serving the word: essays and poems in honour of maurice harmon || o'faolain's way: pages...

O'Faolain's Way: Pages from a MemoirAuthor(s): Patrick LynchSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 22, No. 1, Serving the Word: Essays and Poems inHonour of Maurice Harmon (Spring - Summer, 1992), pp. 142-150Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484472 .

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Patrick Lynch

O'Faolain's Way: Pages from a Memoir

During and immediately after the Second World War, Ireland had a few unusual visitors. Among them was the Very Reverend Hewlett

Johnson, MA, DD, commonly known as the Red Dean. He had been

appointed to his permanent post as Dean of Canterbury by Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald and gave his residential address as The Red House, Canterbury. Physically, a tall, handsome figure with

shoulder-length flowing grey hair, Dr Johnson had long been an em

barrassment to the Church of England and the British conservative establishment.

Extreme left-wing views enlivened his oratory from pulpit and

platform ? hence he earned the epitaph 'red' from the public opinion

he outraged. The best known of his many publications was The Socialist Sixth of the World which reached twenty-two editions and

twenty-four languages. To the average West-End club member, he was a dangerous sub

versive, suspected of even republican views but he became a popular British propagandist when the Soviet Union joined the western allies

against Germany and Italy. After a visit to the Soviet Union, where he had been personally

greeted by Marshal Stalin, he was invited to Dublin by the Irish

Friends of the Soviet Union to inform them in the Mansion House of

his Soviet experiences. His views appealed to his Dublin hosts and

their friends for a variety of reasons; he was a professed Christian and a political radical, a practising communist, a suspected British repub lican and a unique speaker in the Mansion House, where many distin

guished speakers had been before him.

I attended the meeting as a guest of a friend, the late Harry Craig, who was then a Trinity student on the fringe of most left-wing causes, active among the Irish Friends of the Soviet Union and, at the time, the

sole editorial assistant on The Bell, of which Sean O'Faolain had been

founder and was then editor. Harry was later to be joined by Honor

Tracey, but his political views were in no sense reflected in The Bell, whose editor was almost certainly totally unaware of them.

It was expected that the Dean's lecture would be disrupted by

right-wing groups. The gardai had taken precautions and Harry Craig assured me that he had assembled a formidable array of volunteers if

the gardai needed support. As it happened, good-humoured tranquil

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OTAOLAIN'SWAY

lity prevailed ? at the beginning.

I was sitting alongside Sean O'Faclain, who was intermittently

obscured by smoke from his pipe. As an occasional contributor to The

Bell, anonymously because I was then a civil servant, I introduced

myself to Sean, thus marking the beginning of a friendship that was to last for nearly fifty years.

The growth of our friendship fired my admiration for O'Faolain's

character, intelligence and creative gifts. His intellectual integrity was

unshakable, his literary scholarship deep and wide. His reading in the

classics, ancient and modern, was extensive. He had an impressive knowledge of the modern American novel and could defend his pre ferences convincingly, often summarising from his critical essays. His

preferences sometimes surprised. He thought highly of Hemingway, but I think greatly underestimated Scott Fitzgerald, perhaps because of his dislike of the age which was the setting for most of Fitzgerald's

work.

As a critic, Sean had an impressive sense of responsibility. He

despised casual, careless reviewing. When he reviewed a book him

self, he began by reading it at least twice. It was easy, he used to say, to write a thoughtless, superficial review, but difficult to write a book of any kind. He was a superb controversialist, particularly courteous when the effect was most lethal. His debate with Michael Tierney in

The Leader in August 1938 brought out the intellectual best in both of

them. Despite his vehemence in print against Tierney, he had high respect for him. His reply in The Bell to criticism by Bishop Browne of

Galway was all the more devastating in its urbanity, politeness and

restraint.

Sean was an excellent but unobtrusive teacher of the art of writing

English: he had emphatic respect for syntax, simplicity of expression and the avoidance of unnecessary adverbs. He taught mainly by

example, but gave unforgettable lessons in his editorial treatment of

his contributors' work. He had always been touchingly dutiful towards his wife, Eileen.

They had met in the Cork Gaeltacht and were married for sixty years. Their common intellectual interest lay in the influence of Irish on

spoken English in Ireland. For years she hd been a student of folklore.

