Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

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Irish novelist Donn Byrne was born Brian Oswald Patrick Donn-Byrne in New York on the 20 November, 1889. His Irish parents were on a business trip at the time, so soon after he returned with them to Ireland. He grew up being equally fluent in Irish and English, growing up in an area were Gaelic was still spoken.

Contents

[edit] Biography

He turns up as a singing, fair haired boy in the annals of Bulmer Hobson's Irish volunteer movement: in 1906, when he was 14, he went to a meeting with Hobson and Robert Lynd of the London Daily News. Lynd wrote of that meeting, mentioning the singing of a little fair haired boy -- that is, Donn Byrne. It was through Hobson that Byrne acquired his taste for Irish history and nationalism. In 1907 he went to the University of Dublin to study Romance languages. While at the school he published in The National Student, the student magazine. After graduation he continued his studies in Europe, hoping to join the British Foreign Office. However, he turned down his PhD when he learned that he would have to wear evening clothes to his early morning examinations, which he felt that no true Irish gentleman would ever do.

Giving up the Service, he returned to New York in 1911, where he began working first for the Catholic Encyclopedia, the New Standard Dictionary, and then the Century Dictionary. In February 1912 his poem "The Piper" appeared in Harper's magazine. His first short story, "Battle," sold soon after to Smart Set magazine for $50.00, appearing in the February 1914 issue. He sold more stories to various magazines. Some of these were anthologized in his first book, Stories Without Women, 1915. then began working on his first novel, The Stranger's Banquet (1919). He was a prolific novelist and short story writer from this point on; the novel Field of Honor was published posthumously in 1929. His poems were collected into an anthology and published as Poems (1934).

Despite both his wife's success as a playwright, and his own increasing popularity as an author, the family's financial straits forced them to sell up their house in Riverside, Connecticut and return to Ireland. Eventually the family buys Coolmain Castle near Bandon in County Cork. He lived here until his death in a car accident due to defective steering,[1] in June 1928. He is buried in Rathclarin churchyard, near Coolmain Castle. His headstone reads, in Irish and English: "I am in my sleeping and don't waken me."[2]

[edit] Writings

Some of the works were published in the United Kingdom under different titles. These are also noted after the American title.

[edit] Novels

  • Blind Raftery and His Wife Hilaria (1924)
  • Brother Saul (1928)
  • Crusade (1928)
  • Field of Honor (1929), or The Power of the Dog
  • The Foolish Matrons (1920)
  • Hangman's House (1926)
  • Messr. Marco Polo [1] [2] (1921)
  • O'Malley of Shanganagh (1925), or An Untitled Story
  • A Party of Bacarat (1930), or The Golden Goat
  • The Stranger's Banquet (1919)
  • The Wind Bloweth [3] [4] (1922)

[edit] Short story collections

Doherty, 1997[3], provides a complete index of the short stories.

  • An Alley of Flashing Spears, and Other Stories (1934)
  • Changeling, and Other Stories (1923)
  • A Daughter of the Medici, and Other Stories (1935)
  • Destiny Bay (1928)
  • The Hound of Ireland, and Other Stories (1935)
  • The Island of Youth, and Other Stories (1933)
  • Rivers of Damascus, and Other Stories (1931)
  • Stories Without Women (And A Few With Women) (1915) [5]
  • A Woman of the Shee, and Other Stories (1932), or Saragasso Sea, and Other Stories

[edit] Poetry and Travelogue

  • Ireland, The Rock Whence I Was Hewn (1929)
  • Poems (1934)

The early novels can be said to be quite mediocre, noted as "potboilers" by Thurston Macauley, Byrne's earliest biographer. Polo tells the story of the Italian adventurer as told by an Irishman. , and Wind is a romantic novel of the sea. Both show some highly lyrical passages intermixed with the plain language of real life. With Raftery, however, the author seems to reinvent the saga style, the prose breaking off into musical verse now and then as it tells the story of a blind poet wandering Ireland and avenging his wife's dishonor.

His later novels invited comparison with Irish novelist George Moore, especially in their romance and historical themes. It was with Hangman's, though, that he began to identify himself with the traditional Irish storytellers, noting in his preface ("A Foreword to Foreigner's") that: "I have written a book of Ireland for Irishmen. Some phrase, some name in it may conjure up the world they knew as children." It is also in this novel that Byrne returns to his Irish nationalist ideas by alluding to the ongoing strife of the Irish Civil War and fight for Independence.

Byrne was firmly of the neo-Romantic view of the mythical and pastoral beauty of Irish history. His writing hauntingly evokes these images, sometimes seeming want to preserve them. "It seemed to me," he says in Wind, "that I was capturing for an instant a beauty that was dying slowly, imperceptibly, but would soon be gone." his simple narrative style is rarely found today, and has the atmosphere of ancient oral epics such as Taine Bo Cualinge and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

[edit] References

  1. ^ New York Times, June 20th, 1928
  2. ^ 1 This is the inscription on Byrne's tombstone. It first appears in Ireland: The Rock Whence I Was Hewn, where Byrne concludes with the following poem: The bells of heather/ Have ceased ringing their Angelus./ Sleepy June weather/ Has instilled a drug in us.// The cry of the plover/ Is hushed, and the friendly dark/ Has drawn a blue hood over/ The meadow lark.// We travel sleeping,/ Over heather hill and through ferny dale,/ To the Land of No Weeping,/ Of races, and piping and ale.// Hushenn! Hushoo!// The wind is hid in the mountain. The leaves/ are still on the tree./ The hawk is caged in the darkness. The field-/ mouse safe in the hay./ Now I am in my sleeping, and don't waken me./ Tha mee mo hulloo is na dhooshy may!/ Tha mee, Tha mee--/ Golden mammy!/ Tha mee mo hulloo is na dhooshy may!/ I am in my sleeping and don't waken me!// Quoted from the National Geographic version. (Vol. 51, no. 3, March 1927, page 316).
  3. ^ Doherty, John J. (1997). "Donn Byrne: An Annotated Bibliography." Bulletin of Bibliography. 54(2): 101-105.

[edit] Works About Donn Byrne

  • Bannister, Henry S. (1982). Donn Byrne: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1912-1935. New York: Garland.
  • Doherty, John J. (1997). "Donn Byrne: An Annotated Bibliography." Bulletin of Bibliography. 54(2): 101-105.
  • Doherty, J. J. (1999). Donn-Byrne, Brian Oswald. In J. A. Garraty & M. C. Carnes (Eds.), American National Biography (Vol. 6, pp. 724-725). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • Macauley, Thurston. (1929). Donn Byrne: Bard of Armagh. New York: Century.
  • Wetherbee, Winthrop Jr. (1949). Donn Byrne: A Bibliography. New York: The New York Public Library.[6]

[edit] External links