An Irishman's Diary

The writer Criostoir O'Flynn tells a story about a discussion with an acquaintance who expressed surprise that he was still a Catholic. "But Criostoir," said the man, "you can't be a Catholic if you're a writer."

O'Flynn is both. Now in his 73rd year, he is unlikely to renounce his faith or to stop his literary output. Indeed he recently completed his 55th work, a third volume of autobiography entitled Final Pages, which is to be published next spring. He has remained loyal to his faith, though he endured an unfair share of clerical censorship. He argues, however, in his second memoir, Consplawkus: A Writer's Life (Mercier Press, 9.99), published earlier this year, that "the truth of the Catholic religion does not depend on the behaviour of its ministers."

Independence

The title is apt. "Consplawkus," an anglicised version of the Irish "gan spleachas", means, loosely, "independence" or "without dependence". Suffice to say that Criostoir's independence often came at a heavy price - twice he endured the humiliation and economic devastation of being sacked from teaching jobs, by means of "posterior propulsion from a crozier."

This is how he describes the reaction of priest in charge of the primary school at Pallasgreen, Co Limerick, in which he was teaching, when his play Romance of an Idiot, which featured the suicide of a young man, was produced early in 1963:

"When he began to tell me again that the play was immoral, but could be `fixed up' to make it satisfactory, I had no option to tell him that as a teacher, I was willing to listen to anything he had to say about matters educational but with regard to my play and to all my work as a writer, I was independent and would do my writing to the best of my ability according to my conscience. `But that's not the way I see it,' he said, `and that's not how the people will see it. And I as parish priest have to take all things into account'."

The reckoning came soon enough when the PP fired O'Flynn, offering no explanation for the redundancy in a blunt letter which was countersigned by the Archbishop of Cashel.

With this blemish on his record, Criostoir found it impossible to secure another teaching job in Ireland and he left for Liverpool, without his family, to seek work. Lonely, hungry days followed before he found suitable employment. In the meantime, he took odd jobs to get by, washing cars at a garage and unsuccessfully trying to sell cosmetic brushes door to door. "My career in fancy brushes lasted only two days," he tells us. "By that time I was feeling like Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman felt after a lifetime."

Theatre Festival

Still applying for jobs in Ireland, he found work eventually at a Christian Brothers School in Dun Laoghaire. In 1969, however, five years into the job, Croistoir was sacked again after his play The Order of Melchizedek irked his employers when it was produced in the Dublin Theatre Festival. That particular tale will be told in Final Pages.

Elsewhere he writes of his early, discouraging attempts to find outlets for his work at the Abbey Theatre under Earnest Blythe, with Francis McManus at Raidio Eireann, and at An Gum. It becomes clear that there is no understatement when he says the "essential lesson a writer must learn" is "to recover from the despondency and frustration of rejection". However, while Criostoir has described himself in another book as "a battled-scarred old lone wolf who has come a long and hard way", there is far more to Consplawkus than a personal history of campaigns waged.

Criostoir has a great eye for the telling detail, often peculiarly Irish. He writes of meeting a farmer in Dun Chaoin, Co Kerry, who wanted a Irishspeaker's grant to reward participation in the rural electrification scheme. As a young man in Limerick he spontaneously joined a protest meeting "on the current ills of the Irish nation" bringing the attendance to five, the same as the number of speakers. In Dublin, he pawned his typewriter and borrowed another. Later, while teaching English to adult groups in Liverpool in 1963, he encountered two Yemeni immigrants who were eager to discuss "de Valera and freedom". Yemen had become a republic a year earlier.

Translations

Among other work in English and in Irish, Criostoir has published 11 volumes of poetry, 12 plays, five translations - including a version in Irish of Dante's Divina Commedia - and two novels. By any standards, that is an impressive output. He describes the memoir of his childhood in Limerick in the 1930s and 1940s, There is an Isle, as "a corrective to the denigratory account of the same period given by Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes."

Consplawkus, the product of a man more bemused than bitter about the adversity he faced, is imbued with a careful sense of day-by-day life, its troubles and its joys. Telling of an Ireland much different from the boom times of today, it is an underground chronicle of an ordinary man who has spent most of his life "chained to a typewriter", though he says he still doesn't know why. With humour and a robust enthusiasm for words, books, literature and languages, he nobly withstood the pains of rejection and censorship. Should he write another volume after Final Pages, a friend has suggested he call it P.S. We await both.