Download - King of the Beggars 'A Perfect Onion of Worlds within Worlds

King of the Beggars 'A Perfect Onion of Worlds within Worlds'Author(s): Fiona DunneSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 26 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 30-37Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735989 .

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King ̂ ^he#eggars 'A Perfect Onion of

Worlds within Worlds'

FIONA DUNNE

King

of the Beggars (1938) is not about Daniel O'Connell so much as it is

about Eamon de Valera. O'Faolain's disappointment with post-revolu?

tionary Republican politics found its chief focus in de Valera, reflecting the

search for a messianic hero which permeates all his work, especially his his?

torical biographies. De Valera was ultimately found lacking in heroic

qualities when measured against the heroic model O'Faolain developed in

his studies of O'Connell and Hugh O'Neill. However, O'Faolain was

unable to relinquish completely his image of de Valera as Hero, just as he

could never fully renounce his own early and romantic Republicanism,

despite his generally accepted reputation as the 'shrewdest critic of retro?

gressive nationalism', to quote Edna Longley.1 His writings of the 1930s and

1940s reflect the conflict between his early romantic nationalism and his

later disappointment with post-revolutionary politics, but they also reflect

the limits of his critique. All of his criticisms of republican ideology came

from within that same tradition and not, as is commonly imagined, from the

position of dispassionate, or cynical, alienation from it.

Unusual by contemporary nationalist standards in its portrayal of O'Con?

nell as an Irish hero and remarkable for its direct rebuttal of Corkery's Hidden Ireland (1924), King of the Beggars provided the quintessential defini?

tion of O'Faolain's heroic model. While it challenged contemporary

Republicanism, as well as the received historical and nationalist judgement of O'Connell, King of the Beggars was a highly romanticised celebration of a

constitutional pragmatist, which illustrated that O'Faolain's argument with

Republicanism in the post-independence period was essentially a 'lovers'

quarrel', as Julien Moynihan called it, whose anger was born more from

frustrated love than from a radical ideological shift.2 As O'Faolain remarked

30 DUNNE, 'King of the Beggars', Irish Review 26 (2000)



of his similarly complex relationship with his birthplace and of the influence

of early experiences,'no man

jumps off his own shadow'.3

Published in 1938, King of the Beggars comes between two biographies of

de Valera: The Life Story of Eamon de Valera (1933) and de Valera (1939). The

first is less a critical study than a hagiographical account, later renounced by O'Faolain himself in The Bell as 'an utterly rubbishy booklet'.4 The later ver?

sion is a fuller and more complex study, which on some readings is quite

fiercely critical and contains many of the themes and the distinctive voice

that O'Faolain was to develop in later Bell editorials. On closer reading,

however, it is not as unequivocally critical as it initially appears. The differ?

ences between these two biographies can be partly explained by King of the

Beggars, which epitomises the tension in O'Faolain's work between his

youthful romantic Republicanism and his later disillusionment.

The importance of the heroic for the revolutionary generation is evi?

dent in O'Faolain's early literary preoccupations. The 'Great Man' was a

constant theme of his. Within the first decade of his writing career, he had, in addition to his biographies of de Valera and O'Connell, written biogra?

phies of two other nationalist icons: Constance Markievicz, in 1934, and The

Great O'Neill in 1942, in addition to editing The Autobiography of Theobald

Wolfe Tone in 1937. The inclusion of O'Connell in this list is surprising, and the fact that the constitutionalist and pragmatist much derided by

Republicans came closest to O'Faolain's ideal raises fascinating questions about his adherence to conventional Republican thinking. However,

although O'Connell, with his realism and humanity, was the hero de Valera

ultimately failed to be, O'Faolain's portrayal of his decline on entering constitutional politics parallels a similar account of de Valera in the 1939

biography, and reflects the traditional republican view that parliamentary

politics are essentially corrupting. How this problem was handled became

crucial for O'Faolain, and, in his disillusionment with de Valera s version of

idealistic Republicanism, found clearer, albeit indirect, expression in King

of the Beggars, and in the novels and short stories of the 1930s, than in the

second de Valera biography, in which O'Faolain still avoided confronting

fully some of the controversial issues of his hero's life, especially the still

traumatic issues of responsibility for the Civil War and the hairsplitting on

the Oath of Allegiance.

