Portrait of a revolutionary afterlife

HISTORY: Broken Landscapes: Selected Letters of Ernie O'Malley, 1924-1957Edited by Cormac KH O'Malley and Nicholas Allen The Lilliput Press, 528pp. €40

‘I DON’T LIKE people reading my letters, naturally, though I have been trained as well as any to keep my mind to myself on paper.” So wrote Ernie O’Malley to his friend Eithne Golden in New York in March 1940, with one eye on the wartime censor. Despite O’Malley’s belief in his powers of self-possession, what emerges from this handsomely produced collection of letters is an irresistible portrait of a long revolutionary afterlife, characterised as much by cultural vibrancy as it was by the physical and emotional difficulties of his life on Ireland’s western seaboard in the 1940s and 1950s.

Although O'Malley's second incarnation as intellectual and artist was detailed in Richard English's absorbing 1994 biography, Ernie O'Malley: IRA Intellectual, he remains best known for his revolutionary career: GHQ's most important travelling organiser, he trained Volunteers and co-ordinated ambushes across Ireland during the War of Independence. His Civil War included a stint in the Four Courts and a long period of imprisonment after his capture during a shoot-out on Ailesbury Road. Severely weakened by gunshot wounds, hunger strike and the lasting effects of torture in Dublin Castle, O'Malley was told by doctors in 1923 that he would never walk properly again; he promptly took himself on a walking tour of Europe. That journey was spiritually as well as physically restorative; he learned, as he put it, "to use [his] eyes again in a new way".

Returning briefly to Ireland in an abortive attempt to resume his medicine studies at University College Dublin, he soon was on the road again, travelling to the United States as a fundraiser for Fianna Fáil’s Irish Press venture. O’Malley was distinctly ill at ease in the hearty camaraderie of Irish America, and he soon was drawn to artistic and intellectual circles and to the heat and sunlight of the southwest, particularly New Mexico and Mexico.

Writing his first revolutionary memoir, scrabbling together money from painting houses, doing odd jobs and lecturing at Harvard and NYU, his life in the early 1930s was indigent and restless, but the sense of intellectual excitement permeates the letters and diary extracts from this period. He numbered Ella Young, Paul Strand, Hart Crane, Israel Citkovitz and Dorothy Brett among his friends, frequented the Group Theatre in New York and in late 1935 was introduced to the young sculptor Helen Hooker. Falling in love, the pair defied the opposition of her well-connected Republican family to marry in London and settle in Mayo.

They, with their three children, eked out an existence close to Newport, surrounded by the sea and the land, in the shadow of neighbourly hostility and in the face of wartime and postwar privations. The isolation of life on the western seaboard was difficult, and Dublin remained an important source of cultural and intellectual connections. This is where the real value of this collection emerges, and in his thoughtful introduction Nicholas Allen makes a convincing case for reading O’Malley’s vibrant intellectual and artistic life as a corrective to the prevailing view of the sterility of de Valera’s Ireland.

O’Malley was certainly at the heart of a notable cultural network: he was books editor of the Bell, an early champion of Louis le Brocquy and a regular on the Dublin theatrical and literary scene. Soon, though, his marriage was on the brink of collapse. The excruciating detail of its irretrievable breakdown, amid mutual recriminations and the kidnapping of the two elder children, Cathal and Étain, by their mother in 1950, makes for difficult reading.

O’Malley’s contact with the two elder children was thereafter sporadic, and he poured everything into his relationship with Cormac. As Cormac O’Malley notes in his preface, he has spent much of his adult life in search of his father, an immense process of textual recovery leading to the production of this and earlier volumes of letters.

O’Malley’s character emerges forcefully from these letters: detached, brusque, much given to listmaking, and breathtakingly perceptive. Books remained at the centre of his life, and he amassed an impressive collection, numbering some 4,000 in 1953, after an auction of an earlier batch at Sotheby’s in 1949. The impression remains, however, that the visual arts were O’Malley’s real passion. An early project photographing early Christian sculpture never came to fruition, but he went back to it sporadically, and an account of a 1948 journey through Cos Clare and Galway with Bob Herbert and O’Malley’s elder son, Cathal, punctuated by whiskey, reads as one of the few uncomplicatedly happy episodes after the return to Ireland.

Paintings remained an abiding obsession, and he was a perceptive critic and important collector. His account of his purchase of the Yeats canvas Death for Only Oneis revealing: "I saw Jack Yeats, fell clear in love with a picture and felt I must have it." The painting, depicting a tramp standing over the body of another in a bleak western bogland, speaks both to O'Malley's sense of detachment and to his love of landscape, in particular the west of Ireland. For all of O'Malley's intellectual sophistication – and it is clear that he was formidably well read and familiar with contemporary European and extra-European culture – Ireland was his true north.

A recipient of two military pensions (and frequent referee of other applications), he was not altogether comfortable with the self-satisfaction of the official republican narrative. Irish people, he wrote, were “a family too close to each other”. England, his old adversary, is the subject of a few biting observations throughout, but he reached a sort of resolution in a moving late letter to his daughter. Asking to be buried facing eastwards, in the Celtic tradition of facing one’s enemies, he commented: “Indeed [the British] are no longer my enemies. Each man finds his enemies in himself.” In 1955 he wrote, “I suppose Ireland, whatever way it is, is my destiny.” That destiny was not an easy one, riddled with doubts, dissatisfactions and personal distress, but O’Malley emerges as a key figure in Ireland’s postrevolutionary cultural landscape.

Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid is Rutherford research fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Her first book,

Seán MacBride: A Republican Life

, was published earlier this year by Liverpool University Press