After the revolution

Ernie O’Malley and Helen Hooker shortly after they met in 1933. The photo was taken at her studio where she was doing a sculpture of his head.

By Peter McDermott

Cormac O’Malley can still recall the shock at first noticing a large indentation in his father’s back. He was 12.

“Oh, that’s from when they tried to take some bullets out of me with a pliers,” said Ernie O’Malley, then living at a modern apartment complex on Mespil Road in Ballsbridge, Dublin. Who “they” were or how and why he’d been shot was not explained. To that point, the year 1954, and for some time afterwards, his son knew nothing about the IRA or his father’s involvement in the armed conflicts of three decades before.

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The young O’Malley was being educated at a nearby boarding school, its location known only to one trusted friend. At weekends, he was cared for by his father, whom in a recent interview he called “my torch-bearer,” or by his father’s friends. “I moved from safe house to safe house,” he said.

That was because of a breach in his nuclear family, and not, as had been in his father’s case, a result of the split in the national movement

His mother, sculptor Helen Hooker O’Malley, had in 1950 moved back to her native United States, bringing with her – or “kidnapping,” to use her ex-husband’s word – their elder son and daughter. Ernie O’Malley feared his youngest child would be similarly abducted.

During the Civil War, there was nothing particularly safe, it turned out, about the secret room where O’Malley was hiding out in a house on Ailesbury Road, which is a few minutes’ walk from Mespil Road. For the four decades through 2012 it was the embassy of France; in 1922, it belonged to a family opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which had been signed by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith on Dec. 6 of the previous year. Both men had been dead several weeks by the time Free State troops came for O’Malley on Nov. 4. He was shot multiple times in the ensuing gun battle, in which a soldier died, and taken into custody. The seriousness of his wounds and the length of his convalescence likely saved him from execution. At age 25, he was one of the most important and best known of the 13,000 Republican prisoners held by the first Irish government.

Cormac O'Malley at the launch of "Modern Ireland

and Revolution: Ernie O'Malley in Context."

Striking legacy

After his father’s death from a heart attack in the spring of 1957, Cormac O’Malley joined his mother, brother and sister in America. He later studied history at Harvard, served in the U.S. navy, graduated from Columbia Law School and pursued an international legal career, working in Brussels, London and Mexico. But he would return to the academic study of history in 1999, with his father as his principal subject.

“Modern Ireland and Revolution: Ernie O’Malley in Context” – a collection of essays by leading scholars – is the 11th O’Malley-themed book he’s been involved with as editor and is arguably the crowning achievement of his work over two decades.

"Cormac O'Malley has enabled a dynamic corpus of scholarship on Ireland and on the transatlantic ties that bind Ireland and the U.S.,” said Miriam Nyhan Grey of Glucksman Ireland House, NYU. “This is not only as exemplified through writings on his father, but more generally through Cormac's own commitment to uncovering the complexity of Irish America.”

Roy Foster writes of his father in the concluding essay: “What remains striking about O’Malley’s legacy is not only his creation of one of the most remarkable memoirs in Irish literary history, but also the story of the journey of a deeply original and powerful intelligence, coping with the fallout of an extraordinary youth and a saddened middle age.”

The collection offers, writes Nicholas Allen in the introduction, “rich suggestions of the ways in which readings of Ernie O’Malley’s work can broaden our understanding of Irish literature, history and art.”

Allen continues: “More than that, it establishes O’Malley as a key figure in any constellation of Irish cultural life in the troubled global history of the early 20th century.”

The memoir Foster refers to was “On Another Man’s Wound,” published in 1936 to enthusiastic reviews in Dublin and London and the following year in New York. It stood out from the books by his IRA comrades covering the same War of Independence period. Says Allen: “The memoirs of [Tom] Barry and [Dan] Breen were written for an audience fed on the wild fantasies of the Western novel and the cinema adventure, which were signatures themselves of a broader culture of imperial entertainment.”

