My Oedipus Complex

by Frank O'Connor

  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

  A Note on the Selection

  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).

  The Genius

  1

  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. Populati
on 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.

  I can see now, of course, that he didn’t really like me. It was not the poor man’s fault. He had never expected to be the father of a genius and it filled him with forebodings. He looked round him at all his contemporaries who had normal, bloodthirsty, illiterate children, and shuddered at the thought that I would never be good for anything but being a genius. To give him his due, it wasn’t himself he worried about, but there had never been anything like it in the family before and he dreaded the shame of it. He would come in from the front door with his cap over his eyes and his hands in his trouser pockets and stare moodily at me while I sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by papers, producing fresh maps and illustrations for my book of voyages, or copying the music of ‘The Minstrel Boy’.

  ‘Why can’t you go out and play with the Horgans?’ he would ask wheedlingly, trying to make it sound attractive.

  ‘I don’t like the Horgans, Daddy,’ I would reply politely.

  ‘But what’s wrong with them?’ he would ask testily. ‘They’re fine manly young fellows.’

  ‘They’re always fighting, Daddy.’

  ‘And what harm is fighting? Can’t you fight them back?’

  ‘I don’t like fighting, Daddy, thank you,’ I would say, still with perfect politeness.

  ‘The dear knows, the child is right,’ Mother would say, coming to my defence. ‘I don’t know what sort those children are.’

  ‘Ah, you have him as bad as yourself,’ Father would snort, and stalk to the front door again, to scald his heart with thoughts of the nice natural son he might have had if only he hadn’t married the wrong woman. Granny had always said Mother was the wrong woman for him and now she was being proved right.

  She was being proved so right that the poor man couldn’t keep his eyes off me, waiting for the insanity to break out in me. One of the things he didn’t like was my Opera House. The Opera House was a cardboard box I had mounted on two chairs in the dark hallway. It had a proscenium cut in it, and I had painted some back-drops of mountain and sea, with wings that represented trees and rocks. The characters were pictures cut out, mounted and coloured, and moved on bits of stick. It was lit with candles, for which I had made coloured screens, greased so that they were transparent, and I made up operas from story-books and bits of songs. I was singing a passionate duet for two of the characters while twiddling the screens to produce the effect of moonlight when one of the screens caught fire and everything went up in a mass of flames. I screamed and Father came out to stamp out the blaze, and he cursed me till even Mother lost her temper with him and told him he was worse than six children, after which he wouldn’t speak to her for a week.

  Another time I was so impressed with a lame teacher I knew that I decided to have a lame leg myself, and there was hell in the home for days because Mother had no difficulty at all in seeing that my foot was already out of shape while Father only looked at it and sniffed contemptuously. I was furious with him, and Mother decided he wasn’t much better than a monster. They quarrelled for days over that until it became quite an embarrassment to me because, though I was bored stiff with limping, I felt I should be letting her down by getting better. When I went down the Square, lurching from side to side, Father stood at the gate, looking after me with a malicious knowing smile, and when I had discarded my limp, the way he mocked Mother was positively disgusting.

  2

  As I say, they squabbled endlessly about what I should be told. Father was for telling me nothing.

  ‘But, Mick,’ Mother would say earnestly, ‘the child must learn.’

  ‘He’ll learn soon enough when he goes to school,’ he snarled. ‘Why do you be always at him, putting ideas into his head? Isn’t he bad enough? I’d sooner the boy would grow up a bit natural.’

  But either Mother didn’t like children to be natural or she thought I was natural enough as I was. Women, of course, don’t object to geniuses half as much as men do. I suppose they find them a relief.

  Now one of the things I wanted badly to know was where babies came from, but this was something that no one seemed to be able to explain to me. When I asked Mother she got upset and talked about birds and flowers, and I decided that if she had ever known she must have forgotten it and was ashamed to say so. Miss Cooney only smiled wistfully when I asked her and said, ‘You’ll know all about it soon enough, child.’

