Literary hard hitters

TheLastStraw: It has been a month of mixed fortunes for Ireland's blue-chip literary stocks. Shares in James Joyce have fallen for the third consecutive week amid continuing negative sentiment arising from his involvement in Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party (Faber & Faber £14.99).

By contrast, Flann O'Brien closed the latest session several points up, reflecting major investment in his work by the makers of the US TV series Lost.

I haven't yet read the first book, which describes a star-studded party given in Proust's honour in Paris in 1922. But the reviewers are unanimous that Joyce, one of the guests, did not have a good dinner. Among the many geniuses assembled - including Stravinsky, Picasso, Nijinsky (the dancer, not the derby-winning horse) and Diaghilev - the event marked the only meeting between the two men who would vie for the description "father of the modern novel". And although paternity remains disputed to this day, Joyce's performance that night did nothing to advance his claim.

From a tactical viewpoint, he should never have accepted the invitation. If it had been a boxing match for the heavyweight literary championship of the world, no manager would have thrown Joyce, a man who kept fairly regular hours, into a post-midnight showdown with Proust, who slept all day and was at his best at 2.30am, the time he turned up at the event.

In football terms, the pitch had been over-watered by the home team. Except of course that, in reality, it was Joyce who was watered. He arrived already drunk, stared gloomily into a glass of champagne, and was soon snoring - although there is some doubt about whether he was in fact asleep, or whether it was one of those defence mechanisms writers have for dealing with awkward situations.

At any rate, he roused himself after Proust arrived, and the famous conversation took place.

It was more like a chess match than a prize-fight. Proust's imaginative opening ("Do you like truffles?") was easily dealt with ("Yes"). Thereafter, both men resorted to the standard writer's gambit of claiming not to have read each other's work (in chess terms, this would be the simple: 1. e4, e5). The conversation then moved on to its celebrated middle section, in which they discussed women but failed to find common ground. Proust kept asking if Joyce knew such and such a duchess, while the Dubliner tried to steer the subject to chambermaids. Even before the failure of Joyce's chambermaid variation, stalemate was inevitable. But now both men deployed their queens. Joyce resorted to complaining about his health ("My eyes are terrible") (Qxc4!), forcing the Frenchman to retaliate with the details of a stomach ailment (Qxb7ch!). Soon afterwards, they shook hands and agreed a draw.

Once the subject had moved onto medical history, a draw was the best Joyce could hope for. Analysts agree that Proust had much better material: a point he underlined by dying six months later. But the Dubliner, who was the least famous of the two at the time, desperately needed a result. So afterwards he joined the taxi trip back to Proust's apartment where, devastatingly, the host insisted Joyce continue home in the cab.

He always hankered for a rematch with the Frenchman ("If only we had been allowed to meet and have a talk somewhere," he told Beckett). Sadly, their encounter seems to have made no impression on Proust. He didn't even mention Joyce to a housekeeper in whom he confided: the final insult to a man who liked chambermaids.

Flann O'Brien lived his life in Joyce's shadow and was sometimes bitter about it. "A refurbisher of skivvies' stories," he once called him - maybe they knew the same chambermaids. Despite an early flourish, his own publishing career never quite took off. After the success of At Swim-Two-Birds, at least one publisher thought his writing should become more realistic. Instead, he followed up with a portrait of eternity, seen through the prism of a midlands Garda Station. I recall reading that The Third Policeman drew on a part of his childhood spent in Co Offaly, and that his model for eternity was the countryside around Tullamore. You can see where he'd get that, all right. At any rate, the book turned up on this week's episode of Lost, the weird TV series about the survivors - or are they? - of a plane crash on a mysterious island in the south Pacific (near Tullamore).

O'Brien's literary immortality was probably secure anyway. But if he hadn't already been invited to the great, post-modernist party in the sky, he's there now. The conversation could probably do with some help.