Leslie Daiken

Life
1912-1964 [prop. Leslie H. Yodaiken; fam. “the Yod”]; b. Dublin; son of Russian Jewish immigrants, living in Little Jerusalem [Clanbrassil/Portabello]; ed. St. Andrews, Booterston: Wesley College, and TCD (BA in Langs & Lit., 1934); co-founder of TCD Gaelic Society; taught by Beckett for one year (1930-31) and afterwards remained friends and correspondents, jointly with Con Leventhal; twice winner of the Chancellor"s Prize for English Prose; formed Dublin University Socialist Society with others; contrib. to Irish journals such as The Bell and Dublin Magazine; moved to London in the mid-1930s; associated with Charles Donnelly, and ed. The Irish Front; issued Goodbye Twilight: Songs of the Struggle in Ireland (1936), a Republican anthology with poems of Flann Campbell, Jim Phelan, Margaret Barrington, et al., dismissed as ‘rockbottom’ in review by John Hewitt;

changed his name to Daiken by deed-poll in 1943; m.  Lilyan Adams, a Canadian actress, 1944, with whom two dgs. (Melanie, b.1945; Eleanor, b.1947); served in the  Royal Corps of Signals of the Irish Army during the "Emergency" [World War II];returned to London in 1945; on visit London in 1945, Beckett gave him the MS for Watt to seek a publisher (unsuccessfully); m. Adams, 1944; later compiled They Go, The Irish (1944), a "miscellany of war-time writing" with a preface by Sean O"Casey and contributions by Flann Campbell, Jim Phelan, Margaret Barrington, et al.; his poetry was included in the Oxford Book of Irish Verse, ed. Lennox Robinson (1958);

Daiken published books on children"s games with Hudson & Thames and several smaller publishers; he made a documentary on games entitled One potato, two potato, winner of an award at the Festival Mondial du Film, Brussels, 1958; also wrote a radio play, The Circular Road (broadcast on BBC 1960; RTE 1962) - based on childhood experience and featuring a child and his father who dies in the Civil War; published Out She Goes: Dublin Street Rhymes with Dolmen Press (1963); appt. Head of Audio-Visual Dept. at Univ. of Ghana (Acra), in 1963, and d. in post; works and family papers held in NLI; Beckett-related papers held in Reading University Library (Special Collection); Daiken’s papers are held in Texas Univ. Library (Harry Ramson Hum. Research Cen.) and the National Library of Ireland. DIW OCIL

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Works

Bibliographical details
Good-bye Twilight, Songs of the Struggle in Ireland (London; Lawrence & Wishart [1936]), ill. Harry Kernoff [woodcuts], 2pp. l., vii-xviii p., 1 [Intro.;]. l., 21-104pp, front., 20 cm. Incl. Introduction, signed 1936; laments by 38 writers in poetry and song; appendix; ‘First pubished in 1936’.]

They Go, The Irish: A Miscellany of War-Time Writing, compiled by Leslie Daiken (London: [Ivor] Nicholson & Watson 1944), 123pp.; contains foreword [airgraph from Denis Johnston at 8th Army HQ blames the post for being too late to catch this anthology ... blessing from Walter Starkie]; Sean O’Casey, ‘There they go the Irish’, [‘Ireland is a kaleidoscope of amazing contrasts. she is the oldest civilisation in Europe, though she is still in her teens ... A nation of Roman Catholics who abominate prosleytism, but whose army and clans carried to the greave, with dirge of squealing pipe and beat of muffled drum, the body of the most proselytising English bishop ever usurped a See in Ireland, chiefs weeping over his grave, and hoping that they would as fair a chance of heaven as the English bishop had ... &c. (p.7) ... even a more scattered race than the Jews (p.17); castigates Irish politicians North and South from a socialist standpoint]; contrib. Bernard Arbarnel [?pseud]; Margaret Berington [sic for Barrington]; Flann Campbell, “Jottings from a Campsite”’, pp.47-54 [‘“Welcome to the Kingdom Hotel”, says the hut orderly, with a sarcastic flourish ... ending ... Five hundred men eat dry bread for breakfast this morning’]; George Brady, “Four Poems”; Seamus Boy Phelan, “An Irish Child Meets Nazism”; H. L. Morrow, “Journal of Fear”; Charles Duff [to whom the signed copy in University of Ulster Library is dedicated], “Dr O’Cassidy’s Neutrality Mixture”; Violet McGuire, “The Departure”; Ewart Milne, “Four Poems”; Donal MacNeachtain, “Letter to Another Emigrant”; Jim Phelan, “Mild and Bitter”; Finlay Thompson, “Anglo-Irish”; “Three Poems”, Leslie Daiken, “From Inside the Railings”; [set in Stephen’s Green with local references incl. bust of Mangan and ‘Countess’s bust’ (Markievicz); another [‘through archipelagos of anguish hatched and heated ... Doped of an Indian summer ... Bray was my Balbec’]; “Nightfall in Galway” [‘In Eyre Square the stillness of epilepsy ... about the stone ears of Ó Connaire (sic) on his plinth, / a leprachaun listening / falls the husky song of drunkards like the call of a muezzin ... A Church bell rings and a Spring morning unfolds / her hair of Andalusian jet, and combs it out, smiling.’]

