In the Wake of the Walker

More feature films than ever before have been produced in Ireland during the past few years. But for every film completed, there are many more that fall by the wayside, unproduced, incomplete or otherwise waylaid by chance. Stephen Walsh looks at one subject that has proved notoriously unfilmable, though many have tried.

In 1885, WB Yeats met John O'Leary for the first time. The young poet and the aging revolutionary hit it off right away, and O'Leary's influence was immediately felt in Yeats's poetry. Where previously he had sought to emulate Shelley and the Pre-Raphaelites, O'Leary put the twenty year-old on the track that was to dictate the course of much of the rest of his life's work. Rather than look abroad for his models and poetic templates, Yeats was now urged to look at the land of his birth, its myths, legends and native literature, and to use these as a springboard towards the formation of a new native consciousness, an art and literature that might form a spiritual counterpart to the burgeoning independence movement.

Given the free run of O'Leary's extensive library, Yeats became acquainted for the first time with the old heroic epics that were to underpin so much of his work. Another revelation was the more recent books and novels- those from the past hundred or so years- that formed a significant part of the collection. Skeffington's The Malaise of Rory Johnston was a favourite, as was The Fishwife's Legacy, or: The Cod Codicil by Mrs Cregg (a great success in the 1830s and adapted four times for the London stage – once by Boucicault, twice by Colly Cibber – though almost forgotten now). But ever since he was a child, holidaying in Sligo and hearing the old tales of fairies, jinxes and wideboys conning the devil, the bold WB had evinced an especial fondness for what he would term 'the darkling side of literature; that which looks into the unlighted corners and reports of what it sees there'.

'I have lately happened upon an incomplete copy of Thurlow's The Walker in the Wake,' he mentions in a letter written in the spring of 1886. 'I confess, I have read no book like it.'

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 101