No Nightingales, No Serpents

THE IRISH (180 pp.)--Sean O'Faolain--Devin-Adair ($2.75).

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.

For O'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's

"I am of Ireland,

And the Holy Land of Ireland,

And time runs on," cried she.

"Come out of charity

And dance with me in Ireland."

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 to her youth, indeed to her childhood, longer and more tenaciously than any other country in Europe, resisting Change, Alteration, Reconstruction to the very last."

O'Faolain, a Roman Catholic, is at his best in explaining the relationship between church and people. Under James I, he says, the persecution of Catholicism in Ireland began to make the priest a personification of nationalist resistance to England. This was intensified by such acts as Cromwell's edict that "any man who wanted to earn -L-5 need but produce the head of a wolf or of a priest, it did not matter which." Hence, says O'Faolain, the attachment of the people to the clergy.

Yet the Irish clergy, he thinks, have appeared not to reciprocate the people's regard. In explanation, he offers the fact that the Catholic seminary, established at Maynooth in 1795, was staffed by a number of French professors fleeing the terror of the French Revolution. O'Faolain concludes that their influence stamped generations of Irish priests with distrust of any rebellion against authority. Since the Irish themselves were incorrigibly rebellious, the odd end result, O'Faolain thinks, is "a permanent and positive clerical antipathy to the laity."

O'Faolain's picture of modern Ireland, which he thinks is a good place to live, is far from the notions of the ould sod and the emerald isle which many Americans cherish. He sees a nation of peasants-become-freeholders, a nation slowly learning how to make the best of its position "at the end of the queue" of Europe. For the present, however, he strikes a balance: " [We] have no nightingales, but also have no serpents; no moles, also no ballet; no Communist intelligentsia, but also no Catholic intelligentsia."

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