AN IRISH CHILDHOOD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 761, 19 February 1954, Page 13

AN IRISH CHILDHOOD

TWENTY YEARS A-GROWING, by Maurice O'Sullivan; the World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, English price 5/-. HIS book was written by its author in Irish and published 20 years ago. In the same year an English translation appeared, with .an_ enthusiastic introduction by E. M. Forster. Praise by Forster is something that an author both hopes for and fears. A critic of his quality confers an accolade. But he

fs so discriminating and so scrupulous that he tends to make the reader fear that here is another book for the cultured minority. Perhaps for that very reason Twenty Years A-Growing fas tended to be a minority book, which is a pity. For it is a simple unsophisticated autobiography ful] of richness and humour, written in its English version with delight yet without the whimsy that. repels many English readers of Irish material. I know. no Irish but I know enough about the technique of translation to recognise this one as firstclass. The present edition is one of the popular World’s Classics, put out by the Oxford University Press, and both the prestige and the price of this series will ensure the book having ‘the widest possible audience, which it deserves. Maurice O’Sullivan grew up as a smal] boy on Great Blasket, in the Atlantic off the South-west corner of Ireland. Filmgoers will remember much the same setting in Flaherty’s Man of Aran. But while Man of Aran concentrates on the theme of man’s heroic struggle with the sea, Twenty Years A-Growing (although the Atlantic seethes and rumbles throughout it) is a gentler piece of production. The childhood in a primitive community, with the coracles and the fishing, the lobster pots and the boat races and the escapades that brought both delight and adventure are recorded lovingly and yet without sentimentality. The Great War comes, but for Great Blasket it means wrecks aplenty and the atmosphere of Whisky Galore: "By God," one man would say, "war is good." "Arra, man," said another, "iF it continues, this Island will be the Land of the Young." The war years were good for the Island. Money was piled up. There was no spending. Nothing was bought. There was no need. It was to be had on top of the water! But the palmy days of war and free floating drink and food passed away and O'Sullivan grew up to manhood. He had to leave his island. The description of his journey by train (his first train) from the West of Ireland to Dublin is epic. He fell in with a couple of strangers as inngcent as himself, and each accepting eagerly the advice of the others, the trio landed up in Cork. But he got to Dublin in the end, sat an examination for the Civic Guards, and there we leave him on the edge of manhood and of action.’

A wonderful bogk.

I.A.

G.