Myles na Gopaleen's newly discovered drama, An Sgian, exposes the fascist Irish-language groups of the 1940s. But is it as much an exploration of the writer's conflicted relationship with his own family, asks Louis de Paor, who rediscovered the manuscript?
I formally deny that, hired or otherwise, I am a 'humorist'. I am a most serious and thoughtful commentator, and a large number of persons and interests have found much of what I have written far from funny.
Crúiscín Lán, The Irish Times, May 16th, 1951.
On a visit to the Donegal Gaeltacht at the age of 16, Brian Ó Nualláin (Flann O'Brien/Myles na Gopaleen) encountered Máire Ní Ghallchóir, an old woman who lived alone in an outhouse unfit, according to his brother, Ciarán, for an animal of any value. Having only one leg, Máire negotiated the treacherous roads without the aid of a stick, hopping as far as she could before collapsing in a ditch until she had sufficiently recovered to resume her painful journey. The scarifying image of Máire Ní Ghallchóir is a useful reminder that the surreal humour of An Béal Bocht is grounded in first-hand experience of the degraded living conditions of the Gaeltacht and a deep empathy with the unnecessary hardship inflicted on Irish-speaking communities by political neglect. In an article on the Tomás Ó Criomhthoin memoir, An tOileánach, "the superbest of all books I have ever read", Myles na Gopaleen points to the "contemporary political jest of having a Minister for the Gaeltacht", while the Great Blasket is uninhabited: "The lads are now gone, their tongues at rest, their faces baked in salt water." The destruction of a community whose life and culture had been idealised to the point of extinction is, he says, "the apotheosis of native government".
In An Béal Bocht, we are reminded again and again of the gap between the rhetoric of cultural nationalism, which would make a spiritual ideal of the impoverished lives of Irish-speaking peasant communities, and the material hardship endured by those same communities. Throughout the book, the gap between rhetoric and reality is closed with great violence as the inhabitants of Corca Dorcha are forced to conform to a stereotype imposed by sanction of "the good books". At the feis, the natives become increasingly debilitated and finally collapse "from lack of nourishment" during the endless speeches by truly Gaelic Gaels. One of them, finally, "died most Gaelically in the midst of the assembly".
In his 1944 sketch, An Sgian, recently recovered from among Ó Nualláin's papers in the Burns Library at Boston College. At the conclusion of a violent domestic drama, Tadhg Mac Phearsan stands over the bleeding body of his murdered wife, Peig, correcting grammatical errors. That he is mistaken in his amendment only adds to the vicious irony of the situation.
The context of the dispute between Mac Phearsan and his wife is a truly Gaelic split that occurred in a branch of Conradh na Gaeilge in 1942. Established in Dublin in 1940 by Belfastman, Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin, Craobh na hAiséirí has been described by one commentator as the "greatest national movement in Ireland during this period" with more than 1,200 members and sub-branches in all of the major suburbs of the capital as well as in Waterford, Cork and Sligo.
The membership included university lecturers, a supreme court judge and senior civil servants as well as writers and others who would subsequently achieve prominence in less contentious areas of the language movement. Ó Cuinneagáin, the most controversial man in Ireland in the early 1940s, according to former Conradh na Gaeilge president, Proinsias Mac Aonghusa, aspired ultimately to the establishment of a fascist political regime in Ireland with himself as uncontested leader.
Using the tactics of street protest and agitation adopted by the unemployed in Britain during the 1930s, Craobh na hAiséirí organised marches and rallies through the streets of Dublin as well as film shows on O'Connell Street and theatre in St Stephen's Green. Given their highly visible presence on the streets of Dublin in the early 1940s, the personnel and ideology of Craobh na hAiséirí would have been familiar to the audience that witnessed the original production of An Sgian as part of a variety show staged at the Gate Theatre during Christmas 1944.
That theatre should have been used for polemical purposes by Craobh na hAiséirí makes Ó Nualláin's dramatic response to their activities all the more pointed. When the movement split in 1942 as Ó Cuinneagáin's associates became wary of his political ambitions, two new formations emerged - Ailtirí na hAiséirí which Ó Cuinneagáin continued to lead and Glún na Buaidhe, headed by fellow Belfastman, Proinsias Mac an Bheatha. In the play, Tadhg Mac Phearsan remains loyal to the Ó Cuinneagáin faction despite his wife's defection to their rivals who, amongst other things, she says, have put manners on the shoneens of Radió Éireann. She dismisses her husband and his associates as "saighdiúirí stain" (tin soliders). That the fascist and indeed racist tendencies of the movement remained uncompromised by the split is evident in Myles na Gopaleen's account of the street oratory of a member of Glún na Buaidhe denouncing jazz dancing as "the product of the dirty nigger culture of America".
Ó Nualláin is as critical of those who dismiss the Irish language as he is of its fanatical promoters. In a 1940 letter to this newspaper, he claims that "some self-conscious intellectual citizens are anxious to avoid being suspected of knowing Irish owing to the danger of being lumped with the boors. Irish is just a language, and is not to be ranked with illicit distilling, coin-making, shop-lifting or any other pursuit of which respectable people like to disclaim all knowledge".
Ó Nualláin's own attitude to Irish is, however, deeply conflicted. His writing on and in Irish might be characterised as an unresolved domestic dispute, an uncivil war with himself, his family and his background. If, as the Irish proverb tells us, half our laughter is at ourselves, then much of Ó Nualláin's unrelenting criticism of the excesses of the language movement may stem from his own disillusionment with aspirations he once shared with his immediate and extended family.
CIARÁN reminds us that his brother's first published work was the slogan "Don't Buy British Blazers" daubed on the walls of Blackrock College in protest at the importation of items of school uniform from England. The man who excoriated the self-indulgence of the feis as an exercise in worthless self-congratulation was himself the son of the organiser of the first ever feis to take place in his home town of Strabane. The platitudes mouthed by participants at the Corca Dorcha feis bear a striking resemblance to words uttered with conviction and sincerity by his Uncle Gearóid, Professor of Irish at Maynooth.
There are other resonances between the author's personal circumstances and the dysfunctional domestic drama of An Sgian. The murder weapon from which the sketch takes its title is a presentation knife, part of a set presented by Conradh na Gaeilge to the Mac Phearsans on their marriage. In his memoir of their early years, Ciarán Ó Nualláin remembers a decorative plate in the family china cabinet which had been presented to his father on the occasion of his marriage by the local branch of the Gaelic League. Ciarán himself held prominent positions in both Craobh na hAiséirí and Glún na Buaidhe, as editor of Aiséirí, the annual publication of Ó Cuinneagáin's organisation and subsequently of Inniu, published by Glún na Buaidhe, which he continued to edit until his death in 1979.
That Ó Nualláin should choose the setting of a domestic conflict to satirise the violence latent in the rhetoric of quasi-fascist elements in the language movement seems entirely apt in the circumstances, a fitting riposte to the motto of Craobh na hAiséirí: "Téid focal le gaoith ach téid buille le cnámh" ("Words go with the wind, but a blow strikes the bone"). In An Sgian, a minor work by a major author at the height of his creative powers, the characters' words are a prelude to ludicrous but nonetheless barbaric action as the satire cuts ever closer to the bone.
• There will be a rehearsed reading of An Sgian at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, on Sunday at 5 p.m. To book: 091-569777
• Louis de Paor is a poet and director of the Centre for Irish Studies at NUI, Galway.
