A Bell for O'Donnell

In Dublin's Lower O'Connell Street there lived a highbrow little monthly called the Bell. Between its covers, budding young Irish writers appeared arm in arm with such full-blown names as George Bernard Shaw, Sean O'Casey and Liam O'Flaherty. The big names worked for small pay; they felt it a duty to support Eire's only literary magazine.

But after seven anxious years, the Bel was barely swinging. Import restrictions had shrunk its British market. To square garrulous Editor Peadar O'Donnell, one time schoolmaster in County Donegal there seemed but one way out. He would go to the U.S. and raise some money.

Hunted Past. How he fared he told in the final issue of the Bell. "Having been in the U.S. before, I took it the visa would be readily forthcoming . . . I am preeminently the aging, kindly gentleman that should pass in & out of any county unnoticed." Actually, he was not that Milquetoasty: he had fought for the republic in 1918, been caught and condemned to death, escaped by setting fire to the jail. One of his novels (The Way It Was With Them) was chosen a book of-the-month (1928) by the Catholic Book Club of America. But O'Donnell though he is a militant socialist and practicing Roman Catholic, had also helped found a bogful of Communist peasant groups.

"And then," he continued, "came the first hint that angry noises were being made inside the [U.S.] Immigrant Bureau, and anxious friends wrote to ask whether anything had happened during my long stay [in the U.S.] in 1939. Had the police bothered me . . ?"

Strained Relations."Now, right enough, the police had made a dab at me in 1939, but I had got a whisper and had just time to sidestep. It was this way. The British King & Queen took it into their heads to visit the U.S. while I was still there, and the American police, having learned of the strained relations between our two houses on account of what happened to Hugh [an O'Donnell defeated by the British at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601], were anxious to have a word with me." Peadar sought out a top man at headquarters, "and who should he turn out to be but a man from a village where I could name the dogs." After that, Manhattan's Irish cops gave him no trouble at all.

Soon he heard from the U.S. consul. He was turned down. "The letter made it clear . . . that the U.S. for the moment is in short pants and that until it gets back to adult ways there is nothing to do but be gently intolerant of its behavior. It is not easy to have any other attitude toward America in a tantrum, there is so much of ourselves in its people.

"This refusal . . . leaves me no escape from closing down the Bell with this, our 91st number."

This week New York's United Irish Counties Association went to his rescue. It called the refusal of a visa "a masterpiece of ambiguity." And since O'Donnell was a "government official" (he is a member of Eire's Commission of Immigration), the association thought the ruling looked very much like an affront to the government of Eire.

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