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  AN ONLY CHILD AND MY FATHER’S SON

  FRANK O’CONNOR (pseudonym of Michael O’Donovan) was born in Cork in 1903 into a very poor family. Largely self-educated, he learned to speak Irish at an early age. He never lost his interest in Irish poetry, as shown in his many books of poetry translated from Irish, among them Kings, Lords and Commons (1959) and The Little Monasteries (1963). His childhood and adolescence in Cork, spent in poverty, are reflected in his first volume of autobiography An Only Child (1961) and in the novels The Saint and Mary Kate (1932) and Dutch Interior (1940). He fought on the republican side in the Irish Civil War (1922–3) and was imprisoned during this time. The political turmoil of that period is described in his first volume of short stories. Guests of the Nation (1931) and his biography of Michael Collins, The Big Fellow (1937). Active in the Irish literary revival of the 1930s and 1940s, he was a director of the renowned Abbey Theatre, and produced plays by Ibsen and Chekhov. He left Ireland in 1950 to accept an invitation to teach in the United States, where his stories won great critical acclaim. My Father’s Son (1968), his second volume of autobiography and his last book, written just before his death in 1966, begins with his release from prison, and is a wonderful self-portrait by one of the great Irish writers of the century.

  DECLAN KIBERD is professor of Anglo–Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin and author of Inventing Ireland (1995) and Irish Classics (2000).

  FRANK O’CONNOR

  An Only Child and My Father’s Son

  an autobiography

  with an Introduction by DECLAN KIBERD

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  An Only Child first published by Macmillan & Co Ltd 1961

  My Father’s Son first published by Macmillan & Co Ltd 1968

  Combined volume first published by Pan Books Ltd, 1988

  Published with an introduction in Penguin Classics 2005

  1

  An Only Child copyright © Frank O’Connor, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961

  My Father’s Son copyright © Harriet O’Donovan, 1968

  Combined volume copyright © Frank O’Connor and Harriet O’Donovan, 1988

  Introduction copyright © Declan Kiberd, 2005

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–91132–8

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  An Only Child

  My Father’s Son

  INTRODUCTION

  It was said of the great nineteenth-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan that he had two personalities, one well known to the muses and the other to the secret police. The same was true of Frank O’Connor, artist and storyteller, who had once been Michael O’Donovan, Gaelic revivalist and republican revolutionary.

  Autobiographies, when written by such people, can pose an obvious problem – are they to record the life of the active person (bios meaning body) or should they explore the growth of the mind (auto meaning self)? Some settle for the practical option and recapture a life of camaraderie, ambushes and political action, leading to frustration on the part of their readers who feel that more might have been said of their authors’ inner development. Most forms of autobiography tend to privilege the bios at the expense of the auto, because the interior life of people (once so strictly policed by priests in the darkness of a confession box) is regarded as too risky for public ventilation. Hence the complaint of Stephen Spender that so many modern autobiographies ‘write the life of someone by himself and not the life of someone by his two selves’.

  In An Only Child and My Father’s Son there is no such split, for the simple reason that O’Connor’s autobiography in Ireland becomes effectively the autobiography of Ireland. Born in 1903, O’Connor was perfectly positioned to record the years of cultural renaissance and state formation. The paradigm which he established in these books has now become familiar: the writer is born in a colonial setting, whose poverty is mitigated by an eloquent cast of dotty grandmothers, boozy fathers, suffering mothers and wild rebels, before a spell in the nationalist movement gives way to life as a citizen of a newly independent state, confronted by the bleakness of a freedom which nobody quite knows how to use. Again and again, O’Connor alerts us to the connection between self and world: ‘A revolution had begun in Ireland, but it was nothing to the revolution that had begun in me’ or ‘the Irish nation and myself were both engaged in an elaborate process of improvization’.

  A reader might be unnerved by the casual ease with which O’Connor substitutes himself for his country, but it is a technique made possible by the moment through which he lived and by the way in which public events swamped his personal life. It may also owe something to his reading of the classic literature of revolutionary America, for his project is rather like that of Walt Whitman’s poetic epic of the United States:

  One’s self I sing, a simple, separate person,

  Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

  O’Connor was teaching on US campuses in the 1950s when he composed much of this memoir and its implied address is to an American reader – on the opening page a half-crown is explained as sixty cents – who will understand the manoeuvre.

  O’Connor had intended to call the first volume ‘Mother’s Boy’, but an editor at Knopf warned him that this might suggest that he was a sissy. ‘But I was’, he laughed, before obediently changing the title. His narrative, however, remained unchanged in its portrayal of how a melancholy, dirty, drunken father and a buoyant, beautiful and purposeful mother struggled for possession of his soul.

