Stones of Aran (49 page)

Aran was only tolerable for a few months. It was noticed that he “ducked and went to pieces” whenever a ship’s hooter sounded in the bay. Soon he was in Dublin working as a journalist, and helping to found the first Irish Communist Party. At that time a socialist revolution in Ireland did not seem an impossibility, and trade unionists were occupying mills and factories in various towns. When O’Flaherty failed to persuade his comrades in the Party that the hour was ripe, he undertook his own adventure. In January 1922, shortly after the Provisional Government had taken
over from the British authorities under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, he led the “Dublin Council of the Unemployed” in a peaceful but militarily disciplined occupation of the Rotunda Concert Rooms, as a protest against the high rate of unemployment in the city, and hung the Red Flag out of a window. A large and hostile crowd rallied outside and was only restrained from attacking the
occupiers
by detachments of the IRA and the police. After two days Commander-in-Chief O’Flaherty and his two hundred or more supporters came out quietly. O’Flaherty went to ground in Cork for a while, before briefly rallying to the IRA occupation of the Four Courts. Disbanded from that lost cause, he and a
companion
joined the crowds watching the Free State Army extirpating the IRA from some hotels they were still holding out in, and he overheard one old woman telling another that Liam O’Flaherty, “that tried to sell Dublin to the Bolsheviks,” had been shot dead, “thanks be to God!” His companion wanted him to join the Flying Columns the IRA would soon be setting up in the
countryside
, but O’Flaherty felt that he agreed with the old woman: politically and militarily he was dead. Leaving Ireland to its Civil War he went to London, bought a typewriter and began another life.

Wandering in the fog and mud of the London streets,
depressed
by his initial failure to write anything of worth, he
suddenly
thought of Aran, and joyfully determined to make himself the spokesman of its harmonious simplicities. The novel that came out of this inspiration,
Thy
Neighbour’s
Wife,
was accepted by the publishers, Jonathan Cape, on the advice of Edward
Garnett
, literary godfather to a generation that included Galsworthy, D.H. Lawrence and Conrad. The background is the Aran of the 1900s, the social comedy of its emergent middle class detailed in a facetious and satirical Victorian style which is progressively over-ridden by a deeply felt account of the protagonist’s spiritual predicament. The island curate loves his neighbour’s wife, who could have been his had not a mistaken sense of vocation blinded him to his true nature at the crucial moment. Now, seeing her
turn away from her evil husband to the love of a handsome,
rebellious
O’Flaherty figure, he takes to drink, and in an agony of doubt and despair remembers the saints of old who tested their faith by going to sea in the bare framework of a currach. He sets himself adrift from the island’s westernmost point—that
inescapable
locus of ultimate truths—but, out on the darkening ocean with the storm rising, he undergoes “a transformation”:

The instinct of self-preservation awoken in him, he gloriously masters the waves until he is rescued. Then, in a disappointing last paragraph, he takes himself off to the foreign missions in fulfilment of a vow made to a God one had thought he had just outgrown. Nevertheless, in these concluding pages O’Flaherty’s cardinal theme has triumphantly announced itself: Life, its
sacred
greed for yet more life, its solidarity with Death.

In his next novel,
The
Black
Soul,
the magnificent amorality of the island itself drums home the moral. A dark, tormented,
shell-shocked
Stranger comes to recuperate in the westernmost village; his hosts are a splendid specimen of womanhood called Little Mary because she is so tall—she is not quite a peasant, being the illegitimate daughter of a landlord—and Red John, her feeble, despised and rejected husband. The narrative of the Stranger’s growth towards wholeness is scanned by evocations of the
successive
seasons from winter to autumn, four rhapsodic passages seemingly flung together with the careless profusion of nature
itself
. The Stranger’s “Black Soul” is his hyperactive intellect, locked in futile debate with itself, which has to be silenced before his life can meet Little Mary’s at that summit of love which “only a god could describe.” Also, just as Red John’s miserable person
has been spurned by Little Mary, so the Stranger has to disregard the passion of another woman, whose cultivated, idealistic mind exacerbates his morose self-questionings. Finally Red John runs mad (and O’Flaherty conveys the despair of the losers in life’s game just as feelingly as he does the triumph of the winners), and the Stranger, for no reason that his Black Soul can provide or counter, braves a perilous cliff-ledge on “The Hill of Fate” at the end of the island to rescue him. Red John expires at that moment, but the Stranger, having faced the reality of death, is rewarded with the will to life, and he carries Mary off to the mainland. “The most elemental thing in Irish literature,” the poet AE called it, and indeed if one can put up with the novel’s windy longeurs it is bracing to let its welter of imagery smite one’s face like
sea-spray
.

