O'Duffy, Eimar (Ultan) (1893–1935), dramatist and novelist, was born 29 September 1893 in Dublin, son of Kevin O'Duffy, a prominent society dentist. He attended the Jesuit public school, Stonyhurst, in England and took a degree in dentistry at UCD, though he never practised as a dentist. In college his interests were mostly political and cultural and he edited the student magazine St Stephen's. His father wanted him to join the British army, but O'Duffy refused and was ostracised by his family as a result.
O'Duffy joined the IRB and the Irish Volunteers and was one of the chief contributors on military affairs to its newspaper, the Irish Volunteer. In 1916 he and Bulmer Hobson (qv) warned Eoin MacNeill (qv) of the impending Easter rising and MacNeill sent him to Belfast to dissuade volunteers from rising there. O'Duffy never changed his view that the rising had been a mistake. Disillusioned with nationalism, he came to rely with greater certainty on his socialism.
O'Duffy's employment prospects were not good in independent Ireland, given his political views. For a time he worked as a teacher and for the Department of External Affairs. In 1925 he moved to England and then to Paris where he worked for an American paper. In the 1930s, ill and short of money, O'Duffy took to writing several poor-quality detective stories, The bird cage, The secret enemy, and Heart of a girl. On the other hand, in 1932 he published an economic analysis of the great depression, entitled Life and money, which advocated social credit. He died 21 March 1935 in Surrey of a duodenal ulcer. He married (1920) Kathleen Cruise O'Brien. Their son Brian was born the next year, their daughter Rosalind in 1924.
Eimar O'Duffy was both a dramatist and a novelist. As a playwright his works tended to have a Shavian tone to them. In 1915 Edward Martyn's Irish Theatre staged two of O'Duffy's plays, ‘The phoenix on the roof’ and ‘The walls of Athens’. In 1919 Bricriu's feast was published. It is a comedy whose characters include Cú-Chulainn (qv), the Red Branch Knights, and Queen Maeve. O'Duffy failed to have his final play, ‘Malachy the Great’ (1930), either performed or published. It is an historical drama of the tenth century, in five acts.
O'Duffy's real achievement lies in fiction, which ranged from intellectual history and historical fiction to light comic fiction and epic satire. His first novel, The wasted island (1919; revised 1929), is at one level a semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman, at another an intellectual polemic on the Irish revolution. Its principal character, Bernard Lascelles, is the son of an Anglo-Irish physician and is educated in England. He turns against his background, though, ‘and then for the first time he realised fully the selfishness and shallowness of the class he belonged to’. He attends UCD; much of the novel is a portrait of its intellectual milieu. Lascelles opposes the 1916 rising and is critical of Austin Mallow, a Patrick Pearse (qv) figure who is presented as a poet yearning for martyrdom.
Printer's errors (1922) is a gentle satire about an amorous printer abducted by swindlers who maroon him on Ireland's Eye. The lion and the fox (1922) is an historical novel set in Elizabethan Ireland. Miss Rudd and some lovers (1923) is an entertainment about the adventures of a female romantic novelist. During 1922–3 O'Duffy also edited several issues of the Irish Review with Padraic Colum (qv) and others.
O'Duffy's central achievement in fiction was the Cuanduine trilogy, which blended satire and fantasy in its critique of capitalism. King Goshawk and the birds (1926) describes a future world dominated by king capitalists, one of whom, Goshawk, is pitted against a Cú-Chulainn restored to life in a clash between the mercenary and the heroic. In the novel Cú-Chulainn fathers a son, Cuanduine, whose adventures are also recounted. The spacious adventures of the man in the street (1928) recounts the experiences of Aloysius O'Kennedy, a Gulliver-like figure who visits the planet Rathé (an anagram for Earth), and observes its people's foibles, including uninhibited indulgence in sex and yet guilt over eating food. The third volume in the series, Asses in clover (1933), recounts Cuanduine's conflict with Goshawk but is not of the same high quality as its two predecessors.
In 1946 Vivien Mercier wrote that O'Duffy was ‘modern Ireland's only prose satirist’. However, after O'Duffy's death his reputation went into a sharp decline, though in the 1970s Robert Hogan (1930–99) made valiant efforts to revive interest in his work, noting however that his ‘splendid accomplishments were not so great as his remarkable potentialities’.