Review of The Farm by Lough Gur by Mary Carbery Thomas MacGreevy Original Source: Ireland To-Day. Dublin. November 1937. pp.85-86. This text is available only for the purpose of academic teaching and research provided that this header is included in its entirety with any copy distributed. Fiction Peace Is Growth The Farm by Lough Gur. By Mary Carbery. (Longmans. 10s 6d). Machiavelli's axiom that a wise statesman must never go to war if he can attain his ends by peaceful methods applies not only in politics but in literature. The literature of anathema is usually less agreeable to read than the literature produced by temperate minds, and it is always more ephemeral in its effect. It arises from anger which, no matter how righteous it claims to be, is the lowest form of self-indulgence. And though it may be true that human nature is instinctively selfish, it would seem that the great mass of human beings dislike angry writing. They may read it for as long as it remains topical, but cherish it they will not. The literature that remains is the courageous literature that rises above the undeniable wretchednesses of life as it is ordered. Always it is the Virgils who are cherished, not the Juvenals. There has been an immense amount of angry Irish writing in the hundred years since we learned to write out of our own language. Swift had begun it, and our position as an underdog people made it inevitable that the tradition should be continued. Tom Moore might withdraw to where he could write peacefully and in peace, but much of our writing at home had to be partisan writing, and it is all but impossible for partisan writing not to degenerate into angry writing. Now, however, writers living in Ireland seem to be realising that, like militarists in action, angry writers merely augment the troubles they imagine themselves to be putting right. I cannot pretend to an exhaustive knowledge of contemporary Irish literature, and yet in the past eighteen months I have come across several quite realistic Irish books which were remarkable for the temperateness with which they were written. There was Mr. O'Malley's On Another Man's Wound, there was Miss Geraldine Cummins' novel, Fires of Beltaine. And now Lady Carbery has joined forces with her friend, Mrs. Mary Fogarty of County Limerick, in this memoir of home life in the rural Ireland of seventy years ago, a book in which, though facts are faced - it includes tales of the Famine and of Fenianism, of bigamy, of seduction and of imbecility - there are no harsh words. Mrs. Fogarty was brought up in an atmosphere of unsentimental loving-kindness. This was not only because her parents were comfortably off. It was also because they had character. Her father, John O'Brien, and her uncle, Father Richard MacNamara, were nationalist, but cherished the decencies and steered clear of the squalid intrigues of party politics. Her mother, a [p.86] woman of natural distinction, loved the only good literature that came her way, "classical" English literature. A sister, Bessie, listened to stories outside, read Byron surreptitiously at home, and developed into a lovably fiery Irish "patriot," first as a young girl at home and later in France, where she went to school, in Poland, where she went governessing, and in Serbia, where she married. Mrs. Fogarty, herself, went to school to the "F.C.Js." in Bruff, but though she occasionally considered the idea of becoming a nun, she rejected it, went home to Lough Gurand then returned to Bruffas the wife of Richard Fogarty. There were two younger sisters and a brother, a medical student cousin, other relatives and, not less important, a host of farm hands, maids, retainers, neighbours, "ascendency" and "people," and tramps. All these give scope for the authors' quite remarkable gifts as literary portrait painters. The book is like a symphony in terms of portraiture, for the characters are vividly depicted, not only as individuals, but as influencing each others' lives, like so many themes and orchestrations. And it is impossible to say whether the themes or the orchestrations are more admirable, the unassertive integrity of John O'Brien and of Father MacNamara the unassuming dignity of Mrs. O'Brien, the youthful eagerness of Bessie O'Brien, or the pathetic comedy of the "innocent" Dinny-bawn, the simple heroism of Mary Deasyon her wretched deathbed (hoping she would live the couple of hours necessary to finish making her own shroud), the pitiful irony of the return from Americaof a doting mother's disappointing son, the airiness of maids repeating and acting upon pishogues in kitchen and dairy ... Mrs. Fogarty, herself, standing apart from them all and observing them all with her unerring instinct for the humanly significant, has, under Lady Carbery's well-nigh perfect editing, put them and herself on the literary map of Ireland as clearly as Pushkin put the characters in his stories on the literary map of old Russia. The valley of the Lower Shannon was one of the least spoiled parts of Ireland. Now it has electricity works and aerodromes and it must, in the nature of things, become industrialised and hideous. It is very well that a Mrs. Fogarty and a Lady Carbery should have arisen to record its old lovable ways of life while there was yet time. Thomas McGreevy
