Ah, the Irish and their eloquence, their uncanny ability to find the romantic and lyrical in the commonplace, the poetic in the quotidian!
I’ve recently been enjoying the novels of 20th century Irish author Maurice Walsh, best known for his short story “The Quiet Man” which was later adapted into John Ford’s witty Oscar-winning movie starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. (The film borrowed its narrative framework from Walsh, but the clever and memorable dialog was largely the work of Frank S. Nugent, a prolific screenwriter who often worked with Ford and is best remembered for his script for The Searchers.)
Walsh was influenced by Romantic nationalism–the notion that a nation’s people share not only language and laws, but also a culture and an attachment to the land. Walsh’s fiction reflects this worldview, his work is imbued with “a sense of bogs and woods” in the words of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney and it is unabashedly romantic when it comes to the courting rituals of men and women.
Walsh’s style is decidedly poetic but his prose stops short of affectation, it’s not cloying or florid. (Ernest Hemingway, the master of plain-style writing, was said to be a fan.) Walsh has a remarkable sense of language. Consider this paragraph from his 1926 novel The Key Above the Door, set in the Scottish Highlands after the First World War, where his protagonist and narrator, Thomas King, first meets the character Agnes de Burc and describes her as follows:
She was a tall young woman and slim, and her white–or very light cream–dress had something robe-like about it. She wore an oldish panama hat, and her black hair peeped below it. There was little or no color in her face, which was of that type of beauty that, in a travail of expression, we call proud, magnetic, electric, tragic; somber, I think, is the best word of all, and the quality it attempts to describe is always the beauty of the highest quality: beauty of the calm, lean kind, dark-eyed and serious, proud and self-willed, fateful and unafraid, and made for love and desolation since Troy fell: beauty that fate plays with for it own ends, and that man has been thrall to since passion’s first stir.
King offers us a spare physical description: she is tall, young, slim, with black hair and a pale face and then, more vaguely, that Agnes is beautiful. But then he goes further, imagining an emotional depth, a sadness. It’s clear that he’s smitten with her, that he has experienced what the French call a coup de foudre. King likens Agnes to Helen of Troy–a legendary beauty fought over by men–in a foreshadowing of what lies ahead in the novel. Walsh, who often writes lovingly about Highlands fly fishing, has set the hook for the reader. There’s a mystery here (what makes her beauty tragic, somber?), one we want to solve.
Walsh’s romantic worldview fell out of favor in the second half of the century and, not surprisingly, his books fell out of print. His novels may seem old-fashioned and overly sentimental today, but Maurice Walsh knows how to tell a compelling love story. And does that ever grow old? I’d say not.
