Seán O’Faoláin: Commentary

Cork Review (1991)

Sundry Commentators

Eugene Jolas, ‘The Revolution of Language and James Joyce’, in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress: A Symposium, ed. Samuel Beckett [1929] (NY: New Directions 1972): ‘[...] In a recent essay in the Criterion entitled “Style and the Limitations of Speech”, Mr. Sean O’Faolain attempts to dispose of the Joycian onslaught by examining the nature of language and its limitations, and he arrives at the remarkable stand-pat conclusion of the “immobility of English.” Mr. O’Faolain states among other things: “There are real limitations to the eloquence of words. These are mainly two, despite the overteeming richness of what we do possess, our vocabulary is not of our manufacture and it is limited: and meanwhile, liberty to invent, and add to, and replace, is absolutely denied us - denied us, as it would seem, for all time.” Mr. O’Faolain, basing his conclusions on a dessicated philosophy of historicism, rejects Mr. Joyce’s language as “a-historic,” and chides him for running counter to certain eternal laws of nature.’ [Cont.]

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Eugene Jolas (‘The Revolution of Language and James Joyce’, in Our Exagmination [... &c., 1929], 1972 edn.): ‘Again, in a review of Anna Livia Plurabelle ([in] Irish Statesman, Dublin) after examining a phrase beginning with: [80] “She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing &c.,” and after indicating that Mr. Joyce’s system had collapsed, because he (the reader) was unable to penetrate the meaning of certain neologisms, Mr. O’Faolain concludes that this language is “almost music” and serves no useful purpose. The sentence he quotes (from page 21 of A.L.P.) contains the word “silvamoonlake” which he analyses. This mental exercise ends in the recognition of silva as being in relation to silver and sylva, moon as being moon, and lake as being lake. That is already something, although lake should also be understood to have some relation to a lacteal, or milky, image (cf. p.24[,] A.L.P.) the Petrarca Laura allusion, “By that Vale Vowclose’s lucydlac, &c.”). He stumbles against the neologism “forstfellfoss.” This means nothing to him. Now the word foss, “which puzzles him more than “forst” and “fell,” - although the real meaning of “forst” has also escaped him, it being indicative of tree - is rather well known to students of geography. It is a geographical and topographical term which my Baedeker readily reveals to me. Under the heading of World’s Biggest Waterfalls, I discover, not only Niagara Falls (170 m. high) but Feigumfoss in Norway (656 m. high). I also find other falls in Norway bearing the generic ending of foss: Esplansfoss, Grandefoss, Hoenefoss, Stalheimsfoss, and many others. It has been a custom for some time to admit to English citizenship such geographical and topographical terms as: pampa, (ice)berg, spa, fjord, campagne, steppe, veldt, lock, savannah, geyser, maelstrom, lande, canyon, &c. Mr. O’Faolain will probably object that he is not supposed to know Scandinavian in order to understand a work of English literature. But it is equally apt to say that a knowledge of Latin and Greek, and a light smattering of other languages, is no longer sufficient in an [81] age that is rapidly coming to a complete internationalization of the spirit. / Let it be understood once and for all that we can no longer accept the ideas of a past epoch. [...]’ (pp.81-82.) [Cont.]

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Eugene Jolas (‘The Revolution of Language and James Joyce’, in Our Exagmination [... &c., 1929], 1972 edn.): ‘But, says Mr. O’Faolain, “a word is a fragment of history that we have agreed to accept as a symbol for a limited number of its own experiences and ours, and the writer works with these experiences and our knowledge of them; as a result, words become in his hands most pliable, roguish and suggestive things.” To illustrate his point he chooses the word “gentleman.” This example seems to me inept. If he wishes to show that words do not change, then gentleman does not show it. But to show that they do change, let us take “ title,” for example. The Latin word is “titulus” which is the cross on top of the letter “t.” INRI was a “ titulus” for the cross of Christ. There is even a feastday of that name in the Roman Catholic Church. To the lawyer a “title” represents the authenticity of a document representing an heir’s succession. When an American society girl marries a duke or a marquis, she is marrying a “title.” Then “title” also indicates the descriptive term for a work of literature. For Gene Tunney, the word “title” represents the honor he received, after Mr. Jack Dempsey had seen the starry firmament. Etc., etc.’ (p.83.) [See further remarks under James Joyce, Commentary, infra.]

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Michael Tierney, ‘Politics and Culture: Daniel O’Connell and the Gaelic Past’, Studies, 27, 107 (Sept. 1938): ‘The significance of Mr O’Faolain’s book is that it once more raises clearly and frankly the dilemma that faces modern Ireland. Are we bound to rely for all our culture upon an incongruous mixture of etiolated Catholicism, Puritanical individualism, and commercial utility, or is there no hope of being able to obtain some light from our vanished Gaelic past to brighten our gloom?’ (p.367.) Further: ‘O’Connell was clearly not aware that in his commanding position his attitude towards the Gaelic past was condemning his people to that most dreadful of all fates, the awful emptiness of a nation without a history.’ (p.367.) Further: ‘if it were to be widely accepted, might be disastrous, especially at the present time.’ (p.368 [All the foregoing quoted in Jason MacGeoghegan, UUC, MA Dipl. essay, 1996.]

