Reflection on the 'Journeys in Words' online bookclub

It’s a week since the 'Journeys in Words' online bookclub reached its final destination (ending last Tuesday night) and I’m still thinking about the two writers we explored and, specifically, about the animal world Liam O’Flaherty evokes so keenly. At the weekend, Kevin, myself and our two boys walked to Mutton Island for some fresh air and exercise. It was a cool, clear Saturday afternoon and, gazing at the ocean, I kept thinking of the conger eel’s struggle, firstly to placate his hunger by catching mackerel and secondly, to writhe free of the fishermens' net. In my mind’s eye, I could see that net lowering into the Atlantic and scaling it. This is surely the mark of a great writer; someone whose words stay with you, linger in your head, mingling vision and imagination with your present reality. A recent study, highlighted again in an article last week, has shown that crows are self-aware and I'm reminded of that seagull O'Flaherty poises on a ledge, goaded by his mother into finally taking his ‘first flight’. Jennifer Ackerman notes in The Genius of Birds, that our expression "bird brain" is long redundant. Both science and the stories of O'Flaherty remind us of the need to keep refreshing our knowledge about the animal kingdom lest we continue to underestimate our fellow earthly creatures.

While the focus of our book club was the short story form, the late Eileen Battersby aptly reminded us that it "remains too easy to confine a reading of O'Flaherty's highly cinematic art to 150 often superb, short stories - many of them fables which present him as an intense primitive, preoccupied with the brutal inevitably of nature in its dealings with animal and man, while missing out on the political and socio-cultural dimension of his vision. O'Flaherty never forgot the landscape and lifestyle of his island home but, through his travels soon became quite cosmopolitan.” And we certainly broadened our bookclub discussions beyond O'Flaherty the naturalist to consider his nomadic spirit, his political activism (the 99th anniversary of his seizure of the Rotunda on 21 January, 1922 is just a few days away) and, more generally, his entire corpus – (O’Flaherty was remarkably prolific, producing a novel per year throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s).

Having studied for the priesthood early in his life, he underwent a loss of religious certainties and ideological affiliation, and was faced with the necessity of dealing with these crises in his art. I’m struck by the fact that he was a man of action and rebel who travelled the world with an open mind, gradually losing faith in religion, communism and republicanism (roughly in that order) only to realise that what he truly wanted was to get back to that native ‘rock’ in his imagination, to that 'otherwhere' of oral storytelling which we glimpse in The Ecstacy of Angus. In the example of O’Flaherty – who was by no means a ‘saint’ – we can recognise that the journey of artistic integrity is not dictated by financial gain, a quest for fame or by what’s in vogue. Like Patrick Kavanagh, another Irish writer who protested the grand delusions of the Irish Literary Revival, and whose trajectory can be mapped in his early pastoral writings, his urban pieces, his disenchanted anti-pastoral writings (The Great Hunger) and, ultimately, his return to a celebration of the everyday in his canal bank poems, it is the honest seeker who doesn’t compromise to satisfy external tastes or stakeholders whose work will ultimately stand up to scrutiny because it is not a travesty; it derives from an authentic, questing humanity.

A famous quote of O’Flaherty’s that is all over the web and hints at the breadth of the man’s thinking can be read directly above. As well as suffering from the wrath of the censorship board, (he was one of the most censored writers in Ireland in the 1930s) O’Flaherty has, perhaps, also been unfairly disparaged by critics for his refusal to work within a completely realist mode in his novels. (He has been most widely praised for The Informer, Skerrett and Famine). I think this quotation hints at the expansiveness of his vision – something which has proven challenging for academics, who would too easily wish to pin down O’Flaherty and find that they cannot. As Dermot Heaney writes in his paper “The O’Flaherty Novel: a problem of critical approach”: “One cannot help feeling that many critics would prefer a lesser, more easily definable author, a tidier writer.” (1995, Etudes Irlandaises)

