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CORKERY’S ADVICE TO A YOUNG WRITER ALF MACLOCHLAINN patrick Maume’s life of Daniel Corkery1 appeared when Maurice Harmon was already correcting proofs of his biography of Sean O’Faolain,2 neither scholar obviously having had the advantage of the mature opinions of the other. That is a pity, as Corkery and O’Faolain have become handy pegs on which to hang tracts in an ongoing disputation about insularity versus cosmopolitanism in modern Irish culture.3 Corkery gave O’Faolain a copy of The Hidden Ireland, his first monographic work of criticism, at Christmas 1924, when it was, so to speak, hot off the press. In this work, Corkery lauded the eighteenth-century Munster poets writing in Irish. O’Faolain, troubled by what he saw as Corkery ’s excessive praise for these poets and concerned that the book would be a bible for Gaelic revivalists, accused The Hidden Ireland of a narrow identification of modern Ireland with “a cowed Ireland, a land of poverty .” He pointed instead to the classical, scholarly Ireland he had discovered through the works of Kuno Meyer and other editors and translators of the earlier literature. There were, moreover, other areas in which O’Faolain noted a tendency to insularity in his former mentor. Harmon writes: “When Sean first met him, he [Corkery] was enthusiastic about Russian literature , thinking that Ireland and Russia had much in common, that Irish novelists could emulate the Russian novelists. But after the Civil War, he opposed the idea, said Irish writers should not learn from foreign models.”4 CORKERY’S ADVICE TO A YOUNG WRITER 219 1 Patrick Maume, “Life that is Exile:” Daniel Corkery and the Search for Irish Ireland (Belfast, 1993). 2 Maurice Harmon, Sean O’Faolain (London, 1994). 3 See, for example, Lawrence J. McCaffrey, “Daniel Corkery and Irish Cultural Nationalism,” and Emmet Larkin, “A Reconsideration: Daniel Corkery and His Ideas on Cultural Nationalism,” Éire-Ireland 8:1 (Spring 1973), 35–41; 42–51. 4 Harmon, 66. CORKERY’S ADVICE TO A YOUNG WRITER 220 It is, then, of interest to note the opinions on modern literature in Irish expressed by Corkery in response to a request from another writer of the younger generation, Art Ó Riain.5 The occasion of Ó Riain’s request may be briefly described. In 1924 he had won the fiction prize in the Oireachtas , the annual festival of Gaelic literary and platform competitions organized by Conradh na Gaeilge, the Gaelic League, with a collection of linked short stories entitled An Tost (the silence). It may be of interest to note en passant that winners of prizes in other competitions included Liam Gógan, principal assistant to Father Patrick Dinneen in the compilation of the great dictionary of the Irish language and later a distinguished poet, Micheál Mac Liammóir, actor and author, and one Micheál Ó Donnabh áin of Cork, who took third prize in the competition won by Ó Riain.6 Can this be the Michael O’Donovan, so well known to us as Frank O’Connor, who is often bracketed with O’Faolain as another of Corkery ’s liberal former students set against his erstwhile mentor’s conservatism ? With the addition of further stories, Ó Riain’s An Tost was to be published in 1927. It was these additional stories that Ó Riain submitted for Corkery’s opinion. (They were to appear in the Gaelic League journal Fáinne an Lae through 1925, while the episodes of the title story were published in another Irish-language journal, An Lóchrann, through the second half of 1926.) Why it was to Corkery that Ó Riain should have made this submission is not established. Perhaps Ó Riain admired Corkery’s essays in The Leader, or perhaps—although this is a long shot—there was a more direct connection. Ó Riain was secretary to Eoin Mac Neill, minister for education in the Free State government, and may thus have been involved in organizing courses in Irish-speaking areas to impose or improve standards of Irish among teachers in the schools of the fledgling state. This program included a summer school in Baile Bhúirne (Ballyvourney) in West Cork, and Corkery was one of the lecturers. (Ó Riain had perfected...

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