The Black Soul

As the wind rose suddenly in the cool night The Stranger was transfixed by visions of the war borne on the squall: ‘millions of dying men, worlds falling to pieces, continents hurled into the air…millions of guns…beautiful music that enthralled him and made him want to kill…bare grinning faces now fetid smells’.

Hugging Galway Bay with their western flank exposed to all the Atlantic hurls at their crags, the Aran Islands are the setting for Liam O’Flaherty’s novel, The Black Soul.

Through the changing environment and moods of the four seasons, beginning with winter, this is the story of Fergus O’Connor (The Stranger) and his attempt to escape the battlefield horrors of WW1, seeking solace and recovery on these wild Atlantic shores.

His demons are aroused in the wilds of winter and the changing seasons expose the conflicts in his mind –‘oppressed by nature that was black as his soul he began to walk hurriedly towards the sea’.

But slowly the seasons take him on a path to recovery.

He is torn between passion and rejection for two women – the intelligent and fiercely religious Kathleen O’Daly and Little Mary, wife of Red John, with whom he lodges.

Little Mary is the illegitimate daughter of an illegitimate mother and proud of her Breton smuggler grandfather, shot in a frascas in a brothel in the South of France. Like The Stranger, her history marks her out as different in this remote community.

With Celtic contradiction, Little Mary is so called because she is tall and fine featured and she belies her ‘easy’ ancestry, for she is the Virgin Little Mary, her passion fiercely withheld from her maddened peasant husband.

With The Stranger, her sensuality is aroused and she tries ‘her utmost to gain access to those corners where his black soul lurked’.

O’Flaherty describes this wild environment on the edge of Europe – which will appear familiar to Scottish readers acquainted with Scotland’s western seaboard. Even the place names are familiar – a reminder of a strong cultural heritage shared.  ‘In winter all things die. So roared the sea around the shores of Inverara’.

The moods of Fergus’ black soul reverberate through the seasons. He searches for meaning and explores meaninglessness, observes the cycle of rural existence, is overwhelmed by the constant stimulus of the landscape, is driven to seek intellectual companionship where few can offer it and wracked by guilt over his consummation with Little Mary.

In an extraordinary rescue, his soldier’s instincts and decisiveness return – ‘he became intimate with every ledge and slit and boss and weather-stain on the cliffs, with every wave on the bay, with every rock that jutted from the water, with its red wet mane of seaweed floating around it. He even felt kinship with the fishes prowling in the depths’.

Liam O’Flaherty

Liam O’Flaherty was born in Gort na gCapell, a remote village on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands in 1896.

Considered one of the important writers of the Irish Renaissance, he began studies for the priesthood but in 1917 joined the Irish Guards and fought in WW1.

He was badly injured in the trenches and suffered shell shock with recurring problems, no doubt facing his own Black Soul.

He travelled widely after the war, returning to Ireland in 1921 and formed a socialist revolutionary army in the Irish Civil War.

Forced to flee a staunchly Catholic and conservative Ireland, he moved to London where he began to write  the novels and short stories that were to establish him as a major literary figure.

The Black Soul – and much of O’Flaherty’s writing – deals with an Ireland that no longer exists, predating the emergence of the country as a modern European State.However, with the skill demonstrated by Ireland’s Tourism industry, parts of this earlier Ireland can always be summoned up to meet the expectations of returning expats and visitors.

The Black Soul was first published in 1924 and O’Flaherty wrote a number of further novels and his autobiography Shame the Devil (1934).

The Informer, also published in 1924, was made into a film by his cousin, the director John Ford.  Perceived as anti-establishment and by some as actually dangerous, O’Flaherty’s books were banned in Ireland during his lifetime. He left the Communist Party and returned to his Roman Catholic faith before his death in 1984.

Without doubt one of Ireland’s finest writers of the early twentieth century, he is today regrettably much overlooked especially on this side of the Irish Sea.

Jonathan Cape issued The Black Soul as no 93 in their Florin Books imprint in 1936. Wolfhound Press, now part of Merlin Publishing Dublin, published a number of his books including The Black Soul. Details of six of their O’Flaherty titles can be found by clicking on the Wolfhound Press link on their web site.

Copies are also easily found through Amazon or Albris if your local bookseller does not have a copy.

Russell Bruce, Books Editor

The photographs accompanying this article have been chosen to underline the nature of the place that bred O’Faherty’s mindset - his birthplace of Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands off Galway Bay in the west coast of Ireland.

Scotland’s and Argyll’s west coast islanders and those familiar with them, will immediately recognise such places and their influences on the soul.

These places have never known the sheltered and prescribed  structures of town dwelling. They live by a different pulse, at once liberated by and dangerously close to an older more pagan reality. In such places the mythical, the historical and the contemporary are simultaneously present, offering new cloths to be woven and creating vortices from which the artist’s sensibility may not always emerge.

The photographs are, from the top:

• Tramore Beach on the east of Inishmore, by copyright holder Kanchelskis and reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.
• The monchromatic rocky coastline of Inishmore, by copyright holder Pixie and reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.
• The sweep of Inishmore to the Atlantic, showing the plethora of small fields bounded by th stone walls that are an immediate feature of the west coast of Ireland, testifying to the labour necessary to clear land for use. Copyright belongs to the photographer, Sebd and the image is reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.
  
• The view inland over Inishmore from the edge of the prehistoric fort and rital site, Dun Aengus, on the top of a sheer 100 metre cliff edge so looking and defending inwards. It is thought that the cliff-edge location is not original but the result of centuries of coastal erosion.The photographer is The Lopper who has placed the image in the Public Domain.
• The interior of Dun Aengus, called ‘the most magnificent barbaric monument in Europe’. Beyond the visible third ring of its construction is a fourth ring, the famous defensive system of stone slabs, known as a Chevaux de frise. Planted in an upright position in the ground, these are largely well-preserved and were designed to make access slow and difficult. By photographer and copyright holder, Dunlavin Green,  this is reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.