  ‘But, Miss Cooney,’ I said with great dignity, ‘I have to know now. It’s for my work, you see.’

  ‘Keep your innocence while you can, child,’ she said in the same tone. ‘Soon enough the world will rob you of it, and once ’tis gone ’tis gone for ever.’

  But whatever the world wanted to rob me of, it was welcome to it from my point of view, if only I could get a few facts to work on. I appealed to Father and he told me that babies were dropped out of aeroplanes and if you caught one you could keep it. ‘By parachute?’ I asked, but he only looked pained and said, ‘Oh, no, you don’t want to begin by spoiling them.’ Afterwards, Mother took me aside again and explained that he was only joking. I went quite dotty with rage and told her that one of these days he would go too far with his jokes.

  All the same, it was a great worry to Mother. It wasn’t every mother who had a genius for a son, and she dreaded that she might be wronging me. She suggested timidly to Father that he should tell me something about it and he danced with rage. I heard them because I was supposed to be playing with the Opera House upstairs at the time. He said she was going out of her mind, and that she was driving me out of my mind at the same time. She was very upset because she had considerable respect for his judgement.

  At the same time when it was a matter of duty she could be very, very obstinate. It was a heavy responsibility, and she disliked it intensely – a deeply pious woman who never mentioned the subject at all to anybody if she could avoid it – but it had to be done. She took an awful long time over it – it was a summer day, and we were sitting on the bank of a stream in the Glen – but at last I managed to detach the fact that mummies had an engine in their tummies and daddies had a starting-handle that made it work, and once it started it went on until it made a baby. That certainly explained an awful lot of things I had not understood up to this – for instance, why fathers were necessary and why Mother had buffers on her chest while Father had none. It made her almost as interesting as a locomotive, and for days I went round deploring my own rotten luck that I wasn’t a girl and couldn’t have an engine and buffers of my own instead of a measly old starting-handle like Father.

  Soon afterwards I went to school and disliked it intensely. I was too small to be moved up to the big boys and the other ‘infants’ were still at the stage of spelling ‘cat’ and ‘dog’. I tried to tell the old teacher about my work, but she only smiled and said, ‘Hush, Larry!’ I hated being told to hush. Father was always saying it to me.

  One day I was standing at the playground gate, feeling very lonely and dissatisfied, when a tall girl from the Senior Girls’ school spoke to me. She was a girl with a plump, dark face and black pigtails.

  ‘What’s your name, little boy?’ she asked.

  I told her.

  ‘Is this your first time at school?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you like it?’

  ‘No, I hate it,’ I replied gravely. ‘The children can’t spell and the old woman talks too much.’

  Then I talked myself for a change and she listened attentively while I told her about myself, my voyages, my books and the time of the trains from all the city stations. As she seemed so interested I told her I would meet her after school and tell her some more.

  I was as good as my word. When I had eaten my lunch, instead of going on further voyages I went back to the Girls’ School and waited for her to come
out. She seemed pleased to see me because she took my hand and brought me home with her. She lived up Gardiner’s Hill, a steep, demure suburban road with trees that overhung the walls at either side. She lived in a small house on top of the hill and was one of a family of three girls. Her little brother, John Joe, had been killed the previous year by a car. ‘Look at what I brought home with me!’ she said when we went into the kitchen, and her mother, a tall, thin woman, made a great fuss of me and wanted me to have my dinner with Una. That was the girl’s name. I didn’t take anything, but while she ate I sat by the range and told her mother about myself as well. She seemed to like it as much as Una, and when dinner was over Una took me out in the fields behind the house for a walk.

  When I went home at tea-time, Mother was delighted.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I knew you wouldn’t be long making nice friends at school. It’s about time for you, the dear knows.’

  I felt much the same about it, and every fine day at three I waited for Una outside the school. When it rained and Mother would not let me out I was miserable.

  One day while I was waiting for her there were two senior girls outside the gate.

  ‘Your girl isn’t out yet, Larry,’ said one with a giggle.