Introduction
by Hilary Lennon.
Ph.D Student, Trinity College Dublin
[The majority of this article is taken from the longer introduction to the publication:
Hilary Lennon (ed.), Frank O’Connor: Critical Essays (Dublin: Four Courts Press, July 2007)]
For more information on the book from which this chapter has been adapted please click:
Four Courts Press
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Born in Cork on September 17, 1903, Frank O’Connor was an only child that was raised in poverty by his father, Michael (Mick) O’Donovan, a former British soldier and alcoholic, and his mother, Minnie O’Connor, an orphan from a young age. Financial strains necessitated his mother having to supplement the family income by working as a charwoman. O’Connor was a lonely, timid and frail child, and was sick from school on a regular basis. He grew up with a father he was afraid of and who, having re-enlisted in the British army during World War 1, was absent for a number of years during O’Connor’s childhood. As such, O’Connor has described himself as growing up as a classic mother’s boy in his memoir of that time, An Only Child (1961). It is likely that it was for this reason that O’Connor cultivated literary father-figures throughout the early decades of his adulthood. He met his first literary father-figure, Daniel Corkery, when he was about 9 years old and still a student in St. Patrick’s National School. Corkery had come to the school as a new assistant and he awoke an interest in European literature and Irish culture in the young boy. O’Connor’s formal schooling ended in 1916 but he was by this stage educating himself. He was an enthusiastic and committed reader and a frequent borrower from Cork public library. After he left school, O’Connor spent the next few years in a series of jobs but none of them lasted very long as he was considered too much of a dreamer. He had already begun to write short pieces and the political and cultural milieu of the time had a profound affect on the fledgling writer.
He came to consciousness at a time when the country was undergoing its protracted and bloody transition from a colonial state to a constitutional, independent modern nation. While it was Corkery who had turned him away from reading English public-schoolboy stories and stimulated a curiosity in all-things Irish, in particular the Irish language, it was the events of the 1916 Rising that sparked his interest in Irish nationalism. Joining the Gaelic League, discovering Corkery’s first collection of short stories soon after this, A Munster twilight (1916), seeking Corkery out and eventually becoming part of his small intellectual group, the Twenty Club, cemented O’Connor’s pre-independence nationalism. O’Connor joined up as a Volunteer in the War of Independence but, due to his relative youth, saw little military action. He played mainly a propaganda role for the anti-Treaty side during the Civil War. In February 1923 O’Connor was captured by Free State soldiers and was held in Gormanstown Internment Camp just outside Dublin until his release in December of that year. O’Connor never went to university but he later considered this period in his life as rich an education as anything a college could have offered him, as he became acquainted with the prison’s literary men. But by the time he left prison, O’Connor’s attitude had transformed. One result of this transformation was a shift in his attitude towards organized religion and governmental politics; he began to view the Catholic church and the Free State government as adversely dominating forces at work in Irish society and this too had a deep affect on the emerging young writer. The war experiences delineated the beginning of O’Connor’s passage from a romantic adolescent to a more independent realistic adult, but he was an adult who also developed a mixed attitude towards his country. He was a young man who became disillusioned with, and frequently and bitterly fought against, Free State government and church policies; he was also a young man who retained a deep love for the country, its people, its culture and traditions. O’Connor’s lifelong struggle with the role of the state and Catholicism in Irish life, and his conflicting relationship with the country and the people, had its roots in his Civil War experiences. It was this tension of contraries that became central to his writing.
He began using a pseudonym, composed of his own middle name and his mother’s maiden name, during the early stages of his writing career; his pseudonym was assumed soon after the controversy that took place over the publication of Lennox Robinson’s short story in To-Morrow, ‘The Madonna of Slieve Dun’ (August 1924). Robinson was accused of blasphemy (the country girl in the story claimed she had been ‘visited’ in the same way as Mary) and he was forced to resign his position as secretary and treasurer of the Advisory Committee to the Carnegie Trust in Ireland. O’Connor later claimed that as a trainee public librarian he was worried that his own job might also be at risk because of his writing. The first appearance of the pseudonym was in the Irish Statesman on 14 March 1925 when he published a verse translation of ‘Suibhne Geilt Speaks’. Michael O’Donovan had already published poetry under ‘M. O D’ and ‘M. O Donnabhain’ in the short-lived republican periodical An Long (May-June 1922). While changing his name was perhaps in part actuated by a contemporary literary trend (Æ, Brinsley McNamara and Seán O’Faoláin had already changed their names, for example), O’Connor’s eventual choice of pseudonym might have been influenced by the fact that he thought the Irish and English versions of his names too similar and therefore too risky, considering the erotic undertones of ‘Suibhne Geilt Speaks’.
