Máirtín Ó Cadhain

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Bibliographical details
The Road to Brightcity: Short Stories, ed., Eoghan Ó Tuairisc [from Idir Shúgradh agus Dáirire, 1939, and An Braon Broghach, 1948] (Dublin: Poolbeg 1981), 111pp.”; CONTENTS: Introduction, pp.7-12 [see infra]”; Stories: “The Withering Branch”; “The Year 1912”; “Tabu”; “Son of the Tax-King [see Notes, infra]”; “The Road to Brightcity”; “The Gnarled And Stony Clods”; “Of Townland’s “Tip”; “The Hare-lip”; “Floodtide””; “Going On”.

Cois Caoláire (Baile Atha Cliath: Sáirseál agus Dill 1953), 208pp. CONTENTS: “Glantachán Earraigh”; “An Pionta”; “Fios”; “Ciumhais an Chriathraigh”; “An Seanfhear”; “Clapsholas Fómhair”; “Smál”; “An tOthar”; “An Strainseára”. [Errata slip provided.]

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Commentary
Oliver Snoddy, ‘Notes on Literature in Irish Dealing with the Fight for Freedom’, in Éire-Ireland (Summer 1968), pp.138-48, remarks of An Aisling (1967) that it ‘combines a deep analysis of aspects of the Revolutionary period, a criticism of the succeeding years, especially the more recent, and a restatement of the hopes and beliefs of Republicans.’ (p.148.)

Séan Ó Riordáin: ‘Ní aigne Béarlóra ag cur Gaeilge de réir Béarla ar shaol a bhí tomhaiste de réir Béarla i seo ach aigne na Gaeilge féin ag sealbhú réimsí nua agus ag seasamh a cirt féin inti. Athéiriú na hÉireann a bhí ar bun aige. Níor fhág sé mar a dúirt sé Baile Atha Cliath ina pháipéar bán. Stath sé saol béarlaithe na hÉireann as múnla an Bhéarla agus neadaigh i múnla na Gaeilge é. [This is not the mind of an English speaker putting Irish in accordance with English on a life that was measured in English, but the Irish mind taking possession of new regions and doing justice to itself through Irish. He was re-lrelanding Ireland. He did not leave Dublin a blank page either. He uprooted the Anglicised life of Ireland from the mould of English and settled it in the mould of Irish.]’ (“Útamáil Ui Chadhain” [Obituary], The Irish Times, 10 Oct. 1971; cited in Géaroid Denvir, ‘Decolonizing the Mind: Language and Literature in Ireland’, in New Hibernia Review, 1, 1 (Spring 1997), pp.44-68, p.64.

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Eoghan Ó Tuairisc, The Road to Brightcity: Short Stories of Máirtín Ó Cadhain ((Poolbeg 1981), Introduction, pp.7-12: ‘As Maurice has les Landes, so Ó Cadhain has Cois Fharraige’ - Maire Mhac a’ tSaoi [quoted here, p.9]. The real difficulty of the tongue, and its prime attraction for a modern writer, is its unique mixture of the muck-and-tangle of earth existence with a cosmic view and a sense of ‘otherword’. This otherworld sense as Ó Cadhain presents it is a very complex combination of a fundamentalist Christianity, emphasising the Fall of Man, with a large share of the old pagan nature religion. ‘Ghost’, ‘phantom’, ‘fairy’, ‘the dead’, ‘the changeling’, are practically identical terms, and all of them, along with the living, are implicated in a conflict of good and evil, light and dark. Such a worldview is the opposite of romantic, for in it almost all aspects of wild nature - not only sea and storm, but the blue sky, the butterfly, the fine-weather sparkles on the water, the hazelnuts - are felt as hostile, always inhuman, at times malicious. Among the few friendly forces are eggs, fire, greying hair and, oddly enough, hendirt. [10-11; …] It is like being confronted with a Roualt Christ where one had expected to see a Jack B. Yeats ‘Blackbird Bathing in Tir-na-nOg’. [11]; Certain critics have compared Ó Cadhain in Irish to Joyce in English, regarding them as the two giants of twentieth-century prose fiction in Ireland. It is too soon for that kind of dictum, for where is the critic equipped to read both Joyce and Ó Cadhain with equal acumen? Yet the comparison is of some interest. Both men were realists with mythic minds, the were both intoxicated with words, both had a sense of life at once comic and compassionate and saw mankind as forever in exile blundering bout in worlds half-realised. I am not sure whether in fact Ó Cadhain won’t be seen to be il migglior fabbro, having learned in the last resort to keep the myth to himself. [12]; Ó Cadhain’s language is cool and classic, and free of the self-conscious mannerisms and melancholic word-music of the Synge-song school. [END 12; see also under Ó Tuairisc, infra.

