Michael Collins the lost leader?               [1971]

[This review  by Desmond Greaves of Margery Forester’s  book “Michael Collins, the Lost Leader”,  Sidgwick  and Jackson, £3.50,  was carried in the August 19 71 issue of the “Irish Democrat” under the heading “Ireland’s  Mystery Man”. ]

This is a good workmanlike biography of Michael Collins, and for general purposes easily the most serviceable that has appeared. It is worth having on one’s bookshelf for reference, and should be in every public library.

Is not so long as Beaslai’s. But it is free from the bitter Free State bias which marred his book and led him into occasional shameless mist-statements. On the other hand it surpasses Frank O’Connor’s lightweight effort in every way imaginable.

Miss Forester has had two advantages denied her predecessors, namely access to the papers held by the Collins family, and the cooperation of the Llewelyn Davies family.

She has thus been able to include valuable fresh material regarding Collins’s early life and family background, as well as of his stay in London.

While, as is natural in a biographer, she is sympathetic  to Collins, and moreover seems to have recaptured him, or shall we say, intuitively imagined him, better than previous writers, she is prepared to admit he might have had one or two faults,  and she states them with just the right emphasis.

Perhaps excusably she believes that if Collins had lived, all would have come right in the end. But one ventures to doubt it.

One interesting statement that she makes is that the famous “Chartres oath” was drafted by Llewelyn Davies. Here she whets our appetite. She does not unfortunately fully spell out Collins’s relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family. Nor does she explain the connection with the shadowy Chartres whom Griffith is said to have included in the London delegation.

It is quite clear that Collins’s connections in England were much more substantial than has  hitherto been believed. That Collins had a strong attachment to London has been recorded by Robert Brennan. One almost get the impression, reading between the lines in Miss Forester’s book, that its fascination returned when he visited it as one of the “plenipotentiaries”. Could that have influenced his the decision on the “treaty”? 

What it is made admirably clear is how hard the British worked for that “treaty”. Lords and Ladies circulated round the delegation, together with the inevitable Mr Cope.

There is little doubt that Collins committed himself to civil war with the greatest reluctance. Miss Forester gives many examples of his desire for accommodation with the opponent of the Free State. The tragedy was that the terms imposed by England deprived him of the necessary freedom of action. A much more subtle man would have been required, one perhaps without the touch of egotism, and better versed in political theory. 

Miss Forester’s  approach to the Republicans is on the whole sympathetic enough. One comment however is revealing. Of Childers, Lynch and Brugha she remarks: “In the natural world those who cannot adapt themselves to revolutionary changes die.” This bland assumption that counter-revolution is a law of nature is breath-taking in its unthinking optimism. “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.” On the whole the philosophy of this book is that “what is, is right,” and the underlying theoretical assumptions are therefore imperialist. At the same time Miss Forester rises a moon above the level of most English writing on Ireland. A New Zealander, she has acquired a real knowledge as well as a deep sympathy with the country.

Very occasionally one notices a wee blemish. The technical term “seizin” on page 217 is used in a metaphor. And on the next page Lloyd George is shown leading his “principals”, the word being used in application to chief assistants, who of course by definition could not be “principals”. And Mellows’s name is mis-spelled. 

In general however the book is extremely well written, and the publisher has put the footnotes at the foot of the page where they should be, and not at the ends of chapters. There is an excellent index and the typography and production are first class.

C.D.G.