My Oedipus Complex
PENGUIN BOOKS
My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories
Frank O’Connor was the pseudonym of Michael O’Donovan, who was born at Cork in 1903. Largely self-educated, he began to prepare a collected edition of his works at the age of twelve and later worked as a librarian, translator and journalist. When quite young he learned to speak Irish and saturated himself in Gaelic poetry, music and legend. When he was interned by the Free State Government he took the opportunity to learn several languages, but it was in Irish that he wrote a prize-winning study of Turgenev on his release. ‘A.E.’ began to publish his poems, stories and translations in the Irish Statesman. Meanwhile a local clergyman remarked of him, when he produced plays by Ibsen and Chekhov in Cork, that: ‘Mike the moke would go down to posterity at the head of the pagan Dublin muses.’ Frank O’Connor lived in Dublin and had an American wife, two sons and two daughters. He published Guests of the Nation, his first book, in 1931, and then followed over thirty volumes, largely of short stories, in addition to plays. Frank O’Connor died in 1966.
Julian Barnes is the author of ten novels, two volumes of short stories and three collections of essays. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and has won many awards. In 2004 he was made a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres.
FRANK O’CONNOR
My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories
With an Introduction by JULIAN BARNES
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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The texts used in this edition are taken from Guests of the Nation, first published by Macmillan 1931,
Bones of Contention, first published by Macmillan 1936, Crab Apple Jelly, first published by Macmillan
1944, The Common Chord, first published by Macmillan 1947, Traveller’s Samples, first published by
Macmillan 1951, The Stories of Frank O’Connor, first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf
1952 and in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 1953, More Stories of Frank O’Connor, first published by
Alfred A. Knopf 1954, Domestic Relations, first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf and in
Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 1957, Collection Two, first published by Macmillan 1964, Collection
Three, first published by Macmillan 1969, and The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland, first published in
Ireland by Poolbeg 1981
This selection published in Penguin Books 2005
Texts copyright © Literary Executors of the Estate of Frank O’Connor, 1931, 1933, 1936, 1940, 1942,
1944, 1945, 1947, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1959, 1964, 1966
Introduction and selection copyright © Julian Barnes, 2005
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author and introducer 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: 978–0–141–90126–8
Contents
Introduction by Julian Barnes
A Note on the Selection
The Genius
My Oedipus Complex
First Confession
The Study of History
The Man of the World
Guests of the Nation
Machine-Gun Corps in Action
Soirée Chez une Belle Jeune Fille
Jumbo’s Wife
The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland
There is a Lone House
News for the Church
The Mad Lomasneys
Uprooted
The Majesty of the Law
The Luceys
After Fourteen Years
Peasants
The Bridal Night
A Thing of Nothing
Michael’s Wife
A Bachelor’s Story
Fish for Friday
A Story by Maupassant
In the Train
The Corkerys
Old-Age Pensioners
The Long Road to Ummera
The Wreath
The Mass Island
Introduction
I first came to Frank O’Connor by way of a possessive pronoun. The fiction shelves of a secondhand bookshop in Dublin proposed an antique orange Penguin: author’s name in white, title in black, no strident capitals on the spine, and the cover taken up with what was in those days a come-on – a blurry author photo. It was not this, or the distantly familiar name, that made me buy it (the original 3/6d now having become six euros), but the title: My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories. It was the slyly inviting ‘My’ that did it. A lesser writer might have settled for ‘The’, and the book would have stayed on its shelf.
Since his death in 1966, a respectful forgettingness has settled over Frank O’Connor. Indeed, he is now better remembered – and more in print – in the United States than in either Britain or Ireland itself. Why should this have come about? Perhaps because in his large output – of novels, stories, plays, essays, travel books, biography, poetry and translations from the Irish – there is not one particular title to which his name is indelibly attached. Perhaps because his finest work is in the short story, a medium more vulnerable over time. Perhaps because he doesn’t require academic explication; in which he resembles some of the writers he most revered – Maupassant, Chekhov, Turgenev. Perhaps because he spent many years away in America, where his best work first appeared: the New Yorker ran fifty-one of his stories in a two-decade-long association beginning in 1945. Perhaps because he could be as harsh about the land of his birth as other Irish writers: it was ‘a country ruled by fools and blackguards’, where life was ‘emptiness and horror’ – though a country to which he returned, in 1961, for the last five years of his life. Even cumulatively, these reasons seem insufficient.