Foster describes those autobiographies and other like them as “naïve, highly colored morality tales, written in an idiom derived from the 19th century nationalist tracts excoriated by Yeats. By contrast, O’Malley tells his story in cadences influenced by the early Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and American writer friends like Hart Crane, but with a dry assurance all his own. The heroics come through all the more powerfully in his highly polished but economical style.”

Cormac O'Malley with his father

Ernie at the Galway Races in 1954.

And O’Malley certainly admired heroism, whether it was that shown by Collins, his future opponent in the Civil War, or the leaders he fought with in Munster like Seamus Robinson and Sean Moylan (who as a government minister gave the oration at his state funeral in 1957) or those who planned the Easter Rising of 1916.

“He reached that conviction at a young age,” said his younger son, “He felt nothing about taking extreme risk.”

In his 19th year, O’Malley was an apolitical medical student, the second of 11 children from a middle-class home in Glasnevin, Dublin. All changed on Monday, April 24, 1916. By the end of Easter Week, he had taken part in his first military skirmish. Two years later, he was traveling the country as a full-time organizer for the Irish Volunteers attached to headquarters in Dublin.

Released in 1924 after 20 months in prison, O’Malley took an extended trip to Europe at his family’s suggestion to recover from a hunger strike. By 1926, he’d resumed his medical studies at University College Dublin. He was still an abstentionist TD for Sinn Féin, but did not contest the general election of June 1927. Meanwhile, the new constitutionalist Fianna Fáil party, formed by his anti-Treaty IRA friends and comrades, worked hard to win him over. “What can we do to get O’Malley to join us?” wrote one prominent supporter in a letter to another.

Although he never formally threw in his lot with Fianna Fáil, he agreed to go to the U.S. with Frank Aiken, his former chief-of-staff and a senior lieutenant to party leader Éamon de Valera, to raise funds for the proposed Irish Press newspaper.

In “Modern Ireland and Revolution,” Orla Fitzpatrick writes, “[I]t was after that work was completed that he tapped into a network of modernist artists, writers and academics. This exposed him to a new way of thinking and a new way of seeing, leading him to state that the ‘years abroad taught me to use my eyes in a new way.’”

His most significant American friendships perhaps were those with two leading modernist photographers, Edward Weston and Paul Strand. O’Malley spent time in New York and on the West Coast with Weston, but also in New Mexico, where, says Fitzpatrick, his “awareness of and empathy with the indigenous people was heightened.”

O’Malley traveled further south in 1931, at a time when, she adds, many disillusioned with American life “sought authenticity and inspiration in post-revolutionary Mexico.”

In the essay “On Another Man’s Text,” Luke Gibbons reports than in 1930 O’Malley gave a series of lectures on Irish literature at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Otis. The Santa Fe New Mexican reported that his “fluent and assuring” presentation on “Ulysses” was the best of them.

Gibbons comments in relation to his fascination with Joyce’s novel: “In his powers of concentration, fascination with maps and lists, and assiduous eye for detail, he deployed in his military activities qualities not unlike those Joyce brought to bear on ‘Ulysses,’ and O’Malley went on to bring the same eye to his reading of Joyce’s work…”

Vibrant culture

O’Malley met in the early 1930s Helen Hooker, who was from an established New England family. They married in London in 1935 and settled in Dublin at first and then Mayo, where he’d been born. A military pension, together with a disability pension, granted by the de Valera government had made his return to Ireland possible

The O’Malleys, who were interested in painting, literature, photography, theatre, sculpture and architecture, inevitably became involved in the often vibrant cultural scene of mid-20th century Ireland.

Writing, though, was never going to supplement O’Malley’s state income in any significant way. His former Civil War cellmate and friend Peader O’Donnell, editor of the Bell magazine (of which O’Malley was literary editor for a time), advised him to hold back the part of his memoirs dealing with the Civil War (published in 1978 as “The Singing Flame”) because of the danger of his being sued for libel.

“On Another Man’s Wound,” published in its entirety in de Valera’s Irish Press, drew a libel suit anyway from a leading Donegal activist in de Valera’s party. His fellow anti-Treaty combatant won from O’Malley the equivalent of a year’s income in damages.