Her death in 1988 was not entirely unexpected, but when it happened, Sean was shocked. She was in St Vincent's Hospital, Elm Park, for

treatment when, late on a September night, he was summoned as she

had become gravely ill. I accompanied him to Eileen's bedside as she

was dying. He was offered a cup of tea which he drank in stoical

silence, not fully comprehending what was happening. Sean's intellectual and creative powers diminished progressively

after Eileen's death. He missed her continuous conversation and her

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

practical abilities, especially in financial affairs. He was now a lonely

man. His son Stephen telephoned from New Zealand from time to

time, and he had occasional visits from his daughter Julia, who was in

California, where her husband worked in Berkeley. I saw him fairly often during his last years. We went for a drink or

two in the Dalkey Island Hotel or for lunch to the Killiney Court Hotel. Both afforded a good view of the sea which he loved at all

times. Dalkey Island itself seemed to have a special attraction for him. Sean was an abstemious drinker, but he liked talk, even when his

memory was failing. To the end, he dressed well, preferring to wear a tailored suit, a paisley waistcoat and a choice of quite a few hats of

which he was inordinately proud. His conversation often wandered back to Cork and Gougan Barra as he had known them in his youth and to the imperfections, real and imaginary, of the Irish universities.

Harvard and Princeton were his models. He had studied in one and lectured in the other. Why, he would ask, were there so few publi cations emanating from the Irish universities? Why was the work of

such people as John O'Meara, the distinguished classical scholar, and

Proinsias MacCana, the brilliant Celticist, valued more abroad than at

home while the sales of mediocre books flourished? In these moods of

pessimism he feared that the Ireland he loved was floundering. A recurring conversational theme was reminiscence about writers

whom he classified as men and women of letters. He regretted that

these seemed to be a dying species. One of his favourites had been

Desmond MacCarthy, who privately bored his friends about his great novel, which was never written, but every Sunday enraptured his

readers by digressing through books in general while reviewing one

book in particular. Sean admitted that MacCarthy knew a great deal about books. He

would accept his description "man or woman of letters" for himself

and admitted Hubert Butler, David Greene, Maurice Craig and

Elizabeth Bowen into the same category. There might be a few more in

Ireland, but the number was diminishing. He hesitated before includ

ing Conor Cruise O'Brien, whom he regarded primarily as a distin

guished historian and a specialised scholar in literature and political

theory. When I once added that Conor was also an original creative

writer who had at least two plays to his credit, Sean said he would have to give further thought to the definition of a man or woman of

letters. We retraced this ground many times.

But all this was nearly half a century after our first meeting in the

Mansion House. The Red Dean's appearance had evoked sporadic inter

jections, but mainly welcoming applause, when he strode towards the

platform, accompanied by Peadar O'Donnell, chairman of the meet

ing. There certainly was little indication of the scenes that were soon to

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OTAOLAIN'SWAY

follow. The Dean was an experienced, forceful speaker, fluent and

self-assured. Obviously, he was in his element casting his rhetorical

spell on his audience. From many such performances he knew how

they began: he would slow down dramatically as he approached his

peroration and smile graciously with modest dignity as he acknowl

edged the thunderous ovation evoked by his well-rehearsed con

clusion. But this time, it was not to be.

As the Dean swept into his histrionic stride, he could not disguise an impression already sensed uneasily by some of the audience that

this speech had not been delivered for the first time. Then Sean

O'Faolain whispered to me: "He thinks he is speaking in Blackpool." Before I could reply, the Dean confirmed that his thoughts were not

exclusively with his Dublin republicans.

Fingering his pectoral cross and raising dramatically this special

gift which, he told us, Stalin had given him, he went on to describe a

flight in a special aircraft to Kasakhstan where he attended a religious service. I do not recall his exact words, but I shall try to reconstruct

them: "Here were simple people believing in a faith that was not my faith, fervently praying to a god that was not my god. I asked my

interpreter what they were praying for."

Here was the moment of climax as a hushed audience waited for

the response. "Comrades", thundered the Dean, "what do you think

they were praying for?'

He lowered his voice to a whisper as we waited painfully and

anxiously for the reply. Then in a slowly intoned crescendo: "Com

rades ? they were praying for the British Empire."

Uproar followed, composed of laughter, indignation, exasperation and dismay. Peadar O'Donnell buried his head in his hands, a

bewildered chairman. The Dean's bemused expression revealed his

mystification as to what had gone wrong with a lecture that invariably enthralled. But more than anything else, I recall Sean OTaolain's

gaiety as he turned to Harry Craig to say: "You can only end this

chaos if we sing Taith of Our Fathers'."

This sense of gaiety, enjoyment of fun and ironical situations were

features of Sean that were often overlooked. Serious he could be, but

sombre seldom. From time to time, he may have been disenchanted

with many aspects of the Ireland he chose to live in, but he never

despaired, and many of the happier days he had hoped for were

largely of his own making. I had long been an admirer of O'Faolain's writing and of his

courageous campaign against the absurd and oppressive censorship which the Free State had imposed on the creative arts. As he was later to say cynically to an old republican friend: "You and I fought to free

Ireland when it was too late to save her." I had read his early novels

145




and short stories and had reviewed his latest novel Come Back to Erin in 1940 in The National Student.

