NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Geimhreadh/Winter 1999

John Cronin
Brother of the More Famous Flann: Ciarán Ó Nualláin
Gearóid Denvir
The Irish Language in the New Millennium
Thomas McCarthy
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
David Krause
Connolly and Pearse: The Triumph of Failure?
Maria Keaton
The Mother’s Tale: Maternal Agency in Juno and the Paycock
Andrew J. Haggerty
Stained Glass and Censorship: The Suppression of Harry Clarke’s Geneva Window, 1931
Adrian Frazier
Fratricidal Fictions: George and Maurice Moore
Conrad Brunström
Thomas Sheridan and the Evil Ends of Writing
Daniel Tobin
Irish-American Poetry and the Question of Tradition
Léirmheasanna: Reviews
Cover: Clúdach
Nuacht faoi Údair: News of Authors

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
Gaeilgoirí, connoisseurs of satire, and practioners of Dublin begrudgery revere Brian O’Nolan—alias Brother Barnabus, Flann O’Brien, or Myles na Gopaleen—for his humors in the Irish Times and for An Béal Bocht, alias The Poor Mouth. The brother of Brian O’Nolan was also a writer in Irish, and under his own name. As Prof. John Cronin recounts here, Ciarán Ó Nualláin’s writing career paralleled his brother’s, and was overshadowed by it. A founder of the journal Inniu, Ciarán published a novel, Oíche i nGleanna na nGealt (1939); a detective fantasy, Eachtraí Pharthaláin Mhic Mhórna (1944); two collections of newspaper pieces titled Amaidí (1951, 1983); and a memoir of Brian’s childhood and youth, Óige an Dearthár (1973), just lately printed in a translation by the late Róisín O’Nolan (1998). As Prof. Cronin reveals, Ciarán’s memoir tells rather less about "the Brother" and rather more about the whole O’Nolan family during the Free State years and, especially, about the father of them all—Michael Vincent O’Nolan.

As vernacular of the people and the first official language of the Republic of Ireland, as well as a thriving medium for literary and scholarly discourse, Gaeilge will soon enter into its third millenium—like the other Celtic languages of the European Union. That longevity answers millenarian prophecies of the tongue’s ultimate eclipse. Here, Gearóid Denvir delineates both the threats that give those forebodings substance and the efforts that lately have substantiated hopes for the language. In Ireland, despite the language’s offcial status, Irish must yet contest with the economic and political hegemony of English. Even so, Ireland’s role in the European Union and her "Celtic Tiger" economy have created opportunities for the language’s increased use and esteem. The burgeoning of the Gaeilscoileanna movement through the length of Ireland—from Belfast down through Dublin to Cork—provides a bright example of the language’s promise. An energetic educator, poet, and scholar, Gearóid Denvir lately published Amhráin Choilm de Bhailís (1996).

The poetry of John Montague, Eamon Grennan, and lately Greg Delanty, reveals that writing in the United States has been enriched in past few decades by many Irish poets who have flown west to teach and live "American" for a year or two, and sometimes for a lifetime. This suite of poets from the Waterford-born poet Thomas McCarthy begins in the precincts of St. Paul, Minnesota, at the end of a year of seminars and after the courthouse bombing in Oklahoma City. The language and lineation of those poems hin t at the following sequence of Cork quatrains—each a kinds of snapshot taken from the heights of Montenotte overlooking the Lee and the once dense lorry traffic of the Lower Glanmire Road. Thomas McCarthy’s essays have been recently collected in Gardens of Remembrance (1998). Poems from his five collections have just been published by London’s Anvil Poetry Press under the curious title Mr. Dineen’s Careful Parade (1999).

Like the linguistic life of Ireland, and perhaps with as much intention, the political life of Ireland appears replete with contraries and paradoxes—with thorough ironies that are the true stuff of human history as well as fiction. Not the least of these paradoxes is that Padraic Pearse and James Connolly should together have lead the Easter Rising. Here David Krause develops that contrary, and others, in reaction both to present revisionist historiography and to hagiographical representations of Connolly and Pearse from the editorial hand of Desmond Ryan. The contradiction that underscores the historical, and Yeatsian, poairing of Pearse and Connolly comes clear in Prof. Krause’s dialectic. Krause poses Connolly’s humanistic socialism against Pearse’s nationalist mysticism at the point which, in 1915, Connolly gainsaid the need of Ireland’s ancient earth "to be warmed with the red wine of millions of lives." This essay forms part of Prof. Krause’s forthcoming reconsideration of Irish national and literary themes to be titled The Regeneration of Ireland: Renaissance and Revolution.

Sean O’Casey’s famed Dublin trilogy dramatizes on human ground what present critical perspectives on Irish literature and politics often show—that the rhetoric of communal aspiration and contention may easily manacle humane and altruistic instincts. Indeed, O’Casey shows this in Juno and the Paycock when the labor agitator Devane discards Juno’s daughter Mary, or when the Republican "Mobilizer" lays the patriotic groundwork for the killing of Juno’s Johnny. By turns comic then tragic, the dramatic and ethical focus in O’Casey’s play falls on Juno, and here Maria Keaton lays out how O’Casey’s developing characterization of Juno also reveals Juno’s painful acquisition of a renovated maternal ethos. In discarding Boyle, in empathizing with Mrs. Tancred, in cleaving to her pregnant and unwed daughter, Juno frees herself of the masculinist rhetoric of Irish insurrection and conflict and finds, subsisting in the maternal, a more personal and humane life. Maria Keaton will shortly complete her doctorate at Marquette University.