“That sets you back financially, psychologically, morally,” said his son.

Ernie O'Malley, left, actress Maureen O'Hara and director John Ford

on the set of "The Quiet Man" in June 1951 near Cong, Co Mayo.

O’Malley’s most important cultural impact during his lifetime was made in the area of painting. “He was not the artist himself,” Cormac O’Malley said. “He used his public prominence and reputation to expand the horizons of the artist and the Irish public.”

He acquired the works of 25 artists, but most notably a representative eight paintings by Jack B. Yeats, and seven by Evie Hone, both of whom became his close friends.

O’Malley was centrally involved with the planning of the Jack B. Yeats National Loan Exhibition, which attracted large crowds in July 1945. Róisin Kennedy writes: “Its organization required a committee of over 50 individuals, including several prominent members of Fianna Fáil.”

She adds: “In 1945-46, he undertook to interview 30 Irish artists, both to record their careers and in preparation for a planned exchange program with the Tate. That was never brought to fruition, but O’Malley was credited with masterminding the major exhibition of Evie Hone’s work which was held, after both their deaths, in University College Dublin in 1958 and at the Tate in 1959.”

Kennedy said of O’Malley’s career as promoter, organizer, critic and collector: “In art at least, revolution was a gradual and often thankless process of frustrated projects and of compromise.”

At some point thanks to his art and literary contacts, O’Malley came to the idea that the Benedictines would provide the best education for his sons, and through those contacts also he was able to secure places for both of them at Appleforth College, a secondary school in England.

Before he was taken to America, Cathal O’Malley, six years Cormac’s senior, was about to enter that Benedictine institution. The younger son did make it through the gates, but a few months later his father died.

“I wanted to stay on in school,” said O’Malley, who lives with his wife Moira in Stonington, Conn. His mother said he could go back to England after three weeks in America. “She broke her word,” he said. She sent her youngest child to a school in Colorado.

Cormac O'Malley, in 2007 in Westport, Co. Mayo,

standing behind his mother's head of his father.

Return to Mayo

Despite all of that, Cormac O’Malley said he had a good relationship with his mother. It helped that she had remarried in 1956 and provided a stable home environment when he was not at boarding school. His siblings were less lucky in their early American years, in his view.

Mother and younger son shared a passion for the arts in general, and for the work of Jack B. Yeats in particular. He inherited his father’s organizing abilities, too, which his mother was thankful for when she returned to sculpture after the death of her second husband.

Helen Hooker O’Malley Roelefs went back to Mayo in the early 1960s to renovate Burrishoole, the home she'd shared with Ernie O’Malley.

“When Mother's second husband died in 1971 she started to spend more time in Ireland, sometimes up to six months per year,” Cormac O’Malley said, “And started to sculpt Irish figures once again as well as do significant photography.”

When his own two children arrived, though, he found that he couldn’t make the commitment to Ireland. Meanwhile, Helen was spending more time in Dublin from 1981 and her children convinced her to sell up in Mayo. She died at age 88 in 1993.

“My mother never fell out of love with my father,” their youngest said. “She just didn’t like the arrangement.” She was strong willed and financially independent, and so issues between them, such as her extension of their Mayo home, grew over time.

Cormac O’Malley believes that he got the best of both parents: the divorced father Ernie and the remarried Helen. Some of his fondest memories are of him on the water. “He was a great sailor,” his son said. He can also remember clearly the last three summers with his father on the Aran Islands learning Irish.

Ernie O'Malley's personality has sometimes been described as "prickly," but his son said, “We didn’t see much of that. He was tender, attentive, supportive."

With his health obviously in decline, he wrote to his daughter Etain in 1956: “I don’t want a Celtic Cross. I wish to have a good slab of granite over me, and face me to the East, towards the old British, for you were once buried in Ireland facing your enemies. Indeed they are no longer my enemies. Each man finds his enemies in himself.”

Sixty years after Ernie O’Malley’s death, his three children are living thousands of miles to his west. “America has been good to us,” Cormac O’Malley said.

 

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