What the Old Man Said'

...WRITERS WRITING 'What the Old Man Said' By Raymond Rosenthal During the final year of his life, Frank O'Connor, the important Irish storyteller who died last March delivered a series of lectures on his native literature at Trinity College, Dublin They have now been issued as A Short History of lush Liteiatwe (Putnam, $5 95, 264 pp ), a book which will certainly take its place among that small number of invaluable works that mix intense personal feeling with craftsmanlike knowledge O'Connor has not written a well-rounded, complete history to be put beside Thibaudet's work on modern French oi De Sanctis' classic volume on Italian literature This a quirky book on a thorny subject It also marks a high point in lush freedom ot speech, for O'Connor speaks out strongly against the theocratic censorship that has ruined literature in Ireland during the last thirty-odd years But most of all it is alive with wit and insight, despite large gaps and a method of terrific condensation, it told me more about Ireland and its literature than any other book I have yet encountered According to O'Connor, Irish literature had two great seasons The first, covering the seventh to the 12th centuries, consisted chiefly of story-poems of a lyrical, peculiarly concrete and ironic cast that were passed on orally from the Bronze and Neolithic Ages and were finally transcribed by Christian missionary-monks The second began around 1910, when Yeats and Synge returned to those primitive beginnings From the first only ill-assorted fragments exist, many of them written m a Gaelic which even today cannot be completely deciphered, and they represent a scholar's feast and nightmare In his opening chapters O'Connor ventures boldly into regions where thus far most scholars have moved warily He feels that the Irish are, like the Jews, the people of a Book, but a Book that must still be rescued whole from the mists of history and the blunders of the original, uncritical transcribers and latter-day scholars His reconstruction of the central Irish saga, "The Cattle Raid of Cooley " which tells the story of a war begun because ot a wily woman's whims—and that woman will appeal again and again in Irish writing, from Yeats' majestic, cruel heroines to Molly Bloom?seems both loeical and brilliant to an outsider without the knowledge to make a critical judgment In any event this primitive, primary literature contains all of the abiding lush themes, for this leason O'Connor wants lush writers to pay heed to "what the Old Man said" and "to look backward in order to look forward " Besides the woman, theie are sly, courageous, foolish men in this archetypal story, and the bulls, which are the pretext for the wai and the symbol for unspoiled masculinity O'Connor's description and evaluation ot the poem are woith quoting 'The Connacht men succeed m driving the Ulster bull back with them, and then the real battle takes place—the battle of the two virilities, the undefeatable bulls After fighting for a day and night in a Roscommon lake, the Ulster bull emerges triumphant with the wreck of the Connacht bull on his horns, and as he passes, homesick and dying on his lonely journey across Ireland, he tosses the fragments of the Connacht bull to the four quarters and drops dead on the frontier of his native land ' It is one of the great climaxes of literature Nowhere else in literature that I know has war been so vividly imagined, yet some sort of murderous irony pursues irony, Gulliver's Tiavels is a favorite children's book, Ulysses is becoming the last refuge of the crossword puzzle fiends, and only very serious linguists will ever be able to penetrate properly the jungle ot 'The Cattle Raid of Cooley ' ' O'Connoi goes on to define the literature he has explored It is, he says, the lesult of the encountei of a timeless oial tradition with a written one which, "if not too highly developed may produce literature ot the highest quality, autonomous and primary m the way of Greek and Hebrew hteiatme ' He admits that this is not a critical standard, since English and French hteiature are great without being primary But what such a literature gives us is irreplaceable, he maintains, foi it "expresses the joys and fears of man confronted with an unfamiliar umveise " The shock of the Hymn to Man in Antigone does not prepare us foi the shock of the Nineteenth Psalm of the Old Testament "The heavens declare the glory of God " In early Irish literature we get the same sort of surprise and impact?the shock of man's fundamental experience set down as though for the first time" And it is a tribute to O Connor's skill as a translator that, in the fragments of Irish poetry he presents, we are able to glimpse something of the truth he indicates What the primitive lnshman thought about "the glory of God s handiwoik may be lost forever, O'Connor sadly confesses, since 'the eaily missionaries did too good a job of destruction " We know, howevei, what he thought about identity—his biggest fear was to lose it and so his verse was alhteiative...