Michael O’Donovan went on to become an extremely prolific writer as Frank O’Connor. In a literary career that spanned forty-one years he managed to produce eleven collections of short stories. He also published two novels, one book of original poetry, seven books of translated Irish poetry, one biography, an autobiography, three travelogues on Ireland, eight plays, two selected anthologies of Irish writing, five books of literary criticism, and over two hundred and fifty articles and reviews on cultural, social and political issues. O’Connor additionally gave his attention to a great deal of radio work which included talks, dramatic productions, and broadcasts of his short stories;
he was also actively involved in a myriad of letter debates in Irish newspapers from the 1920s to the 1940s. Within two years of his death in 1966, the second volume of his autobiography, an eighth book of translated Irish poetry and a sixth book of literary criticism appeared. Fifteen more collections of his short stories were published posthumously. While some of these publications were selected editions of previously collected stories, many of them also contained unpublished material or uncollected magazine/literary periodical stories, or new drafts of previously published stories (O’Connor constantly revised his stories, even those already published, due to his never-ending striving for perfectionism in the form). Moreover, O’Connor left behind a lifetime of almost daily-written correspondence to family, friends and colleagues, and an extensive collection of papers. O’Connor was a driven, determined and prodigious writer.
O’Connor generally wrote from the perspective of an insider, one who based his fiction on an intimate knowledge of the people, yet O’Connor was also a writer that depicted his characters with an outsider’s detachment. His writings focused on Irish life as it affected ‘ordinary’ Irish people – the stories had mainly domesticated heroes and ‘adventures’ drawn from the everyday. In O’Connor’s depiction of Irish relationships, gentleness, amiable humour, compassion or (especially later in life) sentimentality for his characters was displayed. He was particularly sympathetic towards his younger characters. But the writings also displayed anger, disappointment, flippancy or comic mockery towards those aspects of Irish life he considered hypocritical, authoritarian, falsely pious, or mediocre. For the former see, for example, ‘After Fourteen Years’, ‘Michael’s Wife’, ‘Uprooted’, ‘There Is A Lone House’, ‘The Bridal Night’, ‘Fish for Friday’, ‘Androcles and the Army’, ‘Ghosts’, ‘Old Age Pensioners’; on childhood see, for example, ‘First Confession’, ‘My Da’, ‘The Stepmother’, ‘The Man of the House’, and the collection Larry Delaney: Lomesome Genius, intro. Patrick Cotter (Cork, 1996). For the latter see, for example, ‘Grandeur’, ‘The Babes in the Wood’, ‘Baptismal’, ‘The Miser’, ‘The Holy Door’, ‘A Thing of Nothing’, The Lost Legion, and Dutch Interior.
O’Connor produced a sensitive examination of the social forces that pertain to the Irish middle-class small-town way of life (‘The Luceys’ and ‘The Mad Lomasneys’, for example); moreover, his work generally revealed little interest in the Ascendancy class, a sympathy for the Irish poor (‘The Patriarch’ and The Saint and Mary Kate, for example) and a pointed critique of the arriviste petit bourgeois (‘The Late Henry Conran’ and Time’s Pocket, for example). Yet, his writings strongly focused on the place of the individual within society and reserved condemnation for those forces that hampered individual desires (‘The Procession of Life’ and ‘The Custom of the Country’, for example). O’Connor aspired to social ‘freedom’ for people to express their individuality, but paradoxically he also desired the comfort of a traditional sense of community. His stories represented ‘submerged population groups’ – his oft-cited term for those he considered marginalized, lonely or alienated in society and who, he believed, formed the kernel of short-story material. He once said that ‘the short story remains by its very nature remote from the community – romantic, individualistic’ (The Lonely Voice, London, 1963, 20-1), nonetheless his stories were often less about individualism than of problematic relationships and characters who also seemed to belong to, fitted into, or symbolized Irish communities (‘In the Train’ and ‘Peasants’, for example). His created individual characters often served as mediums to entire ‘communities’ for the reader.
