When W. B. Yeats met John Millington Synge in 1896, he told him ‘urged him to go to the Aran Islands and find a life that had never been expressed in literature’, and from that experience Synge created the greatest plays of the Irish Literary Revival. On Aran - and particularly on Inishmore - he found himself living among many families that bore the name O’Flaherty, widely extended throughout the West of Ireland.
Among its holders in former days, for example, had been Roderick O’Flaherty, the 17th-century author of a Latin history called Ogygia (1685) defending the honour of Gaelic Ireland against the calumnies of earlier and contemporary English writers. O’Flaherty became a victim of land-confiscation after the Battle of the Boyne and died in poverty in Iar Chonnachta (West Galway), yet many humbler O’Flahertys figure in Irish literary record if chiefly as ‘the children of a vanishing race’ in Anglo-Irish novels.
One such is Thomas O’Flaherty Pat, the old peasant who discovers a horde of Armada treasury in George Birmingham’s rollicking novel Spanish Gold (1908) which improbably matches the good-will of the Chief Secretary - that is, the head of the British administration in Ireland - with the native wit of an unspoiled Aran peasant. Another is the much more adulatory account of native Irish character in the intensely Catholic novel of a certain Father John Guinan where ‘Shaun O’Flaherty of the Inishmaan’ is represented as ‘the noble type of Irishman’ in comparison with the anglicised suburbanite ‘Albert Edward de Morphy of Windsor Villa’.
Such stereotypes provide a striking background to the Aran-born writer Liam O’Flaherty whose best-known novel Famine (1937) is examined on this module but in no way anticipate the character of that extraordinary writer. O’Flaherty was the son of an activist in the Land League whose stoical disposition caused his son to call him a man ‘immune to pain or joy’. Of his own background and temperament he wrote in 1930:
O’Flaherty’s high intelligence was evident to his schoolteachers - notably David O’Callaghan, a Gaelic-League enthusiast and fanatical educator who later served as a model for Skerritt in the 1935 novel of that name - and proceeding to Rockwell College in Co. Tipperary, and then to Blackrock College in Blackrock, both establishments of the Holy Ghost Fathers who presumed that he would become a priest in return for their scholarship support.
In the event he founded the first branch of the Irish Volunteers at the latter school in 1913 (before it was quite acceptable to engage in physical-force nationalism), and later shocked his contemporaries by joining the Irish Guards, a regiment of the British Army, in 1914, and suffered head injuries during a bombardment at Langemarck in Sept. 1917, resulting in neurasthenia, which remained with him throughout his life-time.
Back in Ireland with papers of release from the army on medical grounds, where he found himself regarded as a renegade for having enlisted in the first place. Returning to London, he next set out on travels that took him to South America, Greece, and Canada working variously as language-teacher, labourer and gun-runner and an agent of the International Workers’ (the so-called “Wobblies”) which led to his flight to the United States of America.
Although he documented his career in three autobiographical writings ( Two Years, 1930; I Went to Russia, 1931, and Shame the Devil, 1934), the details of O’Flaherty’s life - especially in this period - are cloudy. Everything we know about him is marked by radicalism, whether in the Irish or another context, though sometimes the obvious allegiances - such as Russian Communism - were turned by him into opportunities to preach a perversely ‘pro-British’ brand of anti-colonialism.
In Nov. 1921 he was in Ireland as a founding-member of the Irish Communist Party, and soon afterwards organised a three-day occupation of the Rotunda in Dublin in his capacity as self-styled Chairman of Council of Unemployed on behalf of the Irish Worker’s Republic. After a period of time spent with Rory O’Connor and others on Republican side in the Civil War, he left again for London and there commenced writing in Sept. 1922.
In the 1930s, he lived in American - chiefly in California - and lent support to the Spanish Republicans from there. He did not participate in the Second World War and in 1941 issued a vigorous broadside against the rumoured invasion of Ireland by the English to secure Atlantic ports in a lecture entitled ‘Hands Off Ireland’ given at the Town Hall of New York. In Santa Barbara he met Kitty Tailer, whom he married and with whom he continued to live after his final return to Ireland in 1945, having passed the war in America.
It was with “The Sniper”, a story based on his recent civil-war experience, and featuring a fraticidal conflict between two brothers, that he first came to the notice of the editor of New Leader in 1922 and was advised to contact Edward Garnett, reader for Jonathan Cape - the literary mentor whom O’Flaherty later came to call his ‘literary godfather’. Garnett had set himself the mission of creating a new literature for Ireland, or rather a new Irish literature for the British market-place; it was to be an affair of passionate historical conciousness green fields, a fitting sucessor to the literary revival and the struggles of the revolutionary era.
In order to cultivate the talent of his writers, he fed them with a diet of classic short-story authors such as Maupassant, Turgenov, Chekhov as well as Joseph Conrad; and it was the last-named author who imparted his unduly weighty style to The Black Soul (1924), a story dealing with Red John, a semi-human Irish figure, and the first novel by O’Flaherty that Cape published.
In the same period O’Flaherty took part in a controversy with George Russell (“Æ”) of the Irish Statesman (18 Oct. 1924), he identifying of the ‘wild tumult’ of contemporary Ireland as a creative impulse rather than the disabling force that Russell considered it. In the following year he issued The Informer (1925), his internationally well-known novel, with a plot involving the hunting and execution of Gypo Nolan, another brutish individual who murders a prostitute and sells a comrade to his erstwhile foes - the Free-State forces.
The author’s fame was instantly assured when John Ford made The Informer into a film a year later, though significantly changing its setting from the Civil War (1921-23) to the War of Independence (1919-21) for his American audience, with Black and Tans substituted for Free State soldiers so as to overlay the real divisions of the new Ireland with a more simplistic ‘struggle for freedom’ narrative. In that sense, O’Flaherty’s critique of contemporary Irish society was distorted in his best known title.