Reference

[ There is a full listing of Daiken’s titles in the COPAC/JISC catalogue online; accessed 10.07.2023. See also the account of his papers held at the University of Reading Library (Special Collections) [online] held in two boxes which incl. 13 student notebooks with records of Beckett"s lecture [MS 5647/1/5.]. The Daiken Collection at Reading is head with a biographical sketch by Xander Ryan which cites Katrina Goldstone, ‘Leslie Daiken and Harry Kernoff’, in Studies in Irish Radical Leadership: Lives on the Left, ed. Emmet O’Connor & John Cunningham (Manchester UP 2016) - for which see publisher’s note.]

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Criticism
Samuel Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ in Bookman, 86 (August 1934), rep. in Michael Smith, ed., The Lace Curtain 4 (Summer 1971), pp.58-63 [makes a passing reference to Daiken].

Studies in Irish Radical Leadership: Lives on the Left, ed. Emmet O’Connor & John Cunningham (Manchester UP 2016), 288pp. - Publisher’s notice: Looking beyond a field dominated by Connolly and Larkin, the book takes second string personalities out from under the shadows of the giants. The subjects have been selected to be emblematic of phases and strands in labour history and representative of the variety of characters and mentalities on the left. Together they form a collection of windows on all aspects of the trade union and socialist movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and an exploration of many varieties of radical life, alternative thinking and progressive action in Ireland since c.1800. Each chapter provides a concise biography and assesses its subject as an example of his or her type, be it primitive rebel, early socialist, pioneering trade unionist, communist, child of the revolution, maverick, artist, parliamentarian or party leader. Some are household names, yet understudied, more are being considered in print for the first time. John Cunningham is a lecturer at University of Galway [NUI]. (See online - accessed 11.07.2023.)

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Commentary
Edna Longley, ‘Progress Bookmen: Politics and Northern Protestant writers since the 1930’, in The Irish Review, 1 (1986), writes of Leslie Daiken’s committed anthology Goodbye, Twilight (1936): ‘John Hewitt [and Louis MacNeice] reviewed the anthology and their judgements coincide. MacNeice describes Goodbye, Twilight, as a “collection of proletarian poems - some communist, some Irish republican, and all written in a defiant spirit of opposition ... a violent reaction against Yeats and all that he stood for”. He notes the mixture of “the conventional utterance of the international working class’ with poems “that are blatantly nationalistic and ... even devoutly Roman Catholic”.’ (See further under Longley, Notes, infra.)

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References
Lennox Robinson & Donagh MacDonagh, eds., Oxford Book of Irish Poetry (1958), selects “Lines to My Father” (p.321.)

Kathleen Hoagland, ed., 1,000 Years of Irish Poetry: The Gaelic and Anglo-Irish Poets from Pagan Times to the Present (NY: Devin Adair 1947), gives poems of Daiken.

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre (Univ. of Texas at Austin) holds 4 boxes of papers of Leslie Daiken incl. MSS material relating to his children’s stories and correspondence with Samuel Beckett, Austin Clarke, Cyril Cusack, Sean O’Casey, Seumas O’Sullivan, Thomas B. Rudmose-Brown, Blanaid Salkeld, Caitlin Thomas, Arland Ussher, et al. (incl. William Carlos Williams). [link]

Ulster Libraries: Belfast Public Library holds They Go, The Irish (1944). University of Ulster Library holds ‘They Go, The Irish, A Miscellany of War- Time Writing, compiled by Leslie Daiken (London: [Ivor] Nicholson & Watson 1944), 123pp.

Cathach Books (Cat. 12) list Goodbye, Twilight (1936), with woodcuts by Harry Kernoff [£65].

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