The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  The other Collins, the romantic figure, ‘which this person was certainly not’, as his enemy Brugha said with the clarity of hate, and who has become by far the more widely known, was merely incidental; the real Collins, sitting at his desk, signing correspondence, found the necessity for the romantic figure’s existence a mere disturbance of routine. Collins, of course, had the romantic streak, the power of self-dramatization, which went with his daemonic temperament, but that is a different kettle of fish; his genius was the genius of realism. Answering a business letter in a businesslike way, he would be made aware of the English garrison as a sort of minor interruption and hit out at it as a busy man hits out at a bluebottle.

  For the moment the bluebottle took the form of the English police system, which interrupted his work by raiding his offices and imprisoning his staffs: he proceeded grimly to get rid of it. The first victim of the new Intelligence Service was Detective-Sergeant Smith, known as the ‘Dog Smith’, the Uriah Heep of the force. In July 1919, after several warnings, he was shot down outside his own house in Drumcondra.

  It was Collins’ first killing. Then, as afterwards, he did everything to avoid the necessity for it. With his strange sensitiveness he was haunted for days before by the thought of it. He was morose and silent. When the day of the shooting came, people saw for the first time the curious tension which was repeated over and over again in the years to come. The same scene occurred so often that it became familiar. O’Reilly was usually in waiting somewhere near to bring back a report. As he faltered out the words in answer to the quick glance of his chief, Collins began to stride up and down the room, swinging his arms in wide half circles and grinding his heels into the floor. For ten or fifteen minutes he continued this in silence; then he grabbed a paper and tried to read. But his eyes strayed from the printed columns to the window with an empty, faraway look. Then, raging, he turned upon the unoffending O’Reilly. […]

  It was Christmas, which to a man of Collins’ temperament was sacred to festivity. His Christmases were always Dickensian, with plenty of drink, good food, relaxed discipline and wholesome good humour. It was a busy time for O’Reilly. There were the seamen, each of whom got a five-pound note and, if they were free, an invitation to meet him in a pub. There were presents to be purchased for the scores of people who had helped him during the year: the women who had sheltered him, the detectives who had given him information – all those not actually part of the movement whose sympathy made so much difference. Each of the presents went out with a little note which the recipient would not dare to treasure. Then, so far as possible, he paid each of his friends a short visit, as though to show what he was like off the job.

  After lunch O’Reilly went off on his round of present bearing. Collins had had an early start and a busy day, and was hungry. Rather than give Mrs Devlin the trouble of preparing food, he, O’Connor, O’Sullivan, Tobin and Cullen decided to dine in town. It was four o’clock and only a hundred yards to the Gresham Hotel. The Gresham’s private rooms were booked, so they sat in the big dining-room and ordered a meal with wine. They were only halfway through it when a waiter appeared at Collins’ elbow.

  ‘You might like to know, sir,’ he said in a discreet whisper, ‘the Auxiliaries are in the hall.’

  They had two minutes in which to prepare before the Auxiliaries burst in upon them, brandishing revolvers and rifles. They rose with their hands in the air. As a preliminary the Auxiliaries searched them.

  ‘Eh, what’s this?’ asked the man who was searching Collins, and from his hip-pocket produced a bottle of whiskey.

  ‘Stop!’ said Collins good-humouredly. ‘That’s a present for the landlady.’

  He gave his name as John Grace. He must be the only revolutionary on record who did not say his name was Smith. The famous notebook was examined but the only word the Auxiliary officer could identify was one which he declared was ‘rifles’ and which Collins indignantly declared was ‘refills’.

  When this hitch was got over, he made an excuse and withdrew to the lavatory under escort. O’Connor took up the whiskey he had left behind and invited the Auxiliaries to share it. A corkscrew was produced and another of the guests ordered a second bottle. Noticing his chief so long away, and filled, as they were all filled, with alarm only for his safety, Tobin made a similar excuse. To his consternation he found the officer holding Collins back over a wash basin where the light was most brilliant; teasing his hair about with one hand while in the other he held a photograph of the very man he was examining. The photograph was a bad one, but not so bad that recognition was impossible. To his immense relief the officer released Collins, and the two of them returned to the dining-room. ‘Be ready to make a rush for it,’ Collins whispered.

  But it was unnecessary. The atmosphere in the dining-room had changed from distrust to maudlin pleasantry. The Auxiliaries departed, leaving five men almost crazy with relief. They drank whiskey in neat tumblersful, but it seemed as if nothing could quiet their nerves. They continued to celebrate in Vaughan’s Hotel. In a comparatively brief space of time they were drunk and indulging in horseplay, oblivious of their danger. It was the only occasion on which most of those present saw Collins drunk. O’Hegarty, who had missed the dinner party at the Gresham, was begging them to come away before Vaughan’s was also raided. They ignored him.

  They finally drove to Mrs O’Donovan’s in a car and bundled themselves into bed. It was a Christmas none of them was likely to forget.

