FROM THE ARCHIVES:Portrait Gallery was a short profile of a public figure by an anonymous author in the 1950s: this one was apparently based on an interview with writer Liam O'Flaherty, best known as author of The Informer, filmed by his cousin John Ford.
When one is young, one is inclined to think of novelists, poets and playwrights as a people apart, a people who know nothing of the worries of ordinary everyday existence, a people universally respected, whose views are listened to with suitable awe and with breath well bated.
The youngster imagines the successful author as a brilliant cosmopolitan who is the centre of attraction to-night at a smart literary party in London, and who to-morrow night will be the guest of honour at some sparkling gathering in Greenwich Village . . .
In many respects Liam O’Flaherty satisfies the youthful ideal. Here is a man who is one day in Dublin, the next in the south of France, or perhaps in Algeria. His fascinating and witty conversation is carried on with easy fluency in three languages.
Who could guess that this man began life as a fisher-boy from Aran? Some early dissatisfaction made him run away to fight with the British Army against the Germans; he came back with other ex-soldiers to fight against the British; just before the civil war broke out in 1922, he hoisted the Red Flag over the Rotunda and along with a few score comrades, declared an “Irish Soviet Republic.” But when the Irish revolution dropped its left wing, O’Flaherty, like O’Casey, threw himself into writing.
His fiery temper is well known; yet he is a generous and kindly man, too, who often reminds one of the more genial characters in his books: kind, especially, when he speaks in Irish, his mother tongue.
He distrusts the city. But, in spite of his ingrown suspicion and dislike of it, it is doubtful if he will ever carry out his often-made threat : to return to Aran to build a small house, to talk to the old people and commune with the nature of which he has written so movingly.
“I will go back to the island and I will write novels in the Irish tongue that will shake this country to its foundations.”
One would like to think that he will, but Paris, New York, London, Dublin – these are now O’Flaherty’s lands. The Aran of which he so often talks is the dream of his childhood; and, as he looks back over a span of nearly 60 years, perhaps he wonders whether, if he could return to boyhood, he would go the same way again.
Or would he now prefer to stay at his studies, and become a quiet- spoken teacher in a boys’ school? He does not know. Contentment, he says, he will never get in his life as it is. Yet who knows whether he would have got it in any other sphere?
For O’Flaherty’s agile mind, his fiery temper, his brilliant pen and his fierce passion for life, have made him one of those men to whom life will yield anything but the ultimate achievement of peace.