An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  Meanwhile I could get no treatment nor even a discharge. Only a military doctor could discharge me, and he rarely appeared. When he did drop in a couple of days later I was mad with frustration and insisted on going back to the camp. It was a bitter, black day; the compound was a sea of mud and apparently deserted, since most of the hunger-strikers had taken to their beds to keep warm. I had a message from one of the hospital patients for a friend in the Cork hut, and I was shocked at the changes in it. Partitions and doors had been torn down to keep the stoves going, big cans of water were steaming on the stoves, and the men were lying in or on their beds unshaven, with mugs of hot salt water beside them. This was supposed to stay the craving for food. Those who were still up and dressed were shivering over the stoves, dishevelled and gloomy. But it was the silence that struck me most – all that busy hammering, singing and chatter ended. The men avoided my eyes, and as I went out I was followed by a general hiss. I had apparently got back in time to see things turn really ugly.

  There was no change in my friends of the Limerick hut. Nothing seemed able to suppress their high spirits, and when I came back from the dining hall with my tinware under my blue coat to avoid giving offence, they yelled for a full report on the meal and started to plan ideal menus for the evening of their release and ideal girls to share them with. But though I didn’t realize it, there was already a change. Next day a small group of Corkmen – some of whom had hissed me the previous day – gave in, and when I reached the dining hall there was an ugly scene as they pleaded for food, and the kitchen staff told them arrogantly that they must give twenty-four hours notice. Walsh, Buckley and I gave them our food. One of them asked shyly: ‘Do you remember the day we rescued you in Kilmallock?’ It was his way of reminding me that he had not always been so abject a figure and had done his stint of soldiering as well as the rest. He did not have to justify himself to me. I felt like killing somebody.

  I was blamed for this collapse, quite without justification, because Walsh, Buckley and myself had already agreed that once the strike began we should say nothing to influence anybody. I got the Irish Statesman, which was sent me by a Quaker friend, and that week it contained one of the most furious articles that its editor, George Russell, ever wrote, denouncing the hunger strike. This, too, we decided to keep to ourselves, though Moriarty always got the paper after me.

  That evening an order was issued that I must leave the Limerick hut, live by myself in a room sealed off from one of the bigger huts, and not enter any other. The Limerick men wanted me to ignore it, and offered to deal with any force that was sent to eject me, but I felt they already had enough trouble on their hands. Buckley insisted on moving in with me and, when I protested, said: ‘Oh, no, they’re trying to break us up.’ The baby of the group was growing up with great rapidity.

  There was nothing in the order to prevent me speaking to my own friends, so that evening at dusk I went to see Moriarty and talked with him through the window. He and his three room-mates were in bed, drinking salt water. I sat on the windowledge in the rain, and he began to complain of the delay in bringing him the Irish Statesman. I told some lie about having left it behind me in the hospital, but he didn’t believe me.

  ‘You didn’t bring it because there’s an attack on us in it,’ he said, and I had to admit he was right.

  ‘Is it bad?’

  ‘Pretty bad. Cathal and Tom also thought you’d better not read it.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll read it,’ he said in his gentle lazy way. ‘We’re four sick men, but if you don’t bring that paper down tonight, we’re going up for it.’

  Just then a file of soldiers passed behind me in the rainy dusk with a military policeman at their head. Two burst in the door of Moriarty’s room, took the mugs of salt water from beside the beds, and threw the contents past me into the compound. Then they filled them with hot soup from a bucket. Before they could leave the room, Moriarty, mad with rage, jumped out of bed and emptied the soup after the salt water. I went back to my room, took the Irish Statesman and tossed it in the window to him.

  Next morning, as Buckley and I were on our way to the dining hall with our plates under our coats, Moriarty and his three roommates staggered out to join us with their plates and mugs in their hands. One of them told me that Moriarty had read the article aloud to them without comment and then asked: ‘Are we as mad as this fellow thinks?’ ‘We are,’ said one, and the other two agreed. I knew then that the strike was over. The others who had given in were only poor, shamed and frightened boys to whom nobody paid attention, but Moriarty was a natural leader, and no one who followed his example need regard himself as a weakling. The strike had now become a mere endurance test, and already there was a different tone in the dining hall. The kitchen staff, who fed like restaurant cats, had maintained a tone of chilly disapproval to conscientious objectors and contempt and scorn to defaulters, but now they were on the defensive, waving their arms and shouting that they couldn’t produce food without notice. The defaulters had ceased to be mere individuals and become a class.

