O'Malley / Allen Broken Landscapes

Selected Letters from Ernie O'Malley, 1924-57
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-84351-297-4
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 558 Seiten

Ernie O'Malley was a revolutionary republican and writer. One of the leading figures in the Irish independence and civil wars, he survived wounds, imprisonment and hunger strike, before going to the USA in 1928 to fundraise on de Valera's behalf. Broken Landscapes tells of his subsequent journeys, through Europe and the Americas, where O'Malley moved in wide social circles that included Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Hart Crane and Jack B. Yeats. Back in Mayo he took up farming. In 1935 he married Helen Hooker, an American heiress, with whom he had three children, Cathal, Etain and Cormac, before a bitter separation. His literary reputation was established with a magnificent memoir, On Another Man's Wound (1936). In later years he was close to John Ford, and worked on The Quiet Man (1952). This vibrant new collection of letters, diaries and fragments opens up the broad panorama of his life to readers. It enriches the history of Ireland's troubled independence with reflections on loss and reconciliation. It links the old world to the new - O'Malley perched on the edge of the Atlantic, a folklore collector, art critic and radio broadcaster; autodidact, modernist and intellectual. It conducts a unique conversation with the past. In Broken Landscapes, we travel with O'Malley through Italy, the American Southwest, Mexico and points inbetween. In Taos, he mingled wiht the artistic set around D. H. Lawrence. In Ireland, he drank with Patrick Kavanagh, Liam O'Flaherty and Louis MacNiece. The young painter Louis le Brocquy was his guest on his farm in Burrishoole, Co. Mayo. These places and people remained with O'Malley in his private writing, assembled for the first time from family and institutional archives. Reading these letters, dairies and fragments is to see Ireland in the tumultuous world of the twentieth century, as if for the first time, allowing us to view the intellectual foundations of the State through the eyes of its leading chronicler.

Autoren/Hrsg.

O'Malley, Cormac

Allen, Nicholas

Leseproben

Introduction
Ernie O’Malley’s Afterlife

NICHOLAS ALLEN

Ernie O’Malley was born in Castlebar, Co. Mayo, in May 1897. He died in Dublin aged fifty-nine, long weakened by wounds sustained during the Irish revolution. This book is a collection of his letters in the period after his involvement in the Anglo-Irish and civil wars. The period previous has been covered in two documentary volumes, Prisoners: The Civil War Letters of Ernie O’Malley, and ‘No Surrender Here!’ The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley. These are in addition to Richard English’s biography, Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual, and the various books that O’Malley published or brought to manuscript form in his own lifetime. A hidden hand in this activity is Cormac O’Malley, Ernie’s youngest son by marriage to Helen Hooker, the American heiress whose presence makes for much of the drama in the later pages of this book. Cormac has spent a lifetime in pursuit of his father, who died when he was a boy. This pursuit, as Cormac describes it, follows a sense of Ernie O’Malley as an unknown figure. The letters show a caring, considerate and occasionally fierce father of Cormac and his two siblings, Cathal and Etain. But the domestic presence bumped continually against the public profile, Ernie O’Malley a controversial figure into his late life, losing a libel case for his representation of one Volunteer action during the War of Independence and representative to some of an unforgiving republicanism.

Cormac’s desire to fill out the picture of his father is well rewarded here. The one-dimensional portrait of the revolutionary with an ambition to write is given depth by the following letters. These confirm O’Malley’s interest in the cultural life of not only Ireland but also America, Mexico and Europe during the great period of transition from representative art to modernism in the first half of the twentieth century. Further, they show his equal rooting in the practical life of family and farm. Having married Helen Hooker, O’Malley moved to Burrishoole, Co. Mayo, where the two struggled to keep a family in the damp extremes of the western climate. Their mostly separate excursions to Dublin and its nightlife of pubs and theatres show a city still alive after the excitements of the pre-independence period. Through it all O’Malley kept a correspondence with a set of friends and associates that is published now in a record of his less well-known life after release from internment in 1924. When Cormac asked if I might help him with this book I had no idea of its promise. Like most readers I knew O’Malley from On Another Man’s Wound, an imaginative memoir that John McGahern considered among the best works of Irish prose. I remember reading the book for the first time in appreciation of its landscape as much as its action. On Another Man’s Wound is an account of coming to a sense of one’s self through engagement with the natural world as much as it is a reflection on the traumas, experienced and inflicted, of an active life (which reminds me of J.J. Lee’s acute observation of O’Malley’s portrait of the artist as revolutionary, not the other way round). These letters detail and deepen the mental cartography of O’Malley’s work and life. They offer insight into the progress of a life through many trying situations, from spoiled crops to a failing marriage. Ever the strategist, O’Malley met these challenges with a persistent imagination, his insistent independence a personal metaphor for the social collective that he espoused once so violently.