Michael Tierney, ‘Politics and Culture: Daniel O’Connell and the Gaelic Past’ (Studies, Sept. 1938) - cont.: ‘It would be a great pity if any large number of Mr. Ó Faoláin’s Irish readers should be led, by a natural irritation with some of the crude and hasty methods now in vogue for reviving the Gaelic language, into concluding as he has done that there is no way out except the choice he presents between a “fake” and the entire rejection of their own history. Democracy is no substitute for culture, and much of what is most precious and of highest quality in past civilisations was in fact the result of their enthusiastic devotion to, and attempt to recover, literary, linguistic, and artistic traditions that were not always genuinely ancestral to them. After all a surprising amount of what adds most to the savour of life even at present has come to us from the obsession of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the languages and cultures of Greece and Rome. How much poorer would be European literature and art if all the consequences of the Renaissance were suddenly to disappear? / Yet the Renaissance was far more a “fake” even in Italy, which could lay some claim to continuity with Rome, than the Gaelic revival is in the original home of Gaelic culture, whose political destiny even in our own time has been changed by the half-recovered memory of its ancient “otherness”.’

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Frank O’Connor, ‘The Future of Irish Literature’ (Horizon, Jan. 1942): ‘His [O’Faolain's] first novel, A Nest of Simple Folk (the title itself an avowed plagiarism from Turgenev), is a rich, leisurely, lyrical book about life lived at its very simplest among the peasants of County Limerick. It deals with no great events: an abortive attempt at an insurrection (lightly passed over); the transference of a family from country to country town and from country town to provincial city. It has no outstanding characters; indeed, the people he describes are scarcely articulate, yet their little pieties and follies are described with tender sympathy. / His second novel, Bird Alone, set in the same provincial city, is a very different kettle of fish. It is the story of a raw youth and girl whose love affair brings them into conflict with the furious piety and Puritanism of Catholic Ireland and ends in despair and suicide. The little pieties and follies are drawn once more, but now with a definitely sinister turn. The characters have begun to be articulate: to demand a fuller, richer life for themselves, but as their aspiration grows, the sense of the dead weight of his material hangs more and more heavily on the author’s mind, and the book is almost choked by the feeling of anguish and claustrophobia. The nest of simple folk has raised its head out of the mud and been horrified by what it has seen.’ [Remarks on his play She Had to Do Something considered as an interim position and ‘the first time O’Faolain really wrote as himself, as a personality, not as an anonymous Catholic Irish writer like Colum, but throwing all ancestral pieties to the winds.’ [Cont.]

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Frank O’Connor, ‘The Future of Irish Literature’ (Horizon, Jan. 1942): - cont: ‘In his new novel, Come Back to Erin, a young revolutionary goes to America, falls in love with the middle-aged wife of his step-brother and becomes her lover. She is complex, cultured, subtle; he gawkish, puritanical; a young provincial barbarian. Irish critics profess to lament the long American interlude, but for me, as I am sure, for most other people, it is the whole book. The author of the two brief sections dealing with Ireland seems to me the old O’Faolain who is bewildered and distressed by what he describes; it is only when he reaches America that he begins again to use the full range of his powers; and there we get astonishing sureness; a broad, sweeping outline; comedy and poetry. The nest of simple folk has found its way out at last. / But what of the author? He has grown up in his own material; has learned at last to use the full range of his powers, but what the blazes can he use them on? It is quite clear that, having written the middle section of this book, he would be a fool to go back to the uncertainties of its Irish sections, except with a very different approach. It is also clear what Irish critics dislike. It is no longer regional literature; the writer has ceased to find what is most valuable to himself in Holy Ireland, and cannot translate back into its idiom what he has found outside it. Into that life a cultured Frenchwoman or American - and that means their creator - simply will not go.’ (Rep. in David Pierce, ed., Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader, Cork UP 2000, pp.500-03; p.501; for full text, see RCORSO Library, “ Irish Critical Classics”, infra.)

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Francis MacManus, ‘Literature of the Period’, in MacManus, ed., The Years of the Great Test 1926-39 (1967), calls A Nest of Simple Folk ‘a massive novel in human terms about the humus, the roots, of Irish patriotism, as manifested by the Fenians, the Parnellites and the men of Easter Rising […] This is the kind of historical borrowing which [Frank] O’Connor never attempted.’ (p.122; quoted in quoted in James Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel, 1983, p.121.)