  But the strike dragged on for days before the master-minds of the revolution saw that their organization was bleeding to death under their eyes and issued a hasty general dispensation. Immediately the whole camp became hysterical. Even the sentries dropped their rifles and dragged buckets of soup to the barbed wire, and the prisoners tore their hands as they thrust their mugs through it, pushing and shouldering one another out of the way. Some got sick but came back for more. A tall, spectacled man who had not been invited to join the strike came up to me with an oily smile. ‘Well, professor,’ he said gleefully, ‘the pigs feed,’ and I turned away in disgust because that was exactly what the scene resembled, and I knew it was the end of our magical improvisation. Buckley, Walsh and myself looked on as though it were the funeral of someone we loved, and when we could bear it no more we went off by ourselves to the other side of the camp. We had reason for complacency, but there was no complacency in us. We knew we should never again find ourselves with so many men we respected and we felt their humiliation as though it were our own. In the years to come, travelling through the country, I would meet with the survivors of the period – some of the best, like Walsh, I should not meet because they took off early for America. ‘The Lost Legion’ I called them. There they were in small cities and towns, shopkeepers or civil servants, bewildered by the immensity of the disaster that had overwhelmed them, the death-in-life of the Nationalist Catholic establishment, and after a few minutes I would hear the cry I had so often heard before – ‘The country! Oh, God, the bloody country!’

  The same day another mass meeting was held. This time there was no nonsense about individual county meetings because one of them, out of sheer cantankerousness, might have voted to continue the strike, and the strike was over. I didn’t bother to attend it, but Walsh brought an account of it. Everyone congratulated everyone else on the superhuman endurance and discipline that had been displayed and exonerated those who had abandoned the strike on their own responsibility. But this was anti-climax, and everyone knew it. The camp was a grave of lost illusions; amid the ruin of their huts it was impossible to get the men to take pride in their duties, and the school practically disbanded for lack of students. Nobody thought any longer but of how soon release might come for himself.

  We had had a foretaste of what that meant. Two audacious girls, realizing that fighting was over and that no one was likely to kill them in cold blood, walked coolly across the fields one evening from the main road and stood outside the wire by the Limerick hut, asking for some relative. In their high tower the sentries fumed, waiting for a military policeman to escort the girls away. In no time a crowd gathered, and two or three men who knew the girls stood on the grass bank overlooking the wire and talked to them. The rest of us stood or sat around in complete silence. It was years since some of the group had heard a woman’s voice. Nobody cracked a dirty joke; if anyone had, I think he might have been torn asunder. This was sex in its pu
rest form, sex as God may perhaps have intended it to be – a completion of human experience, unearthly in its beauty and staggering in its triviality. ‘Mother said to ask did you get the cake. Jerry Deignan’s sister asked to be remembered to you.’

  One bright cold November day after I had been in prison for almost a year, I was sitting in Walsh’s room when the Limerick hut-leader burst in and said: ‘Come on, Michael! You’re being released.’ He was a small, brusque, slightly pompous and very kindly man. I didn’t move. It was a favourite joke, though not one I should have expected from him, and I felt I must not give myself away. ‘Come on, I tell you! The officer is waiting,’ he said impatiently, and Walsh went pale and smiled and said in a low voice, ‘That’s right, Michael. You’re wanted.’ I still could not believe it. Walsh accompanied me to my. room, but the officer had gone, and suddenly I did believe it and wanted to cry. ‘Oh, he’ll be back,’ the hut-leader said testily. ‘Why don’t you get your things together?’ My shirt and underpants were drying on a line outside the hut but I could not be bothered to take them. Shaking all over, I made a parcel of my little library – my sixpenny anthologies of German and Spanish poetry, my anthology of Gaelic poetry, my beloved Heine, Hermann und Dorothea, and a school history of the Crusades in French – all that had kept me in touch with the great world of culture that I hoped I might some day belong to. Suddenly the door opened and a green-clad figure asked: ‘Is O’Donovan here?’ That was how they came to call you before a firing squad, and I fancy the sensation was very similar. Too big to be apprehended, it left you stunned and weak and wanting to cry.

  I was too bewildered to feel anything at parting from Walsh, who carried my parcel to the front gate, and I felt ashamed. After the usual signing of forms in the front office, I was given the travel vouchers for the little group that was being released with me, and as the camp gate opened and let us through on to a narrow country road with high hedges that led to the station, I realized that it was something of a responsibility, for I could feel in myself the same hysteria that swept through my little group. When they heard the sound of a car they looked round and cracked morbid jokes about being re-taken, and I could see them measuring the hedges at either side, wondering if they could run for it. I understood it perfectly because I wanted to get into the fields and then run like mad. Run and run and run and never stop! For the first time I felt the presence of that shadow line that divides the free man from the prisoner.

  I had difficulty at the refreshment centre our women had set up in a little cottage by the road. Though I explained that there would be no train for an hour, the men did not want to go in. They wanted to go back on to the main road and bum a lift. Two of them actually did. When the rest had been reassured, we had sandwiches and tea, and the girls who ran the refreshment centre escorted us to the little seaside station. The small local train from Drogheda came in and, seeing a young woman with a baby in one carriage, I climbed in beside them, and all the way to Dublin I scarcely took my eyes from the baby. Even the lovely open sea in evening light did not distract me. I am bad with men, indifferent with women, but I can no more pass a baby than a bookstore. All that year I had been missing what Pearse was to remember on the eve of his execution, ‘Things bright and green, things young and happy’.

