An Introduction
to Frank O'Connor
from the new volume Frank O'Connor: New Perspectives, ed. Robert C. Evans
and Richard Harp (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1998).
ISBN 0-933951-79-5. xxiii + 471 pp. (For more information, look here)
The following introduction first summarizes O'Connor's life and career and
then outlines the contents of the book.
Introduction
This collection has been inspired by a desire to create and re-
new interest in the brilliant literary artistry of Frank O'Connor.
Perhaps Ireland's most complete man of letters, best known for his
varied and comprehensive short stories but also a notable literary
critic, essayist, travel writer, translator and biographer, O'Connor
at his death in 1966 seemed assured of a lasting place in the pan-
theon of twentieth-century Irish writers. For many that is still now
the case. O'Connor's Collected Stories, edited by Richard Ellmann,
has been in print since 1981, and the past several years have seen
new collections of O'Connor's work in The Collar: Stories of Irish
Priests, published in Belfast in 1993, A Frank O'Connor Reader,
edited by Michael Steinman in 1994, and the exchange of letters be-
tween O'Connor and his New Yorker editor William Maxwell, also
edited by Steinman and published in 1996. In addition, at least one
of O'Connor's stories has recently reached a large audience in the
always coveted crossover medium of cinema, as "Guests of the
Nation" was the basis for the widely-seen movie The Crying Game.
There is also interest in O'Connor in non-English speaking coun-
tries, as the interview with his widow Harriet Sheehy in this vol-
ume will attest. Academic interest in O'Connor's work, however,
has somewhat flagged in the decades since his death; there have
been revivals in appreciation of the stories of Flann O'Brien (died
1966), for example, and of the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh (died
1967), but nothing similar for O'Connor, whose work was certainly
as incisive and much more far reaching. The only full-scale biog-
raphy, that by James Matthews in 1983, has the fullness of detail
and narrative richness which a great writer deserves (and which
many lesser writers often get as well), yet its appreciation of the
man is continually undercut by what Matthews regards as his
subject's personal failings. Such failings, be they as they may, have
seldom detracted from critical appreciation of the work of a Joyce
or a Yeats, much less from the work of those writers and artists
whose lives Paul Johnson recounts in such particular detail in Intel-
lectuals (O'Connor is a champion of the moral life compared to
most of Johnson's rogues' gallery). O'Connor attempted to live his
life without cant or hypocrisy; his frailties and controversies were
often public--his bitter disillusionment with the failure of Irish re-
publicanism, his outrage over Irish censorship in the 1930s and
1940s, his divorce in the 1950s--and he said and acted the way he
thought. This brought him considerable grief in Ireland, yet he did
not seek safety in permanent exile as did Joyce or in an outright re-
jection of religion as did modern writers too numerous to mention.
Robert Frost said that he had a "lover's quarrel with the world";
O'Connor had a lover's quarrel with Ireland, and he never stopped
loving her even when she bloodied him up.
If O'Connor's life occasionally embroiled him in controversy,
then, he was willing to live those controversies and not observe
them from afar. It is part, surely, of what gives his stories their
powerful sense of life. For those who were not Irish contempo-
raries of O'Connor, however, his artistic credo may be one of the
more controversial things about him. For O'Connor was neither an
aesthete nor a writer of experimental fiction. He was a great devo-
tee of realistic nineteenth-century fiction, who, as Yeats said, did
for Ireland what Chekhov did for Russia. While this may endear
him to ordinary readers and students, it will not necessarily make
him popular amongst the critics and university scholars who have
beat the drum for modernism as the only acceptable way for litera-
ture to follow this century. O'Connor characteristically took this
literary controversy head-on, not fearing to attack Joyce for aban-
doning a depiction of life as it is really lived by most people. This
is heresy of a particularly rank order for those who think modern
literature must be difficult and obscure and experimental and has
given O'Connor a position among fiction writers perhaps not un-
like that of Frost or (in years past) George Herbert in poetry. But as
Herbert counseled seventeenth-century writers of poetry to avoid
useless ornament and rhetorical decoration so that they could find
that "there is in love a sweetness ready penned / Copy only that
and save expense" ("Jordan II"), O'Connor was a tireless searcher
for the right word or phrase, for the right fable or plot, for, finally,
that most difficult of all techniques, the art which might appear to
his readers to be achieved without effort.
