O'Faolain's Wonderful Fish

...Almost nothing happens—Philly fades out of the story, Noreen runs off to London with a man—but the tension mounts unbearably until the climax, when Noreen's mother, "her eyes out on pins," rips to shreds the blouse the narrator has brought for her daughter...

...Revolutionary Ireland, O'Faolain says, is with O'Leary in the grave, and its fossils are inspecting cattle for warble flies or merchandising patriotic corsets...

...The thrush that the bishop repeatedly hears cracking a snail against a stone is a perfect symbol for the vulnerability of our dreams...

...In "The Younger Generation," the bishop's pastoral letter turns into a childish letter to his dead mother, and then he realizes that he writes "not to the living but to the dying and the dead...

...It is in fact the Irish Revolution, and to the extent that that is now a diminished theme, the only theme with which he can replace it is memory, nostalgia...

...Eventually the author transports Frankie to New York, where he dabbles in high life and glamorous romance before returning to Ireland, his true love, and a job as, of all things, a Warble Fly Inspector...

...Mary's marital unhappiness, subtly hinted, is sharpened by her memories of youthful joy...

...the traitorous small lady naked and passionate in the rain before the revolutionaries execute her...

...In "Two of a Kind" an Irish sailor and his legendary aunt in Brooklyn get together to lie and reminisce, and the lighthouse in Limerick that he describes to her is one that he has just seen in a toyshop on Eighth Avenue...

...In "The Sugawn Chair," the old peasant chair that the narrator's parents comically fail to reseat with straw ropes beautifully represents the love and innocence of their youth...

...O'Faolain spends a lot of time in Italy and he has been teaching and lecturing in the United States for the past three years, but he has never been a member of the Irish literary emigration...

...I Remember I Remember!, as its title accurately shows, is suffused with the theme of memory...

...He is not Yeats or Joyce, and like every contemporary Irish writer he has had to spend a good deal of effort getting them off his back...

...O'Faolain's second novel, Bird Alone, is a gloomy love story set in "those dead years" after Parnell's death...

...That had been clear much earlier, when Frankie Hannafey appeared at the Starlight Roof of the Waldorf in a borrowed dinner jacket...

...Three of the stories— "Midsummer Night Madness," "The Small Lady" and "The Bombshop"—are masterpieces, and what one remembers from them is not the desperate and mindless killing by Tans and Sinn Feiners, or Free Staters and Irregulars, but the richness of life in pockets of the violence: Old Henn, the Anglo-Irish libertine in his decrepit pride...

...O'Faolain has a small but genuine talent, and his polished, subtle and effective short stories include some of the finest of our time...

...No Country for Old Men" is O'Faolain's bold attempt to wrestle with his theme in comic terms...

...the cozy fire the young lovers of "The Bombshop" light for the comfort of Mother Dale's staring corpse...

...The third and last novel, Come Back to Erin, is about a living anachronism, Frankie Hannafey, a revolutionary gunman who has been on the run in the hills, or in jail, for 20 years, first from the Tans, then from the Free Staters, finally from the Eire police...

...Each of the three novels O'Faolain wrote in the '30s is impressive, but none is wholly successful...

...O'Faolain has their brains without comparable imaginative resources...

...Ireland, in Yeats' words, is "no country for old men," whereas the young are "proud and ignorant and lovely," as the old once were...

...Posterity at least will know it...

...The first, A Nest of Simple Folk, tried to chronicle three generations of change, 1854-1916, through the life of Leo Foxe-Donnel...

...The narrator recalls his adolescent involvement with two girls: his cousin Philly, whose innocent and moving love for him he rejected callously, and Noreen, the wild daughter of his aunt's servant, who treated him as he treated Philly...

...The narrator of "Love's Young Dream" realizes that everyone imprisoned in childhood "must, blindeyed, gnaw his way out, secretly and unaided...

...They are captured and jailed, to their delight, and the story ends with one hero writing the other's biography...

...All but one of its 11 stories are about the ironies of remembrance...

...Educated (he has a Harvard M. A.) and literate, his work is thoroughly European, and his masters are not the peasant storytellers by the turf fires, but Chekhov and Maupassant...

...It suffers from over-ambitiousness in trying to make Leo embody too much Irish history...

...The story concludes with the quiet statement that all this happened 40 years before, that the narrator is now married with grown children, that the cottage has been torn down and replaced by a car park, but that somehow these memories are more real than the rest of his life...