Unlike O’Flaherty, who deals with open expanses of nature and external turmoil, Maeve Brennan is a master of fraught interior spaces. In fact, the former externalises inner tumult in the great outdoors and the latter does something similar, but very much indoors, under a roof. Brennan’s detailed descriptions of confined domestic settings are often objective correlatives for the sense of claustrophobia her protagonists feel. A mixture of memoir and a study of two unhappy marriages, featuring the Derdons and the Bagots, The Springs of Affection has justly earned its classic status, finding republication in 2016 with Stinging Fly Press. Her attunement to the Ranelagh suburbs of the 1920s (her childhood home was at 48, Cherryfield Avenue) affords fascinating glimpses into the formation of the young writer’s mind and worldview and also of a unique and rarified era. Like Eilís Dillon, (the subject of our first book club at Galway Public Libraries during the month of October) Brennan was the child of Irish revolutionaries, Robert Brennan and Una Bolger. (Lucy McDiarmid has written a fascinating article that highlights the friendship between Dillon’s and Brennan’s parents). Domestic space plays a crucial role in these vignettes as her characters are increasingly marked by their perception of confinement.

There’s a highly cinematic quality in Brennan’s story cycles too - like O’Flaherty, but in a different vocabulary – compounded by the fact that certain details are repeated & small narratives retold in sharper relief as the stories progress. Brennan can capture the minutiae of interior space exceedingly well. Indeed, a special kind of gift is required to find the narrative in ‘a panel of filigreed brass that runs all around the hearth’ (“The Sofa”) to isolate it and to say to the reader: ‘this, too, is important.’ It is true to say that the 'domestic,' as a subject for fiction, is often glossed over and subtly dismissed by critics. Maeve Brennan stunningly demonstrates, however, that this sphere is often the seat of our emotional and psychological well-being.

In terms of what these two writers, O’Flaherty and Brennan, might share in common: one could argue that they were both 'outsiders' – while enjoying ‘insider’ status for brief periods, especially in the case of Maeve Brennan who was very much what we might now term an ‘influencer’. To be a staff writer at The New Yorker during the 1950s and ‘60s was to occupy one of the most influential seats in American culture and Brennan contributed book reviews, fashion notes, essays, and short stories. Between 1954 and 1981 she wrote a series of sketches about daily life in Times Square and the Village for “The Talk of the Town.” But, as her biographer, Angela Bourke and others note, as an Irish-American woman at this period, Maeve was also very much an outsider.

Liam O’Flaherty retained, and perhaps basked in, his own outsider status during his life – and was also full of contradictions: an Irish republican who fought in World War I, a Gaeilgeoir from Inis Mór who spoke with a cut glass English accent, etc. In many ways he revelled in being a liminal figure and themes of alienation and loneliness loom large in his fiction. Both writers were perceptive observers of the societies in which they lived and the contrasts between the polite milieu of suburban Ranelagh with the more rugged, elemental world conjured by O’Flaherty has made for a rewarding reading experience over the course of this book club. As noted above, both were from Republican backgrounds – O’Flaherty’s father was a Fenian - and both suffered from debilitating breakdowns at various points in their careers - more lastingly and, perhaps, tragically in Brennan's case. Arguably, both were reacting against romanticism in its many variants in their unique ways; O’Flaherty against the Literary Revivalist representation of the ‘perfect peasant’ and Brennan against the highly gendered Hollywood delusion of domestic bliss. Lastly, and in purely superficial terms, both writers were uncommonly good-looking and charismatic, and that is probably where the commonalities end and the rich contrasts take over. Juxtaposing two such varied voices made for a highly enjoyable reading experience with a piquant twist of the unpredictable. Taking this journey through words with two consummate masters of the short story form has been thrilling and I would like to sincerely thank our four guest speakers over the four sessions; experts on Brennan, O’Flaherty and the Irish short story form: Prof. Patricia Coughlan (UCC), Prof. Elke D’hoker (University of Leuven), Seamus Cashman(founder of Wolfhound Press) and Dr. Maurice Casey(historian at EPIC Museum). I also want to thank all of our participants – we had regular members in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Achill Island and even one member in Greece! And, last but not least, thank you to my colleagues at Galway Public Libraries: Josephine Vahey, Sharleen McAndrew and Niamh O'Donovan as well as Teresa Lavina and Gavin of Nova Productions. It now gives me great pleasure to announce here that Galway Public Libraries and yours truly, with the support of Creative Ireland, will be bringing you another online book club soon – commencing in mid-February – and focusing this time, on contemporary Irish writers. More information to follow soon! Watch this space!