  The father belongs to the British Army but, beyond that soldierly loyalty, is indifferent to politics. He comes most fully alive as the drummer in a local nationalist band. The rivalries of the two local bands split the community down the middle but seem rooted more in personalities than politics – a lethal but unnecessary division which seems to anticipate the Civil War with which the book ends. The travails of the orphaned mother in early life are rendered so intensely as to seem even more real than O’Connor’s own early experiences. It is as if, through constant telling and hearing, they have been made his own. When she is left in an orphanage by her mother and told
they ‘have no home now’, it is as if the plight of Ireland under foreign usurpation has been laid bare.

  ‘Mother’ herself emerges as a great, large-hearted character, insisting that the refusal of people to attend the funeral of a local Protestant is neither a proper Catholic nor a proper Irish response. She also shows a notable independence of mind even in old age, suppressing her own portrait by the painter George Russell on the grounds that it made her ‘look like a poisoner’ or amazing her son when he brings her to the Alps by saying ‘there should be great drying up here’.

  Perhaps the greatest gift she passed on was a respect for imagination and a love of books. The only child is solitary and so he sees things more vividly than other children. He consorts less with them than with adults and is less likely to develop a crush on a local girl than on some older man, who may become for him the sort of authority-figure his father has so manifestly failed to be. But, most of all, he feels vibrant as he reads books and boys’ weeklies.

  Long before O’Connor risked martyrdom for the Irish republic, he had become in effect a martyr to The Gem, The Magnet and the popular stories of English public schools. Another title which he had briefly considered for his opening volume was ‘Invisible Presences’, meaning those honourable schoolboys who know how to take a punishment without complaint and how they must never betray a friend to the authorities. This code was far removed from the behaviour of boys in the back-streets of Cork. So a split emerged between the child’s reading and his world. His fantasies were, however, seldom checked by close involvement with other children and so he was always ‘half in and half out of the world of reality, like Moses descending the mountain or a dreamer waking’. As in so many of O’Connor’s finest stories, the narrative here is constantly moving toward a moment when some illusion is stripped away and the dreamer faces reality. The anticipation of fulfilment, especially in the long lead-up to the Christian feast, is far more moving than the fulfilment of the anticipation – a baby Jesus left in his crib without any seasonal present, just like the bereft boy.

  But the rhythm of this autobiography is never depressive: no sooner does one door close than another is opened. The budding atheist has his spirits restored by the first in a series of charismatic mentors, the primary schoolteacher, writer and sage, Daniel Corkery. This tiny, forceful man walks into a classroom and writes ‘Muscail do mhisneach, a Bhanba’ on the blackboard, without explaining that it is the opening line of a famous seventeenth-century Gaelic poem, ‘Awaken your courage, Ireland’. Soon Corkery is using the set texts of the colonial curriculum, like weapons captured from the British enemy, to promote rebellion.

  For a boy who honoured the public school codes, this was a moment of supreme challenge. The Invisible Presences – Harry Wharton and the chums of Greyfriars – must now look upon the Cork youth as a ‘traitor’ and he for his part could only regret just how much they ‘had taken me in’. It was a discovery rather like that of James Joyce’s Stephen Daedelus that the words home, Christ, ale and master sound very differently on an Englishman’s lips and on his own, because ‘his language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay’. Daniel Corkery, perhaps recalling classroom experiences with the young Michael O’Donovan, had complained in a famous passage that the colonial education set up a dispute in children between intellect and emotion, between their reading and their world, so that under its deforming effect their own immediate surroundings begin to seem unvital, second-rate, derivative. It was a problem that would be reported from many another setting later in the twentieth century, whether in a poem by Derek Walcott about growing up in St Lucia or an essay by S. S. Naipaul about reading the English literary canon in Trinidad.

  Under Corkery’s guidance, the young student began to read instead about the boy-deeds of Cuchulain, the ancient Celtic hero: yet he could not help feeling an ongoing sense of indebtedness to the English codes he was now rejecting: ‘If I had to reply that I was different, it was because of what they and theirs had done to make me so’. Lady Gregory’s own book Cuchulain of Muirthemne has been a bestseller among English schoolboys in the previous decade and not without reason, for the warrior’s combination of pagan energy and Christlike suffering made him an early version of the muscular Christian, which is to say a sort of public schoolboy in the disguise of Gaelic hero.

  The English substratum in the mind of Irish nationalism remains an Invisible Presence to the end, even after the experience of war and civil war has chastened the author. Patrick Pearse, leader of the Easter Rising of 1916, is but another prisoner of the schoolboy’s chivalric code who ‘woke up too late’ and really ‘didn’t want to die’. The main literary influences on the republican prisoners during the Civil War were Shelley and Meredith, with their romantic cult of self-sacrifice and of ‘dying for its own sake’. O’Connor’s own war seems more like a search for literary material than a searing ideological crusade. When he steals the cap of a dead boy, it is like a scene once read about in Tolstoy. When he falls in love with an Irish-speaking girl in a safe house, he has ‘no notion of how to make love to her, because she appeared to me through a veil of characters from books I had read’.

