Ernie O'Malley was born in 1887, the second of 11 children. His mother, Marion Kearney, came from a farm near Castlerea in Co Roscommon and been a trainee nurse in Dublin before her marriage. The father, Luke Malley, was born near Castlebar and at the time of his marriage was managing clerk for Malachy Kelly, the Crown Solicitor for Co Mayo. Their house in Castlebar faced the barracks of the Royal Irish Constabulary, who "touched their caps to Father".
They belonged to the comfortable Catholic middle classes, a class which identified itself with the British administration in Ireland. In this world all Protestants were rich and respectable. The Protestant minister invited the Malley children to "cinematographic shows" in his house, but he did not appear as a visitor in their house. Priests came to their house for dinner.
"They were hearty men who drank their whiskeys and sodas with Father or sat at the fire sipping at sweet-smelling punch; but why did they screw up their faces after a long drink if it was not pleasant? One of them always called the `pope's nose' on a bird `the ecclesiastical part'; that meant a laugh at table."
In 1905 Malachy Kelly moved to Dublin on his appointment as Chief Crown Solicitor for Ireland. Luke Malley followed a year later, not to join Malachy Kelly but to begin work as a civil servant in the Congested Districts Board. The family settled in the suburb of Glasnevin and the boys started attending the famous O'Connell School run by the Christian Brothers.
They lived through the ferment that Dublin was at the time. All of it is recorded vividly by Eoin O'Malley: the great lock-out of the Dublin workers in 1913, the ceremonial nationalist funerals, the public speeches, the gun-running at Howth, the marching and drilling in the streets and in the Dublin Mountains, the outbreak of the European war.
The Malley household remained as staunchly British as it was Catholic. The nationalist displays were no more than amusing topics to be discussed at dinner. Frank, the eldest brother, joined the British army as a cadet. Ernie won a Dublin Corporation Scholarship and enrolled as a medical student in the National University. By the time of the 1916 Easter Uprising, he was thinking of joining his brother in the British army. The two were very close.
The Uprising was as decisive for O'Malley as it was for many others, especially when the rebellion was followed by the execution of the leaders:
"Clarke, I had known through a friend of ours, Major MacBride, who used to come across the city to buy cigars in his little shop. Pearse I had seen for the first time a few minutes before. Connolly I had heard speak at meetings. I had seen MacDonagh in the University where he lectured on English, gayer than the other lecturers. Plunkett was editor of The Irish Review, back numbers of which I had read."
He joined the First Dublin Battalion of the Volunteers and drilled with broom handles in halls that doubled for classes in Irish and dancing. When he received his rifle he had to hide it beneath the floor boards of his room.
As his involvement in the movement increased, it became more difficult to account for his activities at home, and once his secret was in the open he reacted with typical decisiveness. He volunteered for full-time duty, and was sent North, where he was given command of the Coalisland Company with the rank of second lieutenant. He gained rapid promotion, and in the remaining years of the war he went all over the country to organise, train and command the companies and brigades of several areas.
On Another Man's Wound, O'Malley's classic autobiography, is primarily an account of that war, the only work of high literary quality to emerge directly from the violence. Upbringing had combined with temperament to make him half an alien in his own country. This gave him the detachment of a natural observer; the war forced him to live close to the people:
"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.
"Mangels and turnips went to the horses, pigs and cattle, they bubbled and smelled with cabbage in cast-iron cauldrons. Herbs, tansy, mint and wild garlic were used sparingly. I gave a tomato to a man I knew at a fair. He eyed the shining scarlet fruit. `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?'"
Among many memorable passages is an expression of that spirit that turns a rebellion into a revolution:
"I had been trying to say some prayers, but could not. My thoughts ran on ahead, crossed and recrossed. I was not afraid of death now. Faces I knew came up, my brother Frank's, Sean Tracey's; then I felt at peace. It was hard to pin anything down, to think I was going to die on the roadside. I would tell them that they were fools, that they could not win; dead men would help to beat them in the end."
There are many vivid portraits, including those of de Valera and Collins. By temperament O' Malley was more drawn to de Valera, and he disliked Collins's habit of making fun of de Valera behind his back. There is a sense of personal growth throughout the work, and increase in sympathy:
"I felt I understood the country better now. I had sloughed off some conventional skins and the layer of the importance of bookish reading which had prevented a closer contact with the life about me. The people had, essentially, warmth, feeling and heart, and they knew of life through living."