  From MY FATHER’S SON – A CASE OF HYPNOTISM

  WE HAD one extraordinary experience while I was writing the book. The hardest man in Ireland to get at was Joe O’Reilly, Collins’ personal servant, his messenger boy, his nurse, and nobody – literally nobody – knew what O’Reilly could tell if he chose, or could even guess why he did not tell it. He was then Aide-de-Camp to the Governor-General; a handsome, brightly spoken, golf-playing man who could have posed anywhere for the picture of the All-American Male.

  Hayes’ invitation brought him to the house in Guilford Road one evening, and for a couple of hours I had the experience that every biographer knows and dreads. Here was this attractive, friendly, handsome man, completely master of himself, apparently ready to tell everything, but in reality determined on telling nothing.

  Hayes was puzzled – after all, he was a historian – and he took over the questioning himself. He was a much more skilful questioner than I, but he too got nowhere.

  And then, suddenly, when I was ready to give up and go home, O’Reilly collapsed – if the word even suggests what really happened, which was more like a building caving in. Something had gone wrong with him. Either he had drunk too much, which I thought unlikely because he was perfectly lucid, or, accidentally, either Hayes or I had hypnotized him.

  I can remember distinctly the question that precipitated his collapse. I had asked, ‘How did Collins behave when he had to have someone shot?’ and O’Reilly began his reply carefully, even helpfully, in such a way that it could be of no possible use to me. Then he suddenly jumped up, thrust his hands in his trouser pockets, and began to stamp about the room, digging his heels in with a savagery that almost shook the house. Finally he threw himself on to a sofa, picked up a newspaper, which he pretended to read, tossed it aside after a few moments, and said in a coarse country voice, ‘Jesus Christ Almighty, how often have I to tell ye …?’ It was no longer Joe O’Reilly who was in the room. It was Michael Collins, and for close on two hours I had an experience that must be every biographer’s dream, of watching someone I had never known as though he were still alive. Every gesture, every intonation was imprinted on O’Reilly’s brain as if on tape.

  I had seen that auto-hypnotism only once before. That was in 1932 when Mother and I were travelling by bus from Bantry. One of the passengers was a violent, cynical, one-legged man who began to beg, and the conductor was too afraid to interfere with him. I took an intense loathing to him and refused to give him money, but he was much less interested in me than in s
ome members of a piper’s band who were also travelling. He demanded that they should play for him, and when they merely looked out of the windows he began to imitate the bagpipes himself. After a time I realized that the bagpipes he was imitating were those he had heard during some battle in France fifteen years before. The bagpipes hypnotized him, and now he began imitating the sound of a German scouting plane, the big guns, the whistle of the shells, and as they fell silent he began to mutter in a low frenzied voice to someone who was beside him, ‘Hey, Jim! Give us a clip there, Jim! They’re coming! Hurry! Jim, Jim!’ He reached over to shake someone and then started and sighed. Then he took an ammunition belt that was not there from the shoulders of someone who was long dead and slung it over his own, fitted a clip – that gesture I knew so well – into the heavy stick he carried and began to fire over the back of the seat. Suddenly he sprang into the air and fell in the centre of the bus, unconscious it seemed, and for some reason we were all too embarrassed to do anything. After a few minutes he groaned and reached out to touch his leg – the one that wasn’t there. Then he got to his feet and sat back in his seat perfectly silent. I have rarely been so ashamed of myself as I was that day.

  But the scene with O’Reilly was almost worse because you could see not only Collins, but also the effect he was having upon a gentle, sensitive boy, and it made you want to intervene between a boy who was no longer there and a ghost. I did it even at the risk of breaking the record. He was sobbing when he described how Collins had crucified him till he decided to leave. ‘Here!’ was all Collins replied. ‘Take this letter on your way.’

  ‘But didn’t anybody tell him to lay off you?’ I asked angrily.

  ‘Yes, the girl next door,’ he said. ‘She said, “Collins, do you know what you’re doing to that boy?” And Mick said (and suddenly Collins was back in the room again), “I know his value better than you do. He goes to Mass for me every morning. Jesus Christ, do you think I don’t know what he’s worth to me?” ’

  When O’Reilly left, the handsome, sprightly young man had disappeared. In his place was an elderly, bewildered man, and you could see what he would be like if Collins had lived. Hayes detained me, and as he refilled my glass he asked, ‘Have you ever seen anything so extraordinary?’ We both doubted if O’Reillly would turn up next evening.

  He did; but this time he looked like the ghost. He gave me a pathetic, accusing look.

  ‘I don’t know what you did to me last night,’ he muttered. ‘I couldn’t sleep. I never did anything like that before. I can’t stop. It’s going on in my head the whole time. I have to talk about it.’

  He did so for the rest of the evening, and once again Collins was there. Nowadays a tape recorder in the next room would probably catch most of it, but I had no way of getting it down because I did not dare take out a notebook.

  The sequel to that was interesting too, for when the book on Collins was published O’Reilly was reputed to be going through Dublin like a madman, threatening to shoot me. One day, he and I met in the middle of Grafton Street. There was no escaping him and I stopped. ‘I’ve been trying to see you,’ he muttered. ‘Come in here for a cup of tea.’ I went along with him, wondering what I had started, but all he wanted was to tell me the book had already gone out of print and he wanted a half-dozen copies to send to friends. Reality, I suppose, is like that.

