Good-bye Twilight: Songs of the Irish Struggle

Good-bye Twilight: Songs of the Irish Struggle was a collection of Irish verse edited by the Irish-Jewish radical and writer Leslie Daiken. A comrade of some of the Irish men who fought in the Spanish Civil War, Daiken assembled an assortment of radical and ‘proletarian’ Irish writers for the collection. Harry Kernoff, a Dublin-based artist with left and republican sympathies, provided the illustrations for the book.  

Scholar Daniel Gomez has described the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War as the ‘impetus behind the anthology’s publication in 1936.’ Writers anthologised in Good-bye Twilight included Charlie Donnelly, who died in February 1937 during the Battle of Jarama, and fellow International Brigades volunteer Tom O’Brien, who would survive the conflict and return to Ireland to found the O’Brien Press. As an anthology combining Irish writers of various leftist hues with others whose nationalism took only a glancing interest in internationalism, the book gestured towards the heterogenous composition of the Irish left itself.  

Good-bye Twilight is an example of attempts by some Irish leftists to join a global stream of Popular Front-era culture. The collection was published in 1936 by Lawrence & Wishart, a London-based press formed through a merger between the Communist Party of Great Britain’s press and the family press of the antifascist publisher Ernst Wishart. The anthology opens with a dedication to Tom Mooney, an Irish-American radical whose imprisonment became a global labour cause celebre. In his introduction, Daiken cited Joseph Freeman, a Ukrainian-born author who was prominent within US Communist cultural circles and a member of the New Masses editorial board.  

The anthology reflects the energies of an Irish literary left recently revived in cultural memory and explored in new scholarship by Katrina Goldstone and others. Spain energised this small but active artistic milieu. Other outposts of this world in Ireland included the Left Book Club, which had a Dublin branch, formed in late 1936, and a Belfast branch, established in April 1937. Elsewhere, Spanish Civil War-inspired writings and drama could be found on the pages of Irish leftist papers, such as the Irish Democrat and the Irish Workers’ Voice and in the performances of the Dublin-based New Theatre Group.