Loving the book On Another Man's Wound.
Basically, O'Malley just describes traipsing by bicycle through the Irish countryside, in the wake of the Easter Rising, training farmers and others in the ways of munitions and organized rebellions. Trying to motivate them, after a long hard day in the fields, to march in line, to be dedicated, to focus ...
So far, there is a repetitive quality to each chapter, although different events continue to move them all forwards.
Again and again, we find ourselves back with Ernie on his bicycle ... moving forwards, onwards ...
Michael Collins is a character. De Valera takes on a kind of mythical glow.
And throughout it all, is Ernie O'Malley, riding his bicycle in the rain to the next town.
Many descriptions of storytelling evenings round the peat fire, etc. But there is indeed a magic in this man's prose.
It's rich. Rich with history, with detail - with SENSORY detail - which is really the only way that people can enter stories, and be made to feel like they are actually there.
To my taste, Ernie O'Malley is a master at sensory detail.
I was enraptured, in particular, with his long chapter in the second section ... describing the people he met, and the seasons as they passed. I'm a sucker for that kind of detail. Having been to Ireland - he does capture the spirit of the place in many ways.
Read an excerpt:
On the food he was served:
The food was good, but rough and badly cooked. Bulk seemed to matter most. Tea, eggs, bacon, stirabout, potatoes and cabbage were the usual food; tomatoes, lettuce, celery, beans, and fruit in general were unknown. The lack of green vegetables was said to be due to the famine years when the people ate nettles and grass...I gave a tomato to a man I knew at a fair. He eyed the shining scarlet. "What kind of a thing is this?" He bit into it, then spat out the pulp in disgust. "Man, dear, do you want to poison me?"
On staying with families in the country:
I slept in huge four-posters with canopies; often there was a series of feather mattresses and a covering of reddish quilts, whole or patch-worked, with an oppressive sense of weight. Often I was given the best room in the house, but generally I slept with some of the family, or lay on a settle, in a warm kitchen. In places the boys dressed in front of their mothers and sisters. This to me was an ordeal. I had not their natural outlook. Furtive attempts to pull on my shirt and trousers, hasty dives back to bed, whilst the women of the house, or the girls, without concern, went about their business filling huge black pots with vegetables and mash for the pigs and hens, or baking cakes in the round flat-bottomed ovens.
On sitting by the peat fires:
More than often I sat in the kitchen on a sugan chair; my back to the lamp which stood on the window sill. I could then listen to the talk when I tired of reading. I joined the groups around the fire. Talk and stories were punctuated by draws from clay pipes and by spits. The pipes had once been white; but use had turned them a shiny brown black, and their stems had broken off; sometimes just the bowl and a short toothy stump remained. They smoked heavy strong cut plug tobacco; it was pleasant when one got used to it. 'Baccy during the European War was scarce and precious. The blasts out of the pipe were a great solace after the day's work; they were lost without a good draw. The pipe might pass from mouth to mouth around the fireplace. Once in a smithy I saw a blacksmith hand his pipe to a man who had asked for a draw; he cracked off the tip with his red hot pincers when the pipe was handed back.From the nook alongside the fire I watched the turf blaze and glow. Shadows and patches of light were thrown up on faces. Often I stared into the rosy red core of the embers watching the figures; and traced them running from one fantastic form to another.
The life was hard and close to the soil.
I remember the years during my childhood when my father smoked a pipe. Even now, if I get a whiff of pipe-smoke, wherever I am, I am transported back in time to when I was a wee one.
And here, to my taste, is a perfect description of the Irish. The blackness of the humor, the "taking a piss out of someone" energy ... The Irish are a tough crowd. I loved this:
There was a love of discussion and argument that would take up a subject casually without belief and in a searching way develop it. That might mean a pleasant joking or an ornate, shrewd and enjoyable development for him who sustained his unbelief and heated words from his opponents; or anger from all in the end as the baiter was drawn into the net of his own words. Anger they played on often as on fiddle-strings. Deferential to a stranger, they evoked in themselves a sympathetic mood, changing gears in conversation to suit his beliefs and half believing then through sympathy whilst he was present. Afterwards when they checked up on themselves it might be different; they would laugh at the stranger's outlandish opinions when their mood had hardened.Always for me there was the relish of a phrase; they were conscious of it also. Acute, natural observation was converted into shades of meaning; some improvised as they talked, they became more extravagant, and delighted listeners helped them over appreciative stiles. Proverbs were many, even in the English-speaking districts, but the Gaeltacht alone kept the richer anthology, remembered from old literature; quotations from poets and stories, sayings of ollaimh, and their apt use.
I shall continue reading on ...
Posted by sheila