Ernie O'Malleyis Art References in On Another Man's Wound

While Ernie O'Malley's On Another Man's Wound is recognized as a classic account of the Anglo-Irish War from 1916 to 1921, the author's introduction to the book makes it clear that it is also a book about culture. "The tradition of nationality," O'Malley wrote, "which meant not only the urge of the people to possess the soil and its products, but the free development of spiritual, cultural and imaginative qualities of the race, had been maintained towards the end of our struggle not by the intellectuals but by the people who were themselves the guardians of the remnants of culture." ⁶ He notes that On Another Man's Wound is not meant to be a conventional historical narrative, but rather, a text that deals with happenings inspired and sustained by the spirit of the people who "seized imaginatively on certain events, exalted them through their own folk quality of expression in song and story" (OAMW 12).

Likewise, O'Malley seizes imaginatively on his experiences of the war, to recreate—like an expressionist painter—his personal reality and to reconstruct the feelings and memories of the eternal essence of his youth. The acute observation of an artist is evident in his graphic accounts of guerrilla warfare, as it is in his lyrical, painterly descriptions of landscape and his insights into personalities.

O'Malley had been interested in art from an early age, long before he wrote On Another Man's Wound. In his 1923 letters from Kilmainham Gaol to Mrs. Childers, he writes that he had been reading about art for many years. ⁷ Frequent references to the work of artists in O'Malley's original draft are an indication of his developing interest in the subject. ⁸ There is an almost surreal quality about his accounts of how he carried copies of Dürer's etchings and woodcuts around with him while taking part in the Anglo-Irish War. ⁹ Art entered the conversations that occurred when he took refuge in artists' houses: "A discussion beginning with an Italian primitive would criss-cross and end in an elaborate analysis of a new type of light machine-gun or the mechanism of an imaginary weapon which we could use" (OAMW 127).

He also carried around with him "in many a strange background of mountain or bog," ¹⁰ a volume of Blake and illustrations of the work of Albrecht Dürer and Piero della Francesca, and a portfolio of art reproductions frayed and crinkled with rain and sweat and cut to fit his pockets. During the war, he visited the National Gallery for peace and quiet during the war and records how, when he heard of the Treaty being signed in 1921, the paintings in the Italian and Dutch rooms looked like "ugly daubs" (SF45).

The Italian painters, especially Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, awoke and stimulated his curiosity about "the human dignity and mystery of man" (SF191) to such an extent that while lying seriously injured in hospital in 1922 he could reconstruct the Florentine paintings in his mind, "but Holbein would intrude, with Cézanne and the glowing flame of Van Gogh, or the vigorous direct touch of Albert Dürer. The imaginative, visionary line of William Blake flowed in and out in sinuous grace"(SF 191).

Describing a bombardment in the candlelit Four Courts, O'Malley refers to the work of Rembrandtto help capture the atmosphere of the scene and compares Rory O'Connor's face to "a Byzantine portrait." For reading material during the bombardment he had Vasari's Lives of the Italian Painters, and a work of Synge illustrated by Jack B. Yeats. O'Malley also mentions having with him a portfolio of drawings and prints by Tintoretto and Piero della Francesca (SF 105).

Later, in Kilmainham Gaol, he and his fellow prisoner Peadar O'Donnell discussed the...