Éire-Ireland, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Fall 1971): Reading Notes

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) 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)

Robert W. Uphaus, ‘Images of Swift: A Review of Some Recent Criticism’, Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.16-22.
Ccites W. B. Carnochan, Lemuel Gulliver's Mirror for Man (Berkeley: University of California Press 1968); Denis Donoghue, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: CUP 1969); Martin Kallich, The Other End of the Egg: Religious Satire in “Gulliver's Travels” (Connecticut: Conference on British Studies at the University of Bridgeport 1970); John R. Clark, Form and Frenzy in Swift's “Tale of a Tub” (London: Cornell UP 1970).

Patrick Murray, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Her Father: the Literary Partnership’, Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.39-50.
Notes that ‘As a punishment for some trivial offense, he ordered her to walk around a grass plot in the garden of Edgeworthstown House until he returned from a visit he was paying. He was away longer than he had anticipated, but the young Maria continued to walk, not even pausing for food, until she could walk no more.’ (p.39)

Patrick Keatinge, ‘The Formative Years of the Irish Diplomatic Service’, Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.57-71
Remarks upon Eamon de Valera; Sean T. O’Kelly; George Gavan Duffy; [Count] George Plunkett; Thomas Johnson; Kevin O’Higgins; Frederick Henry Boland.

Doris R. Asmundsson, ‘Trollope's First Novel: A Re-Examination’, Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.83-91.
Quotes Trollope's revelation in An Autobiography that it was a desire for money which motivated him to write novels: ‘”If honest men did not squabble for money, in this wicked world of ours, the dishonest men would get it all; and I do not see that the cause of virtue would be much improved.”’ (p.83)

Cites Rafael Helling, A Century of Trollope Criticism (Helsingfors: Societas Scientiarum Fennica 1956); Hugh Walpole, Anthony Trollope (London: Macmilian 1928); Lucy P. & Richard P. Stebbins, The Trollopes: The Chronicle of a Writing Family (New York: Columbia UP 1945); Robert M. Polhemus, The Changing World of Anthony Trollope (Berkeley: University of California Press 1968).

John Wilson Foster, ‘McLaverty's People’, Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.92-105.
Remarks that ‘Michael McLaverty dramatises in his novels the dilemma of an individual's isolation from the comforting and necessary, though stifling, grasp of the community.’ (p.92)

Murray Prosky, ‘The Crisis of Identity in the Novels of Brian Moore’, Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.106-118.
Remarks that ‘Moore's novels focus on the breakdown which occurs when an individual alters or represses his deepest desires for the sake of social recognition. His characters [...] are vicitmized by desire and guilt. [...] Moore recognises the petty forms of tyranny practiced on a personal level by one's family and friends, on a broader social level by one's colleagues at work, on a spiritual level by the priestly arbiters of moral values, and on a purely personal level by bellhops, storekeepers, policemen, and judges. Ironically, the values which support this chain of intimidation are upheld by the very people who suffer the guilts and inadequacies it generates. The most pathetic aspect of Moore's characters is not the humiliation they suffer because they fear rejection; it is the necessity they feel to vindicate their abusers by rejecting themselves.’ (p.106) Further, ‘When Moore's characters reach a critical juncture where they can no longer sustain their illusions, their despair is compounded by a brief vision of the inadequacy and fragility of the entire social fabric.’ (p.107).

Donald T. Torchiana, ‘Joyce's After the Race, the Races of Castlebar, and Dun Laoghaire’, Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.119-28.
Cites Zack Bowen, ‘After the Race’, in Clive Hart, ed., James Joyce's Dubliners: Critical Essays (London: Faber 1969); Zack Bowen, ‘Hungarian Politics in “After the Race”’, James Joyce Quarterly, 7 (Winter 1969), pp.138-39; Warren Beck, Joyce's Dubliners: Substance, Vision, and Art (Durham: Duke UP 1969)

Desmond Rushe, ‘Drama: Regional and Dublin’, Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.129-32.
Sir Tyrone Guthrie, d. May, 1971.

Quotes Sir Tyrone Guthrie’s description of the Carrickmore Festival ‘I think it must be about the nearest thing left to the sort of event which the Athenian Festivals may have been.// Carrickmore is a village of 200 people in the wilds of County Tyrone - and that's getting pretty wild. They put up a hall, which holds over a thousand people, and once a year they have a week of plays - amateur groups, by invitation from all over Ireland. They place is PACKED, nobody goes to bed all night. After the play they sit up drinking and tearing to pieces what they have seen, with the incredible acumen and malice of stage-struck Irish.[...] From what I've heard, this really is what Theatre's about - a sort of occasion which simply doesn't exist any more in the professional situation and hasn't, I think, existed since Kean's time. The essence being an intelligent, madly keen audience (p.129) which, instead of being sated with drama (breakfast to bedtime, cradle to grave - on the squirt) is avidly, passionately desirous, And that does NOT mean uncritical adorers. Quite the contrary.’ (p.130). Rushe remarks, that this passage ‘explains Guthrie's attitude, and why he worked so much with companies that were marginally professional, if at all, and why he chose to devote his talents to out-of-the-way places. It may also explain why he would not consider becoming Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre when an unofficial delegation travelled to Co. Monaghan a few years ago in an effort to involve him.’ (p.130). Rushe also notes that Guthrie directed Eugene McCabe's play on Swift at the Abbey, with Micheál MacLiammóir in the title role, and had been going, before his death to direct a new play by Jack White.

Hugh Hunt simultaneously Artistic Director at the Abbey and Professor of Drama at Manchester University, leaving the Abbey when his contract expired, Dec. 1971

Brian Friel was made, in 1965, one of 25 shareholders in the Abbey Theatre. States that he has refused to give any of his plays to the Abbey.