The Best of Frank O'Connor Read online

  DRAFT COPY

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  The Best of Frank O’Connor first published in Everyman’s Library, 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by Harriet O’Donovan Sheehy

  Introduction, Selection and Prefaces copyright © 2009 by Julian Barnes

  Copyright information (US):

  Collected Stories, copyright © 1981 by Harriet O’Donovan Sheehy, Executrix of the Estate of

  Frank O’Connor (Alfred A. Knopf)

  Stories from Collected Stories appear courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  The Common Chord, copyright © 1948 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. (Alfred A. Knopf)

  Crab Apple Jelly, copyright © 1944 by Michael Donovan and renewed 1972 by Harriet R. O’Donovan

  (Alfred A. Knopf)

  My Father’s Son, copyright © 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968 by Harriet O’Donovan

  (Alfred A. Knopf)

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

  (Alfred A. Knopf)

  Traveller’s Samples, copyright © 1951 by Frank O’Connor

  (Alfred A. Knopf)

  Domestic Relations, copyright © 1957 by Frank O’Connor

  (Alfred A. Knopf)

  More Stories by Frank O’Connor, copyright © 1954 by Frank O’Connor

  (Alfred A. Knopf)

  Kings, Lords, and Commons, copyright © 1959 by Frank O’Connor

  (Alfred A. Knopf)

  A Frank O’Connor Reader, copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Connor (Syracuse University Press)

  The Little Monasteries, copyright © 1963, 1968 by Frank O’Connor

  (Dolman Press)

  Bibliography and Chronology Copyright © 2009 by Everyman’s Library

  Typography by Peter B. Willberg

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. Published in the United Kingdom by Everyman’s Library, Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V0AT, and distributed by Random House (UK) Ltd.

  US website: www.randomhouse.com/everymans

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80672-7

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgment

  Introduction

  Select Bibliography

  Chronology

  About the Editor

  1. WAR

  Preface

  Guests of the Nation

  Attack

  Jumbo’s Wife

  September Dawn

  Machine-Gun Corps in Action

  Laughter

  Soirée Chez une Belle Jeune Fille

  From An Only Child – The Fight for Freedom

  From The Big Fellow: Michael Collins and the Irish Revolution

  From My Father’s Son – A Case of Hypnotism

  2. CHILDHOOD

  Preface

  My Oedipus Complex

  From An Only Child – Mother

  The Genius

  First Confession

  From Writing a Story – One Man’s Way

  The Study of History

  From An Only Child – A Love of Heights

  The Man of the World

  From An Only Child – The Bandsmen

  The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland

  3. WRITERS

  Preface

  Introduction to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  From James Joyce: A Post-Mortem

  From My Father’s Son – George Russell and W. B. Yeats

  From Leinster, Munster and Connaught – Yeats

  Centenary Address at the Graveside of W. B. Yeats

  From Leinster, Munster and Connaught – The Tailor and Anstey

  4. LONELY VOICES

  Preface

  The Procession of Life

  The Majesty of the Law

  After Fourteen Years

  May Night

  There is a Lone House

  Uprooted

  The Bridal Night

  A Bachelor’s Story

  Lonely Rock

  5. IRELAND

  Preface

  A Learned Mistress

  Advice to Lovers

  I am Stretched on Your Grave

  A Word of Warning

  A Grey Eye Weeping

  From My Father’s Son – Yeats as Editor

  Kilcash

  Hope

  From Irish Miles – Father and Son

  From Leinster, Munster and Connaught – Cork and Mental Age of Cities Cork

  Sligo

  From The Backward Look

  From Holiday Magazine

  6. BETTER QUARRELLING

  Preface

  From My Father’s Son – First Fiction

  From The Saint and Mary Kate

  The Luceys

  Peasants

  Fish for Friday

  Old-Age Pensioners

  A Thing of Nothing

  News for the Church

  The Mad Lomasneys

  In the Train

  7. ABROAD

  Preface

  The Babes in the Wood

  The Paragon

  Darcy in the Land of Youth

  The American Wife

  A Story by Maupassant

  The Conversion

  The Late Henry Conran

  Michael’s Wife

  From My Father’s Son – The American Liner

  8. LAST THINGS

  Preface

  From Leinster, Munster and Connaught – Monastery

  Song without Words

  ‘The Star that Bids the Shepherd Fold’

  The Frying-Pan

  This Mortal Coil

  The Wreath

  From An Only Child – Grandmother

  The Long Road to Ummera

  From My Father’s Son – Tim Trayner

  The Mass Island

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  ——

  I am very grateful to Harriet O’Donovan Sheehy, Frank O’Connor’s widow, for her forceful encouragement and assistance. She made many useful suggestions, pointed me towards obscure items, and at times stamped a tactful foot. Her selection would inevitably have been different; but she always allowed that the final choice, and responsibility, for this edition was mine.

  J.B.

