Peter Costello
The Writings of Padraic Colum: “That Queer Thing, Genius”,
edited by Pádraic Whyte and Keith O’Sullivan
(Routledge Studies in Irish Literature, £135.00 / €156.00)
There was a time, long, long ago, when Padraic Colum was one of the most quoted by heart poets in Ireland, a man whose words were happily on the lips of young and old. These were mostly poems from his earliest collections, except perhaps for “She moved through the Fair”, which passed from being the work of a poet into the common corpus of Irish folk songs that everyone then knew and sang, rather like Yeats’ “Down by the Sally Gardens”.
Colum and his wife, the critic Mary Colum, author of From These Roots (1937), were distinguished by their attention both to Irish rural life, to indeed the life and traditions of Colum’s Longford childhood in the 1890s, and the modernist trends in writing as well. His own early plays were realistic in trend. (His father, by the way, was one of those brought up before the magistrates for his riotous behaviour at the opening of Synge’s drama The Playboy of the Western World in 1907.)
Colum, indeed, is one of those many classic or near classic Irish writers that present day publishers pay no heed to”
Colum, himself a gentle little man, was one of those who was “present at the creation” in the Irish Literary Revival. He remained a presence down to his death in 1972, adroitly dividing his year between teaching and writing in the United States, and summering in Dublin.
But I think today he has been eclipsed completely as stronger suns in the literary firmament have cast a deep shadow over his achievements which the editors of this slim little book aim to reverse if they can, if only among academics. Colum, indeed, is one of those many classic or near classic Irish writers that present day publishers pay no heed to in their often frantic search for instantly saleable “best sellers”.
Neglected
None of his books are in print here. But that exemplary press in the USA, Cluny Media, has available his award winning books The Big Tree of Bunlahy: Stories of My Own Countryside as well as four of his retellings of classical and Irish myths, in well produced editions.
Also neglected are his series of books written in the 1920s at the behest of the government of Hawaii (not then a state of the US union) recording the ancient origin myths and the legends and tales of the Hawaiians. This series, published by Yale University Press, are very remarkable books, which are seemingly little known now in Ireland, though they show Colum attempting to redress the fatal impact of the American empire on the islands, shamefully taken by force of arms in 1890s with the overthrow of the native monarchy.
This book to hand contains some ten essays by academics on various aspects of Colum’s work. They are not aimed at making him more widely read by that perhaps now elusive creature Virginia Woolf’s “common reader”.
I cannot leave this review without entering a firm protest about the price of this book. Just who do the publishers, a long established firm of great reputation now swallowed up into the international conglomerate Taylor & Francis, think they are publishing this book for, at a price which would feed some families for a week.
On another occasion I will have more to say about this situation. Meanwhile those who are interested in the second row of talents of modern Irish literature will grasp eagerly at this book, whatever the cost.