O’Connor’s conflicted attitude was comprised in part from his exploration of the Irish past and traditions present in modern Ireland. One such area was in his critical and creative exploration of the tradition of religious belief and practice in Irish society. His examination of Irish religious practices continually questioned what he perceived as the overly-controlling role of the Catholic church in Irish social affairs. Despite this judgement, O’Connor also wrote some of the most discerning portraits of priests and bishops available in the canon of twentieth-century Irish literature. For example, see ‘The Conversion’, ‘Lost Fatherlands’, ‘Vanity’, as well as the collection The Collar: Stories of Irish Priests (selec. & intro. by Harriet O’Donovan Sheehy, Belfast, 1993). His depiction of nuns was not as discerning as his portraits of the priesthood – see for example: ‘The Ugly Duckling’, ‘A Case of Conscience’ and ‘The Miracle’ (a different story to ‘The Miracle’ in The Collar collection); this was perhaps due to the fact that O’Connor remained close friends with a number of priests throughout his lifetime.
While O’Connor mocked a passive deference for tradition, his stories also delicately explored people’s loyalty or attraction to the past (‘The majesty of the Law’ and ‘The Long Road to Ummera’, for example). In turn, his work also communicated the belief that outmoded beliefs and customs could possibly lead to social stagnation and sexual sterility (‘A Bachelor’s Story’ and ‘A Thing of Nothing’, for example). His creative work also featured attempts to symbolically lament the dying out of traditional Gaelic culture or represent the surviving fragmented consciousness of a traumatized history that was present in contemporary social discourse (The Lost Legion and The Statue’s Daughter, for example); alternatively, O’Connor utilized the past as a perceived relevant yard-stick with which to gauge post-independence cultural development and change (The Invincibles, Moses’ Rock and Rodney’s Glory, for example). Despite his creative observations on the dying out of Gaelic culture and his tendency to use the past for comparative contemporary analysis, O’Connor’s critical work strongly displays his own deep interest in Irish cultural history and his relentless campaign to encourage a public reading of the Irish past as capable of providing the post-independence nation with a rich, internationally respected, cultural heritage if properly preserved. This is evidenced, for example, in his recording of traditional Irish beliefs (A Book of Ireland), his travelogue descriptions of Ireland’s national monuments (Irish Miles and Leinster, Munster, and Connaught), his critical assessment of Ireland’s literary history (The Backward Look), and his translating what amounted to, as previously mentioned, his eight books of mainly early medieval to nineteenth-century Irish-language poetry.
