O'Faolain, Sean 1900–1991

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O'Faolain, Sean 1900–1991

PERSONAL: Born John Francis Whelan, February 22, 1900, in Cork, Ireland; changed name to Gaelic variant, 1918; died following a short illness April 20, 1991, in Dublin, Ireland; son of Denis and Bridget (Murphy) Whelan; married Elleen Gould, June, 1928; children: Julia, Stephen. Education: University College at Cork of National University of Ireland, B.A., 1921, M.A., 1925; Harvard University, M.A., 1929. Hobbies and other interests: Travel and gardening.

CAREER: Fought in Irish Revolution, 1918–21; Irish Republican Army, director of publicity, 1923; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and Boston College, Boston, MA, lecturer in English, both 1929; St. Mary's College, Strawberry Hill, England, lecturer in English, 1929–33; full-time author, 1932–91.

MEMBER: Arts Council of Ireland (director, 1957–59), Irish Academy of Letters.

AWARDS, HONORS: John Harvard fellowship, 1928–29; Femina Prize nomination, 1932, for Midsummer Night Madness and Other Stories; D.Litt., Trinity College, Dublin, 1957.

WRITINGS:

SHORT STORIES

Midsummer Night Madness and Other Stories, Viking (New York, NY), 1932.

There's a Birdie in the Cage, Grayson, 1935.

The Born Genius: A Short Story, Schuman's, 1936.

A Purse of Coppers: Short Stories, J. Cape (London, England), 1937, Viking (New York, NY), 1938.

Teresa and Other Stories, J. Cape (London, England), 1947, published as The Man Who Invented Sin and

Other Stories, Devin-Adair, 1948.

The Finest Stories of Sean O'Faolain, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1957, published as The Stories of Sean O'Faolain, Hart-Davis (London, England), 1958.

I Remember! I Remember! Stories, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1962.

The Heat of the Sun: Stories and Tales, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1966.

The Talking Trees and Other Stories, Little, Brown (Boston, MA, 1970.

Foreign Affairs and Other Stories, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1976.

(With others) One True Friend and Other Irish Stories, Structural Readers, 1977.

Selected Stories of Sean O'Faolain, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1978.

The Collected Stories of Sean O'Faolain, Constable (London, England), 1980, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1983.

NOVELS

A Nest of Simple Folk, J. Cape (London, England), 1933, Viking (New York, NY), 1934, reprinted, Carol Pub. Group (Secaucus, NJ), 1990.

Bird Alone, Viking (New York, NY), 1936, reprinted, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1985.

Come Back to Erin, Viking (New York, NY), 1940, reprinted, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1972.

And Again?, Constable (London, England), 1979, Carol Pub. Group (New York, NY), 1989.

BIOGRAPHIES

The Life Story of Eamon De Valera, Penguin (New York, NY), 1934.

Constance Markievicz; or, The Average Revolutionary, J. Cape (London, England), 1934, revised edition published as Constance Markievicz, Sphere Books (London, England), 1968, reprinted, Cresset Library (London, England), 1987.

King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O'Connell, the Irish Liberator, in a Study of the Rise of the Modern Irish Democracy, 1775–1847, Viking (New York, NY), 1938, abridged edition, Parkside Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1945, Greenwood Press (West-port, CT), 1975.

De Valera, Penguin (New York, NY), 1939.

The Great O'Neill: A Biography of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, 1550–1616, Duell, Sloan & Pearce (New York, NY), 1942, reprinted, Mercier Press, 1970.

Newman's Way: The Odyssey of John Henry Newman, Devin-Adair, 1952, published as Newman's Way, Longmans, Green (London, England), 1952.

Vive Moi! (autobiography), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1964, published as Vive Moi! An Autobiography, Hart-Davis (London, England), 1965.

TRAVEL

An Irish Journey, Longmans, Green (London, England), 1940.

A Summer in Italy, Eyre & Spottiswoode (London, England), 1949, Devin-Adair, 1950.

