Literary Criticism:These timely essays on Frank O'Connor, expertly edited by Hilary Lennon from a Trinity College Dublin seminar, add to our understanding not just of writing but of Ireland's shifting analytical principles.
O'Connor became a visiting lecturer at TCD at a crucial time in the early 1960s, a time when money was scarce and academic jobs for writers were non- existent. It is to the eternal credit of the TCD authorities that they took a chance on the Cork writer. This book brings happy closure to that 40-year relationship.
Without exception, these essays are brilliantly illuminating. O'Connor is a complex creature, torn by competing loyalties: nationalism, modernism, social realism, the guilty pull-strings of Corkery in Cork and of Bill Maxwell, his editor at the New Yorker. The lanes of Cork were O'Connor's Cannery Row, and, like Steinbeck, the Cork writer forged an individualistic, touchy personal aesthetic that allowed him to jettison hardly anything. In terms of a real literary career, it is true to say that devotion to the nation is a poor substitute for a good literary agent. From a very early age, even while he was still working as a public librarian, O'Connor wrote and acted like a professional. This literary approach placed him at a serious remove from his Cork mentor, Corkery, for whom the nation and each one of its irrefutable justifications were beyond questioning by the younger purveyors of imagination.
Between independence and the era of Gay Byrne's Late Late Show, Ireland became a confessional "Stasiland", and only a fool would now deny that fact. In those circumstances O'Connor, like Kavanagh or Clarke, could only suffer. It could be argued that by remaining in Ireland, O'Connor took the hit for Joyce and Beckett. His moral bravery was astonishing; it wasn't just a Cork crankiness, but something deeply embedded, and the product of prodigious reading. Like Peader O'Donnell, he never gave in, but wrote of his country with all the hope and rage of a writer for whom the prison gates flew open. He believed in the redemptive poetry of a writer's life.
But O'Connor had his blind spots too: Carol Taaffe's superb essay, Coloured Balloons: Frank O'Connor on Irish Modernism, outlines the tortured reading of Joyce that O'Connor endured, his inability to embrace those European forces of modernist, intellectual writing where Joyce was at the centre. Both Alan Titley in The Interpretation of Tradition and Paul Delaney in Fierce Passions for Middle-Aged Men: Frank O'Connor and Daniel Corkery explain something of the overwhelming presences that wished to hold O'Connor back. Delaney's essay is crucial to our understanding of the primacy of imagination over the requirements of politics, knowing that "tradition is alive and always in process".
NICHOLAS ALLEN AND Robert C Evans's essays deal with the most intense and fascinating part of O'Connor's career, the years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the second World War. Thinking that O'Connor's American life had begun with Crab Apple Jelly from Knopf in the late 1940s, I was surprised to learn here that the seminal Guests of the Nation appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1931, hardly eight years after O'Connor's failed Republic had fled south at Ballyhea and Buttevant to be compressed into Corkery's living-room for the rest of eternity. Evans's essay reminds us not to trust a writer's own reading of his work: the much-maligned The Saint and Mary Kate and Dutch Interior were well-received in the US before the war. "The author unfolds a picturesque panorama of Irish life, with colourful characters of tradesmen, tramps and tinkers whose prayers and maledictions are in the rich and abundant idiom of the Irish southland," wrote the reviewer in the Commonweal.
And there was that sense of the Irish south as a primitive place compared to prosperous, industrial Ulster. Having read Evans's essay, I want to read O'Connor's novels again. There are other magnificent essays here, notably Maurice Harmon's very critical look at O'Connor's social method, John Kenny on O'Connor's theory of the short story, Hilary Lennon on the Abbey Theatre's passionate presences, Declan Kiberd on the "profound and occluded intentions" behind O'Connor's translation of the Cúirt an Mheán Oiche, with Kiberd's usual insightful comments ("O'Connor's version of the Cúirt is mighty - but also mighty vulgar").
AS ALWAYS IN an O'Connor project, the most moving presence here is not the most provocative scholar, but the one who knows most: Harriet O'Donovan Sheehy, the author's widow. Harriet's effervescent recall brings the writer to life. For years her loyalty has fed the great local devotion to O'Connor in Cork, loyalty that's been mediated through the friendships of the late Nancy MacCarthy and Diarmuid Hurley, as well as the living advocacy of Patrick Cotter and Jim McKeon.
Literature centres, prizes and libraries have all been dedicated to his memory. The long conversation with O'Connor continues, but the most intense dialogue must still be with the stories. That is as it should be: as Michael Steinman writes, in his essay on the 1946 story, Lonely Rock, "academics may gently tell their inexperienced students that arguing with literary characters is a particularly futile pastime, I think it is only the highest art that provokes in readers the absolute need to do so".
In Cork, that O'Connor dialogue is still very much alive.
Thomas McCarthy has worked at Cork City Libraries for 30 years. His latest book is Merchant Prince (2005)
The Frank O'Connor Festival of the Short Story continues today and tomorrow in Cork.
Frank O'Connor: Literary Essays Edited by Hilary Lennon Four Courts Press, 240pp. €45