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LIAM O’ FLAHERTY was a
child of the nineteenth century, and a man of the twentieth. Born in
rural poverty, he died in urban comfort. Passionate in his love of nature,
he abhorred everything brutish in man. An exquisite writer of short
stories about man and beast on Ireland’s
western seaboard, ironically he is best known for The Informer, his novel
of squalid Communist intrigue in the back streets of Dublin (thanks largely to the famous
film version by his cousin John Ford). Yet Famine, calmly dispassionate
on the horrors of the Great Hunger, is regarded by all his readers as his
greatest work. He was a man with a divided nature; even the Gaelic
language of his childhood village was not the language his father wanted
in the home. Solitary, he tried for many years to gain a foothold in
crowded Hollywood.
An individualist to the core, spontaneous and restless, by inclination a
wanderer, he espoused the fervent Communism so typical of those early
twentieth-century writers who were filled with generosity and purity of
heart; he was still reading Sartre and Le Drapeau Rouge in the last years
of his life. Yet it was a cause that failed him, as it did so many other
admirers of Lenin and Trotsky. In touch to his nerve ends with the tides
and eddies of creation, he loathed with great bitterness all organised
religion, yet spent years studying for the priesthood. In the end he died
with the blessing of a priest, reconciled with God if not with the
institution he had so long rejected.
O’Flaherty was a
strange, often contradictory man, unique among his contemporaries in
Irish literature. In his writings we can see the beginnings of much that
is now being done in both Gaelic and Irish literature. Though often
neglected in the sweep of modern Anglo-American criticism, he was widely
appreciated on the continent; and his own love of France
and admiration for Russian literature suggest that he was more truly a
European writer. From the dying remnants of an ancient culture, from the
shattered fragments of a modern life, he composed the unities of his
art.
This book is published to
mark the centenary of Liam O’Flaherty’s birth. It is intended
to provide, through biographical commentary and extracts from his stories
and novels, together with appropriate illustrations, a recreation of his
varied experiences and his divided imaginative world. More than a decade
after his death, it may also introduce him to new and to younger readers.
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