Word: faolains
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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VIVE MOI! by Sean O'Faolain. It took this Irish novelist 30 years to come to terms with his provincial Irish upbringing; in an engaging autobiography, he records the dilemma of a man forever "impaled on one green corner of the universe...
VIVE MOI!, By Sean O'Faolain. The Irish novelist and essayist writes his autobiography with a candor that few writers can quite achieve in cold type. The result is a fever chart of an overworked Catholic conscience, and a collage of the scenes of an Irish childhood...
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...
...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...
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...