With an Irish Brogue

1000 YEARS OF IRISH PROSE (607 pp.)--Edited by Vivian Mercier and David H. Greene--Devin-Adair ($6).

"A healthy nation," wrote Bernard Shaw in 1906, "is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality, it will think of nothing else but getting it set again." In the late 19th century and early 20th, when the bone of Gaelic nationality was painfully being set, Ireland found voice to curse, plead, moan, gasp, roar and sing out a literature as great and sudden as any of modern times.

There had never been an age without fine Irish writers, but almost to a man--Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde, Shaw--they had crossed the sea to pass their lives laughing prosperously at England rather than weeping insolvency for Ireland. In the 1880s, when William Butler Yeats first twanged his lyre, the world was understandably startled; it was almost like finding a Goethe in a peat croft. But for the next 50 years Ireland kept passing out literary surprises, for first-rate writers came along as fast as poteen at a christening: Russell, Synge, Gogarty, O'Casey, Joyce, O'Flaherty. O'Connor, McLaverty. In Part I of 1000 Years of Irish Prose (Part II, covering the first 930 years, will be published next year), Editors Mercier and Greene have made selections that lead like steppingstones through the turbulence of the great times; and almost every step is a literary gem.

"Old Eire and the ancient ways" that led to the new Ireland are suggested in a series of myths retold by Standish O'Grady. James Stephens and Lady Gregory. More contemporary myths are provided by James Joyce in a passage on Parnell lifted whole from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and by J. M. Synge in his magnificent memoir on the Aran Islands.

A whole play by Sean O'Casey. The Shadow of a Gunman, and a handsomely turned short story by Elizabeth Bowen, An Evening in Anglo-Ireland, bring in the iron theme of revolution. The book rounds out with stories by Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty and a dozen others, a couple of eloquent political manifestoes, a little theologizing, a winsome recollection of Yeats by Oliver Gogarty, the Sirens section of Joyce's Ulysses, a late play by Yeats. About a third of the pieces, the editors note, have not previously been printed in the U.S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.