Now, 30-odd years after his death, one has little difficulty in imagining Mairtin O Cadhain as a great megalithic structure, belonging to another age yet capable of withstanding all ages; rugged, uncompromising, alone, casting a long shadow, as the finest century of Irish-language literature since the 16th draws to a close. By the end of his life he had recreated the Irish short story, published one of the most masterful Irish novels of the century, and provided a constant critique of Irish society and ideology. He was ignored by the English-speaking literati of his day, but his position in Irish was unassailable. Cre na Cille was read all over Connemara, and his work, style, neologisms, and latest experiments were argued over in the universities.
This book is not really a book at all, but an expanded lecture - the original was given to the Wolfe Tone Society in the Mansion House in Dublin in 1963. O Cadhain examines the republican tradition - he was a member of the IRA in the 1930s an internee in the Curragh during the second World War, and a follower of Tone to the end - in relation to the Irish language, O'Connellism, the Roman Catholic Church, Maynooth, Ossianism, Unionism, 1916, the North, etc.
For all its unevenness and proliferation of detours, diversions, and asides - "gabhlanach" (forked, complicated) is a favourite word - it makes fascinating reading; not least because O Cadhain was not an historian, as he readily admits, but a creative writer deeply and personally implicated in his subject.
In "Tone - Yesterday and Today," O Cadhain writes as he thinks and thinks as he writes. He agonises, questions, answers, waxes lyrical, stutters, repeats himself. His style changes constantly: bombastic, elliptical, limpid, laconic, coy, convoluted. Misconceptions are corrected, reputations punctured, insights dispersed, babies thrown out with bath water. In typical O Cadhain fashion, he is at his best when he shares a recollection or, on the other hand, lambastes a position he seriously opposes. He is at his worst when being topical or expecting us to penetrate his coded references and barbed asides. Or perhaps not. This is a posthumous publication. For better or worse, we are not reading the final draft; the clay, though centred on the wheel, has not been shaped or fashioned, let alone glazed or fired, by the master's hand.
As one might expect, therefore, the book overflows with comments and interpretations. Whatever about the republicanism of the United Irishmen crossing the linguistic divide, the rising in Connaught in 1798 was an Irish-language affair. The rebels included both peasantry and aristocracy in a manner that would become unthinkable in the 19th century. The writings of Young Ireland were so much rhetoric ("rosc-chaint" is a nice O Cadhain word, although "reitric" has been in the language for a thousand years). The Roman Catholics among them were "Clongownians, Stoneyhurstians" - another O Cadhain touch. Clarence Mangan and Dostoyevsky are juxtaposed. Maynooth was a national disaster and the Roman Catholic priest it produced, the Maynooth dandy, was not a very pleasant person. The pandering O'Connell is anathema. However, on this last point, it is the analysis of the berated Earnan de Blaghd that now, in the light of the past 30 years, seems the more cogent. Indeed, so it is with the book as a whole. Although many of O Cadhain's insights cut sharp and deep, the overall strength of the "lecture" is its powerful restatement of the old synthesis rather than its discovery of a new one.
It is indeed part of this powerful O Cadhain synthesis that, as a schoolteacher in the late 1920s and early 30s he should have put together a remarkable collection of songs from Carna and other places in Connemara. The collection was originally edited by his brother, Seosamh, and the whole has now been expertly annotated and prepared for the press by Rionach ui Ogain.
Both books add considerably to our appreciation of the achievements of this extraordinary man.
Liam Mac Coil is a novelist and critic. His most recent novel, An Claiomh Solais, was published last year