O'Malley saw the Treaty as a compromise and joined the Anti-Treaty side in the Civil War, commanding the capture and defence of the Four Courts. His account of that war, The Singing Flame, was published posthumously, edited by Frances Mary Blake. The work contains arresting passages, but it has neither the spirit nor the coherence of On Another Man's Wound. There is a pervasive and sad longing throughout for the clarity of action, as if action in itself could bring clarity to the confusion and futility of friends and former comrades fighting one another.
He was more severely wounded than in the War of Independence, and much of the book is spent in prison and prison hospitals. The severity of his wounds and the unwillingness of the Free State to add another martyr to the Republican canon probably saved him from execution.
On his release in 1924, he was in poor health and 27 years of age. While in prison he had been elected to the Dail but never took his seat. After some months spent wandering on the Continent in an attempt to recover his health, he enrolled again as a medical student. In college he spent much of his time with the literary and dramatic societies, wrote poetry and failed his medical exams.
In 1928 he embarked for the US with Frank Aiken to raise money for the proposed Irish Press. Aiken returned to Ireland at the end of the long fund-raising tour, but O'Malley stayed behind. During the next five years he moved around California, Taos, New Mexico and Mexico, mixing with bohemians, artists and writers, and began work on the book that was to become On Another Man's Wound. The American poet Hart Crane left an account of him at that time in a letter from Mexico to Malcolm Cowley, dated June, 1931:
"I have my most pleasant literary moments with an Irish revolutionary, red-haired friend of Liam O'Flaherty . . . shot (and not missed) 17 times in one conflict and another; the most quietly sincere and appreciative person, in many ways, whom I've ever met. It's a big regret that he's Dublinbound again after three years from home, in a few weeks. Ernest O'Malley by name. And we drink a lot together - look at frescoes - and agree!"
In 1932 de Valera came to power, and those as prominent as O'Malley had been on the Republican side in the Civil War were attaining high position. Such positions never held much attraction for O'Malley, but in 1935 he completed his book and returned home. Under the 1934 Pension Act he was entitled to a general's pension.
In 1933 he met the wealthy Hooker family of Greenwich, Connecticut. All the Hooker girls were beautiful. Helen had won the US Juniors' Tennis Championship, and trained as a sculptor; Blanchette married John D. Rockefeller III; and Adelaide was to marry the novelist John P. Marquand. In August, 1935, Helen came to Dublin to make plans for her wedding, and that September she married Ernie O'Malley in London.
On Another Man's Wound was published to acclaim in 1936, but it brought a libel action against the author, which O'Malley lost. The O'Malleys had houses in Dublin and Mayo, travelled, collected paintings. He wrote on painting, books and music. The couple had three children, but the marriage was not happy for long and the divorce was acrimonious. O'Malley's last years were spent in deteriorating health. When he died in 1957 he was given a State funeral.
In his biography of O'Malley just published, Richard English fills out the facts of the life in some detail: he is plainly fascinated by O'Malley, appears to have read everything written on or around the period, and he received much help from the O'Malley family and was given access to papers.
In his preface he makes it clear that he has less interest in the life, in the sense of a conventional biography, than in using an understanding of the life and work to explain the Irish revolution, Irish nationalism, nationalism in general and the tradition of physical force in modern Irish history.
The first third of the work deals with the life in order to provide a biographical foundation for his stated aims, and in doing so he outlines his perception of the revolutionary strategy of that war: "The Anglo-Irish war, therefore, witnessed a combination of alternative politics and alternative militarism; Sinn Fein set up their own government to rival British legitimacy in Ireland, while the IRA engaged in a determined campaign to undermine British rule by military means."
It is no accident that O'Malley's books are permanently on display in Sinn Fein windows, and English quotes a strange reading by Gerry Adams of the meaning of On Another Man's Wound. In the most lucid and interesting chapter he writes about O'Malley the revolutionary and examines the thinking behind the strategy of the war.
O'Malley held democracy in contempt. He believed that the people should be led - coerced, if necessary. Small-scale military actions were designed to render Crown authority ineffective. By this means a small number of committed militants could bring about the conditions for revolution; then the people could be worked on in a process that involved inspiration, intimidation and provocation.
