O'Flaherty, Liam 1896–1984

PERSONAL: Born August 28, 1896, on Inishmore in the Aran Islands, Ireland; died September 7, 1984, in Dublin, Ireland; son of Michael and Margaret (Ganly) O'Flaherty; married Margaret Barrington (a writer), February, 1926 (marriage ended, 1932); children: Pegeen O'Flaherty O'Sullivan, Joyce O'Flaherty Rathbone. Education: Attended Rockwell College, 1908–12, Blackrock College, 1912–13, and University College, 1913–14.

CAREER: Writer. Founder, Irish Communist Party, 1922. Worked as a miner, lumberjack, hotel porter, and bank clerk in the United States and Canada. Military service: Served in Irish Guards during World War I.

AWARDS, HONORS: James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1926, for The Informer; honorary doctorate in literature from National University of Ireland, 1974; Allied Irish Bank—Irish Academy of Letters Award for literature, 1979.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Thy Neighbor's Wife, J. Cape (London, England), 1923, Boni & Liveright (New York, NY), 1924, Lythway Press, 1972.

The Black Soul, J. Cape (London, England), 1924, Boni & Liveright (New York, NY), 1925, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1996.

The Informer, Knopf (New York, NY), 1925, reprinted, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1999.

Mr. Gilhooley, J. Cape (London, England), 1926, Har-court (New York, NY), 1927, reprinted, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1991.

The Assassin, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1928, Dufour, 1983.

The House of Gold, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1929.

The Return of the Brute, Mandrake Press (London, England), 1929, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1930, reprinted, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1998.

The Puritan, J. Cape (London, England), 1931, Har-court (New York, NY), 1932, reprinted, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 2001.

Skerrett, Long & Smith, 1932, Dufour (New York, NY), 1988.

The Martyr, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1933.

Hollywood Cemetery, Gollancz (London, England), 1935.

Famine, Random House (New York, NY), 1937, reprinted, David Godine (Boston, MA), 1982.

Land, Random House (New York, NY), 1946.

Insurrection, Gollancz (London, England), 1950, Dufour, 1988.

SHORT STORIES

Spring Sowing, J. Cape (London, England), 1924, Knopf (New York, NY), 1926, reprinted, Books for Libraries Press (Freeport, NY), 1973.

Civil War, Archer (London, England), 1925.

The Child of God, Archer (London, England), 1926.

The Terrorist, Archer (London, England), 1926.

The Tent and Other Stories, J. Cape (London, England), 1926.

The Fairy Goose and Other Stories, Faber & Gwyer (London, England), 1927, Gaige, 1928.

Red Barbara and Other Stories, Faber & Gwyer (London, England), 1928, Gaige, 1928.

The Mountain Tavern and Other Stories, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1929, reprinted, Books for Libraries Press (Freeport, NY), 1971.

The Ecstasy of Angus, Joiner & Steele, 1931, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1978.

The Wild Swan and Other Stories, Joiner & Steele, 1932.

The Short Stories of Liam O'Flaherty, J. Cape (London, England), 1937, abridged edition, New American Library (New York, NY), 1970.

Two Lovely Beasts and Other Stories, Gollancz (London, England), 1948, Devin-Adair, 1950.

Duil, Sairseal Agus Dill, 1953.

The Stories of Liam O'Flaherty, Devin-Adair, 1956.

Selected Stories, New American Library (New York, NY), 1958.

Short Stories, Brown, Watson, 1961.

Irish Portraits: Fourteen Short Stories, Sphere (London, England), 1970.

More Short Stories of Liam O'Flaherty, New English Library (London, England), 1971.

The Wounded Cormorant and Other Stories, Norton (New York, NY), 1973.

The Pedlar's Revenge and Other Stories, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1976.

All Things Come of Age: A Rabbit Story, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1977.

The Wave and Other Stories, Longman (London, England), 1980.

The Collected Short Stories of Liam O'Flaherty, 3 volumes, edited by A.A. Kelly, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1999.