...again, that Joyce was a ciazy man, a schizophienic, an embattled middle-class rebel, but he also calls him the gieatest master of lhetouc in the history of hteiature He points out that only foieigners unfamiliar with George Moore's seminal book of shoit stories...

...mnemonic?and also about parricide and incest, his two intense temptations and taboos In the later pseudo-sagas written in the Christian epoch "their heroes, the samts, were required to have conceptions and births supenoi to those ot the saga heroes and to destroy more people with their prayers and curses than the saga heroes could destroy with then swords In the matter of conception those samts who got off with an incestuous one may be said to have been born m the odor of sanctity' O'Connor is always witty His description of the monk who compiled ' The Cattle Raid of Cooley" is characteristic He names him the First Murderer, and continues "He tackled every job of editing in the spirit of a small boy trying to make a bicycle from the wieck of a perambulator " When this monk comes acioss a gap, he refeis anily in Latin to "other books" that are unavailable As O'Connor says, it is the "other books that break one's heart It is impossible to write with restraint of the damage done by those well-meaning unscholarly men " Yeats is the presiding genius of this book, the protagonist of the aristocratic thesis against which is set the urban-middle-class antithesis most fully embodied by James Jo>ce O'Connor, whose own best stories combine primitive poetry with irony and concrete observation, is a Yeats man to the marrow, but he manages to keep his head even in the whirlpools of Yeatsian eloquence, and he says things about his hero that cannot be found in more devout books Though admitting that Irish literature from its inception chose imagination over intellect, and though praising the wild, melancholy Celtic strain which Matthew Arnold first identified in English writing, he deplores the lack of critical awareness that runs through all Irish writing, poetic and otherwise Yet then he doubles back and claims that Yeats "had enough chaos in him to make a whole cosmic system If you want to think of him as he was m life you must imagine a man who was forever blundering about in search of truth " But Yeats was saved from his "silliness" by a first-rate intellect "Once, in a fit of delighted exasperation I said that he was the only man I ever knew who could deduce a universal truth from two fallacies and an error " He was also a first-class oigamzei and proselytrzei who convinced such different people as A E Russell Synge, George Moore, and Lady Gregory to work for his cause and under his guidance O'Connor says Yeats legarded literature as a soit ot cooperative activity and was incensed by people who refused to join the cooperative The Yeats "repau-and-maintenance sei\-lce," however, had its price Good lines written by his friends had a habit of turning up in his poems George Mooie used to say "Yeats has got off with the spoons " He was, like D H Lawrence and Tolstoy, an intuitive genius "who deliberately induced a soit of hypnotic suspension of the critical faculty to justify a blind indulgence in his intuition On Joyce, O'Connor is tairei heie than m his othei cntical books He does say...

...The Untitled Field, could believe that Joyce was amazingly original in The Dublmets He says that ' as entertainment foi hospital patients with a long, slow, but not too distressing illness Ulvsses is unsurpassable", still, he concludes that "nothing I or anyone else can say will change the fact that Ulysses is one of the great monuments of Irish literature" He admires its "description of the poetry of everyday life in Dublin," not its rhetorical games or philosophical undeicurrents—which seems to me an equable judgment fiom a violently biased man O'Connor's objection to Joyce is of course based on his own firm preconceptions He dislikes modern literature, described brilliantly as fashioning a new relationship between wntei, readei and subject mattei "In the new style the relationship is between the writer and the object, and it is now the reader who is the third party, present onlv by courtesy This is the magical as opposed to the logical approach to language He forgets that Yeats too was often magical in piecisely that way, and he oveilooks the elements in the modern situation which diove writers like Joyce to fashion this new approach One may disagree with a particular thought, as I do here, and yet be moved by O'Connor's sincerity and shrewd love ot literature 4bove all, his book will be lead as an introduction to a literature whose main figures and outlines are known but whose byways and remote masterpieces will come as a surprise to many After O'Connor's descriptions, I intend to read Maria Edgeworth's novels James Stephen s little known first book, The CIwiwoman's Daughtei, and Wilfred Scawen Blunt's poetry as soon as I can find them...