Late Plums

THE GREEN FOOL--Patrick Kavanagh --Harper ($3).

CALL MY BROTHER BACK--Michael McLaverty--Longmans, Green ($2).

The bragh days of the Irish Literary Renaissance were as exciting as plum cake --full of such plums as Yeats, A. E., Joyce, J. M. Synge. For some time now the cake has been stale and almost plumless. Last week, however, Irish-hungry readers might bite into two fairly fruity bits.

Call My Brother Back, an autobiographical novel, starts off well with an account of a boyhood among the Ulster farmers and fishermen on Rathlin Island, peters out into unimaginative writing, although the last two-thirds of the story is laid in Belfast during the tense days of "the Trouble." For adult readers, the book will taste more like a piece of citron than a plum.

On the other hand, The Green Fool, the autobiography of a sort of Irish Jesse Stuart, is one of the most plum-Irish volumes in a month of Sundays. Born in Mucker (corrupted Gaelic for "good pig-raising place"), County Monaghan, Patrick Kavanagh was "a bit of a lazybones, a bit of a liar and a bit of a rogue." He quit school at 12, worked on farms, joined the Irish Republican Army, learned poaching and desultory banditry, went to all the weddings, wakes, funerals, became highly learned in Mucker legend, superstitions, gossip, cunning.

A brawny lad of 20 before he heard there were any good living poets in Ireland, he published his first poems shortly after in the Irish Statesman, made a pilgrimage to Dublin. Tramping back to Mucker pronouncing the Irish gods and heroes dead, the fairies driven underground, Poet Kavanagh concluded: "Writers leave Ireland because sentimental praise, or hysterical pietarian dispraise, is no use in the mouth of a hungry man."

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