Of all modern Irish writers, Seosamh Mac Grianna seems to have suffered most for his art. Determined, passionate, and uncompromising in his pursuit of truth and good writing, he paid a huge price for his commitment. For a period of about 10 years, from the mid-1920s until 1935, Mac Grianna did little else but write - some journalism, but mostly original fiction, autobiography, and translation - some 20 published books in all.
Every new work was a new departure, a new development of style, a fresh advance on unexplored territory. His final work, Da mBiodh Ruball ar an Ean (Had the Bird but a Tail), a searing and disturbing novel which uniquely took on the nastier side of Irish politics in an effort to come to terms with the relationship between art, materialism and power, was left unfinished.
"The well ran dry in summer 1935. I will write no more. I have done my best and I don't care," Mac Grianna wrote at the end of the manuscript - one of the most heartfelt and anguished phrases in 100 years of writing in Irish, says O Muiri. In 1936 Mac Grianna suffered a mental breakdown from which, it would appear he never recovered. He died in Letterkenny hospital on the June 11th 1990.
O Muiri does a workmanlike job of presentation. His first few pages perform the dull but still important task of putting the writer's life and work in their linguistic and literary context. He recounts the writer's career in so far as it is known, informs us of his opinions at the time, and gives a brief synopsis of the written work as it happens. Despite the great temptation to do so, he avoids using the life to explain the work or the work to explain the life. He confines literary discussion to examples of critical opinion and when given, his own comments are well judged, supported by the text, and sparse.
It is only at the end that O Muiri could be said to indulge himself, reading the final unfinished novel in terms of Mac Grianna's life and opinions prior to his breakdown and summing up his fiction and its importance in a final, discursive chapter.
O Muiri's translations are pedestrian when compared to the original but sometimes strike gold ("his soul was like a dark muddy pool out of which and into which no stream flowed'). His approach to literature is basically Modernist, and while this provides us with few new insights, it is in keeping with Mac Grianna's own outlook and results in an excellent introduction to the life and work of one of Ireland's greatest and most tragic stylists.
Liam Mac Coil is a writer and critic. His most recent novel is An Claiomh Solais