Insofar as postmodernism is a liberation from the notion that
modern art must be "difficult," as T.S. Eliot famously prescribed,
O'Connor's work is likely to grow considerably in popularity at all
levels. His fiction alone has the range of the greatest of writers. The
most frequently anthologized stories are those about children--
"My Oedipus Complex," "The Drunkard," "My First Confes-
sion"--which achieve the difficult end of seeing the world through
a child's eyes without being childish. Such stories are amusing but,
like children themselves, demand to be taken seriously. The moral
of "My Oedipus Complex," for example, is the interesting one that
"Of course the Oedipus Complex exists--and it is not such a bad
thing." Other stories about childhood are considerably less amus-
ing and capture the extreme sensitivity and cruelty which children
may be given to--"The Pretender" is an example. There are few
gender stereotypes in O'Connor's stories. Women play the most
diverse roles and when they do act capriciously or wantonly O'-
Connor makes clear the reasons why--quite frequently it is be-
cause the men they have taken pity on are too stolid or too much
the bumpkin to allow them many other options. The wonder and
independence of a woman's beauty may be explored or her capac-
ity for self-sacrifice, which comes at a price, without O'Connor
feeling that he must give the final explanation for such mysteries.
There are superlative stories of the Irish middle class (written
decades before this became the general interest of journalism or
sociology) which still unravel the complexities of their subject with
a concreteness that other disciplines find difficult. There are stories
of religion which do not condescend to either those who believe or
to those who imperfectly embody their belief or to those who do
not believe at all, stories of war that make clear there are causes
worth fighting for and innumerable ways in which those causes
may be betrayed, stories of the Irish peasantry meeting their urban
cousins, who are pursuing education, religion, or business, which
make clear the strangeness of the encounter and the manner in
which each side may maintain (or not) their dignity.
O'Connor was born in 1903 and has recounted the early years
of his life in one of his best books, An Only Child, a memoir not
published until 1961 but which has the immediacy of a precocious
diary. His childhood was shaped in part by his saintly mother,
who supplied much of the family's income because his father was
unable to keep steady employment because of the demon drink.
His father, Mick O'Donovan, was also at times a terror around the
house to both mother and child. That O'Connor could portray his
father as compassionately as he does in stories such as "My Oedi-
pus Complex" and even "The Drunkard" is testimony to his own
generosity. O'Connor read voraciously but with little direction as a
child; consequently one of the profound influences on his early life
was that of his schoolmaster Daniel Corkery, who aroused and
deepened his love for the allied causes of Irish culture and political
independence. O'Connor then fought on the side of the Republi-
cans in the 1921-22 Civil War, those who favored rejection of the
treaty which brought peace between Ireland and Britain but at the
cost of a divided island. The Republicans lost the civil war--the
treaty's division of Ireland into a twenty-six county "Free State"
and a six-county territory in Ulster (Northern Ireland) which
would remain part of the United Kingdom was made permanent--
and this led to bitterness and disillusionment for O'Connor, as it
did for countless other Irish. But his anguish was directed not only
against the British or the Free Staters but also against those with
whom he had fought, as he discovered in them a romantic naivete
and a spirit of repression and ignorance as inhumane as their
enemies (see, for example, his stories "Guests of a Nation" and
"Freedom"). This largeness of vision is characteristic of O'Connor
and, as always, was won in the crucible of experience rather than
through exile or aestheticism or ideology. His stories about this, as
well as his account in An Only Child, are more moving than those,
for example, of the disillusioned soldiers of World War I that
Hemingway describes, whose remoteness from the cause they are
engaged in undercuts the passion of their experience. They also
feature an engagement superior to that of Yeats's famous question
in the poem "The Man and the Echo" where he wonders, "Did that
play of mine [Cathleen Ni Houlihan] send out / Certain men the
English shot?" For O'Connor, it was not art which gave rise to life,
but life which produced art. One American work on the First
World War that does have both O'Connor's passion and humor is
e.e. Cummings' The Enormous Room, an account of Cummings'
imprisonment in France.
O'Connor's first book of stories was Guests of the Nation, pub-
lished in 1931. A number of these stories concern military life and
many of them he did not choose to reprint. This was notable, as
O'Connor would characteristically rewrite stories innumerable
times and later republish the new versions in an attempt to get
them right. Harriet Sheehy has said that one of her services to lit-
erary history after she married O'Connor in 1953 was retrieving
multiple drafts of stories from his wastebasket so that his process
of revision could be studied. In the 1930s he also worked with
Yeats at the Abbey Theater, serving as Director there from 1937 to
1939. Among the plays he wrote during this period was a version
of his well-known short story "In the Train." In 1937 he also pub-
lished a biography of the leader of the Irish rebellion against the
British, Michael Collins, who later led the forces of the Free State in
the civil war. He was continuously at work on his fiction, publish-
ing six collections between 1931 and 1951, with more to come until
he died in 1966. Several collections were published posthumously.