  2 CHILDHOOD

  PREFACE

  LIKE MANY fiction-writers, O’Connor was at his most apparently autobiographical when setting his stories in childhood. He was the only child of an overbearing, alcoholic father and a protective mother who encouraged both his bookishness and his ‘cissiness’; his mother, brought up by the nuns in an orphanage, had social ambition, while his father was happy to live from day to day and await his British Army pension. The sensitive, artistic boy dreamed of escape from the backstreets of Cork and the embarrassments of family: there was an especially shame-provoking grandmother. Yet the pseudonym ‘Frank O’Connor’ did not escape far (consisting of his own second name plus his mother’s surname); likewise the world experienced by Michael O’Donovan, described in An Only Child, frequently overlaps in both tone and incident with the world created by O’Connor. The day he drank his father’s beer; how he wanted to murder his grandmother; what happened when he tried to apply the English public school code he had read about in an Irish Trades school. Sometimes a whole section of childhood experience – accompanying his bandsman father on outings – will be transported into fiction (‘The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland’).

  But if you lay the childhood autobiography against the fiction, the result is not reductivism but the opposite. O’Connor can be seen taking what was useful and inventing the rest. He was by nature transformational. William Maxwell said of him that he ‘behaved as if he were the oldest of a large family of boys and girls’. So he was – in the sense that he imagined them. He also, when writing about his imaginary siblings and his own distant self, understood and remembered the full peculiarity and relentlessness of children. In An Only Child he wrote that ‘Children … see only one side of any question and because of their powerlessness see this with hysterical clarity.’ The child is father to the writer. The adult may learn to view others with increasing generosity, tenderness and forgiveness, but the writer must retain the child’s absolutism of eye, and that hysterical clarity, whether writing about childhood or anything else.

  MY OEDIPUS COMPLEX

  FATHER WAS in the army all through the war – the first war, I mean – so, up to the age of five, I never saw much of him, and what I saw did not worry me. Sometimes I woke and there was a big figure in khaki peering down at me in the candlelight. Sometimes in the early morning I heard the slamming of the front door and the clatter of nailed boots down the cobbles of the lane. These were Father’s entrances and exits. Like Santa Claus he came and went mysteriously.

  In fact, I rather liked his visits, though it was an uncomfortable squeeze between Mother and him when I got into the big bed in the early morning. He smoked, which gave him a pleasant musty smell, and shaved, an operation of astounding interest. Each time he left a trail of souvenirs – model tanks and Gurkha knives with handles made of bullet cases, and German helmets and cap badges and button-sticks, and all sorts of military equipment – carefully stowed away in a long box on top of the wardrobe, in case they ever came in handy. There was a bit of the magpie about Father; he expected everything to come in handy. When his back was turned, Mother let me get a chair and rummage through his treasures. She didn’t seem to think so highly of them as he did.

  The war was the most peaceful period of my life. The window of my attic faced south-east. My mother had curtained it, but that had small effect. I always woke with the first light and, with all the responsibilities of the previous day melted, feeling myself rather like the sun, ready to illumine and rejoice. Life never seemed so simple and clear and full of possibilities as then. I put my feet out from under the clothes – I called them Mrs Left and Mrs Right – and invented dramatic situations for them in which they discussed the problems of the day. At least Mrs Right did; she was very demonstrative, but I hadn’t the same control of Mrs Left, so she mostly contented herself with nodding agreement.

  They discussed what Mother and I should do during the day, what Santa Claus should give a fellow for Christmas, and what steps should be taken to brighten the home. There was that little matter of the baby, for instance. Mother and I could never agree about that. Ours was the only house in the terrace without a new baby, and Mother said we couldn’t afford one till Father came back from the war because they cost seventeen and six. That showed how simple she was. The Geneys up the road had a baby, and everyone knew they couldn’t afford seventeen and six. It was probably a cheap baby, and Mother wanted something really good, but I felt she was too exclusive. The Geneys’ baby would have done us fine.

  Having settled my plans for the day, I got up, put a chair under the attic window, and lifted the frame high enough to stick ou
t my head. The window overlooked the front gardens of the terrace behind ours, and beyond these it looked over a deep valley to the tall, red-brick houses terraced up the opposite hillside; which were all still in shadow, while those at our side of the valley were all lit up, though with long strange shadows that made them seem unfamiliar; rigid and painted

  After that I went into Mother’s room and climbed into the big bed. She woke and I began to tell her of my schemes. By this time, thought I never seem to have noticed it, I was petrified in my nightshirt, and I thawed as I talked until, the last frost melted, I fell asleep beside her and woke again only when I heard her below in the kitchen, making the breakfast.

  After breakfast we went into town; heard Mass at St Augustine’s and said a prayer for Father, and did the shopping. If the afternoon was fine we either went for a walk in the country or a visit to Mother’s great friend in the convent, Mother St Dominic. Mother had them all praying for Father, and every night, going to bed, I asked God to send him back safe from the war to us. Little, indeed, did I know what I was praying for!