Ailbhe Ó Corráin, ‘Grave Comedy, A Study of Cré na Cille by Máirtín Ó Cadhain’, in Birgit Brämsback & Martin Croghan, eds., Anglo-Irish and Irish Literature; Aspects of Language and Culture, [Proc. of 9th Internat. Conference of IASAIL Uppsala, 4-7 Aug 1986] Vol. 2 (Uppsala 1988), pp.143-48, quotes Ó Cadhain: ‘The most important thing now in literature is to reveal the mind, that part of a person on which the camera cannot be directed. Speec is much more capable of this than observations about his clothes, his complexion, his tongue, the furniture of his house ... It is not that which is extraneous to a person which is important, but that which he is walking about with in his head.’ (Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Páipéir Bhána agus Páipéir Bhreaca, BAC: Cumann Merriman 1969, pp.30-31) [trans.]; also, ‘I could have written in English as Patrick McGill [sic] or Liam O’Flaherty did. I had a choice at some point. But I feel a satisfaction in handling my native language, the speech handled by generations of my ancestors. I feel I can add something to that speech, make it a little better than it was when I got it. In dealing with Irish I feel I am as old as New Grange, the old Hag of Beare, the great Elk.’ (OÓ Cadhain, ‘Irish Prose in the 20th Century’, in Literature in Celtic Countries, Taliesin Congress Lectures, ed. J. E. Caerwyn William (Cardiff 1971), p.151. Cites also Breandán Ó Doibhlin, ‘Athléamh ar Chré na Cille’, in Léachtaí Cholm Cille V, ed. Pádraig Ó Fiannachta (Má Nuad: An Sagart 1974), pp.46-47 [dealing with the similarity between Cré na Cille and writings by Beckett, which, acc. Ó Corráin, can only be coincidental and contingent.]

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Seán O’Tuama, ‘The Other Tradition: Some Highlights of Modern Fiction in Ireland’, in Patrick Rafroidi and Maurice Harmon, eds., The Irish Novel in Our Time (Publ. de l’Université de Lille 1975-76), pp.31-45: ‘Máirtín Ó Cadhain was the most remarkable example in modern Ireland of the writer engagé. ... [T]he main purpose of his life and work was that of rescuing the very language he was writing in - and therefore the nation it belonged to - from oblivion. [...] Ó Cadhain wrote the most consciously patterned and richest-textured prose that any Irishman has written in this century, except Beckett and Joyce. For all that what seemed to give him greatest pleasure was not that he was widely regarded by Irish critics as a writer of stature but that parts of his writing, such as his novel Cré na Cille, were being avidly read by the ordinary people of his own district, Cois Fharraige.’ (p.43; see quotations, infra.)

Alan Titley, in The Irish Times (1 Feb. 1992): ‘The most important single critical work on Máirtín Ó Cadhain has been Gearóid Denvir’s Cadhan Aonair. Louis de Paor, Faoin mBlaoisc Bheag Sin (Coiscéim 1992) is more a psychological investigation of some of the characters in Ó Cadhain’s stories, partly in response to that author’s mistaken assertion that the greatest lack in contemporary Irish writing was the influence of Freud.’

Titley: “Ó Cadhain was not a writer who was hemmed in by boundaries. The best of his work went on until it had said what it wanted to say, until its energy had been sapped, all breath spent, and then left it at that.” Introduction to The Dregs of the Day [trans. of Fuíoll Fuine] (Yale 2019); quoted by Philip O’Leary, reviewing in Dublin Review of Books [DRB] (Jan. 2020).

