My Oedipus Complex (2 page)

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 poetic 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'.

How far would Dolan's ass go with this theory? It's certainly true that many of O'Connor's characters have sadness and loneliness at their centre; but this often seems to make them typical, rather than atypical, of the society to which they belong – one the writer himself described as ‘potty, lonely'. Take O'Connor's priests, for example. These are rarely of the gentle, twinkly sort; they tend to be clever, manipulative, fierce, worldly, temptable and despairingly consumed by the life they have chosen. In this they are also analogues of the writer. As O'Connor put it,

The attraction of the religious life for the story-teller is overpowering. It is the attraction of a sort of life lived, or seeking to be lived, by standards other than those of this world, one which, in fact, resembles that of the artist. The good priest, like the good artist, needs human rewards, but no human reward can ever satisfy him.

But if the priest feels an unassuageable loneliness, this hardly makes him an ‘outlawed figure' on the ‘fringes of society'. Priests were central to Irish society at the time O'Connor was describing. And quite a few others among his cast list might be surprised to discover that their maker considered them submerged and marginalized. Perhaps those priests are not so much outlawed as self-outlawed; and what O'Connor unfailingly locates is the
loneliness at the heart of those who are regarded by others, and even by themselves, as normal, assimilated members of society.

Sometimes the writer doesn't know best. Or, at least, someone else may know best as well. As Maxwell affectionately put it in the course of one editorial disagreement, ‘Of course you are right about the story, and I am too.' Sometimes the quest for perfection can lead to over-revision; a writer may know his work too well, and find looseness in what was naturalness. Thus O'Connor turned against most of the stories in his first collection,
Guests of the Nation
(1931), on the grounds that they were ‘extravagant' and insufficiently revised. He excluded all of them from his first selected, and allowed only one into his second. This seems to me too harsh a judgement; these early stories – many about the Civil War – are an essential part of his work. Here are times of wrenching national division and military chaos described with the verve of a young writer and participant. The older man might have controlled them more, but then the older man might also have filtered out some of the verve.

O'Connor's tireless revisionism sprang from the mania and the quandary at the heart of writing: how to find the balance between life's shapelessness and artistic form, between naturalness and control. In his finest work, this balance is effortlessly achieved (because effortfully achieved). His second wife Harriet O'Donovan Sheehy once described a revealing tic of her husband's: ‘There was almost nothing in the world Michael coveted more than someone else's pen or pencil and I often found several sharp pencils and a little metal pencil sharpener in his pajama pockets.' Such is the writer's nature: one who will look down from his rooftop into your back yard, then go part of the way with you, then hear your confession, and then steal your pencil. The contents of a pajama pocket are a give-away: about the writer's covetousness; also about the writer's constant readiness.

Julian Barnes

O'Connor published six volumes of stories in his lifetime:
Guests of the Nation
(1931),
Bones of Contention
(1936),
Crab Apple Jelly
(1944),
The Common Chord
(1947),
Traveller's Samples
(1951) and
Domestic Relations
(1957). He also chose
The Stories of Frank O'Connor
(1952), followed by
More Stories
(1954), which he later reworked as
Collection Two
(1964). After his death his widow, Harriet O'Donovan Sheehy, published
Collection Three
(1969) and
The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland
(1981). I have chosen thirty stories from the hundred and fifty or so these books contain. O'Connor was very attentive to the ordering of his stories within each volume; I have followed his lead, preferring a kind of overall narrative to the hazards of chronological order. So the book begins with stories about childhood; then war; then peace and adulthood; then age and death. This is not, however, intended to make the contents seem more autobiographical than they are.

O'Connor's letters to and from William Maxwell were published as
The Happiness of Getting It Down Right
, edited by Michael Steinman (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

Some kids are cissies by nature but I was a cissy by conviction. Mother had told me about geniuses; I wanted to be one, and I could see for myself that fighting, as well as being sinful, was dangerous. The kids round the Barrack where I lived were always fighting. Mother said they were savages, that I needed proper friends, and that once I was old enough to go to school I would meet them.

My way, when someone wanted to fight and I could not get away, was to climb on the nearest wall and argue like hell in a shrill voice about Our Blessed Lord and good manners. This was a way of attracting attention, and it usually worked because the enemy, having stared incredulously at me for several minutes, wondering if he would have time to hammer my head on the pavement before someone came out to him, yelled something like ‘blooming cissy' and went away in disgust. I didn't like being called a cissy but I preferred it to fighting. I felt very like one of those poor mongrels who slunk through our neighbourhood and took to their heels when anyone came near them, and I always tried to make friends with them.

I toyed with games, and enjoyed kicking a ball gently before me along the pavement till I discovered that any boy who joined me grew violent and started to shoulder me out of the way. I preferred little girls because they didn't fight so much, but otherwise I found them insipid and lacking in any solid basis of information. The only women I cared for were grown-ups, and my most intimate friend was an old washerwoman called Miss Cooney who had been in the lunatic asylum and was very religious. It was she who had told me all about dogs. She would run a mile after
anyone she saw hurting an animal, and even went to the police about them, but the police knew she was mad and paid no attention.

She was a sad-looking woman with grey hair, high cheekbones and toothless gums. While she ironed, I would sit for hours in the hot, steaming, damp kitchen, turning over the pages of her religious books. She was fond of me too, and told me she was sure I would be a priest. I agreed that I might be a bishop, but she didn't seem to think so highly of bishops. I told her there were so many other things I might be that I couldn't make up my mind, but she only smiled at this. Miss Cooney thought there was only one thing a genius could be and that was a priest.

On the whole I thought an explorer was what I would be. Our house was in a square between two roads, one terraced above the other, and I could leave home, follow the upper road for a mile past the Barrack, turn left on any of the intervening roads and lanes, and return almost without leaving the pavement. It was astonishing what valuable information you could pick up on a trip like that. When I came home I wrote down my adventures in a book called
The Voyages of Johnson Martin
, ‘with many Maps and Illustrations, Irishtown University Press, 3s. 6d. nett'. I was also compiling
The Irishtown University Song Book for Use in Schools and Institutions by Johnson Martin
, which had the words and music of my favourite songs. I could not read music yet but I copied it from anything that came handy, preferring staff to solfa because it looked better on the page. But I still wasn't sure what I would be. All I knew was that I intended to be famous and have a statue put up to me near that of Father Matthew, in Patrick Street. Father Matthew was called the Apostle of Temperance, but I didn't think much of temperance. So far our town hadn't a proper genius and I intended to supply the deficiency.

But my work continued to bring home to me the great gaps in my knowledge. Mother understood my difficulty and worried herself endlessly finding answers to my questions, but neither she nor Miss Cooney had a great store of the sort of information I needed, and Father was more a hindrance than a help. He was talkative enough about subjects that interested himself but they did not greatly interest me. ‘Ballybeg,' he would say brightly. ‘Market town. Population 648. Nearest station, Rathkeale.' He was also forthcoming enough about other things, but later, Mother would take me aside and explain that he was only joking again. This made me mad, because I never knew when he was joking and when he wasn't.