Reading Walt Whitman in Civil War Kerry

The Sensibilities of a Small Town Rebel

Donal O’Cahill, an Irish republican who lived in Killarney, had an unusual hobby.

He liked to collect small flowers and leaves from the tombs and birth-places of the world’s great artists and thinkers, what he termed the ‘deathless dead of the East & West’. In November 1922, amid the Irish Civil War, he asked an Italy-bound friend to help him with his collection.

Writing from the home that he shared with his sister on Killarney’s high street, Donal asked his friend to gather some ‘little flowers’ or leaves from ‘places associated with the famous Florentines’. Donal was particularly eager to have something from the tomb of Dante Alighieri.

I came across this request in an archive in the Library of Congress, among the papers of a US President and his descendants. The letter struck me because it depicted an unusual scene from the Irish revolution: the contemplative practices of a rank-and-file IRA volunteer living far from the urban intellectual world of Dublin.

In our histories, rural Irish rebels often fight and die for Irish freedom. They emerge from hedgerows, walk across mountains and cause a reverent silence to settle over pubs. It is rare for us to find them at home tending to their hobbies.

This letter from Donal O’Cahill, along with many others he wrote, are held in a Washington library because of Donal O’Cahill’s friendship with Chester Alan Arthur III, grandson of the 21st US President, who first met Donal on a visit to Kerry in 1922.

Chester Alan Arthur III - a queer, Irish republican-supporting California commune founder - was a colourful character, to say the least. Because of this, and because he had the ego to believe the debris of his life was worth saving, he rescued from oblivion many unusual voices from his era, now preserved in his correspondence folders.

This archive, largely overlooked by Irish historians, contains a wealth of material from a range of early twentieth century romantics and eccentrics, many of them largely unknown names who passed through the Irish independence movement.

One of those unusual voices is that of Donal O’Cahill. In long and verbose missives to his friend, Donal talked about his life in Killarney as Ireland drifted towards civil war, gesturing towards his cultural influences and his understanding of the turbulent world around him. In one November letter, as Mary MacSwiney undertook a hunger strike in Dublin, Donal O’Cahill told his American friend that he had been reading Walt Whitman’s Civil War diaries and was missing ‘very much’ the ‘extraordinary conversations at ungodly hours of night & morning’ he used to have with Chester.

Their friendship seems to have had a deep impact on Donal. In one letter to Chester, he gave some sense of this in a few florid phrases:

I often tantalize my poor brains wondering how it is that we have met & more. And, somehow or other, I feel that it was no mere accident. Really, we put too many “incomprehensible” things down as accidents. “Incomprehensible”, in a way, certainly; but accident, I for one, refuse to believe. Anyhow, a mic, your fraternal love is fully, gushingly reciprocated. It is something I wonder over much; but – you know me – I must forbear to write of.

Donal O’Cahill to Chester Alan Arthur III, 10 Nov 1922, Library of Congress, Arthur Family Papers, Box 26, 1922 Correspondence Folder

Before meeting Chester in 1922, Donal and his sister Peg had already taken part in local IRA and Cumann na mBan activities in Killarney. The Military Services Pension application of Peg O’Cahill gives us some sense of the activities they carried out for ‘the cause’, but it tells us little about their emotional and intellectual universes.

The pension application does have an amusing back-and-forth between Peg O’Cahill and an interviewer. It’s rare for typescript to preserve the rhythm of speech so well:

‘We had our ways’ (File ref: Peg Cahill, MSP34REF60315)

Donal O’Cahill’s worldliness and sensibilities surely did not make him the typical Kerry republican. His intellectual interests seem to have set him apart and helped him become a well-known ‘character’ in his native Killarney, where he lived until his death in 1983. He was once a ‘somebody’ in certain circles, reflected in the fact that the Irish Jewish artist Harry Kernoff created a portrait of him in the late forties:

Donal O’Cahill, H. Kernoff, 1948, via Artnet.

Donal O’Cahill became a character in a more literal sense in 1936, when he played the role of Billy Malone in The Dawn, the first ever ‘talkie’ produced in Ireland. Telling a tale from the time of the Tans, the Dawn was written, produced and directed by O’Cahill and his friends. Many of them, Donal included, were veterans of the conflict depicted in the film.

A group of Kerry locals grouping together to make the first ever Irish film with sound seems striking - and it was - but it becomes more intelligible in light of Donal O’Cahill’s cultured tastes and illustrious connections. After all, this was a man living in rural Ireland with a Yank friend whose granddad was a President.

Had history taken another path, we might now be talking about the great Irish film industry of ‘Kerrywood’.

Promotional material for The Dawn, 1936

After a long life, Donal O’Cahill died in the summer of 1983. The Evening Echo remembered him as one of ‘Killarney’s best-known personalities’ who ‘had an enjoyable life’. The obituary noted that he ‘never married’.

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For more on Chester Alan Arthur III, see my previous post:

A Queer Migrant in the Irish Civil War