Books: Irish Air

FAMINE—Liam O’Flaherty—Random House. ($2.50).

In the summer of 1845, on an Irish air long heavy with the smell of dung heaps, peat bogs and the personal reek of an ill-kempt and poverty-ridden citizenry, a new and more awful odor arose. Sulphurous, acrid, “like the smell of foul water in a sewer,” it came from the almost-ripened potato plants, lay so thick that in some places it was visible as a whitish cloud above them. Where it appeared, leaves turned first purplish-brown, then black; stems withered, so that they broke at the touch, oozing a pus-colored liquid; the potatoes, when dug, were soggy and black with putrescence, rank-smelling.

Modern specialists in plant diseases would recognize these ominous signs as symptoms of Phytophthora infestans, a species of fungus with rapid germinating properties and extremely virulent effects. To the half-savage, wholly uneducated peasantry, it was known simply as “the Blight,” and regarded as a hellish, heaven-sent scourge. Holy-water and incantation were the only remedies invoked against it. Its onset marked the beginning of perhaps the most bitter famine in post-medieval European history.

Ridden by heavy taxes and a feudal system of landlordism, pinched by the British corn laws (which put a high tariff on imported grain, in favor of England’s home-grown wheat), the Irish had been reduced to practical subsistence on the potato, and when that crop failed whole counties were left literally foodless. Governmental remedial machinery was slow, graft-ridden, stupidly conceived. While the famine lasted. 21,770 people died of starvation, the total Irish mortality for the five years that ended in 1851 was close upon a million. The two most important results were: a desperate stiffening of the rebelliousness already inflamed by Wolfe Tone. Emmet, O’Connell; a tide of emigration, chiefly to the U. S., that in the next 50 years cut Ireland’s population of 8,000,000 in half.

Laid in the thumb-shaped spur of rocky land that juts down from the county of Mayo along the west coast of Ireland, and with this period as background, Famine just fails of being the epic of struggle and suffering its author unquestionably designed it to be. But for readers strong-stomached enough to endure an unrelenting account of human misery. Famine is a powerful and at times wildly moving novel.

Brian Kilmartin, bald, bony, hawk-featured tenant farmer on the hills above the village of Crom; his sons Michael and Martin, and Martin’s newlywed wife Mary, are the principal characters. The story starts the year before the famine when the blight touched a tithe of the crop with the first dapplings of disaster. The damage was small that year, but it was enough to make the Kilmartins draw in their belts a little. Potatoes (dug fresh from the ground in summer, stored in fern-lined earthen pits through the winter; served boiled, with a bowlful of salt water to dip them in, for flavor) were their only food.

Once a year the cottage was thatched. Once a year the pigs were herded together, chickens basketed, all brought down to the market fair at Crom to be sold. The money was hardly in Brian’s pocket before it was out again—to the landlord’s agent, to the local storekeeper. The rest of life was the slow progression of mortality. Michael, long consumptive, died, and the family impoverished itself still further buying poitheen (mountain whiskey) for the wake. Mary birthed her first child. Brian, feeling his age coming on him, turned over the farm to Martin and retired to the chimney corner.

Meantime, in the village, on a slightly higher class level, the basic conflict of ideas was, conversationally at least, being thrashed out—with Father Roche, mousy parish priest, who believed in God but wouldn’t run counter to established authority; Father Geelan, his hardily nationalistic curate; Chadwick the sottish land-agent, British-bred and aghast at the savage hatred and hateful savagery he saw around him, as their several spokesmen. It was not until the next year, when the blight struck and utter famine followed, that the classes met head on and the conflicts emerged in action.

Not until then, too, does the book attain its real power. Chadwick, roiled by an unrewarded infatuation for a village girl and enraged by the cropless tenants’ failure to meet their rent payments, decides on evictions, appears one night with a gang of huskies armed with crowbars to tear the cottages down. Reprisals follow the evictions, and as Brian tries to keep hold of his farm and Mary to keep life in her baby, the rest becomes a kind of Hogarthian nightmare—tumorous faces and hunger-bloated bellies, snatchings at carrion, mad killings—a nightmare from which, by a device distinctly deus ex machina, Mary and child are rescued, to be smuggled with Martin aboard an emigrant vessel, bound for America and freedom.

Neither Author O’Flaherty’s homely, leisurely approach to his story nor its salvaged ending jibes with its swift, brutal panorama. The epic mood in Irish literature, though partly revived by Joyce, seems largely to have died with the kings it celebrated. But there still remains to some Irish writers a gift for infusing the most unwelcoming materials—dirt, ugliness, diseases, naked human misery—with a kind of wild and perilous beauty. Among those writers O’Flaherty is one.