Robert Welch, Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing (London: Routledge 1993): ‘No other writer in modern Irish literature has Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s mixture of rage and compassion. No one else conveys the texture of life in the Gaeltachts of the western seaboard with the agonised intimacy he does. His accounts of this life carry the salt sting of harsh reality. His work, though intensely alive to particulars of all kinds, is not reportage: it is an anatomy of a culture, done from the inside, but of a culture which is in its death throes. His analysis mixes despair and love; but there is comedy too, the wild, shocking comedy of the Gaelic world, which is identical to that in all of Irish life when the layers of respectability are peeled off. So that reading him in Irish one is amazed at the familiarity of the thought and speech patterns he has set down, because they are the thought and speech patterns of the great majority of Irish people in all of Ireland, even when they are speaking English. Reading him one is made aware of how much Irish writing in English, for all its linguistic and intellectual energy, excludes: the intimate flow of Irish speech, its twists and turns; its capacity for holding back information until [188] the drama of the sentence has been allowed to accumulate its readiness to make use of rapid emphasis; its swift rhetorical point of view. And so on. This speech is the method and substance of Cadhain’s novel Cré na Cille (1949); but his short stories, from Idir Shúgradh agus Dáiríre(1939) onwards, delineate the mentality and outlook of which this speech is both the expression and source.’ (pp.188-89.)

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Kevin Barry, review of Alan Titley’s translation of Cré na Cille by Máirtín Ó Cadhain as The Dirty Dust, in The Guardian (15 April 2015): ‘[...] One is immediately taken with the sweet simplicity of the novel’s setup: the dead can talk, and they continue to do so, with cacophonous energy, beneath the clay of a graveyard in a townland somewhere in Connemara. The life of the townland thus persists even after death has waggled its bewitching fingers. The freshly buried Caitriona Paudeen is as close to a central character as the novel provides, and she’s a ferocious old weapon. Immediately, in the book’s first lines, she castigates the living for their cheapskatedness: “Don’t know if I am in the Pound grave, or the 15 Shilling grave? Fuck them anyway if they plonked me in the Ten Shilling plot after all the warnings I gave them.” / The novel is rendered almost entirely in dialogue: there are great skittering reams of the stuff as old feuds are rekindled, old enmities rejoined. The dead are eager for news of the living, and Caitriona voluminously provides it, sparking further storms of insult and dispute. Slivers of stories from the townland emerge, and sometimes they cohere into fuller narratives, but more often they disappear into the ether. As a writer, Ó Cadhain has the attention span of a gnat, and curiously this lends the book a fragmented and contemporary feel. / It’s useful to note that this novel was written in the mid-to-late 1940s, when Flann O’Brien, Ireland’s late-modernist godhead and the arch upsetter of our sacred literature, was writing daily in the Irish Times, and often in Irish, as Myles na gCopaleen, spraying his manic invention all over the innocent newsprint. It’s important to remember how pervasive O’Brien’s influence was at this time - he essentially defined for a couple of decades the humour of the Irish cognoscenti, and I think the shadow of his porter-spattered overcoat falls on every page of The Dirty Dust. / This is most evident in the novel’s brief “Interludes” [...] with Ó Cadhain lampooning the fine writing typically employed when the Swoonful Scribe is exposed to the noble Irish west and excited into a dazzle-burst of award-winning prose: “A tubercular tinge has crept into the crepuscular sky. Milk is indurating in the udders of the cow while she seeks shelter in the inglenook of the ditch. The voice of the young swain who tends the sheep on the hills is suffused with a sadness which cannot be silenced.” / And so forth. But it’s the insane babble of the dead that holds the true poetry, and Ó Cadhain’s great accomplishment, it seems to me, was to achieve a perfect synthesis of style and subject.’ (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or attached.)

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Philip O’Leary, reviewing The Dregs of the Day [trans. of Fuíoll Fuine] (Yale 2019) in Dublin Review of Books [DRB] (Jan. 2020): ‘In Páipéir Bhána agus Páipéir Bhreaca, Ó Cadhain recalls a conversation he overheard on a Dublin bus in which a man called him “a right galoot if ever there was one. A Joycean smutmonger.” What this man was shocked by was not Ó Cadhain’s language, for having developed largely free of the absurdities and excesses of Latinate classism and Victorian respectability, Gaeltacht Irish never needed to develop separate registers of acceptable and “dirty” words to denote body parts and their functions. The simple fact that a writer of Irish like Ó Cadhain wrote about - perhaps even knew about such things - was enough to scandalise more than a few committed “Gaels” for whom the Gaeltacht was more holy ground than a place where people actually lived. Thus the simple fact that Ó Cadhain wrote of that life so naturally and honestly lent his Irish a certain frisson in his own time. To give his readers that same jolt now a translator must up the voltage in his search for English equivalents for what seem to be neutral Irish words and expressions. (One thinks here, for example, of Paul Muldoon’s translations of poems by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.) Titley must have had great fun coming up with his rumpy-pumpys, and to a great extent if they bother us that’s our problem. Besides, should anyone be surprised to find more than a few fucks in a story set in Dublin?’ (Available online; accessed 14.01.2020.)