Ireland’s first Free State government found itself bound by the rhetoric of contrary aspirations many times in its history. Dr. Andrew J. Haggerty delineates one instance of that conflict here. Seeking to establish Ireland’s presence as European nation, in 1925 William T. Cosgrave commissioned from the stained glass artist Harry Clarke a window to adorn the International Labor building at the League of Nations in Geneva. In doing so, the Cumann na nGael government gave prestige value to Irish artistry. Clarke’s execution in fin de siècle style of the windows’ eight panels sanctioned the Irish writer—from Lady Gregory to Seumas O’Sullivan—including Liam O’Flaherty, from whose work Clarke selected an erotic scene from Mr. Gilhooley. By the end of the 1920s, O’Flaherty had built up an onus of moral disapproval in official circles. So, as Dr. Haggerty shows from government and private correspondence, Cosgrave found his office caught between valuing public virtue and artistic sophistication. In 1931, after Clarke had died of tuberculosis, the Irish government returned the completed Geneva Window to his widow. A recent graduate of the University of Miami, Dr. Haggerty has presented papers on Irish censorship at annual meetings of the Comparative Literature Conference and the American Conference for Irish Studies.

As all readers of Hail and Farewell’s three volumes know, George Moore of Moore Hall—the novelist-provocateur of the Irish Revival—had a teasing tongue, and that reputation soured relations with his own family, particularly his beloved brother Maurice. As Adrian Frazier tells the tale, in the midst of Byzantine negotiations with the Congested Districts Board to break up the Moore estate in County Mayo, George Moore offended his brother by providing a foreword to An Irish Gentleman (1913), Maurice Moore’s memoir of their father. In it, George broke Anglo-Irish proprieties and Edwardian pieties by intimating that their father had committed suicide, and Maurice took such offense that relations between the brothers could not be mended. This incident figures in Prof. Adrian Frazier’s forthcoming Yale biography George Moore, 1852–1933 not simply because it entails the fate of Moore Hall demesne, or because it reveals Moore making fiction of familial fact in so small a thing as a preface, but because it shows Moore sacrificing his affection for Maurice to the art of the suggestive sentence. Adrian Frazier is also the author of Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (1990).

Ascendency Ireland, the ancien régime of such estates as Moore Hall, gave rise to the reforming patriotism of the Protestant Nation, and in Dublin to a public rhetoric that, embodied in men like Henry Grattan, briefly rendered Georgian Dublin an almost independent capital. In this setting, as Conrad Brunstrom reveals here, the actor-manager Thomas Sheridan, father to the more famous Richard Brinsley Sheridan, insisted in his British Education (1756) and Lectures on Elocution (1762) that civic discord and political hypocrisy derived from the failure of societies to use spoken language theatrically—that is, in a practices, intentional, disciplined way—rather than to mimic the artifices of written language. This is the civic function of theater and acting. More tellingly in respect to Dublin’s nascent nationalism, and anticipating the Dublin philologue George Bernard Shaw, Sheridan promoted the teaching of the received enunciation of English as a way to break the power of class and regional distinctions. A scholar of British literature of the eighteenth century, Dr. Brunstrom organized the 1998 Eighteenth Century Ireland conference and has published in the Scottish journal Romanticism.

Even before Thoreau noted the coming of the Famine Irish into Massachusetts, the Irish in the United States had contributed their tales of assimilation and accomplishment to American fiction. Indeed, since the publication of Charles Fanning’s The Irish Voice in America, that fiction has become a genre—the Irish-American novel—having its own distinct rules and rewards. Yet, despite the high repute of Irish poetry in two languages, Irish-American poetry has yet to find definition. Today, as Daniel Tobin points out here, there are more Irish poets writing in America than have before been counted. Likewise, there are more American poets of direct Irish ancestry publishing today than counted before. Tobin’s own collection Where the World Is Made (1999) is one example of that accomplishment. Moreover, distinguished American poets—from Walt Whitman to Wallace Stevens, from Marianne Moore to Galway Kinnell—have drawn on Irish and Irish-American themes. Even so, no anthology has yet chanced to define by example and implied critcal precept the fact and idea of the Irish-American poem. Daniel Tobin is the author of Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1999).

Clúdach: Cover
Cool and clear are adjectives that describe well the colorings and brushwork of Patrick Hennessy’s artistry. Born in Cork in 1915, Hennessy studied in Dundee, Scotland. Returning to Cork in 1939, where he lived and painted until his death in 1980, Hennessy became known for his portraits—notably Elizabeth Bowen at Bowenscourt (1955)—and his still lifes. The painting on the cover of this issue of New Hibernia Review, evocatively titled The Silent Room (c. 1955), displays Hennessy’s traits as a painter. Neither a pure nature morte nor a self-evident portrait, The Silent Room is a large (90.5 x 101 cm) oil on canvas. In this painting, the old-fashioned trick of trompe l’oeil inculcates in the viewer the afterthought that this is, in fact, a self-portrait. From that derives the painting’s essential melancholy, a melancholy underscored by the cool eastern light falling through the deep window embrasure.

But those images—a table cluttered by an unlit lamp and books, the door ajar and unlocked, the corner whatnot dimly surmounted by a Staffordshire couple—are all reflections in the overmantle mirror into which the painter looked without recording the reflection of his own image. Quite literally, the objects of the room as well as those on the Victorian cast iron mantle are seen through the artist. The mantle shelf offers a still life resembling Hennessy’s Kitchen Shelf (c. 1961), and both paintings share Hennessy’s domestic totems—the budding rose, the cobalt blue Optrex bottle, the highly glazed and empty teacup. By teasing the viewer’s taste for plot and event, Hennessy’s reticence and exactitude here create the equivalent of an enigmatically self-ironic short story of the Irish 1950s. This is the last of New Hibernia Review’s covers drawn from the McGrath Bequest to the Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork. We thank Peter Murray, the gallery’s director, and his staff for the opportunity to present these Irish paintings to our readers.
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