Maurice Harmon is O'Faolain's official biographer and has already written extensively on his subject's work. Sean recognised the quality of Maurice's critical commentary and was particularly appreciative of his more severe judgements. He was touched, too, by Harmon's pas

sages of praise. "He can't be writing about me", he used to say when he was still reading a few weeks before his death, sometimes wryly adding: "I am sure he will find out what a humbug I have been before he finishes my biography."

I do not feel competent to discuss O'Faolain's fiction, but I have read the biographies. None of them was intended to be a work of academic scholarship, but at least two, The King of the Beggars and The Great O'Neill are powerful, imaginative historical studies.

In The King of the Beggars his portrait of O'Connell is stunning. He lifts O'Connell out of history and restores him to life. Here is a great creative writer displaying his astonishing insight into the emotions and actions of a vastly complex man. He did not, to any extent, draw on primary sources. He absorbed such learning as was available, and

with his perception as a creative writer presented O'Connell as a giant who raised slaves into dignified people worthy of the leader to whom

they owed their liberation.

O'Faolain's O'Connell is a towering figure driving the helots

around him to become European democrats; he was the Benthamist who successfully led the campaign for Catholic Emancipation, sought an alliance between Christianity and democracy and fought fervently for the Jewish cause and the political and social rights of women.

The Great O'Neill opened a new vista in Irish history. O'Neill is seen as a Renaissance man, as much a part of English as of Irish history. F.S.L. Lyons wrote of O'Faolain's perception of the man that O'Neill's "final tragedy was to be swept into a war that he could not hope to win ? a war, moreover, which increasingly took on a religious character, strangely at variance with the worldliness of his earlier

career."

The King of the Beggars is usually regarded as O'Faolain's finest

contribution to history. Like F.S.L. Lyons, however, I prefer Newman's

Way. It is particularly fascinating to see how O'Faolain identifies

himself with his subject. He also identified himself with O'Neill and

especially with O'Connell; with Newman, however, it was a more

intense association, for there was a unique bond of sympathy between

the author and Newman. O'Faolain restricted the book, he once told

me, to Newman's early life because he found it as difficult to penetrate Newman's later life as to understand the final phase of his own.

Sean was a gifted and occasionally arrogant intellectual. He often

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O'FAOLAIN'S WAY

tended to regard Irish universities as provincial and wondered why some highly intelligent people such as his friend Daniel Binchy could tolerate life in them. He could discuss Newman with Binchy, who had read all of Newman's correspondence (which revealed a character

more complex than the gentle creature of Strache/s famous study). O'Faolain's book on Newman has been overtaken by many other

dissertations and studies, some, no doubt more scholarly. For me, however, Sean's remains a unique piece of biographical literature and I have nothing to add to my review in The Bell in March 1953, nearly forty years ago, which I reprint as follows.

* * *

In his percipient study of O'Faolain's work in Maria Cross, Donat O'Donnell [Conor Cruise O'Brien] wrote of the "historical

introspection" of King of the Beggars and The Great O'Neill and of the

"idolatries" which he detected in O'Faolain's attempts to develop and

illuminate half-mystical ideas of the Irish nation. These attempts were

frustrated according to O'Donnell by a fundamental contradiction ?

"the impossibility of making a race-religion about a 'race' that already has a quite different religion of its own as a moulder of its 'racial'

character." He predicted that if these "idolatries" were dropped O'Faolain would "have a chance to turn his energies towards some

thing of more than local significance." "It is exceedingly difficult", he

continued, "to be a Catholic writer in a Catholic country: the pressure of a community varies inversely with its size; ingrowing nationalism

destroys a writer's scope. O'Faolain has been a living example of the

truth and interrelation of these three propositions. He does not have to

refute them all together in order to recover his direction as a writer.

He may have to fly to the ends of the earth."

It is a pity that O'Donnell's essay was completed before the

publication of Newman's Way, for this is more than a remarkable study of the Anglican part of the Newman story; it is the best of O'Faolain's

biographies, and, indeed, in some respects it represents a new phase in

his artistic development. Part of the fascination of his earlier

biographical subjects lay in their varying shades of ambivalence, in the

elasticity of their minds and the serpentine processes of their thought. For his new subject, however, he uses none of the old biographical

apparatus. It is as if he had written on the title page: "It is a false and

feverous state for the Centre to live in the Circumference." Newman's

spiritual experience in Sicily in 1833 was a decisive step on the way to

his confession to Father Dominic in 1845. O'Faolain may not have been

born again as a creative artist during his summer in Italy, but some

readers may find a significance which his publishers never intended in

the omission of any reference on the dust-cover or elsewhere to the

147




previous writings of the author of Newman's Way. Few modern readers are interested in the minutiae of the controver

sies that led to the Oxford Movement, but the fascination of its circumstances and of its central character remains. The novelist in