Spring
Sowing,
a collection of short stories, followed
The
Black
Soul
in the same year, 1924. The title-piece is as well formed an expression of the beauty and sadness of O’Flaherty’s Gort na gCapall as one could hope for. Martin and Mary rise very early one February morning:

Martin sets to work on their first potato-ridge “as if some
primeval
impulse were burning within his brain and driving out every other desire but that of asserting his manhood and of
subjugating
the earth,” and Mary has a moment of terror in the face of “that pitiless, cruel earth, the peasant’s slave master, that would keep her chained to hard work and poverty all her life until she would sink again into its bosom.” For the moment her love is gone; “Henceforth she was only her husband’s helper to till the earth.” But at the end of the long day they are rejoiced by the five ridges they have created:

Despite the “thundering good review” O’Flaherty boasted he had got out of AE for
The
Black
Soul,
the book was not a success in England, and Garnett told him the critics had killed it for ten years. According to O’Flaherty’s highly self-dramatizing
memoirs
,
Shame
the
Devil,
this rejection made him vow to return to Aran and never leave it again. But when he arrived, the mute fear he detected in the islanders told him that they thought he had been infected with the madness of prophecy, “the greatest sin in the eyes of the herd.” (In fact Aran merely regarded him as a writer of dirty books. Fr. Killeen’s manuscript history of Aran
states that the O’Flahertys of Gort na gCapall took the side of the “saucepans” in the famous dispute over the Hill Farm lands, and “as a result developed a bitterly anticlerical attitude. Liam’s filthy novels illustrate the fact.”) His mother had died soon after his notorious escapade in the Rotunda—and because of it, he
half-believed
—and now he found that his father was in his dotage. He realized for the first time how his sister, now a teacher and
lodging
in Cill Rónáin, must have suffered, coming to look after the old man each evening after school:

Three days later O’Flaherty fled back to Dublin.

O’Flaherty claims that he wrote his next and most successful novel,
The
Informer,
with a cynical determination to make money and with an eye on Hollywood. Indeed John Ford made a famous film out of it, but O’Flaherty’s work in itself, a nightmarish
condensation
of his experience of revolutionary intrigue and the Dublin slums, is so convincingly visualized that it unreels like a black-and-white film in the skull. There followed a wide variety of writings: other novels with a background in Dublin and
revolution
, more short stories, a disabused account of a trip to Stalin’s Russia, a remarkably (for him) even-toned satire on this island of “priests, politians and prostitutes’ called
A
Tourist’s
Guide
to
Ire
land,
the historical novel
Famine,
and a projection of his highly sexualized vitalist philosophy onto the Celtic otherworld called
The
Ecstasy
of
Angus.

The best of his Aran novels,
Skerrett,
appeared in 1932. It opens with the energy of a wave rushing ashore: the arrival of the new schoolmaster, his meeting with the parish priest who is at first his
ally in a civilizing mission, and later his rival for dominion, his seizing control of the undisciplined school by indiscriminate beatings, the death of his adored son and the lapsing of his pitiful wife into alcoholism and insanity—but then it falters and fidgets as a wave does at the top of its reach, too many events are
included
for the quite insufficient reason that they really happened, and the narrative only partially recovers itself for the mournful backwash, Skerrett’s defeat, his withdrawal to the book’s
equivalent
of Gort na gCapall, his final humiliation, and his
posthumous
triumph in the island’s memory. Skerrett is O’Flaherty’s old schoolmaster O’Callaghan, and the priest Moclair (an opulent psychological portrait, with the subtlety and sensuality of one of Titian’s cardinals) is Fr. Farragher, whom the young Liam would have had opportunity to study from below, as it were, while
serving
him at Mass. The topography of Aran is reproduced with an exile’s passionate fidelity, almost every step taken can be located in reality, every exclamation, groan and sigh uttered in the five little rooms of that “paltry cottage, one story and a half in height” still echoes through the Residence in Oatquarter.

During this highly creative decade O’Flaherty suffered
recurrent
bouts of depression and nervous collapse. He had “married and reproduced his kind,” as he puts it, but in 1932, unable to write more, he left his wife and baby daughter and undertook the journey into himself described in
Shame
the
Devil
(1934). This is a troubling and perplexing document, a vividly dramatized account of a period of mental anguish, in which his former personalities split away and stand before him in accusation. These sub-selves and the various interlocutors met in his wanderings furiously
debate
civilization and barbarism, communism and fascism,
nihilism
and transcendence, Ghenghis Khan and Pythagoras, suicide and drink; they have in common only the absolutism of their convictions. It is difficult to attribute any particular opinion in the book to O’Flaherty “himself” precisely because of this
proliferation
of fragmentary selves, and sometimes one is glad of this; for instance when he is well embarked on something very
unpleasant
about the Jewish refugees he sees in Paris, he meets someone who praises the Hitlerites for driving them out of
Germany
, and he leaps to the defence of the Jewish race on the grounds that it produced Marx. The book resounds with
Zarathustrian
chest-thumping, and ends with the trumpet-call of “overcoming”: Man, through his intellect and creativity, is
clawing
his way up a wall or cliff towards the achievement of
Godhead
. As to Woman, the following “strange thought,” as he calls it, is at least left uncontradicted: