The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1929-04-27

The WAY IL WAS WITH THEM.
By Peadar O'Donnell. G. P. Put
nam Sons. $3.50.
Review by MARTIN MORIARTY.
THIRTY years ago John Millington
Synge. fresh from the esthetic
atmosphere of Partisan boulevards,
returned to ireland, crossed the
country to the western seaboard, and
sought diversion in the lives of the
poverty-stricken peasant-fishermen
of the Aran Islands. He was in
terested in the Glow murmur of Gaze
lie" which filled his later essays,
THE Aran Islands,; and the fisher
men who fought fiercely with the
wild Atlantic for a livelihood be-
came Riders of the Sea-" to be APP
plauded by sponsors of the national
Abbey Theatre in the days of the
Celtic Renaissance. Their legends,
stored away in the mystic mind of
the dramatist, gave him the folk
material which inspired "In the
Shadow of the Glen" With his
studied use of carefully chosen dis
lect, Synge's plays won the hearts
of the Yeats brigade of literary ma
tionalists, who, at a safe distance
from the stink of Dublin slums,
dreamed of the glorious of Ancient
Irish Civilization.
The last strongholds of a sup
planted culture still attract certain
patrons of the Abbey Theatre and
enthusiastic members of the Gaelic
League. The Western Seaboard-in
this case the Aran Islands off the
coast of Donegal-still inspires
creative literature. But Peadar
0'Donnell, in "The Way 1t was
with Them" is concerned not so
much with the charm of dialect, but
with the actual struggles of the
islanders who live in blind misery on
diet of bread, "praties" and tea.
O'Donnell is alive to the cruelties
of the struggle. He is moved by the
reactions of the islanders to poverty,
by the attitude of the mother of the
Dugan family who denies herself
food that her children may eat, who
even while dying from starvation is
ashamed to admit poverty and seeks
consolation with the rosary-beads
which exert such pernicious, reac-
tionary influence on Irish life. can
for yer lives don't wan of We breathe
word about what We had in the
mornin' if they ask We at school"
Mrs. Dugan exhorts. And again:
Just hunger, not thing else," the
doctor says when prescribing for
"illness."
O'Donnell's Mrs. Dugan is one of
the many island mothers who starve
patiently, pray for the good season
which brings the lucky catches, and
wall at the "bad times" which in
tensify the restless elders, driving
them as emigrants from the island.
'Oh, it's a grand life for a woman
with string of childer at her tail,
an her breasts weasened wi h
hunger" This is the bitter sheer of
an islander who has tasted the pros
perity" of the United States.
=
Life in Gaelic peasant Ireland has
not been accurately reflected in re-
cent Irish literature, O'Donnell con-
tends. His rejection is only incl
dental to a general break with the
mystic past which influences the
work of the new school. Conditions
which forced the break were ex-
pressed by a writer for the Con-
sentative London Daily Telegraph"
in 1926, when in a review of Sean
O'Casey's "The Plough and the
Stars" he declared:
"Within the last ten years the
world has experienced a cataclysm
which has changed the face of ma
ture, and Ireland herself has been
turned from the wandering, soulful
Cinderella Goddess called Kathleen
Nj Houlihan into the clear-eyed,
cynically bourgeois Irish Free State,
with its brave Board of Film Cen
sors and its Shannon Scheme"
The reviewer was right. The bal
cony audience at the Abbey Theatre
today applauds the plays of O'Casey,
built on the grim tragedies of the
enslaved of the Dublin slums in
spite of the tendency to pacifism,
more enthusiastically than the
"dialectized" work of Synge and
others who blinked in the Celtic Twi-