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Katherine Hanley, ‘The Short Stories of Sean O’Faolain: Theory and Practice’, Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.3-11; Hanley quotes the preface to O’Faolain’s collection The Heart of the Sun (1963) in which he differentiates between story, tale, and novel; ‘“ [A short story] is like a child’s kite, a small wonder, a brief, bright moment. It has its limitations; there are things it can do and cannot do, but, if it is good, it moves in the same elements as the largest work of art - up there, airborne. The main thing a writer of a short story wants to do is to get it off the ground as quickly as possible, hold it there, taut and tense, playing it like a fish. […] [The short story] may not wander far; it has to keep close to its base-point, within the bounds of place, time, and character; it will only carry a few characters, three at least, at best no more than three; there is not time or space, for elaborate characterisation… and there is often no plot, nothing more than a situation, and only just enough of that to release a moment or two of drama”’. (O’Faolain, The Heat of the Sun, 1966, p.5; quoted in Hanley, p.3) Hanley continues, ‘So the short story writer, for O’Faolain, must have an unusually keen sensitivity to ideas, and ability to snatch the small thing and make it work. […] The writing is hard work; no believer in frenzied inspiration, O’Faolain remarks that “half the art of writing is rewriting.” neither is the finished story to be regarded as an automatic success: “stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.”’ (p.4) Hanley remarks that ‘In 1963 O’Faolain described himself as “a romantic with a hopeless longing for clasical order.”‘ (p.5.)

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Maurice Harmon, ‘Generations Apart: 1925-1975’, in Rafroidi and Maurice Harmon, eds., The Irish Novel in Our Time (Université de Lille 1975-76), p.49-65: ‘In none of O’Faolain’s novels is there a feeling that the future actually will be better. Expelled from society, his heroes suffer thereafter from a sense of loss. At best the artist can hope to deal with the uncongenial world, and that is the theme of many of O’Faolain’s short stories.’ (p.53.) ‘Underlying O’Faolain’s extensive commentary on Irish society is the hope that in time a more congenial Ireland would emerge. It was understandable that the peasants in the towns, who formed the new middle-class, would not have much idea of his vision of a Republic, who was Tone’s concept of a non-sectarian, liberal state. The hope was that their children would be free to see things differently. But the emergence of an educated liberal Catholic laity with a better sense of the role of the artist did not take place. Under the challenges and opportunities of he Post-War world a new acquisitiveness came into existence.’ (p.54).

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James Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room, The Irish Historical Novel (1983), writes that Ó Faoláin was spurred on by Turgenev’s A Nest of Gentlefolk (p.113). ‘In The Irish, O’Faoláin sketched the overcoming of the influence of Scott in Irish writing, after the nineteenth century, when ‘each novelist is a kind of undiluted Walter Scott, never really sure of the absolute interest of his material […] It was an entirely new thing for men to realise the full and complete dignity of the simplest life of the simplest people. Once they had acknowledged that then they were free to do anything they liked with it in literature - treat it naturalistically, fantastically, romantically, see it in any light they chose. They had conquered their material by accepting it’ (p.162-64). ‘In the midst of this passage, he says, ‘Without the national thing […] an Irish writer was always in danger of becoming a provincial by becoming an imitator. […] The national thing gave Irish writers the necessary resolution […] to find in Ireland the stuff of their work […] The original Abbey Theatre would have been inconceivable without the nationalist movement’ (p.162; Cahalan, op. cit., p.115.) ‘ A Nest of Simple Folk, a historical novel-cum-bildungsroman, set in the period 1854-1916; O’Faoláin wrote that it ‘gave me so much satisfaction. It was an historical novel, or family chronicle, based on everything I had known, or directly observed in the countryside, of my mother’s people, and the city life of my mother and father away back, some twenty years ago, in Cork City.’ (Vive Moi! 1964, p.371; here p.116.). ‘When Denis Hussey rejects his father’s reactionary respectability at the end of the novel, in favour of Leo’s rebellious stance, he reflects Ó Faoláin’s own youthful rebellion, although the fictional Denis responds to the additional knowledge that his father informed on Leo’ (Cahalan, p.121.) ‘The young Denis Hussey, son of the policeman who gives information against Leo Donnel, but who falls under his influence, serves to focus O’Faoláin’s own youthful experience - the chief protagonist Leo having shifted to the background. (op. cit., p.116.) ‘Leo is repeatedly called ‘a desperate character’; he is an energetic and destructive misfit. In The Irish, O’Faoláin discusses the Leo Donnel, rebel-type, ‘The Rebel probably never cared. He was devoted to failure. He was a professional or vocational failure. […] There was only one thing at which the Rebel wished to be a success and that was at rebelling. Death did not mean failure so long as the Spirit of Revolt lives’ (The Irish, p.120-21; here p.117.)

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Richard Kearney: ‘Seán O’Faoláin, for one, has expressed the view that the main trouble with modern Ireland stems for the “old curse and bore”’, or “revered, unforgettable indestructible, irretrievable past […] the underground stream that keeps on vanishing and reappearing.” O’Faoláin attributes such preoccupations to the mesmerising atavisms of “myth and mystique” epitomised by what he calls the “atrocity” of nationalism. The curse and bore of the past is also evinced, he insists, in our political ineptitude and inability to govern ourselves: “All our life-ways remained for far too long based on social structures dependent on the primitive idea of the local ruler, while Europe was developing the more powerful concept of the centralised state.” Against this intellectual self-excoriation, so typical of that post-colonial servility which repudiates its own past, I would invoke the pronouncement of Sir Samuel Ferguson that we should attend to the records of the past in order that we may liberate our minds by “living back in the land we live in”.’ (The Irish Mind, 1985, p.36; makes ref. to Deane, The Question of Tradition, in Crane Bag, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1977, p.8.)