Voicing the standard nationalist judgement of O'Connell, de Valera's

apologist Dorothy Macardle dismissed him as having 'asked for Ireland

nothing more ambitious than a measure of self-government under the

British Crown'.5 O'Faolain's choice of O'Connell as an appropriate model

for twentieth century Ireland seems unusual. Indeed, he claimed that 'the

Ireland of the present day may . . . best be appreciated in terms of this

DUNNE, 'King of the Beggars', Irish Review 26 (2000) 31



period and this man.'6 O'Connell 'had no doubts that Ireland was begin?

ning all over again',7 a sentiment O'Faolain articulated about his own times

in his Bell editorials, where he declared that Ireland was now at the begin?

ning of its adult and creative history.8 The fundamental reason for his

choice of O'Connell, however, lies in O'Faol?in's definition of the heroic, in which personality is paramount. O'Faolain claimed that he wrote the

1933 biography 'in the hope of being able to see something of the human?

ity that lies beneath the mask', yet it emerged clearly in his depiction of de

Valera that he was unable to achieve this aim. He presented deValera's more

negative qualities, (as he saw them) as positively as he could, deciding that

what de Valera 'loses in humanity he gains in detachment . . . the emotions

of the moment do not catch him as they do other men. He can rise above

the passions of the moment more quickly than almost any other living Irishman.' By the conclusion, it is obvious that O'Faolain had failed to

reveal any humanity beneath the mask, as he virtually acknowledged by

attempting to present this lack as a virtue, claiming that 'a leader of a peo?

ple in such a country as Ireland must sacrifice all that human side to his

country, as de Valera has sacrificed it for many years now'.9 King of the Beg?

gars was crucial in clarifying for O'Faolain his dislike of the bloodless

abstraction of de Valera's rhetoric, and the dishonest intellectual hairsplit?

ting that effectively denied the compromises he had made to gain power. His fiction also allowed O'Faolain greater freedom to express his disap?

pointment in Republican politics. The erosion of faith which began during the Civil War can be traced in his short stories and novels of the 1930s and

1940s. Anti-Treaty i te hopes were rekindled in 1932 when deValera's party won the general election. This combination of renewed hope, mingled with

a sense of repressed disillusionment, born from O'Faol?in's experiences of

the Civil War, was reflected in the defensive propaganda of The Life Story of Eamon de Valera. His sense of disillusionment was intensified after 1932 by the fact that the Ireland in which he was increasingly unhappy, while not yet a republic, was governed by a self-proclaimed Republican party, skilfully

using the rhetoric of the revolutionary struggle. It was, above all, the gap between that rhetoric and reality which alienated O'Faolain. It is difficult to

trace the precise development, as well as the extent, of that disillusionment,

especially considering the unreliable nature of his own later account in Vive

Moi!, with its concerns to establish continuity over the course of his life.

That O'Faolain made time during the most busy and prolific years of his

career (the 1930s) to rework a biography that was only seven years old, indi?

cates how strongly he felt about his revised opinions. The 1939 De Valera

dealt more critically with issues such as the 1921 Treaty and deValera's role

in the civil war, and while O'Faolain still sought to find in de Valera a




messianic hero, he was increasingly unable to square this with de Valera's

personality and his recourse to special pleading and abstraction.

