FROM THE ARCHIVES:The re-issue of Philip Rooney's novel Captain Boycottin 1984 prompted this review by fellow writer Benedict Kiely. – JOE JOYCE
PHILIP ROONEY wrote six novels: a vigorous clear writer with a natural gift for narrative, with an exact knowledge of his native West which came to his aid in the writing of this novel now reprinted; and an expert knowledge of the horses – not the Clydesdales but those prancing, mincing, neurotic creatures to whom Chinamen and others enthrust [sic] their hard-earned money.
Rooney took some pleasure in announcing, as often as the subject came around, that his first inspiration came from Nat Gould, a learned author not now much consulted but more-or-less replaced, I am told, by Dick Francis. Rooney's first novel, " All Out To Win", showed the influence. It appeared in 1935 from the Talbot Press and was also serialised in a Dublin daily paper. A teacher in the secondary school which I then frequented quite rightly advised my colleagues and myself to read it.
In that same year, there was in a certain Gaeltacht a superb seanachie who was also a bit of a practical joker. There was also an earnest young man from abroad who was so avid for the writing down of the ancient tales that he wore down both the patience and the stock-in-trade of the storyteller who, not wishing to admit that there would be any limit to the contents of the treasure-house, began day-by-day translating the Rooney serial not only into Irish, but into the acceptable Homeric or Fenian imagery. So that somewhere in some college archives, “All Out To Win” is still riding to win, which story I was able to pass onto Rooney the first time we met. He was pleased to think that his galloping horses could have in them the matter for mythologies.
The best-known of Rooney’s novels was naturally enough the one here to hand; because it was turned into a passable movie, and because the unfortunate Captain Boycott had been well and widely known for a long time. Unfortunate in that being more or less a nonentity, he was caught between the wishes of the Earl of Erne and the effective new departure suggested by Parnell.
It has often seemed to me that if Charles Cunningham Boycott’s surname was Fetherstonhaugh or Cholmondeley he would never have, even unwittingly, added a word to the English dictionary. Or if he had been called Twentyman as was one of the military gentlemen who went to Ballinrobe to supervise the troops who went there to guard the Orangemen who went there to harvest the crops that the true-hearted men from the County Mayo wouldn’t touch, taste or handle since they decided to boycott Boycott.
You couldn’t with any punch or effectiveness say of a bad landlord or agent or land-grabber: “We’ll Fetherstonhaugh him, or Cholmondeley or Twentyman or Majoribanks him.” Not even if you knew how to pronounce all the names. No more than you could with a straight face say: “Heil Shickelgruber!”
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