Dingle to Dublin

TWENTY YEARS A-GROWING--Maurice O'Sullivan--Viking ($2.50).

Maurice O'Sullivan was born and bred in the Great Blasket, a small Gaelic island just northwest of the coast of Kerry, "where the storms of the sky and the wild sea beat without ceasing from end to end of the year and from generation to generation against the wrinkled rocks which stand above the waves that wash in and out of the coves where the seals make their homes."

Did you ever hear how the life of man is divided? Twenty years a-growing, 20 years in blossom, 20 years a-stooping, and 20 years declining. From his first 20 years Maurice O'Sullivan recalls many wonderful things, and the swing and the lilt of his words make you think they were sung to the harp of Tara. When he was less than a year old his mother died, dear God bless her soul and the souls of the dead, so Maurice was sent to a school in Dingle since his older brothers and sisters had little more sense in them than he had at the time. In school he spoke only English. His father came to take him back to Blasket when he was half grown. Maurice was given a couple of half-crowns, his first long breeks and felt he was a great sport for fineness.

It was not long before he had Irish and had learned the lore of the tight little rocky island. He had a friend, too, named

Tomas. Maurice and Tomas had fine times. They were stood in schoolhouse corners together and together they hunted rabbits on the downs, puffins', petrels', and gulls' nests on the cliffs. At Halloween they snared thrushes for a midnight roast, and once at Ventry, on the mainland, they got tipsy on ale and tobacco, gave a sharper a beating and watched great brawny Tigue

Dermod of the Cooas and a curragh full of townsmen win the boat race.

When he was older, Maurice helped his father catch mackerel and lobsters, tended the clotted sheep on the uplands. He remembers a brush with a shark, when the slimy brute followed their small boat, his breath smelling like that of the devil himself. He recalls even more vividly the War, not because any of the Blasket people were fools enough to fight in the red

(English) army, but because ship after ship spilled its soggy treasure on the Blasket shore. Sometimes there were corpses. Once a bloated officer from the Lusitania. After the War the day came when sorrow was on the island. The fishing was gone under foot. More and more wakes were held for the young people going off to America, and the old ones wondered who would be left to bury them. Maurice went to Dublin, joined the Civic Guard.

The Author, now stationed at Connemara, wrote his book in Gaelic "for his own pleasure and for the entertainment of his friends." The Free State Ministry of Education wanted to print it, with certain revisions. Guardsman O'Sullivan would not be bothered. A young English linguist in Dublin read the autobiography, translated it as faithfully as possible into Irish English, which clings close to the ancient singing Gaelic. Stocky Guardsman O'Sullivan, now 30, seemed satisfied with the translation. "Here is the egg of a sea-bird," writes Author E. M. Forster in a preface, "lovely, perfect, and laid this very morning." Twenty Years A-Growing is the Book-of-the-Month Club's August se lection.

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