The focus on failures of personality, rather than of policy, is a further

measure of the limits of O'Faolain's critique. The theme of narrow idealism

being opposed to humanity was to be most thoroughly explored in his 1940

novel Come Back to Erin, where Leonard criticises Irish idealists:'they go like

bulls against the dirty material things in life, and before they know where

they are, they have gone against life itself'.10 O'Faolain's view that humanity and republican extremism were

mutually exclusive, runs as an undercurrent

through the 1939 biography, where he remarked that de Valera's pedantry 'must keep him so very lonely

? so cut off from all that is casual and idle and

of the common warm run of life'. He continued to grasp at straws in a plea

to find a redeeming feature:'But as with all characters, whom one may from

time to time think a little comical, is there not even in the frailty of de

Valera's at least one human touch? And does not that frailty, that touch of

humanity make one feel a little more sympathetic towards him?'11 O'Faolain

asserted, not very convincingly, that de Valera had warmth; it simply wasn't

obvious. In the earlier biography, O'Faolain had struggled to turn his hero's

vices into virtues, arguing that de Valera's tendency to reduce 'too much to a

formula, often a very abstract formula indeed', was 'the fault of his great

qualities of detachment and consistency'.12 Remarkably, he was still finding excuses for de Valera's abstract political ideology thirty years later, claiming in Vive Moil that abstraction was 'an innate Irish quality'.13 However, abstract

idealism was normally equated with inhumanity and coldness in both

O'Faolain's fiction and journalism. One of The BeWs promises to its readers

was that it would stand for 'life before any abstractions'.14 The concluding words of the 1939 de Valera illustrate this:'somebody like myself, a biogra?

pher or a novelist interested in the solid variety and warm colour of human

nature, wrestles with him uneasily, terrified lest at any moment he should

vanish ?

as an abstraction'.15

While still unwilling to confront fully the extent to which his idealistic

expectations had been disappointed, O'Faolain as biographer was com?

pelled, in his second life of de Valera, to raise the mask, and forced to

recognise beneath it, not a hero but a flawed human being. Forced by

unfolding events to separate the symbol from the man, in a way he never

had to do with any of his dead heroes, O'Faolain found it difficult to come

to terms with the de-mystification of that hero who was not only alive, but

in power, presiding over a society, which, in O'Faolain's depiction of it, was

struggling to cope with the consequences of his actions. One attraction of

O'Connell was that he was a hero safely in the past, who could not disap?

point, but it was, above all, his personality which held the key to his




greatness, in O'Faolain's view. Acknowledging that each represented a dif?

ferent nationalist tradition, O'Faolain none the less placed O'Connell

alongside Tone and Collins, arguing that what they had in common was not

ideology, but humanity. In the conclusion of the 1939 biography he con?

trasted de Valera with Tone, 'so merry, so human, so gay', with Collins, 'so

boisterous, so natural, so passionate,

so un-self aware' and with O'Connell,

who 'with his hat on the side of his head and the merry rogue's wink in his

eye', was 'a rascal to whom one forgives everything'.16 O'Faolain had set the

general tone of King of the Beggars with an early image of O'Connell 'with

his tall hat cocked on the side of his curly head, his cloak caught up in his

fist, a twinkle in his eye'.17 However, unlike in the 1933 biography of de

Valera, O'Faolain could create in King of the Beggars a hero who was heroic

in spite of, and even because of, his faults.

The defensiveness of the 1933 biography is entirely absent from King of the Beggars, and although he did excuse some of O'Connell's faults, as he

had de Valera's, mostly with stereotypical references to the Irish or Kerry mind ('we know our Kerrymen'), he depicted O'Connell as a true tragic

hero, in the sense that his weaknesses were proportionate to his greatness. The basic defence of O'Connell's 'mean lawyers' tricks,

. . . ambiguity,

. . .

dishonesty, evasiveness, snobbery', was that 'he alone had the vision to

realise that a democracy could be born out of the rack and ruin of Limer?

ick and 1691'. From their undemocratic world, O'Connell took the 'slaves'

who were 'without a leader, without the slightest political sense', gave them

'a kingdom of the mind', and 'fashioned them into a modern democracy'.18 In contrast to Corkery's peasants, who were aware of being 'the residuary

legatees of a civilisation that was more than a thousand years old',19 O'Fao?

lain's eighteenth century peasants lived in what he called 'a state of political obfuscation'. King of the Beggars was also a direct rebuttal of The Hidden Ire?

land and of his old teacher, Corkery, who was the focus of one of

O'Faolain's earliest experiences of disappointment in an idol. Far from

being the vital link which established the cultural continuity between

modern Ireland and the golden age of the Gaelic tradition, as Corkery and

de Valera believed, O'Faolain argued that the Gaelic world of the eigh? teenth century had actually retarded politicisation and modernisation.

