An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930-1960 by Brian Fallon Gill & Macmillan 313pp, £19.99
Brian Fallon, who re tired recently as Chief Critic of this newspaper, is eminently qualified to write this book, and it shows. While there are many hungry young Turks anxious - and no doubt in many cases well qualified - to make their mark on the burgeoning subject of Irish cultural history, it is a pleasure to find someone of Fallon's maturity, in both style and judgment, steadily setting out his arguments without resort to the ideology of -isms.
This is a very personal study, redolent of the critic with a shrewd eye and a wry sense of the apposite. One may not relish everything Fallon puts before us, nor may one fall in with every argument, but his general survey of life in Ireland - mainly Dublin - and its connections with, especially, France, in the three decades under review is leisurely and convincing. Even when I find myself in disagreement with him (and there are times when he fails in his bid to dispel the prevailing impression of a cultural lacuna) I have to acknowledge that the authorial presence, the strength of the critical voice, is assured and measured.
In their turn literature, theatre, the visual arts, the Irish language, censorship, and political culture are reflected on. Yeats and Joyce are examined as late visitors from an earlier epoch; the vitality of their successors and those working in cognate art forms is explored with an enthusiasm that makes one want to go back to poets and novelists whom Fallon persuades us are unjustly and unreasonably neglected. Only the chapter on music and musicians betrays a lack of sure-footedness which I am sure the author would be the first to acknowledge. One is immediately struck - perhaps it is provoked by Fallon's own professional background - by the very high quality of the journalism of the period: intellectuals wrote for the papers then in a way that few achieve today, when we seem to be pleased by something dreamed up cleverly in the bath rather than reflected on during the course of a couple of long days. Perhaps the absence of television, and the affinity of radio broadcasting to text, helped that process in times past - the leisurely and intimate address which had real education at its back rather than the facile acquisitions of today's points-race victims. Reading the pages here on the theatre, one is stirred by Fallon's hints at the real greatness of Kerry playwright George Fitzmaurice; on poetry, the informed affection with which he writes of his own father, the poet Padraic Fallon, to whose memory the book is dedicated; one can guffaw at his droll remark that Protestants' gardens looked "better than those of their Catholic neighbours - generally they still do", or wonder at his statement that "the conversion to Rome of Evie Hone . . . created ripples in the Irish art world which have still not entirely ceased" - if this is true, it is also arguable, but one feels sure that Fallon would argue it successfully.
And running through the book is a strong belief, never over-stated, that those who "had fought or at least hoped for a self-ruling Ireland with a lifestyle and culture of its own" had achieved exactly that and should not be faulted for it. In this sense, Fallon is a subtle apologist, in the best sense of the word, for the cultural state of modern Ireland up to the 1960s and its attendant "intellectual malaise . . . self-doubt and self-questioning". The principle of accommodation is vital to an understanding of what was achieved, as well as what was abandoned, during these tricky decades, and Fallon mentions that Mairtin O Cadhain became Professor of Irish at TCD; he might have mentioned that O Cadhain was probably the last writer to speak in such violent terms of "the war for the repossession of Ireland" - an ambition that surely included the extinction of the residual "West Brits" among whom he sojourned.
There are a few regrettable errors: Villiers de l'Isle Adam's influential play was Axel, not "Axel's Castle" (which was the title of Edmund Wilson's study of the play); Yeats wrote "The Wanderings of Oisin", not "Usheen"; the current National Concert Hall is not the former Aula Maxima of UCD, which is in fact in St Stephen's Green; the Jewish Lord Mayor of Cork was Gerald Goldberg, not David; the impression is given that censorship of publications no longer exists, which it does; and gardai are said to have judged The Rose Tattoo "obscure" when I think "obscene" was intended. Slowly the jigsaw puzzle of how Ireland survived the Literary Revival and the political culture that came with independence, is being put in place. There can be no doubt that Brian Fallon's contribution to the debate - for that is what it will remain for a long time - is valuable and compelling.
Richard Pine is the author of books on Oscar Wilde, Brian Friel, Lawrence Durrell and the Dublin Gate Theatre, and editor of Music in Ireland 1848-1998