The inspiration came from a highly romantic notion of an Irish identity that could be reawakened. As long as the myth worked it did not matter if the existence of such an identity was questionable, and once awakened it could be manipulated by calculated acts of revolutionary violence. Whenever this failed, the people could be intimidated into acquiescence. There is an example of a girl having her hair cut with garden shears by the IRA for fraternising with British soldiers. When one of the men suggested that they might as well cut off her ears too, the girl passed out and did not recover consciousness for several days.
Inspiration and intimidation were complemented by the provocation of the State into actions of counter-productive harshness. Rule of law was crucial to the British administration. To be provoked into breaking the law was to subvert their most powerful weapon. At the same time, all-out guerrilla activity would ensure that the cost of the response would eventually be judged too heavy for the British government to carry.
O'Malley was more open than his successors about these tactics and more blunt about what people could do who did not subscribe to his view of nationhood: "The people of this country would have to give allegiance to it or if they wanted to support the Empire they would have to clear out and support the Empire."
O'Malley was in the middle of organising his forces to continue the war when the Treaty was announced, and he was bitterly disappointed. He argued that the people had been coerced into a settlement by the British and consequently had not been given a real choice. The tactics that had worked so well against the British no longer worked. However much it was disputed, the new State had acquired legitimacy. Kevin O Higgins was to state this view with remarkable clarity at the very outset of the Civil War: "If civil war occurs in Ireland it will not be for the Treaty. It will not be for a Free State versus anything else. It will be for a vital, fundamental, democratic principle - for the right of the people of Ireland to decide any issue, great or small, that arises in the politics of this country."
Richard English is convincing on all of this in his analysis of the revolutionary mind. O'Malley's vision of Irish nationality was romantic, quasireligious, with a strong emphasis on the spiritual; and it was invested in the people, as long as the people did not dispute or choose to misinterpret their investiture.
The succeeding chapters are less convincing. In the part entitled "The Intellectual" he strives to make O'Malley bear a weight he is unable to carry. He is on even more uncertain ground in The Companion, where he attempts to draw conclusions from O'Malley's marriage and his friendships. The wide reading drawn upon in support of his conclusions can be confusing and sometimes irrelevant.
The historical accuracy of O'Malley's memoirs has often been disputed. English is aware of this but takes it no further. Surely an investigation would tell us more about O'Malley than the use of tangential figures, even those as worthy as Edward Said, to support arguments about O'Malley's approach to the arts?
The war was the most intense experience of O'Malley's life. Several times he mentions that he did not expect to live through the war. After such an experience, no matter what shape his life was to take, it could not have been other than difficult. A number of times he could have entered politics, but he rejected the offers. His character was ill-suited to compromise or obfuscation. In the libel case over On Another Man's Wound, he discovered that what people believed in private they would not support in court.
He became a difficult marginal figure in a country he had helped to create. The myth that he had been prepared to follow, no matter what the cost to himself or to others, had turned into an inward-looking, pedantic theocracy that he was forced to live in.
There are fascinating glimpses of this life in Richard English's biography. We see O'Malley living and farming, not very successfully, in Mayo; chairing a meeting in Dublin of Republicans in sympathy with the antiFranco forces in Spain, when the Hierarchy and most of the country were rabidly for Franco. He worked as an adviser to his friend John Ford on The Quiet Man and The Rising Of The Moon, promoted and wrote about the work of another friend, Jack Yeats, and many other painters. He was friendly with several writers, and visited Beckett in Paris.
He successfully resisted an attempt to evict him from his house near Newport during the divorce, and retained custody of one of his children. He sent his son to school in England and looked towards London as the centre of culture.
I believe that by using the life as a basis for a number of theses, Richard English misses out on something that could be much more fascinating, a full life; and all the admirable things, and the less than admirable, would come to us more powerfully through suggestion rather than exposition.
Perhaps the depth of O'Malley's disaffection can be guessed at in his response to an objection that one of his friends at this time was a Fascist. "As if that made any difference. I can't carry round my wars with me all the time. Goodness knows I have enough hangover from fighting against an Empire to quarrel with ideologies. People are more important to me now, anyhow."
Ernie O'Malley, IRA Intellectual by Richard English, published by The Clarendon Press, Oxford (£25 in UK).