Broken Landscapes: Selected Letters of Ernie O'Malley, 1924-1957 ed. by Cormac K. H. O'Malley and Nicholas Allen (review)

Amid a flurry of new editions of Ernie O'Malley's key works, from a new edition of the canonical civil war memoir The Singing Flame (2012) published this year to his Raids and Rallies (2011) and The Men Will Talk to Me: Kerry Interviews (2012), this volume of his selected letters provides a crucial anchoring context. Very little of it has been published before. With the upcoming publication in 2013 of a new edition of O'Malley's best-known work, On Another Man's Wound, O'Malley has started to receive the attention he deserves. The volume presents a selection of letters from his most creative years as a writer, scholar, husband and father. Broken Landscapes also provides a substantive essay by Nicholas Allen, whose work in Modernism, Ireland, and Civil War is the most influential current framing of O'Malley's life and work; almost a hundred pages of detailed notes; eleven uncollected critical essays, chiefly about visual art, that O'Malley wrote for a range of venues; and a brilliant intervention by David Lloyd, "Afterword: On Republican Reading," that offers a critical-theoretical framework in which to understand O'Malley's contribution to Irish life and republicanism. It is now becoming apparent that O'Malley's massive body of work, much of which had been left unpublished in attics and archives, constitutes a significant contribution to Irish modernism as well as subaltern modernism globally.

Broken Landscapes marks a decisive moment in O'Malley's rediscovery, and in the visibility dissident Irish republicanism has recently achieved. O'Malley is valuable in this recovery of dissident republicanism for several reasons. As Lloyd puts it, "O'Malley inhabited the republican tradition more than he reflected upon it. In many ways, he embodied its principles." This volume allows us to fully understand what this embodiment might mean. "I don't mind being called a gunman," O'Malley writes in a very diplomatic letter to Desmond Ryan in a 1936. He continues, "we were, I suppose, though we didn't use that term ourselves. And you are a pacifist, and I respect you for your beliefs, I don't see why you shouldn't use the term." O'Malley was an Irish officer during the Anglo-Irish War, and later in the civil war in some eighteen Irish counties and areas of operation; he trained hundreds of volunteers and led several key raids. His afterlife as a writer who, having emigrated to America, found himself in artist colonies from Provincetown, Greenwich Village, Carmel, Taos, Sante Fe, Mexico City, to Woodstock and Yaddo, mixing with lights of the American and international cultural left like Hart Crane, Paul Strand, and Sergei Eisenstein is mapped out in this volume in some detail. "O'Malley's transition from activist to writer" as Allen notes, "has been a transition that many of his readers have found difficult to negotiate."

Broken Landscapes thoroughly contextualizes this period of transition. In the absence a full biography of O'Malley (an abbreviated one was published fifteen years ago), this collection fills a scholarly need. We can, for example, now trace O'Malley's movements in America and Mexico in the crucial years he was drafting On Another Man's Wound. In the way that only diaries and letters can offer insights, we share a young man's awe at arriving in New York in 1928, standing in skyscrapers when before he hid in fields or sniped from within the Four Courts: "At about 3.30 the sirens in the harbour gave tongue and from the windows of the 11th floor we saw aeroplanes going down the river; then they reappeared on their way up. The top of the buildings . . . was soon crowded, as was every window. Papers and streamers rained down whilst the boats continued to siren. A silvery gray cigar body...