...An ambitious and successful architect is upset in "A Shadow, Silent as a Cloud" when a waitress turns out to have shared his childhood at a country house, and all his youthful dreams of love return to challenge him...

...The narrator becomes a "bird alone, a heron without a mate," as much from Parnell's death and the failure of political hope as from the melodramatic death of his beloved carrying his unborn child—in fact, it is the same story told on two symbolic levels...

...O'Faolain's images are powerful and compelling...

...Through a series of accidents, they find themselves across the border in Northern Ireland, in the company van with a pink corset painted on each side, involved in an IRA raid on a police barracks...

...At Mary's final announcement, she hears from Sarah "a noise like a drip of rain, or melting snow, or oozing blood...

...He is a minor writer, as George Herbert, say, is a minor writer...

...Atlantic-Little, Brown, 240 pp., $4.50), will do much to correct this...

...Although he has remained in provincial, narrow and puritanic Eire, O'Faolain is the least provincial of Irish writers...

...It seems unlikely that the publication of his latest fine volume of short stories, I Remember...

...In 1948, after the Bell was stilled, he wrote a letter to the New York Times Book Review announcing that "Irish literature is passing through years both hard and lean...

...The story ends with Sarah's recognition that for no reason she can understand her sister will never return...

...The title story is a delicate and beautiful tale of two Irish women: Mary, married to a wealthy American, and her crippled sister Sarah, who cannot stir out of the house but has total recall...

...Two elderly businessmen, who took part in the 1916 Rising 40 years before, now manufacture Celtic Corsets, decorated with designs from the Lindisfarne Gospels...

...O'Faolain's first book appeared in 1932, a brilliant collection of seven short stories entitled Midsummer Night Madness...

...Three stories stand out from the rest...

...A Touch of Autumn in the Air" is about an old man's vivid memories of an insignificant sensual experience in his childhood, suddenly recalled by a sweetshop odor, and the narrator comments: "It was plain, at last, that he was thinking of all those fragments of his boyhood as the fish scales of some wonderful fish, never-to-be-seen, sinuous and shining, that had escaped from his net into the ocean...

...What distinguished Yeats and Joyce from all their contemporaries was not their imaginative power, but the possession of a first-rate mind that turned that imagination in the right direction: Yeats toward the spare, tuned-off-the-note verse of his mature years...

...at various times he is a peasant, an Ascendancy rake, a Fenian revolutionary, a village laborer, a town shopkeeper and so forth...

...The nostalgic voice of Sean O'Faolain is the true voice of Ireland in 1962, and as long as he continues to publish, the Irish Renaissance lives on...

...His roots remain in Ireland, where, incidentally, two of his books are banned...

...Since 1940 O'Faolain has written no more novels, although he has published volumes of short stories, biography, travel, literary criticism and cultural history...

...The strength of the book is its sense of nature as history and destiny, what Leo's wife calls "the mad black blood that is in you...

...At 62, O'Faolain is, with the possible exception of Sean O'Casey, the foremost living Irish writer...

...Joyce toward the drastic confrontation of language that culminated in Finnegans Wake...

...I thought that was all over and done with years ago," says his American half-brother, not unreasonably...

...Love's Young Dream" seems to me the best thing in the book, a superb story...

...I Remember...

...There are less successful stories in the book, and sometimes a weak ending...

...But the general level is very high...

...Other Irish writers, notably O'Casey and Seumas O'Kelly, had the imaginative power without the shaping intelligence...

...In the early '40s he edited the Bell, a literary and political monthly...

...His subject matter, however, is entirely Irish...

...Unlike Goldsmith and Sheridan, Moore and Wilde, Joyce and Yeats, Shaw and O'Casey, O'Flaherty and Miss Bowen, as well as innumerable others, O'Faolain has remained living and working in Ireland...

...The Troubles pervade all of them, but they are political only to the extent that their subject matter is the tension between the violent times and the constants of human passion...

...Her wounds are rubbed raw by Sarah's pitiless reminder of every event in Mary's past and present, "untrue in the way that a police report is untrue, because it leaves out everything except the facts...

...When the images are used as symbols, they are equally effective...

...still earlier, John Whelan) is not nearly so well known in this country as Frank O'Connor and other Irish fiction writers markedly his inferior...

...For a time in the 1930s he lived in London, but he soon returned...