O'Connell's pragmatic abandonment of'the picturesquerie, the outer trap?

pings of Gaeldom', was crucial to his success, as it was only then that the

peasantry 'could become de-Gaelicised and develop a sense of national

identity'. Having 'no political sense, no absolute sense of themselves as a

nation, they might have become, but for him, like the Welsh and Scots, pic?

turesque appendages of England'.20

Although he credited O'Connell with having created modern Irish




democracy, O'Faolain asserted that he was 'radical only in relation to his

times; never a Republican, far from it, never a social reformer, except in so

far as Irish Freedom was one gigantic social reform . . . there is no reason to

blame him for that. His day is not ours'. Neither was he a humanitarian but

'a brutal realist, occupied with the present conditions of his country', whose

'vision of an Irish democracy was limited by those conditions'.The fact that

O'Connell could not be measured as a Republican in the contemporary

sense, made it easier, paradoxically, for O'Faolain to find the heroic in him, as normal standards could be relaxed. Following from this, O'Faolain rea?

soned that O'Connell,'in so far . . . as he was not a Radical he was Irish, and

inclusive. The Separatists, by being Radical, were less Irish and exclusive',

because, according to O'Faolain, nationality and separatism were not tradi?

tionally linked in the Irish context, and to be separatist in the Republican sense was, in fact, to deviate from the Irish norm, which had always tended

towards conservatism.21

In contrast to what he saw as de Valera's insularity, O'Faolain presented O'Connell as a true European and internationalist, who '[drank] deep of

Europe', in common with Tone, and in particular with Hugh O'Neill,

whose internadondism was a focal point of The Great O'Neill.22 Through? out all of his writing, and especially his historical biographies and Bell

editorials, O'Faolain constantly urged Ireland to participate in the main?

stream of European thought, and this was clearly part of his self-image as a

cosmopolitan, intellectual citizen of the modern world. O'Connell, he

stressed, was not only 'the first Irish political leader', but 'one of the great internationd figures of his time'.23 In keeping with this image of O'Connell

as a modern European, and in contrast to deValera's anti-liberalism and nar?

row Gaelicism, O'Faolain stressed O'Connell's liberal credentials and

underplayed seriously the extent of his sectarian agenda. In so doing, how?

ever, O'Faolain also demonstrated again the traditionalism of his own

romanticism, as he argued that although O'Connell was motivated by non

sectarian concerns, his politicisation of the Catholic Irish allowed them the

freedom to express what he called the 'native genius', that is, the very essence of Irishness: 'Inevitably Emancipation had to mean more than per?

mission to practice one's religion ... it had to mean leave to project the

whole native genius in every way'.24

O'Faolain was equally unafraid to depict his hero's failings, indeed, the

tragic romance of O'Connell's decline was part of O'Faol?in's heroic

scheme; O'Connell's humanity, fundamental also to his embodiment of a

cause and a people, was the very source of his greatness. His description of

O'Connell's mind towards the end of his career, mirrored what he had

come to feel about de Valera, especially in the 1939 biography: it was 'a




perfect onion of worlds within worlds'. In fact,'few men possessed and con?

trolled a more torturous mind'. O'Connell was, however, redeemed from

qualities which would have ruined anyone else, because he was above all 'a

great patriot', which for O'Faolain meant that he dealt with, and trans?

formed reality. A true tragic hero, O'Connell held within himself the

potential for his own destruction, because 'however complex a man may be, he has only one brain to hold his complexities and that brain infects itself.

