There were few novels, indeed few books of any kind beyond the Bible and an occasional western or detective potboiler, in young John O’Brien’s middle-class, Irish Catholic home in suburban Elmwood Park. Despite a rich Irish literary tradition that includes James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and Sean O’Casey, O’Brien insists that the Chicago Irish have always feared the written word, avoiding even approved theology in favor of direct priestly authority.
Dalkey Archive may not be Simon & Schuster; O’Brien’s all-time blockbuster has sold only about 6,300 copies. But Dalkey Archive’s Chromos, a resurrected 40-year-old manuscript by Spanish emigre Felipe Alfau, was one of five novels nominated for the 1990 National Book Award. Another novel due out this year by Nicholas Mosley recently won Great Britain’s prestigious Whitbread fiction award. While Dalkey’s list of published works, a mix of modern classics rescued from out-of-print obscurity and contemporary adventures on the frontier of fiction, includes few household names, its writers are a well-respected lot: Harry Mathews, Raymond Queneau, Gilbert Sorrentino, Louis Zukofsky, Djuna Barnes, and Ronald Firbank, to name a few. Increasingly the books are reviewed in major journals, from Washington Post Book World to the New Yorker. And last year judges awarded Dalkey Archive a Carey-Thomas Award (sponsored by Publishers Weekly) for its discovery (and rediscovery) of experimental writers.
O’Brien, now a soft-spoken, amiable 45-year-old, was hired in 1975 to teach literature at Illinois Benedictine College in southwest-suburban Lisle. The school’s aging three-story main building has become home to Dalkey Archive Press as well. When it opened, the school catered mostly to the upwardly mobile children of Eastern European Catholic immigrants to Chicago. As a professor, O’Brien rebelled against what he saw as the dominant canon of academia and pursued instead the linguistically experimental tradition associated with Joyce, whose hermetic Finnegans Wake, he had been taught, marked the end of avant-garde writing. But practitioners of this formalist “experimental” strain live on, and O’Brien sought them out. In the spring of 1980 he met novelist and essayist Paul Metcalf at O’Hare, as Metcalf passed through town. Together they bemoaned how many books they both liked that were out of print and how little critical attention their favorite authors got.
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O’Brien and Moore assumed Alfau was dead; they searched libraries and reference books but could find nothing about him. Then someone suggested checking the New York phone book. Moore found his name listed, called, and reached the author, now 88 and retired from his longtime job as a translator at Morgan Bank. Moore asked if they could publish his book. “He said fine, but he seemed disinterested,” Moore says. “He didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I tried to explain about standard advance royalties, and he said to let it go.” But despite his diffidence, Alfau privately must have had stronger feelings. “If it fails this time,” he told O’Brien, “it’s my fault.”
Chromos is the convoluted tale of a group of “Americaniards,” Spanish emigres in New York who are obsessed with Spain and Spanishness; with their culture’s odd location on the peripheries of Europe, Africa, and Asia; and with the unsettling encounter between Spaniards and the Americas, especially the United States. They gather in apartments and cafes, debating life and literature, as the narrator reads bits and pieces of two manuscripts by his friend Garcia, which are interwoven with the text of the story itself.
Alfau now lives in a Queens nursing home; his second wife is dead, his only daughter lives in California. He avoids interviews and most people, spending much of his time watching television. In his old apartment he would discourage callers by saying he was Alfau’s friend or a relative, explaining that Alfau was on a long trip to the south or Spain. Now there are only five people who can be admitted to see him, including his doctor, Moore, and O’Brien. He professes no interest in his books or in life.
