Word: faolains
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...IRISH (180 pp.)-Sean O'Faolain-Devin-Adair...
Irish Novelist Sean O'Faolain (A Nest of Simple Folk and The Great O'Neill) would never call himself a professional historian; his new book pretends to no scholarly grandeur and contains little beyond what O'Faolain had at his finger tips. But there have been few offhand studies of Irish history that manage to be so illuminating or so urbane...
...Faolain (pronounced O'Fay-lawn), a great test of the Irish came in the Middle Ages when Ireland tried to graft monastic learning on to the old Celtic sense of the supernatural. For a while Ireland seemed to be evolving a great world culture-what Arnold Toynbee has called the "abortive western Celtic civilization." The new culture languished (because, O'Faolain makes plain, the Irish Celts were and always have been recalcitrant to the point of laziness), though the wild memory of it persisted, caught in such songs as Yeats...
Says O'Faolain, in further judgment: "The greatest curse of Ireland has not been English invasions or English misgovernment; it has been the exaggeration of Irish virtues-our stubbornness, conservatism, enormous arrogance, our power of resistance, our capacity for taking punishment, our laughter, endurance, fatalism, devotion to the past all taken to the point where every human quality can become a vice instead of a virtue. So that, for example, humor becomes cynicism, endurance becomes exhaustion, arrogance blindness and the Patriot a Blimp. In other words Ireland is learning, as Americans say, the hard way . . . Ireland has clung...
...paying well, Mrs. Garrett had got some good names (Henry Steele Commager, Jessamyn West, Frederic Prokosch, V. S. Pritchett, Sean O'Faolain) to write for Tomorrow. She kept her psychic secrets pretty well out of it. People who wanted to know what her aim was got a steady, blue-green stare and a soft answer: "I have no bone to bury, and no ax to grind. But I have a policy: I believe in the humanities, and in common decency...