Books: A Corner of the Universe

VIVE MOI! by Sean O’Faolain. 374 pages. Little, Brown. $6.75.

When Irish Novelist Sean O’Faolain (pronounced O’Faytawn) was 20 and a student at the University College in Cork, he wrote a poem containing the phrase “Mother Ireland’s teeming navel”; he was subsequently astounded, he recalls, to learn from a medical student that in the history of medicine “no mother had yet been known to eject a baby through her belly-button.”

That anecdote suggests the innocence in the Irish character that is both appealing and maddening, and Novelist O’Faolain knows as much about it as any Irishman now working: “Ireland is learning, as Americans say, the hard way. Ireland has clung to her youth, indeed to her childhood, longer and more tenaciously than any other country in Europe.”

O’Faolain’s autobiography is the presumably unfinished story (“Thus far: Dublin, February 1964” reads the final notation in the book) of how one Irishman slowly took in the world “in nuclear bits and pieces,” and became a writer in the process.

Withering Sirocco. In the city of Cork at the turn of the century, the O’Faolains were “shabby genteels at the lowest possible social level, always living on the edge of false shames and stupid affectations.” O’Faolain’s father was a police constable in the Royal Irish Constabulary; his mother was a farm girl, a deeply pious woman whose “religious melancholy withered everything it touched, like a sirocco.” The ambition of both of them was to see their three sons reach “the highest state in life that anyone could achieve”—that of a Gentleman. No one of the brothers quite made it to Gentleman, but two of them did well enough so that the family no longer had to “think small beer of themselves.” One became a priest, the other a revenue inspector in the British Civil Service. The youngest, Sean, opted for writing—a decision that his mother never quite forgave him.

His writer’s instinct was first honed at the stage door of the Cork Opera House, where every Sunday afternoon he witnessed “the arrival of forests, waterfalls, mountains, white douds, paneled halls, cannons and candelabras.” Out of them he fashioned “highly emotional images of the Admirable Life,” undisturbed by the fact that the stagehands who handled the props might be “Lazy Casey or Georgie Cantwell, who might, tomorrow morning, be holding up the street corner by the quay waiting for the pub to open.”

In the parish church, young Sean would kneel by the hour before a “full-sized carved and colored figuration of Purgatory,” praying most particularly for “the girl highest in the group, always almost redeemed, her long, fair hair always falling to her waist, her manacles always already parted, her uppermost hand always just out of reach of the Divine Child’s foot.” O’Faolain’s father was “absolutely loyal to the Empire, as only a born hero-worshiper can be,” and after Sunday services Sean would accompany him to the British army barracks on Wellington Road to watch the regiment parade and “when the drums rolled and the brass shook the air, I could hear the saber clash, the hoofbeats, the rifle fire of The Dash for Khartoum, With Kitchener in the Soudan. My father would nod at us sagely and proudly. We belonged.”

Impaled and Trodden. It took him nearly 30 years, says O’Faolain, to free himself by “slow, tentative, instinctive” steps from the “soft smother of the provincial featherbed.” The first step took him to the university, where he learned “the hot and vivid [Irish] pleasures of aimless disputation, of purely contentious shindyism.” A second, more important, step took him in 1920 into the Irish Republican Army. His experiences in the I.R.A., first fighting the British and later the troops of the Irish Free State during the civil war, left him with a “savage disillusion with Ireland’s ineptitude.” At 26, he won a graduate fellowship to Harvard and departed Ireland, convinced that “I don’t care if I never see the bloody place again.”

He cared a great deal more than he thought. By the time his two years at Harvard were up, he knew that he “belonged to an old, small, much-trodden country, where every field, every path, every ruin had its memories, where :very last corner had its story.” It took lim seven more years to get back, but he was back to stay. If his book is “a no to my own boyhood, my own youth, even to my own parents,” it is a yes to “the basic experiment with life” that made him a writer. For better or worse, he notes, he remains “impaled on one green corner of the universe.”