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Quotations
Autobiography: ‘I am now a longer period in Dublin now than I ever had been in my native place. I had to garner a very accurate knowledge of the city, a knowledge more accurate than many true Dubliners have, when I was an active member of the IRA. There are more of my near relations in Dublin than at home. Very many of my neighbours and people from my native district are living quite close to me. We are a kind of ghetto, perhaps. Kafka and Heine, to mention only two of those whose work I know, both came from ghettos. As far as I can see Dublin consists entirely of ghettos. One could not say that it has been a community since Joyce’s day, when the town was very much smaller, more integrated, more dynamic. It was Joyce who wrote the first of Dublin’s novels, and perhaps the last. Neither of them is a novel of conflict or action. Ulysses is of the picaresque type, a type which is not at all dissimilar to Diarmaid [sic] and Gráinne [...]. I feel that a large labyrinth like Dublin lends itself easily to picaresque storytelling.’ (‘Páipéir Bhána agus Pápéir Bhreaca’, in Eriu, XIII (Dublin 1972), pp.242-48.) Further, ‘Irish is a new, though narrow medium, and it is to me a challenge. It is my own, and this I cannot say about any other medium. In the desolation of my heart I hear - I still hear: “The cry of the blackbird of Leiter Laoigh/and the music made by the Dord Fiann.” I am as old as the Hag of Beara, as old as Brú na Bóinne, as old as the great deer. There are two thousand years of that stinking cow which is Ireland revolving in my ears, my mouth, my eyes, my head, my dreams.’ (All cited in Ó Tuama, op. cit., 1975-76, p.44.)

Famine: ‘That sodden pulp of Famine fields, those nights of reeking coffin ships are bone of our bone, we carry them about with us still as rancorous complexes in our breasts.’ (An Ghaeilge Bheo - Destined to Pass, Dublin: Coiscéim 2002, p. 4; quoted in Fionntán de Brún, ‘Expressing the Nineteenth Century in Irish: The Poetry of Aodh Mac Domhnaill (1802–67)’, in New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua, Spring 2011, pp.81–106.

Irish models?: ‘In matters of form and style, we were greatly handicapped by having no proper models of the kind we needed badly, that is, some authoritative poet attempting to deal with contemporary problems in contemporary style. If our poetry had been at full flood, rather than at an ebb, from, say, 1900 onwards, such apoety would have existed and the cahnge would not have appeared so strange when it came.’ (Quoted [& trans.], in David Greene, Writing in Irish Today [Irish Life and Culture Series], XVIII, Cork: Mercier 1972, pop.39-40; cited in Frank Sewell, ‘Seán Ó Ríordáin, ‘Joycery-Corkery-Sorcery’, in The Irish Review, 23, Winter 1998, p.43.)

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Wild geese: ‘There would be neither name nor surname on a rough bit of board in the churchyard by the Fiord for generations to come. The voyage - that immensity, cold and sterile - would erase the name from the genealogy of the race. She would go as the wildgeese go.’ (Road to Bright City, p.28.) ‘The mother realised she was but the first of the nestlings in flight to the land of summer and joy: the wildgoose that would never again come back to its native ledge.’ (p.39; End.)

Ghetto Ireland: ‘We are in a kind of ghetto, perhaps. Kafka and Heine, to mention only two whose work I know, both came from ghettos. As far as I can see, Dublin consists entirely of ghettos. One could not say that it has been a community since Joyce’s day, when the town was very much smaller, more integrated, more dynamic.’ (Quoted in Sean Ó Tuama, Repossessions, p.10; cited in Frank Sewell, ‘James Joyce’s Influence on Writers in Irish’, in Geert Lernout, et al., eds., The Reception of James Joyce in Europe, Thoemmes/Continuum 2004, p.472.)