  The girls had arranged rooms for us in a hotel in Parnell Square because there was no train to Cork. It was late when I reached home next day and, after the first excitement of homecoming was over, Mother suddenly burst into tears and said: ‘It made a man of you.’ It was one of those remarks she often dropped that puzzled and upset me, because the context was always missing, and I had noticed no change at all in myself unless it was the urgent realization of the importance of grammar, particularly the accusative case. Now I know that she saw some change in me and was glad that I was at last a man, though she could not help grieving for the awkward adolescent who had been so helplessly dependent on her. All that really mattered to me was being home again, where I could see her and talk to her about my plans for the future, and sleep in the little pink-washed attic she had made so neat for me, and sit by the orange-box that served me for a bookcase and flick through the pages of books I had been separated from so long that I had forgotten their very existence. It did not even matter to me that while I was in gaol I had won the first prize in the national competition for a critical essay on Turgenev in Irish – a prize that Corkery had won a couple of years before – which was just as well, because that year the national festival went bust, and I never got the seven pounds that would have meant so much to me. Anyway it pleased Father because it meant that sooner or later the writing might bring in some money.

  But the following Sunday I found I did not want to go to Mass, and at the first and only political meeting I attended, Corkery had to rescue me from a young man who called me a traitor. After that, it was friends who believed I had done wrong in opposing the hunger strike, and a girl who said bitterly when I met her in the street: ‘I hear you don’t believe in God any longer.’ Though this wasn’t true, it took me some time to realize what Mother had seen in that first glimpse of me, that I had crossed another shadow line, and made me wonder if I should ever again be completely at ease with the people I loved, their introverted religion and introverted patriotism. I suspect she saw it all, in the way that mothers do, and understood the consequences for me better than I have ever been able to do. Thirty years later, when she was not far from her death, I spoke to her about the possibility of my having to leave Ireland and – knowing her hatred of leaving home – suggested that I might get a place for her in Cork. ‘Of course I’ll go with you,’ she said without a moment’s hesitation. ‘I know you must be free. Life without freedom is nothing.’ To her, of course, ‘freedom’ did not mean freedom to do what one pleased – that was a conception that never crossed her mind – but freedom to do what one thought ‘right’, whatever the consequences. She left me bewildered then, as she had so often left me bewildered before. It was strange to hear an old woman of eighty-five, an orphan, a servant girl who had never had anything she could really call her own, speak with the very voice of Antigone.

  All our arguments about the immortality of the soul seem to me to be based on one vast fallacy – that it is our vanity that desires eternity. Vanity! As though any reasonable man could be vain enough to believe himself worth immortality! From the time I was a boy and could think at all, I was certain that for my own soul there was only nothingness. I knew it too well in all its commonness and weakness. But I knew that there were souls that were immortal, that even God, if He wished to, could not diminish or destroy, and perhaps it was the thought of these that turned me finally from poetry to storytelling, to the celebration of those who for me represented all I should ever know of God. My mother was merely one among them, though, in my human weakness, I valued her most, and now that I am old myself, I remember the line of a psalm (probably mistranslated) that has always been with me since I read it first:

  ‘And when I wake I shall be satisfied with Thy likeness.’

  New York, 1958–60

  My Father’s Son

  Contents

  1 Rising in the world

  2 The provincial in Dublin

  3 The Abbey Theatre

  4 The death of Yeats

  When Frank O’Connor died on 10 March 1966, he had not completed this second volume of his autobiography, My Father’s Son. Much of it existed in early drafts, some of it in separate pieces. We are indebted to Dr Maurice Sheehy of University College, Dublin, for comparing the different drafts and producing the present text.

  ONE

  Rising in the world

  1

  At the age of twenty I was released from an internment camp without money or job. The Civil War had just ended, and since I had taken the loser’s side I found that ex-jailbirds like myself did not get whatever positions were available under the new government. But all teachers were now required to learn the Irish language, so for a few months I taught Irish to
the teachers at the local Protestant school in Cork – St Luke’s. This brought in only a few shillings a week, but I now knew how to teach and I liked the work.

  I also liked Kennelly, the headmaster, an irascible little Kerryman who wore pince-nez. I suspect he was a fearful bully and disciplinarian because he always snapped at everyone who came near him, including his pretty daughter, and snapped loudest of all at the school manager, Canon Flewett.

  ‘All clergymen are the same, Mr O’Donovan,’ Kennelly would say as he saw me part of the way home. ‘Catholic, Church of Ireland or Presbyterian, you can never trust any of them.’

  It was part of his innocent vanity that I could never teach him Irish because he remembered it all perfectly from his childhood in Kerry. But he was a man with a real flavour, and I enjoyed watching him when someone got him mad, keeping what he thought was a perfectly expressionless face, though his little nose took on an autonomous life and expressed a whole range of emotions that no pince-nez could stand up to. In spite of his snappiness he was extraordinarily gentle with me; he even brought me home once or twice to supper with his wife and daughter, but I was so embarrassed that I do not even remember what nonsense I talked; and when he saw me home it was to advise me in a fatherly way to have nothing more to do with politics.