O'Malley of Shanganagh

207 pp. First edition. Orange cloth boards with black titles. White jacket with illustration on front. "Donn Byrne (born Brian Oswald Patrick Donn-Byrne) (20 November, 1889 – 18 June 1928) was an Irish novelist. He was born in New York City where, he claimed, his Irish parents were on a business trip at the time, and soon after returned with them to Ireland. He grew up being equally fluent in Irish and English, growing up in an area where some Irish Irish was still spoken. Recent research (2012) has revealed that Byrne elaborated and cultivated versions of his biography which were far from being accurate. Descriptions of Byrne's early life and academic life as recorded by Thurston Macauley are flatly rejected and convincingly disproven by a lengthy article by John Bradley (Seanchas Ard Macha vol. 24 no.1. Pages 183-239). Bradley was parish priest in the parish of Lower Killeavy, where the Byrne family originated and had access to local knowledge and some documentary information about the family. Bradley shows that Byrne was inclined to disguise his humble roots rather than use them as evidence of his considerable achievements and of the extraordinary intelligence which enabled him to leave the townland of Carrickbracken, Camlough, Co Armagh and become a successful novelist and short story writer. In effect, Byrne seems to have been inclined to create a "novel" of his own life and Macauley, the first biographer of the tragic writer was encouraged by Byrne's widow Dorethea, to maintain the fantasy, she herself being given to frequent changes of name. (Some of the edits offered here and the reference to Bradley's article, are by someone who was born in the humble house where Byrne lived in Carrickbracken, and which is marked by a plaque today.) The early novels can be said to be quite mediocre, noted as "potboilers" by Thurston Macauley, Byrne's earliest biographer. Polo tells the story of the Italian adventurer as told by an Irishman, and Wind is a romantic novel of the sea. Both show some highly lyrical passages intermixed with the plain language of real life. With Raftery, however, the author seems to reinvent the saga style, the prose breaking off into musical verse now and then as it tells the story of a blind poet wandering Ireland and avenging his wife's dishonor. His later novels invited comparison with Irish novelist George Moore, especially in their romance and historical themes. It was with Hangman's, though, that he began to identify himself with the traditional Irish storytellers, noting in his preface ("A Foreword to Foreigner's") that: "I have written a book of Ireland for Irishmen. Some phrase, some name in it may conjure up the world they knew as children." It is also in this novel that Byrne returns to his Irish nationalist ideas by alluding to the ongoing strife of the Irish Civil War and fight for Independence. Byrne was firmly of the neo-Romantic view of the mythical and pastoral beauty of Irish history. His writing hauntingly evokes these images, sometimes seeming want to preserve them. "It seemed to me," he says in Wind, "that I was capturing for an instant a beauty that was dying slowly, imperceptibly, but would soon be gone." his simple narrative style is rarely found today, and has the atmosphere of ancient oral epics such as Taine Bo Cualinge and the Epic of Gilgamesh."