  INTRODUCTION

  ——

  Frank O’Connor was once stopped on the road west of Kinsale by a man who said to him: ‘I hear you’re a famous writer. I’d like to be a famous writer too, but ’tis bloody hard. The comma and the apostrophe are easy enough, but the semicolon is the very divil.’ The man was wrong, of course: the ability to punctuate, and even to spell, correctly are often missing from some of the best writers. What counts is the ability to be on that road, allow yourself to be stopped, listen to what the man says, remember the voice, and know when and how best to use it. O’Connor’s art was that of a man who travels his native Ireland at the speed of a bicycle, happy to pause and listen, slow to come to a general conclusion, preferring the particular instance and the gradually revealed truth.

  Mrs W. B. Yeats used to address him as ‘Michael-Frank’, an affectionate combining of his birth-name (Michael O’Donovan) and his pen-name. But that brief hyphen is also an indicator of the proximity between his personal and artistic selves. In some writers, the artistic self is separated off from the daily one: Jekyll closes the study door and turns into Hyde (or, sometimes, vice versa). O’Connor, while containing paradoxes and contradictions as any artist d
oes, was much less of a bifurcated spirit than most. What he was lay very close to what he did; his fiction and non-fiction have similar contours and spirit. And to read the totality of his work is to discover multiple criss-crossings between books, with the same stories alluded to and retold.

  But such repetitions, when they occur, don’t feel like a writer recycling his material. Instead, the reader is more likely to smile in affectionate recognition as the stories of the Tailor and Anstey, or Mrs Yeats and the next-door dog, or Lord Edward Fitzgerald and the Native American woman, come round again. This is not just because O’Connor is a seductive and trustable narrator to whom we willingly submit, whether he is writing a short story about childhood, describing Celtic architecture, explaining Irish poetry, or fulminating against the Famine or James Joyce. It is because voice is central to O’Connor’s art. He is that comparatively rare thing in modern times, an oral prose writer.

  When he came to literary awareness, modernism was enjoying its fullest and most successful expression. In its general and necessary attack on a dying tradition of panoramic social realism, it also inflicted major – and to O’Connor’s belief, catastrophic – damage on the notion of the writer’s voice. Modernism fragmented and ironized it, made it unreliable and shifty, sometimes hidden away altogether. O’Connor wanted to keep alive in prose, and especially in the short story, what he believed to be at its heart: the sound of ‘an actual man, talking’.

  Talking, but also listening. O’Connor once said that when he remembered people – even those he was very fond of – he sometimes couldn’t remember their faces, but could always take off their voices. So, in his art, how a character sounds is more important than where they live or what they are wearing, or even what they look like. William Maxwell, O’Connor’s editor for many years at the New Yorker, amicably complained that though he was capable of ‘marvellous descriptions’, he didn’t go in for them much because they didn’t interest him. They did when he was writing topographically or architecturally – then he looked as closely as anyone – but in the rendering of human beings into fictional form it all began with voice – their voice, his voice.

  The writer Benedict Kiely once noted that ‘O’Connor can be as outrageously at ease with his own people as a country priest skelping the courting couples out of the ditches.’ His fellow New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan also teased him with the clerical comparison, imagining St Patrick’s Cathedral with O’Connor ‘where he usually is in the afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a priest and giving penance to some old woman’. But the real priest listens, judges, issues penances, and keeps the sinner’s secrets. O’Connor listened, took notes, did not judge, and turned the confession into a story. His masters were not the moralists or the modernists, but those like Turgenev (‘my hero among writers’) who went with seeming simplicity to the complexity at the heart of human matters. And the short-story writer he turned to most often was Chekhov. When Maxwell inherited O’Connor’s volumes of Chekhov, he described them as ‘so lived with – turned down corners, coffee stains, whiskey stains, and perhaps tears’.

  In his essay on the Russian in ‘The Lonely Art’, O’Connor identifies one central, and to him profoundly sympathetic, belief in Chekhov’s work: the notion that ‘We are not damned for our mortal sins, which so often require courage and dignity, but by our venial sins, which we often commit a hundred times a day until we become as enslaved to them as we could be to alcohol and drugs. Because of them and our toleration of them, we create a false personality for ourselves.’ (Again, O’Connor’s confessional was an unorthodox one.) In ‘The Bishop’, written the year before Chekhov died, a bishop, originally from a poor background, is dying a lonely death. He is visited by his old mother who, because of his eminence, at first cannot stop calling him ‘Your Grace’. Only towards the end does she break through the ‘false personality’ society has imposed on her, to the intimate contact mother and son once had: she starts calling him again by the private names she once used when he was a small boy unable to button his trousers. ‘It is a final affirmation,’ O’Connor writes, ‘of Chekhov’s faith in life – lonely and sad, immeasurably sad, but beautiful beyond the power of the greatest artist to tell.’

  And yet not beyond the power of the artist to try. If Chekhov was O’Connor’s prose master, Mozart was his musical master, and there is a conscious iteration in O’Connor’s analysis, on the two hundredth anniversary of the composer’s death, of what it is that we have come to call ‘Mozartean’:

  It is a way of seeing things which revokes the tragic attitude without turning into comedy, which says, not ‘Life is beautiful but so sad’ but ‘Life is so sad but beautiful’, and this way of seeing things, half way between tragedy and comedy, represents a human norm.