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Fergus O’Ferrall, ‘Liberty and Catholic Politics 1790-1990’, in Daniel O’Connell, Political Pioneer, ed. Maurice R O’Connell, 1991, pp.35-56: [In] The King of The Beggars (1938), O’Faoláin offered a radically different interpretation of recent Irish history to [the dominant one of the 1930s] viewing it as the result of the democratic victories won by O’Connell rather than the revamped Gaelic heroism of Pearse/Cuchulainn. [51] O’Faoláin’s book led to a symposium in Studies (1938), where Michael Tierney said, ‘In many ways the future of our political, social and education[al] systems must depend on whether or not we agree with what he [O’Faoláin] has said about the significance of O’Connell.’ (Tierney, ‘Politics and Culture, Daniel O’Connell and the Gaelic Past’, in Studies Vol. XXVII, no. 107, 1938, pp.361-62; cited in Terence Brown, Ireland, a social and cultural history 1922-1985, pp.66) (Ferrall, p.51.)

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Patrick Walsh, ‘Daniel Corkery’ (MA thesis, UUC 1993), cites O’Faolain, ‘The Language Problem’, in The Irish Tribune [4 pts., 9 July-30 July 1926), where O’Faolain argues that Irish was being taught for its own sake rather than its ‘intellectual content’, and that the text books used in schools and universities were ‘simple deception and a sham’; he argued for a shift in policy, and ‘that the keynote of such a policy should be that Irish be treated as a literary language’; he also argued for a more rigorously academic approach in place of the emphasis on the ‘colloquial’; and he condemned the emphasis on ‘the decadent drivel of the eighteenth century’ advocated by Corkery. ‘Mr Corkery’s book on The Hidden Ireland of the eighteenth century is typical; it has come at an unfortunate time. […] It is a piquant reflection that was intended to do good and has actually succeeded in doing more to retard Irish education than three centuries of foreign rule’ (16 July 1926). ‘That post-1700 tradition is a peasant tradition, and it is the peasants who have a grip in the education system of today’ (23 July 1926). Further comments from O’Faolain in ‘Daniel Corkery’, Dublin Magazine, 11 (April-June 1936). There he suggests, in regard to Corkery’s equation between the Irish writer and the Thurles hurling crowd and the English writer and a soccer crowd, that Corkery’s English image is even more confused and inadequate than his Irish one, devoid as it is of any awareness of class tensions or social complexity. (Walsh, op. cit., p.80; and note that Walsh followed his thesis with a successful PhD.)

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R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish History and English History, London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press 1993): ‘A Republican activist in the 1920s, O’Faolain had by the later 1930s become a sceptical interrogator of many of the purist assumptions behind hard-line Irish nationalism. For his new periodical he borrowed the name of a great Russian journal of the previous century; and the Bell published many of the short stories which gave Irish writers a good claim to stand in the Russian tradition. It also involved writers and thinkers from various shades of the Irish political spectrum, and from different historical and religious traditions within the island; it raised many of the issues of pluralism, secularism and Irishness which the Irish Statesman had tried to advance in the 1920s. Under O’Faolain’s editorship, the Bell advanced the uncomfortable and often unwelcome case that Ireland’s unique cultural inheritance was inescapably affected by traffickings with Britain as well as the Gaelic legacy; and that this commerce, tragic and exploitative in so many ways, could be culturally enriching in others. Through this process, an “Irish” sensibility emerged which was both more complex and more intellectually liberating than realised by those obsessed either by colonial imitativeness or purist narodnik Irish-Irelandism.’ (‘The Irishness of Elizabeth Bowen’; p.111).

R. F. Foster [as Roy Foster], ‘When the Newspapers Have Forgotten Me …’, in Yeats Annual 12 (London: Macmillan 1996), calls O’Faolain’s obituary appreciation of Yeats in ‘Yeats and the Younger Generation’, Horizon (Jan. 1942), a coruscating essay what shows how much of Yeats’s intellectual origins Hone missed, making one regret that the biography O’Faolain began was abandoned. (Foster, op. cit., pp.170, 175.)

