play") in 1934. The story was a first-person narrative ostensibly written by a novelist called Brother Barnabas, whose characters become tired of doing his bidding and who eventually conspire to murder him:

The book is seething with conspiracy and there have been at least two whispered consultations between all the characters, including two who have not yet been officially created. Candidly, reader, I fear my number's up.

The mythological content of At Swim was inspired by O'Nolan's affection for Early Irish literature. He grew up in an Irish-speaking home and although he claimed in later life that he had attended few of his college lectures, he studied the late medieval Irish literary tradition as part of the syllabus and acquired enough Old Irish to be able to compose in the language with reasonable fluency. His M.A. thesis was entitled "Nature Poetry in Irish" (Nádúirfhilíocht na Gaedhilge), although his examiner Agnes O'Farrelly rejected the initial draft and he was obliged to rewrite it. At Swim-Two-Birds contains references to no less than fourteen different sources in early and medieval Irish literature. Most of the poetry recited by King Sweeney was taken directly from the Middle Irish romance Buile Suibhne, O'Nolan slightly modifying the translations for comic effect. For example, the original "an clog náomh re náomhaibh", translated by J. G. O'Keeffe in the standard edition as "the bell of saints before saints", is rendered by O'Nolan as "the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints".

At Swim-Two-Birds has been classified as a Menippean satire. O'Brien was exposed to the Menippean tradition through the modern literature he is known to have admired, including works by James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, Søren Kierkegaard and James Branch Cabell, but he may also have encountered it in the course of his study of medieval Irish literature; the Middle Irish satire Aislinge Meic Con Glinne has been described as "the best major work of parody in the Irish language".

O'Nolan composed the novel on an Underwood portable typewriter in the bedroom he shared with his younger brother Micheál. The typewriter rested on a table constructed by O'Nolan from the offcuts of a modified trellis that had stood in the O'Nolan family's back garden. O'Brien's biographer believes that it was the unusual material that the writing table was made of that inspired the name of the character "Dermot Trellis".

O'Nolan used various found texts in the novel; a letter from a horseracing tipster was given to him by a college friend, while the painter Cecil Salkeld gave O'Nolan the original "Conspectus of the Arts and Sciences". Before submitting the manuscript for publication O'Nolan gave it to friends to read. A friend wrote him a letter which included suggestions about how to end the novel and O'Nolan incorporated the salient part of the letter into the text itself, although he later cut it. The sudden death in 1937 of O'Nolan's father Michael O'Nolan may have influenced the episode in which the student narrator regrets his unkind thoughts about his previously despised uncle.