Big Fellow, Long Fellow: A Joint Biography of Collins and de Valera by T. Ryle Dwyer Gill & Macmillan 371pp, £19.99
After publishing my book Disillusioned Decades, Michael Gill asked me what I would like to do next, and when I told him a biography of Michael Collins, he replied: "There'd be very little interest in that, and it would take you ten years, and you'd have to go through every scrap of paper." Despite this verdict, I wrote the book on Collins, for the London publisher Hutchinson, found that there was very great interest in it, and subsequently agreed to Hutchinson's suggestion that I follow it up with a book on de Valera, which I did. This also aroused considerable interest and controversy. On top of this, there were several publications of a good standard to mark Collins's anniversary, such as Meda Ryan's book on his death. Ryle Dwyer himself also produced a biography of de Valera.
So where Michael Gill changed his mind and, having decided originally that there was not much of a market for one book on Collins, before all the foregoing were published, subsequently decided there was room for a compendium volume on both Collins and de Valera, I do not know. Possibly either the burgeoning Michael Collins industry or the advent of the Christmas market played a part in the decision. But it's hard to see just what this book is for. I would have thought that, in the wake of not alone my own book, and Ryle Dwyer's other books, but the great outpouring of Collins material recently, any new book on either Collins or de Valera would have had to have the benefit of either fresh material, or fresh insights. Ryle Dwyer's book has neither. It reminds me of one of those Reader's Digest lollipop books, an edited-down volume designed to make it easy for the reader to lick rather than chew. Ryle Dwyer's books have often struck me as being the opposite to Cyril Connolly's famous statement that within every fat man there is a thin one struggling to get out. In the slim volumes which he has produced, often containing very interesting material on key aspects of contemporary history, there are the makings of one or more fullscale works which would do justice to the man's obvious talent. This book does not do so.
It is tricked out with scholarly accoutrements in an illusory fashion. In his bibliography he lists a variety of sources, both primary and secondary, but throughout the work there is no indication of where his facts or his quotations come from. Whether this was as a result of the publisher saving money on end notes and references, I don't know, but it's a bit odd, to say the least. The lack of references leaves Ryle Dwyer open to (no doubt unworthy) allegations that, despite protestations of expertise in his preface, all he has really done is to take his own past writings, those of a few others - including my own - compress them, and produced this book. It is claimed in the blurb that the book is "the first attempt to examine both men in a comparative light". It is not. I have already drawn attention to the personality differences and differing home lives enjoyed - or, in de Valera's case, endured - by both men. Collins came from a loving background surrounded by a doting mother, brothers and sisters. De Valera was rejected by his mother and reared by a not very attractive bachelor uncle. This, and his seeming illegitimacy, must have left a track through his mind, especially in the Ireland of his day.
He reinvented himself as having two parents and, particularly from 1916 onward, soothed the uncertainties within himself by a singleminded drive for power that brooked no rival near the throne, either when he was splitting the Irish in America, or the nation back in Ireland. Ryle Dwyer says that "no biographer has yet found evidence of his mother's arrival in the United States". In fact, on page 8 of my biography of de Valera, I point out that the New York emigration records available in the National Archives building at 201 Varrick Street, New York, show that a Kate Coll, passenger no. 130, aged 22, arrived on October 2nd 1879 aboard the SS Nevada from Liverpool.
Thus, despite all the rumours of Kate's being pregnant, when she left Ireland she can hardly have been carrying Eamon de Valera, born October 14th, 1882. But this does not mean that de Valera was conceived in wedlock. His official biography (by Longford and O'Neill) stated that his mother was married at St Patrick's, Greenville, New York, but when I visited the church, and others in the vicinity, I found that there was no record of any de Valera/Coll marriage. All Ryle Dwyer has to say about the marriage is that "there is apparently no mention of this in the church records". I would have thought that a fresh biography of de Valera, examining him in a "comparative light", might have tried for a bit of fresh evidence, perhaps a birth certificate.
Ryle Dwyer doesn't seem to have digested all that well the material which has appeared since his l991 de Valera biography. And it is hard to see what he has added of his own. His last chapter is entitled: "De Valera proved Collins right". The Treaty did provide freedom to achieve freedom. Speaking for myself, as I had already established some years ago that de Valera's ego, formed no doubt in childhood insecurity, was a prime factor in the conduct of the Civil War, this value judgment did not exactly come as a blazing surprise.
My own preference, seeing that de Valera influenced Irish life so much, would have been for an analysis of the three pillars of his power, the Fianna Fail Party, the Irish Press and his Constitution. This last will almost certainly join the Irish Press in oblivion, in the context of the united Ireland that the present leader of Fianna Fail, Bertie Ahern, looks forward to in some fifteen years' time. But because of de Valera's gut instinct for power, how to get it and how to hold it, Fianna Fail will very probably be the party that drafts the new Constitution. At this stage of the writings on both Collins and de Valera, I would like to have seen a biographer tackle the power factor, the most enduring aspect of de Valera's career.
Ryle Dwyer certainly has the potential to produce such an analysis, but he hasn't done himself justice with this book.