An Autumn in Italy, Devin-Adair, 1953, published as South to Sicily, Collins (London, England), 1953.

OTHER

(Editor) Lyrics and Satires from Tom Moore, Cuala Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1929, reprinted, Biblio Distribution Centre, 1971.

(Editor) The Autobiography of Theobald Wolfe Tone, Thomas Nelson (London, England), 1937.

She Had to Do Something: A Comedy in Three Acts (first produced in Dublin, 1937), J. Cape (London, England), 1938.

(Compiler) The Silver Branch: A Collection of the Best Old Irish Lyrics, Variously Translated, Viking (New York, NY), 1938, reprinted, Books for Libraries, 1968.

The Story of Ireland (history), Collins (London, England), 1943.

(Editor and author of foreword) Samuel Lover, Adventures of Handy Andy, Parkside Press, 1945.

(Author of preface) D 83222, I Did Penal Servitude, Metropolitan Publishing (Dublin, Ireland), 1945.

The Irish, Penguin (New York, NY), 1947, published as The Irish: A Character Study, Devin-Adair, 1949, revised and updated edition, Penguin, 1969, published as The Story of the Irish People, Avenel, 1982.

The Short Story (criticism and stories), Collins (London, England), 1948, Devin-Adair, 1951.

The Vanishing Hero: Studies in Novelists of the Twenties, Eyre & Spottiswoode (London, England), 1956, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1957, published as The Vanishing Hero: Studies of the Hero in the Modern Novel, Grosset (New York, NY), 1957.

(Editor) Short Stories: A Study in Pleasure, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1961.

Contributor of short stories and articles to numerous magazines, journals, and other periodicals. Editor, Bell (Irish periodical), 1940–45.

O'Faolain's letters and manuscripts are collected at the Bancroft Library, University of California—Berkeley.

ADAPTATIONS: Two of O'Faolain's short stories, "Mother Matilda's Book" and "The Man Who Invented Sin," were adapted into plays and broadcast by Granada Television Ltd., 1970.

SIDELIGHTS: "Of all the significant O's in twentieth-century Irish literature," noted Paul A. Doyle in Best Sellers, "Sean O'Casey is the most humorous and flamboyant, Liam O'Flaherty the most emotional and unpolished, Frank O'Connor the most satiric and whimsical, and Sean O'Faolain the most versatile and profound." One of modern Ireland's greatest chroniclers, O'Faolain produced many memorable novels, short stories, and nonfiction works during his career, which spanned more than fifty years.

Born John Francis Whelan in County Cork, Ireland, O'Faolain from an early age was inhibited, according to Gordon Henderson's Dictionary of Literary Biography article about the author, by "his father's unquestioning respect for authority, his mother's excessive piety, and the preoccupation both had with rising above their peasant-farmer origins." He was also influenced by the plays at the nearby Cork Opera House, and spent much of his time during his youth watching the dramatic presentations of such classics as The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Prisoner of Zenda. One play in particular had a dramatic effect on O'Faolain; Lennox Robinson's "The Patriot," a story set in an Irish shopkeeper's parlor, elicited a strong reaction from the boy. As O'Faolain related in Henderson's article: "For years I had seen only plays straight from the West End of London…. Here was a most moving play about Irish peasants, shop-keeping and farming folk, men and women who could have been any one of my uncles and aunts down the country. It brought me strange and wonderful news—that writers could also write books and plays about the common everyday reality of Irish life."