All told he wrote more than two hundred stories, many of them
first appearing in magazines. James Alexander examines the sto-
ries that he published in The New Yorker in this volume of essays;
that most munificent of magazines paid its writers $1.00 a word in
the 1950s.
O'Connor's translations of poetry from Irish began in 1932 and
continued steadily until the 1960s; they probably achieved their
widest circulation in 1959 with the publication of Kings, Lords, &
Commons by Knopf in New York and, in 1961, by Macmillan in
London. The annotated bibliography at the end of this book indi-
cates the high regard in which these translations have been held.
And, indeed, it is to that bibliography that one should turn to best
appreciate the extent and quality of O'Connor's achievement. For
he deserves as his literary epitaph the tribute Dr. Johnson paid to
Oliver Goldsmith: "Qui nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit; nul-
lum quod tetigit non ornavit"--"he left scarcely any kind of writing
untouched, and he touched none that he did not adorn."--R.H.
***
Our volume opens, appropriately, with an interview of Harriet
O'Donovan Sheehy, Frank O'Connor's widow, who discusses his
private personality and public personae, his attraction to short fic-
tion, his attitudes toward priests, the origins of his stories, and
how his personal qualities affected their marriage. Mrs. Sheehy
shares not only her fond memories of the man but also her
thoughtful appreciation of his art.
In the first regular essay, written in a lively style that O'Con-
nor himself would surely have enjoyed, Alan Titley discusses O'-
Connor's views of the Irish literary tradition, paying particular at-
tention to his book The Backward Look. John C. Kerrigan also makes
that book his focus, exploring O'Connor's views of his forebears
and contemporaries, particularly Yeats and Joyce. Both Titley and
Kerrigan discuss O'Connor's poetry and translations--topics not
often explored in studies of this famous master of short fiction.
Meanwhile, Shawn O'Hare looks at a work almost unknown even
to O'Connor specialists--his unpublished book on dreams. O'Hare
suggests that the evidence provided by this text implies that O'-
Connor's fiction may have been more "modernist" than is com-
monly supposed.
Richard Harp turns to that fiction itself, discussing especially
its great themes of loneliness, freedom, self-knowledge, love, con-
version, and achieved satisfaction. Michael Neary, on the other
hand, looks at the stories from a different perspective, examining
the tensions between the events presented and the narrators' in-
terpretations of those same events. As often as not (according to
Neary), O'Connor encourages readers to question rather than
merely accept his narrators' views. Julianne White's essay also dis-
cusses the reliability of O'Connor's narrators as well as the major
theme of human isolation, particularly in the stories entitled "The
Grand Vizier's Daughters" and "The Duke's Children."
The latter work, first published in The New Yorker, was one of
forty-five tales by O'Connor first printed in that famous magazine.
These stories are the subject of James D. Alexander's essay, which
argues that O'Connor's New Yorker fiction is far less light and
comic, far more dark and serious, than has often been assumed. Its
depictions of Irish culture and Irish lives--particularly the lives of
children and priests--is much more disturbing (in Alexander's
view) than many readers might expect. Owene Weber, meanwhile,
examines O'Connor's presentations of the lives of another impor-
tant group of characters--women. She discusses his depiction of
tomboys, "quicksilver girls," married women, and "bold crones,"
clearly demonstrating his intense interest in lively female charac-
ters. Priests, another group in whom O'Connor took great interest,
are the major concern of Megan L. Denio's essay, which focuses
especially on one priest in particular: Father Jerry Fogarty. A re-
curring character in many of O'Connor's later stories, Fogarty ex-
emplifies (Denio argues) both the disappointments and the hopes,
the loneliness and the love, that O'Connor considered central to
the human condition. According to Denio, Fogarty combines and
embodies two of O'Connor's favorite kinds of character--the child
and the priest. Finally, in another essay covering several stories,
Katie Magaw and Robert C. Evans turn from discussions of theme
and character to a discussion of style and technique, arguing that
the irony and paradox so often found in O'Connor's stories con-
tribute not only to the richness of their artistry but to the complex-
ity of their implied view of life.
