"Nobody Now Knows Which...": Transition and Piety in Daniel Corkery's Short Fiction

In the opening chapter of Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931), Daniel Corkery notoriously dismissed the entire tradition of Anglo-Irish literature as neither national nor natural, remarking that "Ireland has not yet learned how to express its own life through the medium of the English language."¹ Unless writers are absorbed in the forces of religion, nationalism, and the land, Corkery argued, their work should not be considered Irish. Not surprisingly, this argument has proved contentious. More often than not, Corkery's pronouncements have led to his being depicted as a doctrinaire cultural commissar. His criticism is usually interpreted as an exclusivist argument that set the limits for literary expression in the fledgling Free State.²

While this is the dominant manner in which Corkery has come to be remembered, a few scholars have suggested that his legacy is more complex and significant. Emmet Larkin, Seán Ó Tuama, and Patrick Maume, for instance, have all provided portraits of a more complicated and less assured individual.³ Patrick Walsh has also responded to the received way of reading Corkery.⁴ In recent years, some suggestive rereadings of Corkery have been conducted through a postcolonial lens, and these have touched on a range of preoccupations in his work: his concern over the place of hybrid and diasporic identities in the nation; his critique of imperialist historiography; his interest in questions of education and language; and his attempts at developing independent critical values in a decolonizing state.⁵

This eclectic body of criticism tends to focus on Corkery's more controversial attempts at literary analysis. This article, however, looks at some of Corkery's short stories, and in particular those in his third volume, The Stormy Hills (1929), published two years before Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature. These stories merit attention for a number of reasons. For one thing, The Stormy Hills has received little detailed attention to date. This lack of attention applies to Corkery's noncritical work in general. Readers often forget that Corkery was also the author of a novel, some poetry, four books of short stories, and several plays, including one in the Irish language, An Doras Dúnta (1953). If Corkery's work as a critic has sometimes been simplified to the point where he has become "the whipping boy for all right-on pluralists," as Declan Kiberd recently lamented, it could be argued that his importance as a creative writer has been all but airbrushed out of memory in recent decades.⁶ Alexander Gonzalez's now twenty-year-old description of Corkery as an "unreasonably neglected author" remains strikingly pertinent.⁷

This critical amnesia is all the more extraordinary when one recalls that many of Corkery's noncritical pieces were widely praised in their day. His novel The Threshold of Quiet (1917) was published to critical acclaim, for instance, and his first selection of short stories, A Munster Twilight (1916), also earned rave reviews in the press. Many of Corkery's contemporaries responded with a generosity of spirit to Corkery's fiction: Æ kindly remarked "we take our hat off to Mr. Corkery" when The Threshold of Quiet was published, while Francis Ledwidge wrote to Corkery from the trenches in praise of A Munster Twilight.⁸ The Stormy Hills was also well received by writers and critics. Reviewing for the Irish Statesman in late 1929, the young Frank O'Connor pronounced that on the evidence of this text Corkery was "our best story-teller."⁹ O'Connor's close association with the older writer might engender some scepticism about his praise, but it is worth recalling that Corkery and O'Connor had already begun to fall out by this time—their first serious disagreement has been dated by O'Connor's biographer, James Matthews, to late 1924, and their only extended dispute in print took place in the pages...