Seán O'Faoláin (1900–1991)

This set of stories is more "contemporary" than the last set -- I read earlier this year, those were set in childhood, youth, Cork. These are stories of emigrants and Cork folk relocated to Dublin. Love stories, many of them. In a word, they felt dated in that way the work of many men who wrote in the first half of the 20th century does. An effort of some sort is being made to view women as fellow travelers, but not a very serious one. There are unvarnished moments: "Love, my dear, poor boy, show more is a sedative disguised as a stimulant. It's a mirror where man sees himself as a monster and women as a thing of unvarnished beauty,. If it wasn't for that all men would, otherwise, and normally, fear all women. You fear women. I fear women. But because we need them we have to have them. And that's where they have us, in the great and final triumph of women over men, called--by them not by us, and well called--Happy Wedlock. Love is a prison staffed by female warders . . . " Now this speech is given by a friend and the narrator, in the story, ends up in a sturdy friendly marriage, yet, in story after story in the collection this first sentiment is present. Or there are two sorts of men (and to be fair, women)--the dull and faithful and the fun and untrustworthy. He's a good writer, O'Faolain, knows his craft, but I did find myself skim-reading by the end. Several stories have an homage to Joyce feeling to them, especially the very short final story, "Passion." In his preface O'Faolain makes a distinction between story and tale (think blunt and incisive versus wandering and intuitive) that was perhaps the biggest takeaway for me. ***1/2 show less

O'Faolain takes on the emerging middle class post-independence in Ireland (with occasional earlier forays --[A Nest of Simple Folk] being one--a novel that leads a country lad inexorably to the Easter Rebellion in 1916) and the Irish "character" in general. The short story was considered his forte. These are the stories of an older person, almost all of them male, and they are full of nostalgia and sadness but without self-pity, more a sort of wonder at the folly of human behaviour. An older show more man meeting a woman he knew as a lad ". . . nobody knows what life is until he has lived out so much of it that it is too late then to do anything but go on the way you have gone on, or been driven on, from the beginning." Or an older man regarding a young lad of 15: "Each of them is imprisoned in childhood and no one can tell him how to escape. Each of them must, blind-eyed, gnaw his way out, secretly and unaided." "At certain moments all through our lives we touch a point where ignorance is teetering on the brink of some essential revelation which we fear as much as we need it." The stories are dated now in that they portray a time and a way of being that is fading, but the subject of this collection, the folly of youth and the wisdom of the elders, alas, is a theme that remains untouched and likely will for all time. ***1/2 show less

Known more for his short stories, this is one of O'Faolain's few novels, and it is worthwhile, especially if you are making a study of modern Irish literature and the fight for independence. Or even if you are not and are interested in Ireland. The central character is Leo Foxe-Donnell, but the book is about the entire family, the O'Donnell's, Foxes, Hussey's, and Keene's. The Foxes are anglo-irish landed "gentry" but well on the slide downward. A daughter marries into a neighboring farming show more family, the O'Donnell's converts to Catholicism and is shunned by the Foxes. Their youngest child is Leo and becomes the mother Judith's favourite. For him she connives to procure the family manse, she has him sent to her cousin, a doctor in Limerick to be educated. But Judith could change his name to Foxe-Donnel and try to make a country gentleman out of Leo, but Leo wasn't interested in any of it. Nor did he have the sort of mind for learning doctoring. Leo goes home to Foxe Hall as a young man and there he promptly gets involved in a Fenian plot. He is betrayed inadvertently by a family member and spends the next ten years in jail. But his life course is determined. He is a revolutionary through and through, but not in a wild way, in a quiet and determined, an unstoppable way. In the second half of the novel the story shifts focus more to the Hussey family, to Johnny Hussey the policeman and his son Denis. Denis and the Hussey's it could be said is representative of O'Faolain's own family and the attitude, before Easter day, 1916, of most Irish, that resistance was futile and one had better make the best of the way things are. O'Faolain marks that day as an absolute turning point for Ireland. If J.G. Farrell in Troubles shows the rot at the core of the Empire, here O'Faolain shows the gradual but unstoppable awakening of Irish determination, and how the example of a few can eventually turn the tide. There is much else to love here, description of the Kerry countryside, of Limerick and later Cork, the stories too of the trials of the women, of Judith, Mag, and Bid. It's a quiet book, and it is, as the title implies about an entire group of "simple" people, a book that builds and makes its point gradually. Don't expect a great deal of excitement but you can expect to come away enlightened. **** show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1943061.html

Like most kids growing up in Catholic Ireland, I "did" some of O'Faolain's short stories at school. I guess I hadn't appreciated how big a figure he was in the (admittedly small) world of the arts in mid-century Ireland, constructing the literary self-image of the new state as it found its way to becoming the Republic. This book was his third history book in five years, coming after his edition of Wolfe Tone's autobiography in 1937 and his biography show more of Daniel O'Connell in 1938; he claims not to be attempting a serious academic history, but this is disingenuous; he must have realised that a book on such a subject by a writer of his profile would establish received wisdom for decades to come.

I'm more interested in the subject than the writer. O'Neill was the leader of the Irish side in the last struggle between the old Gaelic order and the London government; surrendering after nine years of war in 1603, he slipped away to exile in Rome and died there. For O'Faolain's purposes, he is of course a hero in that he tried but failed to establish an independent Irish state. But there were a couple of interesting slants which prevent it from being a hagiography.

Hiram Morgan has disproved one of the key planks of O'Faolain's narrative, that the young O'Neill was fostered in England, and Morgan is rather better on the overall politics and culture of the era. It's a bit of a shame, actually, because O'Faolain is big on the importance of communication and even compromise with the English, and O'Neill's (fictional) early life in England equips him to be the right man for this job. Where O'Faolain does better than Morgan is on the human level. His sixteenth-century Ireland is a rather sexy place (certainly in comparison to the repressed de Valera / McQuaid state). O'Neill's marital history is explained in great detail, including the elopement with Mabel Bagenal, the daughter of one of his regional English rivals. O'Faolain is fairly neutral rather than scandalised about this; I guess that he hoped his readers would draw their own conclusions.

And his account of the end of the war is rather good, though here he does slip into moral lessons from history a bit. Though a proud Cork man himself, O'Faolain admits that Kinsale was practically the worst place for the Spanish to land; had they come anywhere in the north or northwest coast, O'Faolain reckons they would have won the war fairly quickly. As it was, a less good English leader than Mountjoy could easily have screwed up the siege. But it's impossible to find a positive description of the way the arriving Irish soldiers blundered into a catastrophic and decisive defeat, and O'Faolain goes into splendid descriptive detail about it. O'Neill is in the end the victim of a bad Spanish decision, unusually good English command, and a lack of discipline among his own supporters and allies. My memory is that Cyril Falls, writing only a few years later and as an avowed Unionist, is actually a bit more even-handed in his assessment.

Anyway, not an essential book for historical understanding of the period, but an important book for understanding more recent perceptions of the events. And quite a good read. show less