O'FAOLAIN, Sean

Nationality: Irish. Born: John Francis Whelan in Cork, 22 February 1900. Education: University College, Dublin, B.A. in English 1921, M.A. in Irish 1924, M.A. in English 1926; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Commonwealth fellow, 1926-28; John Harvard fellow, 1928-29), 1926-29, M.A. 1929. Military Service: Served in the Irish Republican Army, 1918-21: director of publicity, 1923. Family: Married Eileen Gould in 1928 (died 1988); one daughter, the writer Julia O'Faolain, and one son. Career: Teacher at Christian Brothers School, Ennis, 1924; lecturer in English, Boston College and Princeton University, New Jersey, 1929; lecturer in English, St. Mary's College, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, Middlesex, 1929-33; full-time writer from 1933; editor, the Bell, Dublin, 1940-46; director, Arts Council of Ireland, 1957-59. Awards: D.Litt.: Trinity College, Dublin, 1957. Died: 21 April 1991.

Publications

Short Stories

Midsummer Night Madness and Other Stories. 1932; as Stories of O'Faolain, 1970.

There's a Birdie in the Cage (story). 1935.

A Born Genius (story). 1936.

A Purse of Coppers: Short Stories. 1937.

Teresa and Other Stories. 1947; as The Man Who Invented Sin and Other Stories, 1948.

The Finest Stories. 1957; as The Stories, 1958.

I Remember! I Remember! 1961.

The Heat of the Sun: Stories and Tales. 1966.

The Talking Trees. 1970.

Foreign Affairs and Other Stories. 1976.

Selected Stories. 1978.

The Collected Stories 1-3. 3 vols., 1980-82.

Novels

A Nest of Simple Folk. 1933.

Bird Alone. 1936.

Come Back to Erin. 1940.

And Again? 1979.

Plays

She Had to Do Something (produced 1937). 1938.

The Train to Banbury (broadcast 1947). In Imaginary Conversations, edited by Rayner Heppenstall, 1948.

Radio Play:

The Train to Banbury, 1947.

Other

The Life Story of Eamon De Valera. 1933.

Constance Markievicz; or, The Average Revolutionary: A Biography. 1934; revised edition, 1968.

King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O'Connell. 1938.

De Valera: A Biography. 1939.

An Irish Journey. 1940.

The Great O'Neill: A Biography of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone 1550-1616. 1942.

The Story of Ireland. 1943.

The Irish: A Character Study. 1947; revised edition, 1969.

The Short Story. 1948.

A Summer in Italy. 1949.

Newman's Way: The Odyssey of John Henry Newman. 1952.

South to Sicily. 1953; as An Autumn in Italy, 1953.

The Vanishing Hero: Studies in Novelists of the Twenties. 1956.

Vive Moi! (autobiography). 1964.

Editor, Lyrics and Satires from Toni Moore. 1929.

Editor, The Autobiography of Theobald Wolfe Tone. 1937.

Editor, The Silver Branch: A Collection of the Best Old Irish Lyrics. 1938.

Editor, Handy Andy (abridgement) by Samuel Lover. 1945.

Editor, Short Stories: A Study in Pleasure. 1961.

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Critical Studies:

O'Faolain: A Critical Introduction by Maurice Harmon, 1966, revised edition, 1985; O'Faolain by Paul A. Doyle, 1968; The Short Stories of O'Faolain: A Study in Descriptive Techniques by Joseph Storey Rippier, 1976; "O'Faolain Issue" of Irish University Review, Spring 1976; "Sean at Eighty" by Julia O'Faolain, in Fathers: Reflections by Daughters edited by Ursula Owen, 1983; O'Faolain: A Critical Introduction by Maurice Harmon, 1985; O'Faolain's Irish Vision by Richard Bonaccorso, 1987; Sean O'Faolain: A Study of the Short Fiction by Pierce Butler, 1993; Sean O'Faolain by Maurice Harmon, 1994.

