The writer and the revolutionary spent their time in Mexico drinking and discussing poetry and paintings
By the time he arrived in Mexico, O’Malley was a teacher, poet and art historian. He had embarked on a long exodus through Europe, the United States and Mexico in the wake of the Irish Civil War. In April 1922, six years since the Easter Rising, O’Malley’s garrison of Anti-Treaty Republicans had occupied the Four Courts. Free State forces laid siege, led by Michael Collins.
He left Dublin early in 1925, his body bearing the marks of the last decade. He wore special boots, designed to accommodate injuries inflicted by British torturers in Dublin Castle as 1920 turned into 1921. Six bullets shot from the guns of Free State forces had made his flesh their home, and there they remained until his death in 1957. O’Malley instinctively knew that romanticism was dangerous.
Plans were broken, far countries were walked through. In Mexico, O’Malley met Hart Crane. They ‘became friends and remained friends to the end despite my sense of personal discipline and his utter lack of it’, O’Malley wrote, partially registering Hart’s deepening alcoholism and struggles with his psychological health - reductive narratives of which have dogged Hart’s writing, figuring the poet as the alcoholic poète maudit, doomed to Baudelairean damnation in the Gulf of Mexico.
O’Malley recalls the moment that documents dating from the 12th century were lost: ‘The yard was littered with chunks of masonry and smouldering records; pieces of white paper were gyrating in the upper air like seagulls…Flame sung and conducted its own orchestra simultaneously.’ Papers fly and O’Malley surrenders his group of soldiers, under instruction by his IRA commanders. Papers burn and a three-day-old war beds in for a year.
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