O'Faolain enables him to write brilliantly of aspects of Newman's

personality which have escaped others because he was not primarily a

theologian or a philosopher but an artist. The approach is exciting and

original, but the author is aware from the outset that any portrait is defective which fails to account for the evolution of Newman's

thought. He deepens our understanding of Newman's mind by recon

structing his early life from the profusion of family letters and memoranda. By means of a constantly changing focus he presents a

picture of the man as he developed; in the Apologia Newman was to

look back on his early life, to rationalise some of his experiences and to see all of them in fixed focus.

The original conception of the book was a family portrait but the future cardinal had to be prevented from dominating the picture. No such domination occurs; there are delightful cameos of the rest of the

family, but their role is subsidiary and they are used to add clarity and

definition to the main portrait. John Henry remains the central figure

throughout. The others, however, are important in the telling of his

story. He was deeply attached to them although quite uninfluenced by them. Yet to the end of his days some of them were part of his life,

often in bizarre and exasperating circumstances. Careful research has

enabled O'Faolain to unearth a great deal of interest about the family

pedigree and about John Henry's brothers and sisters: the beautiful but unsympathetic Harriet; the gentle Jemina; the strange brother

Charles, atheist, socialist, sometime clerk in the Bank of England, sometime associate of Holyoake and always with an unfailing genius for inopportunely turning up to plague his harassed brother. There

was also Francis, a caricature of a nineteenth-century liberal, full of

hate and enthusiasm for such varied causes as women's suffrage, mixed bathing, land reform and teetotalism, who became a Plymouth Brother and set off for Bagdad to convert the Muslims. In a striking

passage O'Faolain contrasts the character of John and Frank. "Both

were idealists, but John was basically a mystic or a man of faith, whereas Frank was basically a moralist, or a man of good works-In

this old rivalry between spirit and good works, between the religion of

transcendentalism and the religion of good behaviour, between a

mind fundamentally Catholic and a mind constitutionally Protestant,

priorities must ultimately declare themselves. Frank was at bottom a

humanitarian and reformer, John was not really interested in India, or

drunkenness, or prisons, or fairs, or wakes, or, indeed, in human wel

fare at all. Catholics rarely are ...". Altogether the family background

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OFAOLAIN'SWAY

which is described with outstanding success leads the reader to a better understanding of Newman and to a closer sympathy with his sensitive, tortured soul.

In later years Newman was to regard the training of the human intellect as the essence of his idea of a university, yet there have been those who accused him of irrationalism and obscurantism. "We held",

wrote Leslie Stephen, "that our common sense enabled us to appreci ate [Newman] only too thoroughly by the dry light of reason and to resist the illusions of romantic sentiment" O'Faolain's study succeeds in resolving this apparent contradiction more convincingly than it has ever been done before. To understand Newman's intellectualism one

must understand the process that led him to Catholicism. "For my self", Newman wrote in a well-known passage in the Apologia, "it was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quick silver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new

place; how? the whole man moves, paper logic is but a record of it. All the logic in the world would not have made me move faster towards

Rome than I did."

O'Faolain has not merely completely understood the intellectual

processes of Newman; he has also devised admirable literary form for

tracing them. His study of the introspective in his subject gives a

consistency to the story which can only be destroyed by those who would lead up to the conversion by long digressions on such exogen ous themes as the influence of Pusey and Keble. "It is profoundly revealing of Newman", he writes, "that it was the artist in him and not

the intellectual that finally admitted defeat in considering the mystery and the miracle." Or again: "All his life he oscillates between the

intellectual, expressible thing, which emerges from man as law or

morality, and the irrational, inexpressible thing, which enters into man

as faith or mysticism." Newman's Way is, to my mind, the best biography and one of the

best books that O'Faolain has written. It recaptures most successfully the atmosphere and tensions of an intellectual movement that startled

nineteenth-century England. It has the distinction of style and the

originality of approach that have marked all its author's previous work without any of the recurring faults that marred some of it. He

invokes the aid of no quasi-mystical concepts of his own creation to

explain the personalities of his story. The characterisation is always vivid and compelling. The portrait of John Henry is done with much

sympathy and with great insight. The irony of his narrative is

restrained, so that he invests his writing with an integrity that has not

always been apparent in his earlier work. Throughout, the biography is sustained by a wealth of research, much of which is original and

149




none obtrusive. Excepting, perhaps, Bird Alone, this is O'Faolain's finest book. Perhaps he has found that neither the novel nor the orthodox biography is the best medium for his great gifts.

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