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References
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 3: selects An Braon Broghach, poems; and Cré na Cille [pp.857-60]; BIOG & COMM, 933; REMS, pp.815-16: the five volumes of stories by Martín Ó Cadhain (1906-70) give substance to the tradition of the short story in Irish. ‘An Bhearna Mhíl’ (‘The Harelip’) is exemplary of much of his fiction, in that it combines the telling of a simple story of young love blighted by ineluctable social convention with his passionate concern to explore and exploit the resources of the Irish language. Liam Ó Flaithearta had advised him to prune his writing mercilessly, but Ó Cadhain’s purpose to remould the language and the natural convolutions of is imagination determined his distinctive style.’ [Eoghan Ó hAnluain, ed.].

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Notes
Translations: A translation of Cré na Cille by Joan Trodden Keefe was originally undertaken as for a post-graduate degree award in the University of California, viz., Joan Trodden, Churchyard Clay (1984). Note, Michael Cronin calls for an English translation of Cré na Cille, in The Irish Times, 7 April 2001).

Class act: Éamon Ó Cíosáin, Buried Alive: A Reply to The Death of the Irish Language [by Reg Hindley] (Dáil Uí Chadain 1991), pamph., cites Ó Cadhain’s writing of acute class differences in Gaelteacht areas in ‘Irish Above Politics’, and ‘Gluaiseacht ar Strae’. (p.9).

Leg-pull: Stan Gébler Davies, James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist (London: Davis-Poynter 1975), thanks ‘Martin O’Cadhain [sic] for (probably) pulling my leg about the derivation of the name Barnacle’ (Acknowledgements; p.319). In commenting on the sentence ‘God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain’ in the “Proteus” chapter of Ulysses, Davies speaks of it as a strange way to introduce the name of one’s wife adding that Joyce, always curious about words, had gone to the trouble of finding out the curious derivation of the name, viz., Barnacle as a name rare even in Galway and retales a ‘strategy worthy of that sometimes cunning race [the Catholic Irish]’ according to which the barnacle goose was categorised as ‘a mature form of the sea-creature known as a barnacle’ and therefore considered edible in Lent. Davies’s footnote reads: ‘At least I presume he had done so. I got the explanation from the late Martin O’Cadhain, Gaelic scholar, whose name derived from the Irish for barnacle goose, as do O’Kane and Kane.’

The Son [of the]Tax-King (in Road to Brightcity) features a ruined castle very much in the mode of the castle of the O’Donoghues [in Charles Lever’s novel of that name], riven by lightning, and a monument to Irish history and its depredations: ‘[T]he castle still stood. Those massive piles of stone encrusted with moss and lichens seemed to stand of set purpose, corporeal images, reminders of a wrong once done and then again undone. / Among the Burke castles Clonbeg was one of the most delapidated. It had once been a spacious building [...] The violent thunderstorm of a few years back had down for the greater part of it. It had knocked the east gable to the ground, the sidewalls unsupported had followed soon after and lay in shattered masses scattered about. It was a wonder to all that the fierce lightening flash which had struck the castle had left even a stone standing ... But the west gable which had its back to the [44] bleakness of the irrational West, and faced the fertile cultivated Plain - that gable still stood, last of its warlike phalanx, loath to relinquish its immemorial watch on the Galway Plain. [...] The crows had made their own of this “bare ruined choir” [...] ‘ [45]

The Key / An Eochair, trans. by Louis de Paor & Lochlainn Ó Tuairisg: In The Key/An Eochair, one of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s most Kafkaesque novella, J., a “paper-keeper,” accidentally locks himself in his office when his key breaks in the lock. The novella - a mixture of satire, farce, black comedy, and, ultimately, tragedy - relates the efforts of J. and various other characters, including his wife, civil service colleagues, and superiors, as they try to extricate J. from his predicament. Yet all efforts to free J. must be in accordance with civil service protocols, and no such protocol exists for J.’s unique dilemma.’ (Dalkey Archive publisher"s notice - online; accesssed 14.01.2020.)

Stamped: An Irish stamp [based on chalk port. by Sean O’Sullivan?] was issued with a portrait of Ó Cadhain in 2006 (48 cent), in the same series as Johann Casper Zuess.

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