He was born Michael O’Donovan in Cork in 1903, a demographic rarity at that time: both a late child and an only child. His mother, Mary, had been born in 1865, a date she long concealed from her son; she was an orphan who channelled into him her social and cultural ambitions. His father, Michael, was an old soldier proud of his two pensions from the British Army, a bandsman and navvy, given to powerful drinking bouts which blighted family life. Frank was a self-admitted mother’s boy and sissy, who deep into ad
ulthood fought his father for possession of the woman of the house. He left school at fourteen, and worked on the railways as a clerk in the flourishing misdirected-goods department. At fifteen he started doing ‘odd jobs’, as he put it, for the IRA; but proved a ‘wretchedly bad soldier’, and was interned by the Irish Free State for a year in 1922–3. Upon release he became a librarian, teacher, translator and man of the theatre, first in Cork then Dublin, rising to become director of the Abbey Theatre. After retiring from that post in 1939, he lived from his writing, with the help of teaching stints at American universities.
Much of his early life, up to and including internment, finds its way into his stories; his later life less (or less obviously) so. His first volume of autobiography, An Only Child, is full of brief anecdotes and asides which are recognizably the germ of later stories: how he drank his father’s pint; how he decided he was a changeling; how he determined to murder his embarrassing grandmother; how he sought to apply the English public-school ethic in an Irish trades school. Each is, however, only the germ: the final story has less to do with its authenticity of origin, everything to do with the manner of its development. William Maxwell, who was O’Connor’s editor at the New Yorker and thereby his great friend, said that Frank, despite being an only child, ‘behaved as if he were the oldest of a large family of boys and girls’. Such a transforming instinct is a good start for a fiction writer.
So is listening carefully – which may come in many forms, from a child’s eavesdropping upwards. In 1959, Maxwell received a letter from one of his magazine’s readers asking when to expect a new story from another of the Irish writers he published, Maeve Brennan. He showed the letter to Brennan, who judged its tone (or the request itself) impertinent, and concocted a fantastical reply purporting to come from Maxwell himself. The editor is terribly sorry to have to inform the reader that ‘our poor Miss Brennan’ has died – indeed, she shot herself (‘in the back with the aid of a small handmirror’) at the foot of the main altar of St Patrick’s Cathedral on Shrove Tuesday. The letter continues: ‘Frank O’Connor was where he usually is in the afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a priest and giving penance to some old woman and he heard the shot and he ran out…’ Brennan is making fun of her fellow-countryman and his subject-matter; but also of the writer’s love of hearing other people’s innermost secrets – which he, unlike the priest, will subsequently betray.
O’Connor himself put the point a different way. In An Only Child he describes himself as ‘a natural collaborationist’. By which he means that, ‘Like Dolan’s ass, I went a bit of the way with everybody.’ An initial biddability followed, at a certain point, by an instinctive intransigence. When he was an internee, Republican prisoners across Ireland were called out on hunger strike against the Free State; O’Connor was one of only three among the thousand prisoners in his camp who both voted and spoke against the decision. The writer has a similar stance, and duty: a bit of the way, but no further; join with others, inhabit their lives at will, but remain mulishly yourself.
Imaginative sympathy, and then, in rendering the lives of others, a furious – and, to some, infuriating – perfectionism. William Maxwell, who knew writers well, said that, ‘If there is an alarming object in this world it is a writer delighted with something he has just written. There is no worse sign.’ O’Connor almost never gave such a sign. Though he liked to write a quick first draft – obeying Maupassant’s injunction to ‘Get black on white’ – everything thereafter was itchy dissatisfaction and constant revision. His story ‘The Little Mother’ exists in seventeen versions, published and unpublished; sometimes the count rose as high as fifty drafts. A story might eventually appear in a magazine, but that would not be the end of revisions. Then it might be published in volume form, and still O’Connor would go on tinkering. Finally it might be Selected or Collected, yet there was always further work to be done. All for the sake of what Maxwell, writing about his friend, called ‘The happiness of getting it down right.’
Yeats, an admired and loved – if tricky – colleague at the Abbey Theatre, who encouraged O’Connor and published two volumes of his translations from the Irish, said famously – perhaps too famously – that ‘O’Connor is doing for Ireland what Chekhov did for Russia.’ This was promotionally useful, as such statements tend to be (Richard Ellmann called him ‘Flaubert among the bogs’, which maybe doesn’t work as well), but only true in part. Evidence of O’Connor’s love for Chekhov can be adduced from his edition of the writer, which Maxwell inherited and described: ‘So lived with – turned down corners, turned down sides of pages, coffee stains, whiskey stains, and perhaps tears.’ But the Irishman also knew the dangers of emulation: ‘He’s inimitable,’ he said of Chekhov to his Paris Review interviewer, ‘a person to read and admire and worship – but never, never, never to imitate.’ If seeking Russian connections, we might do better proposing a triangulation consisting of Gorky (O’Connor once described himself as ‘an aspiring young writer who wanted to know Ireland as Gorky had known Russia’), Isaak Babel (‘the man who has influenced me most’) and Turgenev (‘my hero among writers’). O’Connor’s first published work, written as an internee, was a prize-winning essay in Irish about Turgenev.
