The Books: “On Another Man’s Wound” (Ernie O’Malley)

History bookshelf:

Next book on the shelf is On Another Man’s Wound by Ernie O’Malley. Like my dad said when he told me to read this book: “Most memoirs of IRA members are not well written. It’s all ‘Then we blew up the lorry and hid in the bushes.’ But O’Malley can actually write.” He sure can. This is literature, a beautifully written book. Luscious language, filled with Irish songs and poems, personal portraits of people he met, a real sense of the time. Ernie O’Malley was a medical student in Dublin when the Easter Uprising happened in 1916. He was kind of indifferent to the whole thing at first – but as the fighting continued – his perspective changed. So much so that he joined the IRA. He traveled around Ireland (in the South, not the North) and organized battalions, training farmers and regular people in the ways of war.

This is his story, written in his own words. But again, what sets this book apart from other revolutionary memoirs is his talent for writing. It’s almost like he is determined to get down as complete a picture of Ireland at that very moment in time as he possibly can. It’s like Synge’s book on the Aran Islands. Everything is going to change … and people will change … so let’s get it all down NOW before they do.

On Another Man’s Wound is filled with lots of Irish legends, told around peat fires in the West – the songs they would sing, the poems they would recite …

It’s hypnotic. A lovely and elegaic book. It’s a love letter to Ireland. It reminds me a lot of Synge’s stuff.

From On Another Man’s Wound by Ernie O’Malley.

The brigade Vice-Commandant, Maurteen Devitt, and the Quartermaster, Peadar O’Loughlin, were on the run in their part of Mid Clare. They had more time for Volunteer work and knew the by-roads and the general direction of police patrols. Maurteen was thin in body, pale faced and energetic with a sharp turn of tongue in speech and wit; satiric.

Maurteen Devitt’s father was an old man, an Irish speaker, his favourite curse being, “the curse of the crows upon you,” but he sympathised with us and did not regard us as half wits, as many others did. Once I arrived early in the morning, tired out, as I had walked a long distance, I knew the songs were out at a dance and that the father was alone. He came to the window and when I told him I wanted to get in, he said: “Be off with you, Patsey Mitchell, you playboy.” I mentioned my name, but he did not seemingly know it, as it had not been spoken of in the house, although I had been staying there some weeks. He cursed me fluently, ending up with the curse of the crows; I knocked again, but as he became more exasperated i gave it up, buttoned up my coat and went to sleep on thte ground. One of the sons found me in the morning sleeping, white with hoar frost. The old man always bore this in mind and never ceased to blame himself when he met me.

In the night time I often sat opposite to him in the fireplace listening to his talk. He always wore an old hard hat, light green with sun, brown mottled in spots with a torn brim and a dint on the top. He had a hoar stubble of a beard. He slurred his words in English through gaps in his stained teeth, but Irish seemed to flow swiftly enough. He had a great friend who came often; then they spoke Irish all the evening; sometimes the old man would translate or begin a story in English with many pauses. He would hold a match in his broken clay pipe or a piece of glowing sod, then puff, hold the pipe in one hand, talk, draw on the pipe to find it had gone out. Time and again the pipe went out; intent on the story he used it to emphasize words. Refilling the pipe was a ceremony. The ‘baccy was pared from a hard black piece of plug or twist, ground slowly between the palms and rammed down into the bowl; some of the last pipe’s ashes on top, then a tin cover with a hole in the top. The pipe was cleaned by sticking the bowl in the red turf glow.

Sometimes they’d laugh together and shake their heads with delight when speaking of Pedlar McGrath or Se�n O’Twomey. Some poems he would not translate; they seemed to enjoy them all the more. “The ould fellow is worked up,” Maurteen would say, when he began on Rafferty or Donnchadh Ruadh MacNamara. Then I regretted I had not studied Irish thoroughly. I knew next to nothing of these poets save in translation. But here the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lived again, for these two men could tell story after story of the poets’ pranks, drinkings and songs, and describe them as if they had lived in the same parish. They recited verses of men whose names I did not know. I think the only thing that left me with a shred of reputation was that I had a battered copy of the Love Songs of Connacht.

Old Devitt and his friends were like the others I had met in this stretch of Clare and in the Rosses. Their sense of literature was on the lips and in their faultless memory. In craggy Carren an old man recited the whole of The Midnight Court for me. They were not literary nor had they any pretence to learning. The extension of their knowledge made them simple; they were not conscious of it, but they knew more of poetry as a living feeling than had anybody else I had met save poets themselves. They could curse hard and long mostly for emphasis and the sound of words, but also in anger.

What I liked most about him and others was their independence, their air of being true to themselves. In the towns people conformed their suppressed selves to an outward convention; here they created their own environment in and through themselves. They had no feeling of equality or inequality, but a definite reality, and it would be a long time, I knew, before I could ever hope to have anything as real in myself as they had.

They had a sense of life that made them fresh and interesting to listen to and the flavour of a life of the open air was in their words and thought. They were starkly real like chunks of their own earth when they spoke of the land, its irritable uncertainty and its aching sweat, but a feeling for words and phrasing would lift a talk about manure.

Old women screwed with rheumatism, their faces like ploughed fileds, took snuff or a draw of the pipe in the corner while they fingered their beads. These were the obvious signs of outward realism and the harsh background of their lives; but there was a deep content, an ease in life and a depth in themselves that could well up nourishment. They were able to entertain and amuse themselves easily. Song was a definite expression as natural as talk, and they all sang. They sang at the end of the a hard day’s work and were refreshed or musicioners used fiddle or melodeon in a manner peculiar to themselves. In spite of aching land work they had the leisure of the wealthy and they made use of it simplyl and fully. Gentleness and fierceness, lack of sentimentality and a definite concreteness merged with poetry and sharp realism in speech; kind towards suffering and callous towards cattle and dogs and their burden-bearer the skinny ass.