In the following pages, I offer a reading of O’Malley’s cultural presence, rather than repeat details of his life, which are to be found in Richard English’s indispensable biography. Similarly, the contributions of Anne Dolan and J.J. Lee to ‘No Surrender Here!’ have upholstered fully O’Malley’s involvement in the revolutionary period. Rather than give an overview of the materials to follow here, I direct the reader to the short essays that introduce each section for particular details of O’Malley’s life as it progressed. If this introduction gives a setting for O’Malley’s achievement, it speaks also to David Lloyd’s afterword, which builds a broader context for O’Malley’s writing. As Lloyd argues, O’Malley lived an idea of the republic as much as he articulated its ideals. Given this, I have taken latitude to range widely across O’Malley’s creative life, and perhaps to the reader abruptly, in order to give some sense of what I understand to be his unique achievement. O’Malley is remembered now as an insurgent and a writer. He was a leading organizer and activist during the War of Independence. Violently against the Anglo-Irish Treaty, he was party to the republican surrender at Dublin’s Four Courts in late June 1922. This period is memorialized in one of the great prose works of twentieth-century Irish literature, On Another Man’s Wound, which was published in 1936. O’Malley’s transition from activist to writer has been a transition that many of his readers have found difficult to negotiate. Historians have looked to the memoir as a material account of his specific involvement in particular actions. The licence taken by the work of art has registered in many of their readings as evidence of laxity, or worse.1 Literary scholars have been unsure where to place O’Malley (which has meant frequently that he has no place at all). He has retained a passionate place among many readers. But there is no sign to date of his entrance to the canon of twentieth-century writing, despite the skill, composition and reflection of his prose. The clipped lyric of O’Malley’s writing owes its various origins to his time in the Americas, his experience as a senior officer in the revolutionary movement and his voracious reading in literatures of many traditions. This heterodox formation challenges many local assumptions; that republicanism and republicans are bound to single-frame versions of politics and the past; that literature is by definition antipathetic to the actuality of violence. These assumptions lead to curious disfigurements, suitably dissected by J.J. Lee in his introductory essay to the earlier volume of O’Malley’s civil war papers, ‘No Surrender Here!’, and amplified in David Lloyd’s afterword to this book.

Put simply, Ernie O’Malley’s anomalous condition reflects our history, not his. The inability to situate the complexity of his life in any vital sense of combined activity is a challenge to Richard English’s Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual.2 Similarly Ann Dolan’s introduction to ‘No Surrender Here!’ misplaces O’Malley as ‘little more than a literary figure’.3 The answer might be that for all his activity in the War of Independence and civil war, O’Malley’s enduring importance might be exactly here, in the literature. More than this, it might be argued further that culture was the presiding sphere of intellectual dissidence in the decades post-independence. Given the state’s tortuous acquaintance with words in the form of treaties and constitutions, it is no surprise to think that words in the form of novels and newspapers, magazines and manifestoes, might have operated as a continuing republic of letters. Certainly O’Malley’s former comrades thought so. He found himself in America first as a fundraiser for The Irish Press and on his return to Ireland was enticed into the set of former republicans who formed The Bell.4 Typically, O’Malley took this activity one step further. An autodidact of relentless energy, he pursued an interest in the visual arts that took him from the sodden fields of the west of Ireland to the dry baked murals of Mexico. To read the letters, diaries and fragments that follow is to enter into more than a testimonial to one person’s genius. It is to think how, when and, less frequently, why Ireland entered into global conversation even in the years of its most apparent separation. It did so through the movement of its people, their contacts and their chance relationships. A great gift of these letters is the revelation of the subterranean networks that most of us cultivate, but few preserve. O’Malley’s correspondence across Europe and the Americas throws light on an Ireland that often sits in darkness. The skills of improvisation, once learnt in war, persist in a straitened economy, O’Malley chasing up contacts to cadge petrol coupons, whiskey, places to stay.

The O’Malley of the following pages is, then, a character that few of his readers, friendly or otherwise, will recognize. Partly this problem is our own, partly it is inherited. Elements of O’Malley’s archive have been available to scholars for decades. Besides their biographical and contextual use, little has been made of their importance as a rebuke to the limitations of our theories of the past. The cold exterior of a young man burdened with mortal responsibility over his soldiers begins to thaw in the walking tour he set himself through France, Spain and Italy on release from prison in 1924. Certain habits of his war experience remained throughout his life; an attachment to brusque orders to even his closest relations; a careful, sometimes miserly, account of stores and possessions; a physical stubbornness that kept him moving even as the doctors ordered rest. Other elements flowered,...