Walsh · 1933
Maurice Walsh and *The Quiet Man*
In the late spring of 1933, in the upstairs writing-room of the rented cottage at Spiddal in Connemara on the Galway coast, where he had been writing for the summer holiday, Maurice Walsh, fifty-four years old, the Kerry-born Irish civil servant (Inland Revenue Excise officer at the Customs House Dublin since 1922) and the already-published Scottish-Highland-and-Irish romance novelist of *The Key Above the Door* (1926), completed the short story *The Quiet Man*, about a Irish-American emigrant who returns to a Connacht village to reclaim his deceased father's farm and falls in love with the village blacksmith's red-haired sister, Mary Kate Danaher. The story, about six thousand words, was bought by the American Saturday Evening Post for two thousand dollars (in the 1933 Depression-era American magazine market the equivalent of a major novel-advance) and was published in the February 1933 issue. The John-Ford film of the same name (1952), starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, became the foundational Irish-American romance-film of the twentieth century, won two Academy Awards (Best Director and Best Cinematography), and is, by every careful judgment of Irish-American cultural-history, the most-watched film of the Irish-diaspora imaginary.
It is twenty past four on the afternoon of an unrecorded day in May 1933, in the upstairs writing-room of the Murphy family's rented cottage at An Cnoc Buidhe (the Yellow Hill) on the Spiddal coastal road, about ten miles west of Galway city, in the Atlantic afternoon light. He is fifty-four years old. He is Maurice Walsh, born at Ballydonoghue near Lisselton in north County Kerry on the second of May 1879, son of John Walsh the Kerry farmer and Elizabeth Buckley, schooled at the Listowel National School, in the Inland Revenue Excise service since 1901 (twenty-three years at the Customs House Dublin since 1922; before that, eighteen years in the Excise inspectorate in Scotland, mostly at the Highland distilleries, where he had met his wife Caroline Begg of Dufftown in 1908 and where the Highland-Scotland setting of his 1926 first novel The Key Above the Door came from).
On the writing-desk in front of him is the finished six-thousand-word short story he has been drafting since the Easter holiday: the Irish-American emigrant Shawn Kelvin (later renamed Sean Thornton in the John Ford screenplay) who returns from twenty years in the Pittsburgh steel-mills to a Connemara village to reclaim the Inisfree-cottage that had been his father's; the village blacksmith Will Danaher (renamed Squire Will Danaher in the Ford screenplay); the red-haired sister Mary Kate; the fight on the Spiddal road that closes the story in the traditional Connemara-village reconciliation-by-bare-knuckle convention.
He thinks: the Saturday Evening Post is the American-magazine market for the Irish-American romance-story. The Post has paid for The Key Above the Door short-story extracts at the rate of about fifteen-hundred-dollars-a-piece since 1929. The Post will, on the Quiet Man, pay about two thousand on the Depression-era American magazine market.
He thinks: the story is, in plain reading, about the Irish-American emigrant's return. The Irish-American diaspora since the Famine has five million bearers in the United States. The emigrant-return imaginary is the foundational political-cultural theme of the Irish-American 1930s.
He thinks: the Connemara setting is fictionalised at Inisfree, which I have placed somewhere on the Galway-Mayo Atlantic coast. The Galway-Spiddal-Cong locations are the real-world places I have been on holiday at for the past six summers. The John-Ford or one of the other Hollywood-Irish-directors will, on a future film adaptation, choose the actual locations for the screen-version.
He sends the finished manuscript to his American agent George T. Bye at the Curtis Brown office in New York in the late May 1933. The Saturday Evening Post bought the story in the June and published it in the eleventh of February 1933 issue (the publication date is the American-magazine-convention back-dated to the cover-issue, not the actual writing date; The Quiet Man was, in fact, written in 1933 and published in 1933). Walsh received two thousand dollars on signature.
John Ford, the Irish-American film-director (born John Martin Feeney in Cape Elizabeth Maine in 1894, of Spiddal-Galway-Feeney emigrant parents), bought the film rights from Walsh in 1936 for ten thousand dollars and held them for sixteen years before being able to get the production financed. The film The Quiet Man (Republic Pictures, 1952), starring John Wayne as Sean Thornton, Maureen O'Hara as Mary Kate Danaher, Victor McLaglen as Squire Will Danaher, and Barry Fitzgerald as Michaeleen Oge Flynn, was shot on location in Cong in County Mayo (the Quiet Man Cottage, the Pat Cohan's bar, the Inisfree church) over the summer of 1951. The film won the 1953 Academy Award for Best Director and the Academy Award for Best Cinematography (Winton Hoch, Archie Stout). The film is, by every careful judgment of Irish-American cultural-historians (Roy Foster, James MacKillop), the foundational film-imaginary of the Irish-American diaspora.
Maurice Walsh continued as a published novelist of Scottish-Highland-and-Irish romance through the following thirty years (about fifteen novels and short-story collections published 1926–61). He retired from the Excise service in 1933 on the success of The Quiet Man royalties. He died at his Dublin home on the eighteenth of February 1964, eighty-four years old. He is buried at the Esker cemetery in Lucan, County Dublin. The Cong-village in County Mayo has been, since the 1965 Quiet Man Heritage Cottage opening, the most-visited single Irish-tourism site in the west of Ireland by the American-tourist demographic. The Quiet Man Cottage, the Pat Cohan's bar (a replica of the original Pat Cohan-pub-frontage built on the original village-street in 1990), and the Inisfree-church (St Mary's, Cong) are the pilgrimage sites of the annual John-Wayne-Maureen-O'Hara fan-convention every September.