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Garry Delea worked in a Turf Commission Agency (bookie's office) but he was ready for anything, wished some great opportunity would come along. Like all Republican sympathizers he knew about Tully McCoolagh. the secret leader of the Irish Republican Army, but had never laid eyes on him. When one night a friend hinted that a meeting might be arranged, Garry jumped at the chance. At the meeting Tully asked Garry to sign a manifesto that would mean arrest and certain death to two of the signers. Garry agreed without batting an eye. In Mount joy Prison he and Tully were put in the same cell; they were to be shot in the morning. To his astonishment Garry discovered that Tully's real name was Tulloolagh: she was a woman. The night passed differently from what he had expected. And at dawn he and Tulloolagh were released; the other two had been shot instead. Garry had been ready enough to die for Ireland; his night with Tulloolagh had rather shaken him; and now this final anticlimax upset him further. The Irish Republican Army disbanded. Her days of dangerous disguise at an end. Tulloolagh hoped Garry would marry her and live peacefully in the country. But Garry had tasted true happiness when he was facing death; he wanted it again. With wild Irish asceticism he dedicated himself to share "the little, ludicrous tragedies of the world."
Author Stuart tells this highly improbable and occasionally ridiculous tale with such feeling that its incoherent passion is impressive, convincing in spite of itself.
The Author. Like many a good Irishman, Francis Stuart happened to be somewhere else when he was born—in his case, Australia. His Ulster-Unionist (anti-Free State) parents sent him carefully to Rugby, England's heartiest school. The inevitable Irish upshot was that Francis Stuart landed in a Dublin jail as a rioting Irish Republican. Against the wishes of both families he ran away with Iseult, niece of famed, beauteous Patriot Maud Gonne MacBride, whose husband had been executed in the 1916 rising. Now he lives in Glendalough (Dublin suburb), flies a plane, raises chickens, tries to find in his writing a harmony for the Irish soul. Backed by William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, he has just been nominated to membership in the new Irish Academy of Letters. Other books: Pigeon Irish, We Have Kept the Faith (verse, given a prize by the Royal Irish Academy).
U. S. High Life
TROPICAL WINTER — Joseph Hergesheimer—Knopf ($2.50).
Joseph Hergesheimer is no Communist and he likes the good things of this world. Like other successful writers he has moved familiarly among the pleasure-hunters of the U. S.'s expensive winter resort, Palm Beach, jotting down many a note of things seen & heard. Some of these ten short stories appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, but they would make good reading for the grimmest Communist. With few exceptions the people in Tropical Winter are vicious, hysterical, more than half-crazed by pleasure-laden lives. Since Deatfrdebunked Ivar Kreuger, no one supposes that matches are made in heaven, but bourgeois opinion still holds that Palm Beach and romance go hand in hand. Author Hergesheimer does a good best to prick this bubble. Some of the stories:
A middle-aged couple, straining up the social ladder, get their fingernails on the top rung—then slip.