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Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press 1998): quotes O’Faolain’s view of James Joyce’s later writings as ‘a revolt against the despotism of fact’, echoing Matthew Arnold’s phrase - in quoting which Smyth adds that O’Faolain is ‘unaware, perhaps, of the implicit structure of power and knowledge on which this discourse relied.’ (p.85; quotes O’Faolain on Finnegans Wake, as under Joyce, infra). Further: ‘In this O’Faoláin was responding to AE’s treatment of the publication as a book-collector’s item rather than a work of literature; O’Faolain’s reply - which also appeared as ‘Almost Music’ in Hound and Horn, Jan.-March 1929 - was in turn answered by Eugene Jolas in transition and identically in the Irish Statesman, arguing that Joyce was entitled to “create a vocabulary which is not only a deformation, but an amalgamation of numerous modern languges spoken in the world today.” (Deming, 1970, Vol. 2, p.398). ‘O’Faolain retorted with a letter addressed to Jolas invoking Pascal on artists who add nothing to nature or reality, and commenting on his own account: “The aesthetic, of half-aesthetic behind Anna Livia denies that art can add a jot to reality, and though Mr. Joyce is welcome to the joy of that despair, from which no argument can raise him, I may be permitted to ask M. Jolas if he realises this?” […] M. Jolas is at fault. People do not create a vocabulary. [… &c.]’. O’Faolain goes on to say that Joyce is a ‘Romantic of the first water’, and ‘a Quixote whose terrible earnestness is his downfall’, but that ‘his great genius has saved him from utter failure.’ (Irish Statesman, 2 March, 1929; Deming, Vol. 2, p.400.). Smyth continues, ‘The realistic aesthetic purveyed by O’Faolain throughout his critical and creative work was part of an early revisionist analysis of the recent revolutionary period. … O’Faolain misses the complexity and completeness of Joyce’s attack on a reality limited by a particular critical model of the relations between the cultural and political spheres.’ (p.85.) See further remarks upon O’Faolain’s use of Collingwood’s query as a rationale or framework for his work [in] The Irish (1947): ‘O’Faolain can only formulate his examination of Irish history in terms of a universalist narrative of “world civilisation”, a gesture which engages with (and thus reinforces) the boundaries between “racial” and non-racial experience.’ (p.198.). See also comments on The Bell, pp.113-18 et passim.)

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Terence Brown, ‘After the Revival: The Problem of Adequacy and Genre’, in Ronald Schleifer, ed., The Genres of Irish Literary Revival (Dublin: Wolfhound Press 1980): ‘It was in his biography of the Great Liberator, King of the Beggars (1938), that O’Faoláin proposed this thesis with greatest force (the thesis is the inspiration of many of his journal articles). What is clear in this masterful book is that O’Faoláin does not reget the passing of the old order for all his distaste for contemporary Ireland. Indeed, the biography [King of the Beggars] is essentially a polemic against those features of modern Irish society he accepts as his own, that he found oppressive, since he believed they originated in a false understanding of Irish history which a true reading of O’Connell’s life and work would correct. The romantic nationalism that had fed the revolutionary [159] movement and the Literary Revival alike had fostered in O’Faoláin’s sense of things a view of Irish history that was idealistic to the point of fantasy. Despite all that had happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, that questionable creed asserted, Gaelic Ireland had remained intact and had been restored in acts of Republican violence. The Rising of 1916 was a restorative culmination, not a beginning. O’Faoláin thought such a view romantic claptrap, proposing by contrast a view of O’Connell as King of the Beggars, a great utilitarian, English-speaking, anti-Gaelic, Irish leader who took a mob of disenfranchised helots whose civilisation was in tatters and made of them a mass movement that bore fruit in the democratic achievements of the twentieth century’ (pp.153-78, p.159-60; rep. in Ireland’s Literature (1988), Chap. 7; p.97-98; quoted in part in Jason MacGeoghegan, UUC, MA Dipl. essay, 1996).

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Terence Brown, review ofMaurice Harmon, Sean O’Faolain, A Life (London: Constable 1994), in Saturday Irish Times, [?16] June, 1994, writes that ‘Harmon writes with restraint about the sexual and emotional entanglements; had the extreme good fortune to be loved by four remarkable women - his wife Eileen, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the writer Honor Tracy, and the brilliant NY hostess Alene Erlanger - none of whom enjoyed his total commitment for any length of time; the O’Faolain who emerges in Harmon’s fairminded and humane book seems a man who could only rare (when The Bell was ringing loud and clear, perhaps) risk the absolute commitment to art, to life or to love which the finest achievement in any sphere demands.’

Terence Brown, reviewing Clair Wills That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland in the Second World War, in The Irish Times (17 March 2007), “Weekend”: ‘ Even Sean O’Faolain’s decision to found a literary/cultural periodical in Ireland was a matter of real risk. For in the first editorial of The Bell in October 1940, when a German invasion of the country was still imaginable, O’Faolain bravely announced, in his desire for inclusiveness: “Whosoever you are then, O reader, Gentile or Jew, Protestant or Catholic, priest or layman, Big House or Small House - THE BELL is yours.” He must have known that such a sentiment in respect of a putative Jewish readership would in the event of Nazi occupation have marked him out for liquidation.’