OTHER

Darkness (short story; limited edition), Archer (London, England), 1926.

The Life of Tim Healy, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1927.

A Tourist's Guide to Ireland, Mandrake Press (London, England), 1929, Irish American Book Company (Niwot, CO), 1998.

Joseph Conrad: An Appreciation, E. Lahr (London, England), 1930, Haskell House, 1973.

Two Years (autobiography), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1930.

I Went to Russia (autobiography), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1931.

A Cure for Unemployment, E. Lahr (London, England), 1931.

Shame the Devil (autobiography), Grayson, 1934.

Devil's Playground (screenplay), Columbia, 1937.

Last Desire (screenplay), Lumen Films, 1939.

The Test of Courage, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1977.

The Wilderness, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1978, Dodd, 1987.

The Letters of Liam O'Flaherty, selected and edited by A.A. Kelly, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1996.

Also coauthor of screenplay "The Informer," based on O'Flaherty's novel of the same title, 1935.

ADAPTATIONS: O'Flaherty's novel The Informer was filmed three times, most notably in 1935, in an adaptation directed by John Ford and starring Victor McLaglen.

SIDELIGHTS: Criticism of Irish twentieth-century writer Liam O'Flaherty's fiction is marked by a number of paradoxes. He has been both praised and condemned for his "Irishness" and his "anti-Irishness," his naturalism and his expressionism, and his existential awareness and his romantic idealism. While the sheer quantity of his writing could account for such differences in interpretation, the fact that they occur in discussions of the same works implies, rather, that O'Flaherty is a writer of greater complexity than is often acknowledged. In The English Novel in Transition, 1885–1940, William C. Frierson suggested that "the author's writings reflect the chaos of his life." And for a writer who has lived as everything from a hotel porter to a revolutionary fighter, wandering to places as far from Ireland as Canada and Rio de Janeiro, the life and the subsequent fiction could be chaotic indeed.

The setting for most of O'Flaherty's novels and short stories is Ireland, and his central characters are often Irish peasants deeply rooted in the land. James H. O'Brien pointed out in his Liam O'Flaherty that "collectively O'Flaherty's short stories describe two or three generations of life in the Aran Islands and the west of Ireland; perhaps they reach back even further, so little did life change in those areas until the end of the nineteenth century." Moreover, on the basis of a few of his novels—especially The Informer—he is thought of as a novelist of the Irish revolution.

On the other hand, as an early reviewer of The Informer was quoted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as commenting, O'Flaherty "never makes the common error … of falling into sentiment about Ireland or slipping out of the world of reality into that non-existent world of petulant, half-godlike and utterly fictitious Irishmen that other writers have created out of their false vision and saccharine fancy." Rather, he was part of a second wave of modern Irish writers, along with James Joyce and Sean O'Casey, who rebelled against the Celtic-revivalist ideals of Yeats and Synge. The fact that O'Flaherty was ultimately forced to leave Ireland and take up residence in England further separates him from the Irish literary tradition.

Nevertheless, one aspect of O'Flaherty's fiction grounds him solidly in an Irish tradition, specifically an oral tradition, and this is his ability as a storyteller. As O'Brien explained, "In both novels and short stories, a Gaelic influence is manifest in the directness of narrative, the simplicity of language, and an elemental concern with primary emotions." In a review of The Tent and Other Stories reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Edward Shanks saw this influence at work and remarked that O'Flaherty "sees directly and puts down directly what he sees. His best pieces, such as 'The Conger Eel,' have the character of pictures, simple and moving because they mean no more than they say."

A number of critics have taken exception to O'Fla-herty's classification as a naturalist. O'Brien believed that the writer's "purpose is not to present a realistic or naturalistic view of the Irish peasant…. Instead, O'Flaherty generally uses the simplicity of peasant life to depict elemental reactions and instincts." Frierson similarly wrote: "Although naturalistic in his view of human depravity, in his brutality, and in his insistence upon physical reactions, Mr. O'Flaherty is too forceful to be pessimistic, too violent and too melodramatic to present us with a study of humanity. His distortions are those of the expressionist."

