Word: faolain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Performance. Said Sean O'Faolain: "The influence of the United States on Europe is the influence of a grandchild on his grandfather. This possibly will, if all goes well, be known in time as the Aeneas-Anchises complex, in grateful commemoration of the bravery, or obstinacy, of Aeneas in carrying his purblind sire out of the crumbling city of Troy...
When this spooky little novel appeared in England last year, it threw the critics into a tizzy. Elizabeth Bowen wrote: "This book, read in two hours, haunts me"-but she could not say why. Sean O'Faolain said: "It shakes the tapestry of life like a night-wind," but admitted he was "not quite sure what it is all about...
...Faolain, a Roman Catholic, is at his best in explaining the relationship between church and people. Under James I, he says, the persecution of Catholicism in Ireland began to make the priest a personification of nationalist resistance to England. This was intensified by such acts as Cromwell's edict that "any man who wanted to earn ?5 need but produce the head of a wolf or of a priest, it did not matter which." Hence, says O'Faolain, the attachment of the people to the clergy...
...Irish clergy, he thinks, have appeared not to reciprocate the people's regard. In explanation, he offers the fact that the Catholic seminary, established at Maynooth in 1795, was staffed by a number of French professors fleeing the terror of the French Revolution. O'Faolain concludes that their influence stamped generations of Irish priests with distrust of any rebellion against authority. Since the Irish themselves were incorrigibly rebellious, the odd end result, O'Faolain thinks, is "a permanent and positive clerical antipathy to the laity...
...Faolain's picture of modern Ireland, which he thinks is a good place to live, is far from the notions of the ould sod and the emerald isle which many Americans cherish. He sees a nation of peasants-become-freeholders, a nation slowly learning how to make the best of its position "at the end of the queue" of Europe. For the present, however, he strikes a balance: " [We] have no nightingales, but also have no serpents; no moles, also no ballet; no Communist intelligentsia, but also no Catholic intelligentsia...