His pervasive antinomy also extended to his theories of readership and his engagement with the material conditions of reception in the post-independence decades. O’Connor firmly argued that artists represent ‘nothing’ in their work but he also strongly argued for instrumentalism in art – which would result in a literature that somehow could embody a type of non-referential creative writing that could also inspire social change. Here was a writer that continually bespoke the primacy of technique in writing considerations but paradoxically was someone who also viewed the writer as a social ‘reformer’. He was a writer who wrote for ‘the lonely reader down the country’ but who also aimed at reaching a ‘community’ of such like-minded readers, those imagined members of the reading public who, like O’Connor, felt estranged from post-independence society. His writing of the material conditions of reception pointed always to an Irish setting. O’Connor engaged with his perception of Irish church and state hegemonic control over the reading audience, and his conjectures on author-reader relationships tried to undermine the institutionalizing of the contemporary reader. He linked the private act of reading with the broader socio-political context, and an important part of his oppositional act to a hegemonic control of reading was located in his theory of the short-story form. According to O’Connor, the genre itself could embody social opposition as it functioned as ‘a private art intended to satisfy the standards of the individual, solitary, critical reader … [who will] see into the shadows’ of the story (The lonely voice, 14, 25). V.S. Pritchett described this process as one of ‘seeing through’, whereby presentation of character and incident in the short story allowed the reader to see other planes of meaning beyond the surface. The reader completed the disclosure of what lies behind the surface of the story. Contrary to his advocacy at times that art was primarily concerned with aesthetics, the gaps and omissions inherent in the short story form, he also believed, would leave a far greater onus on the reader to complete the picture proffered in the story; it created space for the reader’s ‘moral imagination’ and ‘moral judgment’ to dilate into social considerations (The Lonely Voice, 25). In similar terms, O’Faoláin described the short story as a ‘pointing finger’ in his study of the genre – The short story (Old Greenwich, Conn, 1951, 32). For O’Connor, the short story did not depend on any identification process between the reader and the characters, and instead involved a direct relationship between the writer and reader in specific historical conditions. The ‘superior’ reader, particularly at a local homologous level, could recognize and critique the characters and way of life presented in these realist or naturalist stories (O’Connor inhabited both styles at varying times); his stories were so much of their time and place that they might, he idealistically hoped, stimulate readers’ critical engagement with life in mid-century Ireland. This in turn might subvert church and state hegemony, not in any radical socially transformative sense but more in terms of the development of organic intellectuals in the country who could actively debate the social and political issues of the day and provide domestic dissent to the official position.
O’Connor carried his conflicted attitude towards Ireland into his personal life, his work as a librarian, his time spent as director of the Abbey
Theatre in the mid-late 1930s, his working for the Ministry of Information and the BBC during World War II, his regular contributions to the New Yorker from the 1940s-1960s, his teaching at Trinity College, Dublin, and Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford and Berkeley American universities (most of his books of literary criticism were produced out of his lectures), and his already-mentioned engagé publishing output. Over the course of these decades, the works of O’Connor comprised a cultural history of mid-century Ireland as they were implicated directly in the processes of social and political friction or accord that engulfed Irish life.
This did not endear him to the social and political establishment. Several of his books were banned over the years; he also endured an unofficial ‘blacklisting’ by the state authorities during World War II. The pressures of enlisting nationwide support and perpetuating a neutral consensus during the war years ensured the disappearance of O’Connor’s lucrative radio work, and O’Connor and his family endured financial hardship throughout the 1940s. At one stage, he was publicly denounced as an ‘anti-Irish Irishman’ in an editorial of the Irish Press (15 December 1949) for an article he had just published which revealed some of the true social conditions in Ireland (‘Ireland’ in Holiday, 6 December 1949). O’Connor eventually went into exile in America for most of the 1950s where his career flourished (and which would explain some of the lasting American interest in his work). When he returned to Ireland in September 1961, he gradually began receiving recognition and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College, Dublin, in July 1962. It was all too brief as he died on 10 March 1966.
While O’Connor has suffered from a critical neglect in the last few decades of the twentieth century, more recent events in Ireland and Britain would indicate a growing upsurge of interest in O’Connor’s work and reputation. The popular as well as critical upsurge includes the setting up of the perpetual Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in 2000 by the Cork-based Munster Literature Centre. The largest international monetary prize for a short-story collection is currently the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, also organized by the Munster Literature Centre and in association with the Irish Times since 2006. Renewed attention was also given to his writings with the republication of The Lonely Voice (Cork, 2003). Penguin Classics republished his two autobiographies as one volume and this publication is introduced by Declan Kiberd, who stated that the ‘volumes are justly counted among the classics of Irish writing’ (‘Introduction’ in O’Connor, An Only Child and My Father’s Son, London, 2005, xiii). A new collection of his short stories was selected by British writer Julian Barnes, My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories (Penguin Classics, 2005). Barnes’ introduction to the collection was prominently placed in an edition of Britain’s Guardian ‘Review’ literary supplement, alongside a large picture of O’Connor on its cover with the subtitle of ‘the restless genius of Frank O’Connor’ (2 July 2005). The Department of English, University College Cork, has also just set up an annual Frank O’Connor lecture and the inaugural lecture will be given by the American writer and Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard Ford, in late 2007.
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