  That human norm tells us where O’Connor’s art came from, and where it is heading.

  Julian Barnes

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ——

  SHORT STORIES

  Guests of the Nation, London/New York, 1931.

  Bones of Contention, New York, 1936; London, 1938.

  Crab Apple Jelly, London/New York, 1944.

  The Common Chord, London, 1947; New York, 1948.

  Traveller’s Samples, London/New York, 1951.

  Domestic Relations, London/New York, 1957.

  The Stories of Frank O’Connor, New York, 1952; London, 1953.

  More Stories, New York, 1954.

  Collection Two, London, 1964.

  Collection Three, London, 1969.

  The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland, Dublin, 1981.

  Collected Stories, New York, 1982.

  My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories, London, 2005.

  NOVELS

  The Saint and Mary Kate, London/New York, 1936.

  Dutch Interior, London/New York, 1940.

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  An Only Child, New York, 1961; London, 1962.

  My Father’s Son, London, 1968; New York, 1969.

  NON-FICTION

  The Big Fellow: A Life of Michael Collins, London, 1937.

  Irish Miles, London, 1947.

  The Road to Stratford, London, 1948 (revised as Shakespeare’s Progress).

  Leinster, Munster and Connaught, London, 1950.

  The Mirror in the Roadway: A Study of the Modern Novel, New York, 1956; London, 1957.

  The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, Cleveland, Ohio, 1962; London, 1963.

  The Backward Look: A Survey of Irish Literature, London, 1967.

  POETRY TRANSLATIONS FROM THE IRISH

  Kings, Lords and Commons, New York, 1959; London, 1961.

  The Little Monasteries, Dublin, 1963.

  OTHER

  The Happiness of Getting It Down Right: Letters of Frank O’Connor and William Maxwell, edited by Michael Steinman, New York, 1996.

  A Frank O’Connor Reader, edited by Michael Steinman, New York, 1994.

  Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, edited by Malcolm Cowley, New York, 1959.

  Michael/Frank: Studies on Frank O’Connor, edited by Maurice Sheehy, Dublin/London, 1969.

  Frank O’Connor at Work by Michael Steinman, New York, 1990.

  Frank O’Connor: New Perspectives, edited by Robert Evans and Richard Harp, West Cornwall, CT, 1998.

  Frank O’Connor: Critical Essays, edited by Hilary Lennon, Dublin, 2007.

  There is also a website sponsored by University College, Cork:

  www.frankoconnor.ucc.ie

  CHRONOLOGY

  ——

  DATE AUTHOR’S LIFE LITERARY CONTEXT

  1903 Birth of Michael John O’Donovan in Cork City (17 September) to Mary (Minnie) and Michael O’Donovan over a shop in Douglas Street. His father is an ex-British Army soldier, nicknamed ‘Big Mick’. Within a year the family moves to Blarney Street, a slum area. These early years are marked by poverty and illness, made worse by Big Mick’s persistent alcoholic binges. Butler: The Way of All Flesh.

  Mann: Toni
o Kröger.

  1904 Shaw: John Bull’s Other Island.

  James: The Golden Bowl.

  Conrad: Nostromo.

  Saki: Reginald

  1905 Wells: Kipps.

  Forster: Where Angels Fear to Tread.

  1906 Samuel Beckett born.

  1907 Briefly attends Cork’s first national school at Strawberry Hill. Synge: Playboy of the Western World (riots at the Abbey Theatre).

  Adams: The Education of Henry Adams.

  1908 Bennett: The Old Wives’ Tale. Forster: A Room with a View.

  1909 Wells: Tono Bungay.

  1910 Family moves again, this time to Harrington Square, near O’Donovan relatives. Attends St Patrick’s School, but records show that he is often absent due to eye trouble and recurrent illnesses. Forster: Howards End.

  Wells: The History of Mr Polly.

  1911 Pound: Canzoni.

  Mansfield: In a German Pension. Chesterton: The Innocence of Father Brown.

  HISTORICAL EVENTS

  In Ireland, the last of a series of Land Acts makes it easier for tenant farmers to buy their land. Emmeline Pankhurst founds Women’s Social and Political Union in Manchester. Wright brothers’ first successful powered flight.

  Entente Cordiale between Britain and France. Russo-Japanese War (to 1905). Opening of Abbey Theatre (National Theatre of Ireland) in Dublin.

  Formation of provisional government (Ulster Unionist Council) in Northern Ireland while in the South Sinn Féin is formed. First Russian Revolution.

  Launch of HMS Dreadnought, first modern battleship.

  Transatlantic wireless telegraphy service between Galway and Canada is opened.

  Irish Universities Act leads to foundation of National University of Ireland in Dublin (1909). Asquith Prime Minister in Britain (to 1916).

  Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union is founded. Lloyd George introduces People’s Budget.

  Death of Edward VII and accession of George V.

  The 84-strong Irish Home Rule Party led by John Redmond supports the Liberals’ Parliament Act to reduce the power of the House of Lords in return for another Home Rule Bill. Strikes of dockers, miners, railwaymen and transport workers in Britain.