And even if we allow that some kind of Chekhovian or Russian mapping is going on, the Irishman’s case has an additional complication. Yes, he described without parallel a certain Ireland – provincial, priest-dominated, impoverished, hard-drinking, secretive, generous, collusive – at a certain time: after independence but before modernization or prosperity or (a key factor in numerous stories) contraception. His stories both look and are profoundly Irish in character and setting (there are occasional excursions among the Irish living in England). Yet they are by no means all Irish in origin. Some writers seek to prove their universality – or, at least, their appetite and diversity – by setting their work in different places and times. O’Connor did the opposite. English or American life might provide a story, an anecdote, a potentially useful scrap, but if he came to write it, he would quite deliberately repatriate it to Ireland. In 1955 he was living in Annapolis, and discovered three impeccably ‘Irish’ stories among local Annapolitans, including ‘The Man of the World’. The reasons for such transportation are partly defensive – stick with the voice, and voices, that you know and can render best – but also more high-minded: the external details of a story may vary, but its inner truth is universal. O’Connor liked to cite the story of Lord Edward Fitzgerald meeting an old (American) Indian woman and being told that as far as she was concerned, humanity was ‘all one Indian’.
He was to a large degree that paradoxical thing, an oral prose writer. His stories aim for your ear rather than your eye; they depend upon the sense of ‘an actual man, talking’ – one whose first task is to settle, even lull you (thus sometimes provoking the delusion that an easy, even sentimental, ride lies ahead). In this type of writing, verisimilitude of tone and psychological truth matter more than a flamboyant comparison or a self-advertising phrase. There is the narrative voice, and, within it, the voices: variations and modulations of speech are central to the representation of character. In this, O’Connor’s fiction is consonant with his own nature: ‘If I remember somebody, for instance, that I was very fond of, I don’t remember what he or she looked like, but I can absolutely take off the voices.’
Maxwell judged his friend capable of ‘marvellous descriptions’ but regretted that they ‘didn’t interest him’. The New Yorker editor would ask what a particular room, or house, in a story looked like, and O’Connor might admit that he didn’t really know; though he might ruefully agree to put up a few walls and doors if that was what the customer wanted. On Maxwell’s part, this was the reaction of an editor dutifully worrying about his magazine’s less imaginative readers; but it was also the response of a practising novelist to a short-story writer. The novelist historically pays more attention to fixtures and fittings than does the creator of the more compacted and poet
ic form. As O’Connor put it, the novel depends on creating a sense of continuing life, whereas the short story need merely suggest such continuance.
On one occasion, when Maxwell was locationally baffled, O’Connor sent him a couple of sketches to explain his story, marked with helpful annotations like ‘Window’, ‘Door’, ‘Hallway’, ‘Table’, ‘Father’ and ‘Son’. But this story – about a child ashamed of his parents – survives, fifty years on, not because of any decorative infill, but because of its narrative structure and psychological truth, because O’Connor remembered and understood the full peculiarity and relentlessness of children. He knew that ‘Children…see only one side of any question and because of their powerlessness see it with hysterical clarity.’ Hysterical clarity: in this respect the child is father to the writer. The adult may learn to view others with more tolerance, tenderness and wisdom; but the writer must retain the child’s absolutism of eye, whether writing about childhood itself, or war, or marriage, or solitude, about the life of a tramp or the life of a priest.
The child’s-eye view. O’Connor describes in An Only Child how as a small boy he had a great taste for sitting on roofs. ‘I was always very fond of heights, and afterwards it struck me that reading was only another form of height, and a more perilous one. It was a way of looking beyond your back yard into the neighbours’.’ This rooftop reader is an additional father to the writer: first you watch the lives of others, later you imagine them. O’Connor was to exploit this remembrance of height and reading in one of his best stories about childhood, ‘The Man of the World’, in which two boys, eager for the secrets of adult life, spy on a neighbouring house from a darkened attic. The child as spy as reader as peeping tom as writer.
O’Connor was a most untheoretical writer whose favourite lines from Faust were: ‘Grey, my dear friend, is all your theory, and green the golden tree of Life.’ Nevertheless, like many another literary practitioner who spends time in academe, he ended up with a theory of the short story. This he codified in The Lonely Voice, a study of the form which has since become a textbook in American writing schools. ‘There is in the short story at its most characteristic,’ he proposes, ‘something we do not often find in the novel – an intense awareness of human loneliness.’ The story deals especially with ‘submerged population groups’, which helps explain its strength in America, where such groups abound. They contain the form’s characteristic personnel: ‘outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society’.