The volume's next section, which compares and contrasts in-
dividual stories, either in their various versions or with other
writings, begins with Michael Steinman's detailed examination of
the early and late texts of "The Procession of Life." O'Connor con-
stantly revised (a point stressed by many contributors), and
Steinman shows how the two versions of "Procession" reflect two
distinct stages of O'Connor's life as man and artist. Robert Fuhrel,
on the other hand, compares and contrasts not two versions of one
O'Connor story but rather one work by O'Connor ("The Man of
the House") with a similar work by James Joyce ("Araby"). The
differences between these works (Fuhrel contends) typify the
larger differences of style, theme, and purpose between O'Connor
and his great colleague and rival. Lastly, this section devoted to
comparing and contrasting individual works turns to O'Connor's
masterpiece, "Guests of the Nation." One of O'Connor's earliest
stories and one of his best, "Guests" is also widely considered one
of the finest short stories ever written. Robert Evans and Michael
Probst examine the points of contact between the story and An
Only Child, the highly effective first volume of O'Connor's autobi-
ography. The essayists consider whether the story influenced the
life, whether the life influenced the story, or whether the connec-
tions are far more complicated than such simple alternatives im-
ply. Lastly, Katie Magaw and Evans compare and contrast "Guests
of the Nation" (the story) with Guests of the Nation (the dramatic
adaptation prepared by Neil McKenzie). Studying the two works
side by side, they argue, helps illustrate the particular qualities of
each.
The next section of this volume (a "Critical Kaleidoscope") of-
fers several distinctive features which we hope will make the book
especially useful to students, scholars, teachers, and even other
writers. Thus, John M. Burdett, Michael Probst, Claudia Wilsch,
and Carolyn T. Young first provide paraphrased samplings of O'-
Connor's own comments about writers and writings--comments
culled from several of his books of criticism and from personal in-
terviews. These are intended to offer a quick sense of his thinking
on a variety of topics, partly so that readers can better perceive the
intentions underlying his own fiction. Next, Kathleen B. Durrer,
Scott Johnson, Katie Magaw, and Claire Skowronski present a
concise introduction to the various critical approaches (especially
modern theories) often used to interpret literary texts. These theo-
ries are then used to provide a kaleidoscopic survey of two of O'-
Connor's best short stories--the well-known "Guests of the Na-
tion" as well as another work, "The Bridal Night," that deserves
much more attention than it has yet received. The same focus on
theory is then applied to an O'Connor story that is almost com-
pletely unknown: "Lady Brenda." This work has never before been
published in book form and was printed only once in a magazine.
The story is used here partly as a test case for assessing how easily
O'Connor's fiction can be analyzed from a variety of theoretical
perspectives. Brief analytical comments on the work are offered by
Patricia Angley, Kathleen B. Durrer, Timothy Francisco, Ashley
Gordon, Karen Worley Pirnie, Michael Probst, Claire Skowronski,
Ondra Thomas-Krouse, Claudia Wilsch, and Jonathan Wright--all
of whom participated in a special seminar on "Critical Pluralism"
sponsored in 1997 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Their
work suggests the possible advantages of a "pluralistic" critical
approach to O'Connor's writings.
From brief comments on an obscure story, we next turn to ex-
haustive analysis (by Robert Evans) of O'Connor's most famous
piece of fiction--"Guests of the Nation." Evans tries to pay close
attention to the style, structure, and detailed craftsmanship of this
tale, hoping thereby to illuminate as precisely as possible some
factors that help make this work so powerfully compelling. Fi-
nally, this "Critical Kaleidoscope" ends with a very lengthy listing
of most of O'Connor's published fiction, collected and uncollected.
Each entry provides publication details, a brief plot synopsis, and
brisk summaries of some pertinent critical commentary. We hope
that this part of the volume will give readers a handy guide to
O'Connor's characteristic themes and subjects, the issues his critics
have debated, and the stories they may most want to explore on
their own.
As the book reaches its conclusion, we offer three pieces of
new primary data. The first is a conversation between Harriet
Sheehy (O'Connor's widow) and Valentina Tenedini, who has
recently translated one of O'Connor's novels, Dutch Interior, into
Italian. This conversation not only provides new glimpses of
O'Connor's life from the perspective of Mrs. Sheehy but also offers
an informal discussion of the main features of one of O'Connor's
two attempts at long fiction. Harriet Sheehy herself then offers a
fascinating "Postscript" in which she comments on many of the
issues raised (implicitly or explicitly) by the other essays in this
book. Next, we present a previously unpublished text by
O'Connor himself--his 1959 adaptation for radio of "Guests of the
Nation," perhaps his finest story.
Finally, the closing portion of the volume offers a detailed
chronology of O'Connor's life (prepared by John M. Burdett and
Robert Evans); an extremely lengthy bibliography of works by and
about O'Connor (prepared by John C. Kerrigan); and several in-
dices designed to make the information in the book as accessible
and useful as possible. All in all, we hope that our book will help
to stimulate even more interest in a writer whose stature is likely
to grow as a new century provides new perspectives on the era
now ending.--R.C.E
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