Sean O'Faolain gets adjusted

"Anyway, by the time I had more or less adjusted myself to the life about me, it suddenly broke in on me that Ireland had not adjusted herself to the life about her in the least little bit.  Irishmen in general were still thinking about themselves, or rather, in their usual way, double-thinking or squint-thinking about themselves, in terms of dawns, and ands, and buts, and onwards, and dew, and dusk, while at the same time making a lot of good, hard cash to the evocative vocabulary of tariff, tax, protection, quota, levy, duties or subsidies, meanwhile carefully compiling a third and wholly different literary style (pious, holy, prudent, sterling, gorsoons, lassies, maidens, sacred, traditional, forefathers, mothers, grandmothers, ancestors, deep-rooted, olden, venerable, traditions, Gaelic, timeworn and immemorial) to dodge more awkward social, moral and political problems than any country might, with considerable courage, hope to solve in a century of ruthless thinking.  This ambivalence, once perceived, demanded a totally new approach.  I have been trying to define it ever since.  For, as long as we were all in a splendidly romantic-idealist fervour about Ireland we could all write romantically, or idealistically, about Ireland, as Sean O'Casey did.  (He is sometimes called and probably thinks himself a realist but he is actually the biggest old romantic we ever produced.)  Or if we were being realistic we could write in the realist tradition.  But for any kind of realist to write about people with romantic souls is a most tricky and difficult business [.]

"[...]  [W]hen it comes to writing about people who, like the Irish of our day, combine beautiful, palpitating tea-rose souls with hard, coolly calculating heads, there does not seem to be any way at all of writing about them except satirically or angrily.  Once a writer's eye gets chilly about their beautiful souls he becomes like the only sober man at a drunken party, and the only decent thing for him to do then is either to get blind drunk with the rest of the boys (all singing in chorus, 'I'll take you home again, Kathl-ee-eeen') or else to go home and scrub himself clean in a raging satire on the whole boiling lot of them."

--  Sean O'Faolain, from "Foreword."  Selected Stories of Sean O'Faolain.  Penguin 1970.  p.11-12.

Bowen's Jingling Syntax

“When her editor questioned some of the contortions, Bowen replied: ‘I’d rather keep the jars, “jingles” and awkwardnesses – e.g. “seemed unseemly,” “felt to falter”.  They do to my mind express something.  In some cases I want the rhythm to jerk or jar – to an extent, even, which may displease the reader.’”  (from Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page, 166, note 57: Letter to Daniel George, 2 June 1948, HRHRC)

Mss letter to Daniel George, in Princeton "Milberg Misc. Mss." file, 18.4.49:  “I wondered if I’d been a bit harsh of Angus Wilson, but I hate noisy “strong” writing, and also still more writing that’s a discharge of decaying matter from the system.  I felt A.W. was intelligent enough to merit a rap.  And that Sean O’F., who to my mind as a reviewer resembles an old nanny-goat teetering over a rock garden, just as much as he’s an eagle, at his best, in stories and novels, more than makes up to A.W. for my deficiencies.”

The relevant passages from The Heat of the Day:

à  Pg. 11:  “Lest this be too subtle, his tone was unkind enough to drive at least his will to unkindness home – it did: she withdrew from the pocket her other hand in order to, self-protectively, fold her arms.  She could be felt to falter behind the barricade; and the programme, let go of by her as though incriminated, fluttered to the ground.”  (passage at concert, goes on to musicians’ “black, seated bodies had fastened to them the faces and hands of ghosts”

à  Pg. 236:  But this evening for Louie had rung the knell of Harrison, man of mystery, as a subject…It seemed unseemly, even, that his companion should have claimed for him the prerogative of pain: Louie simultaneously felt he could never suffer and wished he might.”