Perhaps the most important event of O'Faolain's early years, however, was the Easter Rebellion of 1916. Although at first he opposed the uprising, motivated by his father's unwavering loyalty to the crown, O'Faolain soon became outraged at the brutal way the British forces "crushed the rebellion and then systematically executed its leaders," as Henderson put it. "Fired with a new sense of nationalism," he continued, O'Faolain "was soon taking lessons in the Irish language and, at eighteen, joined other young men and women at a summer school for Gaelic speakers in the mountains of West Cork." At the same age, the young man unofficially changed his name from the anglicized John Whelan to the Gaelic Sean O'Faolain. He then joined the Irish Volunteers, an organization that later produced some members of the militant Irish Republican Army (IRA). While O'Faolain eventually became involved with IRA activities—he was the group's publicity director at age twenty-three—the writer avoided the extreme, often violent tactics for which that organization has since become infamous. "To have cast me for the role of a gunman would have been like casting me as a bullfighter," explained O'Faolain in Henderson's piece. It was during this tumultuous period in Irish history that O'Faolain began his writing career.

The author's early works, including the novels A Nest of Simple Folk and Bird Alone, explore the lives of people caught up in various stages of "The Troubles." Leo O'Donnell, the lead character of A Nest of Simple Folk, for example, is seen over a period of sixty-two years, starting in 1854 and ending with the Easter Rebellion. O'Donnell, imprisoned for several years because of his Fenian involvement—the Fenians, an Irish nationalistic group, were established in the nineteenth century—"grows old futilely pursuing patriotic dreams," as Henderson wrote, and passes his strong sense of Gaelic pride on to his nephew, Denis Hussey, a character modeled after O'Faolain himself. As both a political story and a poignant character study, A Nest of Simple Folk is "a memorable work, memorable as an instance of the power and passion of memory," according to Do-nat O'Donnell, reviewing the novel in Renascence.

Bird Alone, banned as obscene by Ireland's Censorship Board, opens with the elderly Croney looking back over his life as a builder in Cork. The book focuses on his relationship with his grandfather, a staunch Fenian who helps shape young Crone's political viewpoint. Later, ostracized because of both his Irish activism and a scandal involving a woman who dies while giving birth to his child, Crone becomes a recluse, a "bird alone," living in an attic room.

"This is one of the very few modern novels … in which the treatment of character bears the stamp of a complete and subtle mastery," commented V.S. Pritchett about Bird Alone. In his Christian Science Monitor article, Pritchett continued: "The sympathy is profound to the point of tears—and they are often tears of that convinced laughter which comes when one says, These people are round, whole, real and lovable and yet have that quality of mysteriousness which leaves us … in questioning wonder before even those whom we know very well." The reviewer deemed Bird Alone "the genre piece of a master." William Troy, on the other hand, had praise not for the characters in the novel, but for its setting. County Cork is presented, Troy declared in Nation, as "more real and interesting than any of its inhabitants. This is managed partly through the fluid poetic style and partly through a formal framework which makes possible the rapid transitions and vivid condensations of the memory." Troy did have criticism for Bird Alone—he received an impression "of conflicts unresolved, of ambiguities remaining suspended"—but he ultimately cited the book's "flowing current of exquisitely modulated language." This view was shared by Boston Transcript critic A.B. Tourtellot, who found that the novel's "major flaw … is the inadequate treatment of the story as a story." However, Tourtellot concluded, Bird Alone is "a fine and rich book, but fine and rich chiefly because of the craftsmanship of its author and not because of the strength of the story."

O'Faolain's final novel, And Again?, published when he was eighty, is a parable about aging, memory, and death. The protagonist, sixty-five-year-old journalist Bob Younger, receives a piece of mail one day from the gods on Mount Olympus. The gods inform Younger that he has been given the chance to relive his life, with a twist: he will have little memory of his early years, and rather than starting as a baby he will start at his present age and grow younger each day. Once Younger accepts the offer, he sets out to learn who he is and where he came from. He gets romantically involved with a number of women through the years, choosing younger women as he himself de-ages. Calling the novel one of "amazing originality and inventiveness," New York Times Book Review contributor Carolyn Gaiser noted that And Again? "proves to be a charming if erratic tour de force." Writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Clare Boylan remarked, "Flawed, luminous and with a matchless understanding of and zest for life, it is reckless, full-blooded, intellectual literature that will delight and invigorate readers malnourished by the Lean Cuisine diet of mannered-modern miniaturists."

