An Irishman's Diary

Sean O'Faolain is best remembered today as one of Ireland's great short story writers. But a life that spanned most of the 20th century fitted in far more than the handful of works that he felt could survive after him, securing a niche in the literary canon.

As a young man he was active in the IRA during the War of Independence and then as a propagandist for the anti-treatyites during the Civil War, a tumultuous period followed by a stint of self-imposed exile in the US at Harvard. He returned to Ireland in 1933 following de Valera's election victory and in the following decades published the collections of short stories that made his reputation.

There were also novels, biographies of Countess Markievicz, Daniel O'Connell and Hugh O'Neill. His memoir Vive Moi! is considered a classic of the genre. In 1940 he founded and edited the literary magazine The Bell, in which he attacked the censorship and suffocating Catholic conformity of independent Ireland. As if not busy enough, he also worked as a lecturer, critic and travel writer and was one of the grand old men of Irish letters at the time of his death in 1991.

What is less well known is that O'Faolain is also the godfather of the Irish Studies Nucleus at the University of São Paulo, the most important centre of Irish cultural studies in South America. This role is all the more surprising, given that O'Faolain never set foot in Brazil and would probably have given the place little thought if he had not received a letter from that country around the close of 1972.

Its sender was a young Brazilian woman named Munira Mutran, who had recently finished an MA in English literature and was looking for a new topic to develop into a PhD thesis. A visiting US scholar suggested she steer clear of the big literary names and instead follow her desire to focus on a contemporary writer. As a suggestion, he gave her a book of O'Faolain's short stories.

Mutran had never heard of the Corkman, but quickly found herself transported to a new literary and cultural world, having previously x been familiar only with English and American writers. She sent off what she remembers now as a long and naïve letter informing the intended subject about her project and wondering if she might ask him some questions.

Four months later she received a warm and generous reply, mainly concerning itself with Mutran's inquiries about Irish writers: "Shaw, Joyce, O'Casey, Synge, Yeats: these are the big five, and most people count Shaw as in the English field. As he mostly was. . .The rest of us are minor writers, talented perhaps, but not men of genius.

So why should you hear about us?" It was the start of a 15-year correspondence. O'Faolain's answers and the books he sent helped fuel Mutran's interest in him and in Ireland and her PhD continued apace. When she finished it in 1977 she turned to sharing her passion with others and so the Irish Studies Nucleus came into being.

Today it offers South America's only postgraduate course in Irish cultural studies, publishes its own journal, The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies, and regularly organises symposia that bring some of the major contemporary Irish writers to South America, the most recent visitor to the nucleus being Colm Tóibín.

And so it is that in a city which historically has few Irish connections you can find South Americans preparing for vivas on the plays of Tom Murphy, Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh while past pupils have been awarded doctorates for research on the likes of John Banville, Kate O'Brien and O'Faolain's old friend Elizabeth Bowen. As its doctoral students have secured tenure at other universities, the nucleus's influence has spread across the continent.

Munira Mutran - now Prof Mutran - met Sean O'Faolain and his wife Eileen several times during visitors to Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, but she says he took little interest in his role in the growth of Irish cultural studies in Brazil.

In his letters to her, published in Brazil in 2005, he is reluctant to discuss scholarly research into himself and his own work. (When she sent him a copy of her thesis on him, written in Portuguese, he replied: "I am glad I cannot read it.") Instead the correspondence developed in other directions, becoming one between two close friends in spite of the difference in miles and years.

In 1981, a time of political strife in both Ireland and Brazil, he wrote to Mutran after completing an essay on the H-Block hunger strikes for the London Review of Books: "I mean - history is never neat. We are living in an untidy stretch of it. One worries for one's young.

The picture is never clear. One cannot plan ahead. Living now takes courage, intelligence, a great deal of wits, a broad soul. We think of you with much fellow feeling. But you are wise. You can, you know it, only plan with hope and live out your plan with determination. Bless you - it is always endearing and cheering to hear from you. We are energised and encouraged and made happier to know you are there. Distance makes no difference. Love: Séan."

And distance has made no difference. In São Paulo, Sean O'Faolain is still thought of today as a dear friend.