Books: Rags, Bones & Moonlight

THE MAN WHO INVENTED SIN (183 pp.) — Séan O’Faoláin — Devin-Adair ($2.75).

The best of Séan O’Faoláin’s stories belong with those of Chekhov. This 48-year-old Irishman, born in Cork, fought in Ireland’s Civil War and afterwards, in Midsummer Night Madness, wrote a series of haunting stories about it. They had the hard authenticity of firsthand pictures of war and revolution, with none of the drab, repetitious prose that is now almost a trademark of war novels. His themes were as subtle as Turgenev’s, with clear and vivid pictures of action, but the distinction of his work was its fine cadenced prose. O’Faoláin’s novels, e.g., A Nest of Simple Folk, had much the same quality, but were diffused and blurred by an indistinctness that lay like a mist over setting and characters alike.

The small publishing firm of Devin-Adair has now brought out a selection of 15 of O’Faoláin’s short stories. They are like pieces chipped off a larger design, showing, despite their incompleteness, a wonderful workmanship.

Author O’Faoláin is aware of their limitation. Speaking of Irish writers generally, he once remarked that they had come from poor households, and there was a side of life they did not know. Their romance, he said, could only “be made out of what we have—rags and bones, moonlight, limed cabins, struggle, the passion of our people, a bitter history, great folly, a sense of eternity in all things, a courage ‘never to submit or yield.’ “