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David Norris, ‘Imaginative Response versus Authority: A Theme of the Anglo-Irish Short Story’, in Terence Brown & Patrick Rafroidi, eds., The Irish Short Story (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979): O’Faolain’s view of the individual as opposed to the collective response in the civil war period is similar to O’Connor’s, going even so far as to balance in “The Patriot” the narrow political passion of a Corkery-like orator, Bradley, against the personal fulfilment of the narrator and his bride. However, the most interesting recurrence of the theme of imaginative response is in “Midsummer Night Madness”. The narrator, who is presented from the start as a man sensitive to beauty in nature, is sent on an intelligence mission by the IRA to investigate the inactivity of a local battalion. Its commandant, Stevey Long, has established headquarters in the house of an Anglo-Irish roué - Henn, whose exploits were among the legends of the narrator’s childhood. Whatever about the weapons of war, Long has plied the weapons of peace and love not wisely but too well, with the result that old Henn’s half tinker servant, Gypsy, has become pregnant. Henn is forced into what he regards as a morganatic marriage to conceal this disreputable fact. [56] / Such a bald statement of the narrative dealing only in action omits a very remarkable factor, the subterranean action of a group of images of the kind described in the opening of this essay as a characteristic indicator of the presence of imaginative life, in attracting the narrator across the boundaries of prejudice and revolutionary commitment, until finally and indeed remarkably he is united in feeling not with his military ally Stevey, but with his traditional enemy, old Henn. And the reason? Quite simply, these two characters alone share in the story something deeper, more permanent, than divisions of class, ideology or age - the ability to respond joyously, imaginatively to the experiences of life. / Just as the narrator responds to the summer evening in the opening lines, so old Henn reaches out to the beauty of women whose breasts are “like tulips”, an epicurean refinement lost on Long to whom it is all just a question of “great titties”. The conflict between the celebrators of life, and its prudent despoilers, is succinctly drawn in a small scene where Stevey interrupts a discussion of fishing prospects between Gypsy and the old man. [Quotes:] “His [(Stevey’s] voice was rough and coarse beside the rich voice of the girl and the cultured voice of the old man. / ‘Leppin’? Rise? Rise how are you! That was me spittin’ when she wasn’t looking.’ / ‘Oh, there was a rise”, she cried. ‘I saw their silver bellies shining as they leaped’. / ‘Ooh, mocked Stevey. ‘Bellies! Naughty word! Ooh!’ (which is fairly ironic, considering the effect his ‘leppin’ and ‘risin’ have had on her ‘belly’).” / When one remembers how close O’Faolain was to his own republican involvement when he wrote this story, there is an astonishing integrity about his presentation of the relationships between revolutionary and aristocrat. In later stories analyzing the censorious small-mindedness of the new Free State, O’Faolain maintains this stance. Moreover, the tone is ultimately optimistic as well as comic, and the possibility of a real and courageous stand for artistic and personal freedom shines beyond even the all too human figure of “an old master” like John Aloysius O’Sullivan.’ (pp.56-57.)

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Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘The playwright politician’ [interview] in Des Hickey and Gus Smith, eds., A Paler Shade of Green (London: Leslie Frewin 1972), p.228-35; p.232; ‘Among living Irish writers Seán Ó Faolain influenced me more than anybody else when he was editor of The Bell by his astringent criticism, which was very good for me at the time, although I did not realise this immediately, and in particular by his example in combining the activity of a writer with social criticism.’

Conor Cruise O’Brien [as Donat O’Donnell], ‘The Parnellism of Seán O’Faoláin’ in Maria Cross (Burns & Oates 1963), pp.87-105, ‘This Parnellism is passive, an extension of self-pity, but it can be dynamic. A Nest of Simple Folk is planned to show the apotheosis of Parnellism in a moment of historical decision. The 1916 rebellion freed Denis [Hussey] from his family’; notes ‘the obsolete machinery that has confused and restricted so much of his writing …’ (ibid.)

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Robert Greacen, review of Maurice Harmon, Sean O’Faolain, A Life (London: Constable 1994), in Books Ireland (Dec. 1994), Greacen testifies to O’Faolain’s interest in the North (‘What are young people in Belfast thinking?’.) first issue of The Bell, subtitled a ‘survey of Irish life’, included contributions from Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, Jack B. Yeats, and Lennox Robinson; first editorial declared that ‘[The Bell] has in the usual sense of the word no policy. We leave it to nature to give the magazine its own time-created character’; expressed preference for ‘the positive to the negative, the creative to the destructive. We ban only lunatics and sour-bellies’; the series ‘I did Penal Servitude’ by D 83222 (being O’Faolain’s phone number) was written by Walter Mahon-Smith, who was sentenced for fraud; Frank O’Connor, first poetry ed., later replaced by Geoffrey Taylor; included a number of Ulster issues; encouraged Sam Hanna Bell to contribute, with other Northerners, incl. Forrest Reid, George Sheils, John Hewitt, W. R. Rodgers, Tom Carnduff, and Greacen [see The Bell, July 1941], with an orange cover; O’Faolain editor for six years; after which O’Donnell through 43 more issues; H. A. L. Craig, of TCD, one-time assistant, prior to Robert Greacen; O’Faolain on Belfast and the North, ‘Belfast has immediacy, Ulster has contemporaneity. Our southern curse is that we have never cut the umbilical cord’; ‘Of course it is also true that Belfast is a city of mixed grills and double whiskeys, of stalking poverty and growing hate’; O’Faolain force behind WAAMA to ‘improve and protect the status and working conditions in Ireland of writers, artists, actors and musicians’; note that Greacen cites David [err. for Edward] Garnett as the man that really set O’Faolain on the road; Garnett introduced him to writers of his own age like H. E. Bates, who noted that he had ‘arrived permeated down to the roots with admiration for Joyce and had promptly been sent packing, like O’Flaherty, to write of the wet Irish pastures of his childhood’; the relationship considered by Harmon (1994) as ‘the most important in Sean’s entire literary life’; ends with comparison to Arnold Bennett - to the Irish what Bennett is to the English.