  The horrors of that civil conflict soon become real enough, in the image of a battered youth or in the burning of a widow’s home: ‘this was all our romanticism came to’. Ever alert to ironies, O’Connor notes again and again the remarkable number of romantic Englishmen who attach themselves to the cause of Gaelic revivalism or of the Irish Republic. Although never quite saying so, he seems to worry that the whole national renaissance may have been itself an aftershock of English Romanticism, or as the poet Patrick Kavanagh dubbed it, ‘a thoroughgoing English-bred lie’. O’Connor’s suggestion that there might be an unhealthy intersection between revolutionary politics and the romantic literary vision has had a major influence on subsequent critiques of Irish nationalism by Conor Cruise O’Brien, just as his narrative of struggle out of childhood poverty may be seen to provide a model for a more recent bestseller, Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt.

  In the end, however, O’Connor recognizes that his own ‘make-believe’ education succeeded just as well as the ‘improvised’ government set up by the rebels. In both cases the virtual became real. But his deeper interest is to tell the story of how Michael O’Donovan became Frank O’Connor. As in such clearly autobiographical stories as ‘First Confession’, the tone veers between the chatty and the magisterial, as the innocent young fantasist is recalled by the rather sardonic adult he has become. O’Connor loved to hear and to tell short stories and there are many embedded in both of these volumes. They carry the timbre of his speaking voice. Just as his own father loved to read snippets aloud from a newspaper, adding vast layers of commentary in order to raise the printed word to a more intensely oral type of experience, so does O’Connor infuse his stories with the rhythms and inflections of his own voice. He favoured the short-story form because it allowed for poetic effects and a climactic epiphany: and his marvellous study of that genre, The Lonely Voice, mimics in its very title An Only Child. His theory in that study was that the short story was the appropriate form for the lives of the Os and the Macs, the ‘submerged population groups’ of insurrectionary Ireland, who went on to invent a free and independent state.

  There is also a suggestion in the tide that its author remained only a child. He would certainly have questioned the widespread notion that ‘innocence’ is something lost in a careless half-hour at the age of seventeen or eighteen. For O’Connor, people either were or were not innocent to begin with, and most remained as they began to the very end of their days. He himself was innocent in the root-Latin meaning of that word: in-nocentes, open to injury, open to the hurts of a full life. The imagination he compared to a refrigerator, which even after decades of disaster could remerge intact, older in years if not in experience. Sometimes, this can seem a little ludicrous, as when the young librarian ca
tches George Russell saying in the 1920s what Joyce had him saying in the Ulysses of 1904 (‘The only question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring’). Sometimes, it can be touching, as when the adult mask of Lennox Robinson slips to reveal the joking boy beneath. And on occasions it can be quite heroic, as when W. B. Yeats tells him ‘all the things I wanted to do when I was eighteen I am doing now that I am an old man’.

  If O’Connor had a model in shaping this account, it must have been Yeats’s own Autobiographies. Throughout he uses Yeatsian signature-words (like ‘phantasmagoria’), rhythms and ideas. Painfully shy in youth, both men learn how to project a personality through a phantasmagoria that will somehow protect their innermost privacies. Although O’Connor tells a lot about the growth of his mind, he remains remarkably reticent about love-affairs and personal life. Perhaps he was merely illustrating the truth of his wisecrack that ‘an Irishman’s private life begins in Holyhead’ by showing that in a book set only in Ireland there will be no personal details at all. In this discretion too he followed the example of his master. Yeats in his memoir uses other, older men in order to explore his own emergent self: and so it is here. Each of O’Connor’s mentors holds out a possible identity to the youth, but one that seems finally botched or incomplete. Daniel Corkery is the provincial intellectual, art-lover and critic, whose charismatic teaching lapses finally into dogma, placing nation before art. Osborn Bergin is the gifted scholar and inspirational Gaelic revivalist who succumbs to pedantry in the end, pointing out the grammatical mistakes on funeral inscriptions. George Russell is the sage and small-town visionary who enables the young but fails to measure up to his own contemporaries. Richard Hayes is the social snob who worked selflessly to save the lives of the poor, but was overtaken by vanity and intrigue. Only Yeats emerges in something like unqualified glory, as a man who could make his own inner contradictions work for him, and so become the great poet of the age who recognized nevertheless that the future of Irish literature lay in realist prose. It is a striking fact that the autobiography ends with Yeats’s death.