His brain was also infected by the corrupting influence of parliamentary

politics, O'Faolain suggested, as was de Valera's, but O'Connell had 'the firm

guidance' which his type of complex mind needed. This was the 'external

force of his patriotism'. His parliamentary career 'deflected him from the

source of his own strength ? his own people

? and almost killed his own

reputation and their spirit'. O'Connell's fate was also paralleled with de

Valera's in the 1939 biography, where the modern messiah was presented as

becoming corrupted by parliamentary politics and further removed from

the reality of the people, despite his claims to the contrary. O'Faolain inten

sifed his scrutiny of O'Connell's flaws, as he charted his hero's gradual 'decline into horror'. Like de Valera in The Life Story of Eamon de Valera,

O'Connell descended further into a hell partly of his own making, partly due to external forces, as he moved from being 'the Man of the People' to

'the Sphinx', from 'the King of the Beggars', to a 'poor, gibbering old cretin,

jigging and laughing at his own pawky humour'.25

Together with the two de Valera biographies, King of the Beggars thus pro? vides a remarkable insight into one particularly reflective mind of the

revolutionary generation, an insight which is still relevant one hundred years after its author's birth. King of the Beggars illustrates the inaccuracy of Luke

Gibbons' claim that O'Faolain established 'many of the underlying critical

stratagems in the revisionist approach to history', particularly in debunking nationalist heroes.26 O'Faolain was, however, no ruthless moderniser stomp?

ing on tradition, but one anxious to recruit tradition more meaningfully to

the nationalist enterprise, than the revolutionary generation had done, in his

view. Reflective he certainly was, but there were narrow enough limits to

his radicalism and his dissent, and nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated

than in his romantic treatment of O'Connell, a treatment he yearned to give his modern hero, de Valera.

Notes and References

1 Edna Longley, Tlie Living Stream (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994), p. 13.

2 Julien Moynihan, 'God Smiles, the Priest Beams and the Novelist Groans,' Irish Univer?

sity Review, Spring 1976, p. 27.




3 Sean O'Faolain, Vive Moi! (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965; this edition 1993), p.

121.

4 Sean O'Faolain, 'Principles and Propaganda', The Bell 10,3, 1945, p. 197.

5 Dorothy Macardle, The Irish Republic (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937; this edition

1968), p. 47.

6 Sean O'Faolain, King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O'Connell (London: Thomas Nel?

son, 1938; this edition 1968), preface.

7 ibid., p. 38.

8 'Ulster,' The Bell 2, 4 1941, p. 11.

9 Sean O'Faolain, Tlxe Life Story of Eamon de Valera, (Dublin: Talbot, 1933), pp. 9-10,

107-8, 110.

10 Sean O'Faolain, Come Back to Erin, (New York: Viking, 1940), p. 237.

11 Sean O'Faolain, De Valera, (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1939), p. 55.

12 The Life Story of Eamon de Valera, op. cit., p. 108.

13 Vive Moi!, op. cit., p. 147.

14 'This is your magazine', The Bell 1,1 1940, p. 8.

15 De Valera, op. cit., p. 181.

16 ibid., p. 178.

17 King of the Beggars, op. cit., p. 21.

18 ibid., and historical note.

19 Daniel Corkery, Tlxe Hidden Ireland, (Dublin: Gill and Son, 1924), p. 41.

20 King of the Beggars, op. cit., pp. 25, 29.

21 ibid., pp. 106, 273-4, 106-7.

22 'Ireland and the Modern World', Tlxe Bell 5,6, 1943, pp. 424-5.

23 De Valera, op. cit., pp. 51-4.

24 King of the Beggars, op. cit., p. 213.

25 ibid., pp. 204, 80, 78, 77, 68, titles of chapters, 325.

26 Luke Gibbons, 'Challenging the Canon: Revisionism and Cultural Criticism', The Field

Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Seamus Deane, Vol. Ill, (Derry: Field Day, 1991), p.

562.




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