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Guy le Moigne, review of Maurice Harmon, Sean O’Faolain: A Life (London: Constable 1994), in Linen Hall Review (Autumn 1994), pp.24], partly based on interview with O’Faolain, 26 Aug. 1975; gives account of the greater frankness of Vive Moi (rev. edn. 1993), especially regarding O’Faolain’s affairs with Elizabeth Bowen, Honor Tracy, and Alene Erlanger (‘Kick’) - the second-named coinciding with the period of his ‘so-called Roman conversion’ in A Summer in Italy (1949) and the third with his visit to an intellectual French Jesuit in New York, of purported spiritual significance also; stresses the overlap of his fiction and his autobiography, Harmon remarking that Vive Moi was perhaps his most nearly successful novel; positive evaluation of Harmon’s Critical Introduction (1967). Le Moigne draws attention to the faulty bibliographical items in Harmon’s work, picking up obvious false accreditations such as Marcel Ayné, La Nausée [err. for Sartre] transmitted to him in the list that O’Faolain sent to Borgerhoff (1979) [no ref.]. Bibl., Paul A. Doyle, Seán O’Faoláin (1968.) Richard Bonoccorso, Sean O’Faolain’s Irish Vision (1987), here called ‘underrated’.

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Julia O’Faolain, ‘Modern Ireland, the Church and Sean O’Faolain’, in Times Literary Supplement (24 March 2000), p.16 [full page,], writing at the centenary of her father’s birth: ‘[…] I have been remembering him and with him an ireland which he struggled for much of his life to change. Now that it has changed, the old Ireland seems so remote that, I am told, few young Irish people know it existed at all.’ Quotes V. S. Pritchett: ‘Of all the Irish writers[,] Mr O’Faolain seems to me the most authoritative and diverse’; remarks: ‘The civil literties for which he fought are taken for granted, and a new confident Ireland is forgetting the nervous conformism once imposed by poverty. / This amnesia helps me to understand the success of Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes, which I myself found to harrowing to read. The past, once forgotten, grows exotic, and a mental trip through the slums may feel spiritually beneficial to readers who never saw them.’ Speaks of the ‘linkage between the young Irish state’s inability to cope with poverty and its readiness to toady to the Catholic Church’ at cost of the ban on contraceptives [&c.], and tells of a charwoman in Killiney who threw herself down the O’Faolain’s steps in a desperate attempt to terminate an unwanted pregnancy when a Protestant doctor refused for fear to help her miscarry. O’Faolain gives an account of her father’s ‘agonising’ over the willingness of God to tolerate such events and concludes that he ‘gradually gave up on God’; speaks of his open letter to fellow old Republicans in 1966 (the anniversary of 1916), reminding them that instead of the ‘pursuit of the happiness of the Nation and of the individuals that compose the Nation’ for which they had fought, ‘[w]e have set up a society based on privilege’ run by ‘a minority of ambitious businessmen, “rugged individualists” looking down at, fearing, and even hating “the men of no property” , thriving on the same theory of God-made ineuqality, welcoming and abetting […] the repression of every sign of individual criticism […]’. Speaks of ‘the silent crumbling’ of yet another of Sean’s old dreams’ on a visit to comrades in the ‘speckled’ West Cork Gaeltacht. Cites Graham Greene’s commission on behalf of Eyre and Spottiswoode that sent O’Faolain to Italy in the spirit of placing a character ‘in an alien setting to see what will happen’; O’Faolain converted from Irish to Roman Catholicism. Julia writes: ‘Ireland has always been a palimpsest of a place, and, even now, old modes and mores are perceptible’, before telling how, when O’Faolain died, three strange [unknown] priests asked to be allowed to concelebration the funeral mass and were resentfully allowed, one going on to hog the conversation with ‘a foreign baroness’ to the indignation of the guests, and conjectures that O’Faolain ‘had have been too gentle in his stories about clerics’. Cites J. F. Powers as a sterner critic and laments his death. (Photo shows Kick Erlanger, Sean O’Faolain, Eileen O’Faolain, Lauro Martines and his wife Julia O’Faolain, at the Plaza in New York, New Year’s Eve, 1959.)

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Conor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2000), writes: of O’Faolain and Peadar O’Donnell: ‘[…]an intellectual stratum formed by the social changes effected via Westminster before Independence: the break-up of the estates of the Anglo-Irish landlord class and their consequent decline; the concomitant production of a class of peasant proprietors; and the rise of the commercial and professional middle classes. Such intellectuals took the new socio-economic order for granted, and thus were not disposed to think or seek its transformation. Thus the generation of famous post-Independence intellectuals, exemplified by Sean O’Faolain, Peadar O’Donnell, and their journal The Bell, produced critiques of the social order in which primacy was given to the realm of discourse, not to the material base. The stress was on “critical exposure rather than systematic radical analysis” (Liam O’Dowd, ‘Neglecting the Material Dimension: Irish Intellectuals and the Problem of Identity’, in Irish Review, 3, pp.8-17.) Such thinkers did not affilate their work to mass movements for change, but rather produced a somewhat self-validating discourse of greater cultural “civility” than the prevailing norms.’ (p.29.)

