Among the sharpest eyes cast on the Ireland of the early 1920s were those of V. S. Pritchett, just starting as a writer, sent by the Christian Science Monitor of Boston. "Six articles, £25 the lot, including expenses." If he did well he might become their correspondent in Dublin. He was to describe how people lived their ordinary lives despite the Civil War. It was February 1st 1923. He knew no one in Ireland. To the Abbey Threate, where The Countess Cathleen was playing to a dozen people - the war kept them away. He arrived in Cork to a racket of machine-gun fire. "A barefoot urchin who took my case said " 'Tis only the boys from the hills." A posse of soldiers came into his room. "They looked respectfully at my books. One of them started to read a poem by Yeats and said if I kept to that I would be all right." He kept going and became correspondent.
He loved Clifden "where the sands were white and the kelp burns on them . . . and the curious tropic of Kerry." He had one experience of Irish country house life in Civil War time. At a party, he told a man he didn't hunt, shoot or fish. "What do you do then?" the man asked coldly. His life as an Irish sportsman began and ended when he fell off a horse into the mud. "I liked curious clothes, and back in Dublin stayed in my riding breeches" until somebody tactfully suggested he looked like a stable boy.
"It is a choking and confusing experience to meet one's first great man when one is young." Yeats: "It was a Georgian house," as unlike a hut of wattle in a beeloud glade as one could imagine. Writing a half century later, he could not remember the conversation but the resonance of voice, the exalted flow. More tea was needed. Yeats, after hesitation, went to the splendid Georgian window, opened it, and out went the tea leaves with a swoosh into Merrion Square "for all I know on to the heads of Lady Gregory, Oliver St John Gogarty and AE." And AE a "large tweedy bunch of a man" was a slave to the encouragement of young writers. Pritchett sent him his first story. He kept it for two years "and almost with tears of apology sent it back saying it was crowded out." AE occupied most of the space in The Irish Statesman.
There was an Orangeman up north whom Pritchett liked. In an IRA raid on his house, the man went for his gun under the bed. "I always keep one up the spout. A lesson you don't forget in the British Army." But, said his lively, southern wife "It went off as he got it from under the bed. There was a crash of china. He had shot the chamber pot."
"Sign on wall of Sean O'Casey's bleak room: `Get on with the bloody play.' It was The Plough and the Stars." From Midnight Oil, 1971. Pritchett died in March 1997, Sir Victor.