The expressionistic representation of violence and emotion is a characteristic other critics note. Frierson explained it further: "Everywhere there is primitive physical violence, reckless impulse, greed, and cruelty; and the full force of the author's dramatic fervor is exerted by riveting our attention upon physical manifestation of the strongest emotions." H.E. Bates, writing in The Modern Short Story, maintained that O'Flaherty, "like [French writer Guy de] Maupassant, saw life in a strong light, dramatically, powerfully. Energy alone is not enough, but the sensuous poetic energy of O'Flaherty was like a flood; the reader was carried away by it and with it, slightly stunned and exalted by the experience."

These different aspects of O'Flaherty's fiction—the Irishman turning away from yet remaining tied to Ireland, the realistic storyteller imbuing his tales with an intense expression of human emotion—are brought together by John Zneimer's interpretation. Comparing O'Flaherty to Dostoevski, Sartre, and Camus, Zneimer, in his The Literary Vision of Liam O'Flaherty, placed the Irish writer in an existentialist, as well as Irish, tradition. Because the Ireland in which O'Flaherty lived was an Ireland in which the old values and dreams were being destroyed by twentieth-century reality, O'Flaherty's Irishness and his existential awareness are inextricably tied. As Zneimer maintained, "He speaks in his novels about traditions that have failed in a world that is falling apart, about desperate men seeking meaning through violent acts." Thus Zneimer viewed O'Fla-herty's concern both with naturalistic details and the turbulence of human emotions as products of "his increasing awareness of man's mortality and ultimate annihilation in a universe that has no meaning and offers no consolation."

O'Flaherty turned his art, Zneimer concluded, into a religious quest, making his novels "spiritual battlegrounds whereon his characters … struggle to find meaning" in a meaningless world. O'Brien perceived this struggle, too, though he expressed it differently: "Beneath O'Fla-herty's absorption in the physical, external world lies a belief in the evolutionary process, of men, especially artists, finding fulfillment in the struggle for perfection." In contrast, his short fiction reflected the author's love of Aran life; as Booklist contributor Brad Hooper noted of the three-volume The Collected Stories of Liam O'Flaherty: "What a great yarn spinner he is, in the best Irish tradition of profiling exuberant characters in a charming style."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bates, H. E., The Modern Short Story, T. Nelson, 1945.

Cahalan, James M., Liam O'Flaherty: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1991.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 5, 1976, Volume 34, 1985.

Costello, Peter, Liam O'Flaherty's Ireland, Wolfhound Press, 1996.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 36: British Novelists, 1890–1929: Modernists, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1984, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Frierson, William C., The English Novel in Transition, 1885–1940, Cooper Square, 1965.

Frigerg, Hedda, An Old and a New: The Split World of Liam O'Flaherty's Novels, Uppsala (Stockholm, Sweden), 1996.

Jefferson, George, Liam O'Flaherty: A Descriptive Bibliography of His Works, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1993.

Kelly, A.A., The Letters of Liam O'Flaherty, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1996.

O'Brien, James H., Liam O'Flaherty, Bucknell University Press, 1970.

Zneimer, John, The Literary Vision of Liam O'Flaherty, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1971.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 2000, Brad Hooper, review of The Collected Stories, p. 1984.

Library Journal, August, 1998, Michael Rogers, review of Return of the Brute, p. 142; August, 2000, Den-ise J. Stankovics, review of The Collected Stories, p. 165.

London Mercury, August, 1926.

New Statesman and Nation, January 21, 1933.

New York Times Book Review, August 30, 1987.

Publishers Weekly, November 29, 1991, p. 46.

Spectator, October 3, 1925.

Time, September 17, 1984, p. 82.

Times Literary Supplement, January 1, 1982.

World of Hibernia, winter, 2000, John Boland, review of The Collected Stories of Liam O'Flaherty, p. 19.

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, September 10, 1984.

Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1984.

New York Times, September 9, 1984.

Time, September 17, 1984.