Although his novels and books of criticism were well received, O'Faolain eventually earned more acclaim as a short-story writer. In his collections the author examined the many aspects of modern Irish life. "His stories are typically dense, lush, complex, and rich—his is not an art of understatement," noted Gary Davenport in a Hudson Review article. O'Faolain "has two major themes: what it means to be Irish, and what it means to be an Irish Catholic. [The author] is a loyal but critical Irishman; he is capable of denouncing Irish provincialism of both the nationalist and religious genres, but unlike [playwright George Bernard] Shaw he denounces it from within: he lives in Ireland and he remains a Catholic…. And these stories are full to bursting of life. Landscape provides much of this richness—especially the fecund landscape of his native Cork: low thick clouds, endless rain, sodden earth. And the characters who live in this environment partake of its sense of being outside time."

"In regard to style," commented Paul A. Doyle in his book Sean O'Faolain, the author "favors the technique of uniting suggestion and compression. He uses the words 'engrossed' and 'active' in reference to good style. The beginning of the narrative must at once establish the mood of the story and then the writer works carefully word by word, sentence by sentence, toward the total effect—the innermost illumination which is really the story … behind the story." Doyle noted: "The superior stories in [O'Faolain's collections] are characterized by subtlety, compassion, understanding, irony, and a perceptive awareness of the complexity of human nature. Themes and insights are suggested and implied rather than flatly stated, and the themes are significant. In these superior stories O'Faolain demonstrates authorial objectivity and detachment; he avoids description for its own sake; and he successfully infuses a poetic mood—subdued and delicate—over the narratives. Overall, then, it may be affirmed that stories such as 'A Broken World,' 'The Man Who Invented Sin,' 'The Silence of the Valley,' 'Up the Bare Stairs'—to mention a few—exemplify considerable artistry and expert control of modern short story techniques."

"Although the tone in his stories is sometimes satiric," offered Henderson, O'Faolain "more often withholds judgement of his characters' actions or adopts the stance of an understanding observer. In this respect O'Faolain says he took Chekhov as his model and acknowledges that he also learned from Chekhov to de-emphasize plot, advance the action indirectly by implication, strive for compression, and suffuse his stories with a poetic mood." O'Faolain's reputation as an important modern author, Henderson concluded, "rests most firmly on his short stories," later efforts which were published in magazines such as Colliers and McCall's. "Their popular appeal, however, does not reduce his stature as a writer of serious fiction," the critic added. "Like [James] Joyce and [Frank] O'Connor, he took the short story as he received it from [Guy de] Maupassant and [Anton] Chekhov and transformed it into something uniquely his own and uniquely Irish."

O'Faolain continued to write until well into his eighties, and died in 1991. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Richard J. Thompson noted of the Irish writer that "O'Faolain's place in world letters is guaranteed by his short-story production, which will stand in quality besides the masters of the form from Edgar Allan Poe to Ernest Hemingway. In purely Irish terms he occupies a place of honor not just as a writer but as a literary groundbreaker, a social force, and a kind of national patriarch."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Benedict, Keily, Modern Irish Fiction: A Critique, Golden Eagle Books (Dublin, Ireland), 1950.

Butler, Pierce, Sean O'Faolain: A Study of the Short Fiction, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1993.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973, Volume 7, 1977, Volume 14, 1980.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 15: British Novelists, 1930–1959, 1983, Volume 162: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1915–1945, 1996.

Doyle, Paul A., Sean O'Faolain, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1969.

Harmon, Maurice, Sean O'Faolain: A Critical Introduction, University of Notre Dame Press, 1966.

O'Donnell, Donat, Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Irish Writers, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1952.

O'Faolain, Sean, Vive Moi! (autobiography), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1964.

Rippier, Joseph Storey, The Short Stories of Sean O'Faolain: A Study in Descriptive Technique, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 1976.