Brian Fallon, Anthony Cronin: Man of Letters (Cranagh Press [Univ. of Ulster 2003): ‘In Irish literature the supreme example of a man of letters is surely Sean O’Faolain, who was a novelist, short-story writer, biographer, critic, editor, polemicist and social commentator, translator (from the Irish) and unsuccessful playwright. Until very recently, he was still viewed as primarily a creative writer of fiction, but his novels appear to have lost their currency and even many or most of the short stories nowadays seem increasingly to belong to their epoch, rather than going beyond it or above it. O’Faolain achieved a high degree of topicality over several decades and even a kind of urgent contemporaneity; he engaged in most of the essential controversies of his time, he was a major voice and influence, yet already it becomes harder and harder to pick even half-a-dozen books from his large output and predict, with much confidence, that they will still be read fifty years from now. Too often, the highpowered literary careerist and polemicist won out over the artist.’ (p.2.)

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Declan Kiberd, reviewing Faber Book of Best Irish Short Stories, ed. David Marcus, in The Irish Times (30 April 2005), Weekend, p.11: ‘[...] Ó Faoláin thought English writers preferred the social amplitude of the novel to capture the layers of a made society, whereas the Irish and Americans, still not fully “conventionalised” favoured a more personal exposition. Through much of the 1930s and 1940s, Ó Faoláin in seemed somewhat unnerved by the adoption of the short story (in the New Yorker, on radio, in national papers) as his country’s quintessential art form. He fretted about the problem of “Adequacy”, and whether Ireland was yet sufficiently calibrated by different economic classes and social rituals to sustain the full complexity of the novel. In asking as much he echoed a question once raised about mid-19th-century America by Henry james: how could one write a novel of manners about a society that had none? [...] No wonder that both he [Frank O’Connor]and Ó Faoláin saw the story as the appropriate form for the risen people, the rebels on the run, the Os and the Macs. […]’ (For longer extract, see under Kiberd, Quotations, supra.)

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Frank Shovlin, ‘O’Faoláin experimented throughout his career with a wide variety of forms: short story, novel, historical biography, drama, poetry, travel writing. […] The Bell can be interpreted as one such attempt to find a genre capable of accommodating O’Faoláin’s artistic needs’ (p.102; quoted in Kelly-Anne Matthews, PhD diss. on The Bell, 2007 [draft]).

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An Irishman: ‘I am an Irishman working in England. My foreman is an Englishman, my fellow workers are English. I live with an English family. Since your government announced its proposal to sever the last link with the crown and commonwealth, I have been asked questions by aforementioned persons viz. What are the advantages of such action by your govt. [T]he disadvantages are outlined for me and a very gloomy list it is for us, reporting to the Ploice [sic] station, having to return to Ireland, unemployment, a lower standard of living. Is the last doorway in Mr de Valera’s wall being bricked up. As Sean Ó Faoláin so ably put it in his talk over the radio tonight “The only world open to the Irish soon will be the next one.” Don't think that we are sending out angels and saints in our Irish boy and girl emigrants. Most of them are backward and unable to fit into the more civilized mode of living here after the more cramped and less free standards prevailing in Ireland.’ (Letter sent from Britain to John A Costello, Taoiseach, following the introduction of the Republic bill read out in the Dail in Dec. 1948; quoted in E. Delaney, ‘In a Strange Land’, in The Irish in Post-War Britain, OUP 2007, p. 137. Delaney remarks that it ‘exposes the gulf separating the world of Irish emigrants in Britain from the world of their ertswhile political leaders.’)

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John Montague, ‘a territory of one’ own’, review of Trespassers: A Memoir, in The Irish Times (25 May 2013), Weekend Review, p.12: ‘[...] But is there not an element of the incestuous in a daughter discussing her father;s love life? In some weird way, Sean seems to have won the day with his last novel, And Again?, published when he was 80, in which the gods on Mount Olympus offer to let the main character “grown younger instead of odler, forget his past, enjoy successive erotic adventures with his daughter, his grand- then great-granddaughter.”. Julia acknowledges that her father’ s "notion of serial incest came uncomofrtably close to revealing wanton impulses which, though fictional, were recognisably his. [...] The pages on the dotage of her father are painful to read. The subject has already been raised by Maurice Harmon’ s biography, but it is particularly poignant coming from a daughter. After his wife died, “he fell apart, got dementia, lusted impotently after a youngish woman who encouraged him so rashly that he lost his bearings, fought with his hosuekeeper, ran into the street inadequately clad ... to rage like Lear at the human condition and shock the neighbours.” / It is a brave book.’ Montague expresses regret that she does not tell more about O’ Faolain’ s interference in her own life as when he demanded she leave a Parisian boyfriend to care for the O'Faolains at home, or when he vetted an American son-in-law by writing to Harvard.