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Sean O'Faolain's first collection of stories seems to romanticize events that take place during the Anglo-Irish War and the Civil War—escapes, a kidnapping, an assassination, bomb making, military engagements. But they are not so much evocations of youthful rebellion as condemnations of rebel irresponsibility and violence. O'Faolain, once an idealistic rebel, recaptures that idealism in the earliest story, "Fugue," but the final story, "The Patriot," clearly states his preference for love and a stable existence.

In that first collection he distances himself from rebellion. For years, through stories, novels, historical biographies, and articles, he tried to understand the forces that drove him to give himself passionately to revolutionary violence. His second collection of stories, A Purse of Coppers, is a dispassionate examination of the Ireland that emerged from the revolution. In this collection he relies more on suggestion, indirection, and compression, and he is at ease with the conventions of story writing. The stories are linked by the theme of loneliness, a metaphor for the ways in which Irish society restricts individual development. Every man, Hanafin says in "Admiring the Scenery," lives out his own imagination of himself and every imagination needs its background—not just any background but a context in which he can reach his capacity as a whole man. It is a characteristic of these stories that men are shown to exist in a cul-de-sac.

O'Faolain's alienation from Irish society prevented him from seeing people in a more complex manner. But through his biography of Daniel O'Connell, King of the Beggars, he came to recognize the convoluted nature of the Irish mind. He accepted in O'Connell the blend of the admirable and the disgusting and saw that as a true measure of the man. He began to explore human nature for its own sake, to delight in it, to satirize it. After the war, when his horizons expanded, he enlarged his canvas. He liked to examine so-called ethnic traits and to reveal that the stereotype was not always accurate: the licentious Italian in "The Sweet Colleen" is more chaste than the Irish maiden; the amorous Frenchman in "The Faithless Wife" is much slower at getting the Irish woman to bed than she expects.

O'Faolain moved away from peasant life in his story "Lovers of the Lake," an account of a pilgrimage made by a successful Dublin surgeon and his well-to-do mistress. Along the way he reveals the complexities of human nature and differences between the sexes. A similar recognition of subliminal and ancestral forces permeates "The Silence of the Valley," a story about the wonder of remote western regions in Ireland where remnants of the older life linger on.

One of the most remarkable aspects of O'Faolain's work is that he improved with age. The six collections published between 1962 and 1982, including the six previously unpublished stories in Collected Stories, reveal a writer at the top of his form. He bursts through the conventions of the short story as he had discussed them in The Short Story, writing complex, expansive stories and episodic, more leisurely tales. He packs both with incident and detail, and he turns their themes over and over, ever fascinated by human eccentricity and excess, by emotional shifts and feints. He can be mocking, exaggerating appearance, gesture, language, and response, as in "Falling Rocks, Narrowing Road, Cul-de-Sac, Stop"; or he can be exactly tender, as in "The Talking Trees," in which a little boy races down a street after he has seen the beauty of a girl's naked body, his head alive with images: "Like birds. Like stars. Like music."

The beginnings of this late flowering are seen in I Remember! I Remember!, in the troubling persistence of memories for reasons impossible to understand. In "Love's Young Dream" the narrator recreates his youthful attachment to two girls with the aches and hopes, the longings and the despairs of adolescence. In "A Touch of Autumn in the Air" O'Faolain makes the point that life has to be imagined. One girl hoards facts; her sister, like O'Faolain, uses facts to create an imagined world in which to live her life. One is free, the other trapped.

His characters often pursue the unattainable. In "An Outside Inside Complex" Bertie Bolger desires to be part of a world seen through a window, but when he succeeds in possessing that world and its desirable occupant, it is the world outside, seen through her window, that fills him with longing. One of O'Faolain's favorite characters is a sophisticated, cosmopolitan male—educated, traveled, analytical, a lover of female beauty. But in his pursuit of beauty he is often deceived and disappointed as much by his own lack of guile and timidity as by the woman's reluctance to be won. Through this attractive, amusing figure O'Faolain can demonstrate his fundamental belief that humans are endlessly varied and fascinating.

—Maurice Harmon

See the essays on "Lovers of the Lake" and "The Man Who Invented Sin."