Review: Seán O’Faoláin: Literature, Inheritance and the 1930s

Seán O’Faoláin: Literature, Inheritance and the 1930s

Author: Paul Delaney

ISBN-13: 978-0716532668

Publisher: Irish Academic Press

Guideline Price: €16

On the centenary of his birth, in 2000, the novelist Julia O’Faolain celebrated the fact that her father, Seán Ó Faoláin, who had died in 1991, “seemed to be the only writer who stayed on in Ireland, living entirely by his pen, arguing with its Establishment and trying to change it”.

Ó Faoláin, unlike James Joyce and others, argued with Ireland by standing his ground and so confronting the country he had fought to liberate as a young revolutionary. As a short-story writer, novelist, biographer and essayist he became one of the key figures forming cultural debate in Ireland from the 1930s onwards. His argumentative stance was particularly evident in his founding of the literary journal the Bell, a rallying cry for intellectual diversity.

But his books gradually went from bookshops after his death, his stories are now rarely taught in schools and universities, and Ó Faoláin is evaluated more in historical terms than in terms of his importance as a novelist and short-story writer. At the moment only his biography of Daniel O'Connell is in print, and recent studies centre on the Bell, highlighting his cultural criticism rather than his creative work.

Why the decline?

In this new study Paul Delaney addresses this idea of Ó Faoláin’s “apparent obsolescence” by suggesting that the decline is partly due to the vulnerability of the forms he excelled in: “short stories, in particular, are routinely considered the preserve of emerging writers in the publishing world, and Ó Faoláin’s alleged failure as a novelist has often been taken as evidence of his shortcomings as a fiction writer”.

In addition, Delaney makes the case that Ó Faoláin’s “preference for realist storytelling practices” in the context of modernist experimentation by contemporaries like Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien and Elizabeth Bowen also contributed to his decline in reputation. These are persuasive arguments, but they could equally be made about Ó Faoláin’s friend Frank O’Connor. That O’Connor remains in print makes Ó Faoláin’s decline even more puzzling, and this new book reassesses his literary reputation and links his achievements as a creative writer with his strengths as a critic.

Delaney's subtitle is Literature, Inheritance and the 1930s, and his decision to focus on Ó Faoláin's impressive productivity after his return to Ireland from London in 1933 is sound. This was a crucial period of self-invention both for Ó Faoláin and for Ireland; as a result, critiquing his own country soon became the driving force behind the admirable, almost terrifying energy of his creativity.

This was the decade in which he established himself as a significant writer and became a force to be reckoned with in Irish society, producing two interesting if somewhat dated novels, Bird Alone (1936) and A Nest of Simple Folk (1933), two outstanding short-story collections, Midsummer Night Madness (1932) and A Purse of Coppers (1937), as well as that biography of O'Connell in 1938, another, less successful one of Constance Markievicz (subtitled The Average Revolutionary) and no less than two studies of Éamon de Valera.

Delaney gives us Seán Ó Faoláin before the Bell, and, as the book progresses, this is clearly no bad thing, given that his role as a public intellectual has obscured his achievements as a short-story writer. Sensibly, Delaney does not limit himself to the 1930s, drawing liberally from writings in the Bell, as well as from his witty and unsentimental memoir, Vive Moi, published in 1965.

Realist agenda

Delaney opens his study with a consideration of contemporary debates on Ó Faoláin and on his status as a cultural figure. He puts forward his own view that “Ó Faoláin hoped to initiate a new agenda in Irish writing – one that would be realist, pluralist and socially committed”. Yet at the same time he identifies an irreconcilable tension behind this agenda; “arguments in favour of the revision of the Irish cultural heritage are presented in a style which is simultaneously inclusive and patronising”.

Ó Faoláin wrote in 1926, “We must borrow in great handfuls from Europe at the same time borrowing in great handfuls from the pre-1607 Ireland”. However, often in practice he found it difficult to reconcile these two traditions, and Delaney uses this idea of an implicit ambivalence as a way into his subject.

His book falls into two sections, the first dealing with biography. Here Delaney argues that, in Ó Faoláin’s hands, life writing became a means by which he could “intervene in received accounts of Irish history”. Delaney notes that, as a biographer, Ó Faoláin worked outside conventional scholarly forms of research, and my own sense is that Ó Faoláin treated each biography more like a proto-novel, constructing his successive subjects – de Valera, Markievicz, O’Connell – as epoch-making figures, each one willing a new Ireland into place.

Ó Faoláin’s appealing voice as biographer is frequently heard in this section, his crisp tone and directness refreshingly confident at this remove. At times his history becomes oratory, as in his great lines about O’Connell: “He thought a democracy and it rose. He defined himself, and his people became him. He imagined a future and the road appeared.”

The second half of the study deals with his two novels and his two collections of short fiction, including the masterful early collection Midsummer Night Madness, where the former revolutionary used his experience of war to reflect on its tensions, dangers and brutalities.

Delaney outlines the imaginative processes of these short fictions where “daring journeys are undertaken into spaces which are at once liberating, confusing and self-revelatory”.

Delaney’s approach has clarity and focus. He prefaces each section with a useful introductory essay on the genre and ends with a series of lively, informative endnotes, although I would have been interested to see him use a more blended chronological approach to the work, with each genre considered in tandem as the decade progresses.

This could have suggested a more integrated sense of Ó Faoláin’s emerging aesthetic, the disillusioned revolutionary, determined to deploy a kind of poetic realism in his fictions yet keenly aware that he was writing in the aftermath of his own youthful romanticism.

Delaney has provided a solid grounding for reconsidering Ó Faoláin within contemporary thinking about Irish literary culture, presenting him not just as an influential critic but also as a writer of some of our best short fiction. This kind of vital critical writing on Ó Faoláin is timely. A reissue of his best short stories would be even more so.

Eibhear Walshe lectures in the school of English at University College Cork. His novel, The Diary of Mary Travers, is published by Somerville Press