The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  It wasn’t until months after that I realized how many there were. It was Sunday morning, but when we reached the bandroom there was no one on the bridge. Upstairs the room was almost full. A big man wearing a bowler hat and a flower in his buttonhole was standing before the fireplace. He had a red face with weak, red-rimmed eyes and a dark moustache. My father, who seemed as surprised as I was, slipped quietly into a seat behind the door and lifted me on to his knee.

  ‘Well, boys,’ the big man said in a deep husky voice, ‘I suppose ye have a good notion what I’m here for. Ye know that next Saturday night Mr Redmond is arriving in the city, and I have the honour of being Chairman of the Reception Committee.’

  ‘Well, Alderman Doyle,’ said the bandmaster doubtfully, ‘you know the way we feel about Mr Redmond, most of us anyway.’

  ‘I do, Tim, I do,’ said the alderman evenly as it gradually dawned on me that the man I was listening to was the Arch-Traitor, locally known as Scabby Doyle, the builder whose vile orations my father always read aloud to my mother with chagrined comments on Doyle’s past history. ‘But feeling isn’t enough, Tim. Fair Lane Band will be there of course. Watergrasshill will be there. The Butler Exchange will be there. What will the backers of this band, the gentlemen who helped it through so many difficult days, say if we don’t put in an appearance?’

  ‘Well, ye see, Alderman,’ said Ryan nervously, ‘we have our own little difficulties.’

  ‘I know that, Tim,’ said Doyle. ‘We all have our difficulties in troubled times like these, but we have to face them like men in the interests of the country. What difficulties have you?’

  ‘Well, that’s hard to describe, Alderman,’ said the bandmaster.

  ‘No, Tim,’ said my father quietly, raising and putting me down from his knee, ‘ ’tis easy enough to describe. I’m the difficulty, and I know it.’

  ‘Now, Mick,’ protested the bandmaster, ‘there’s nothing personal about it. We’re all old friends in this band.’

  ‘We are, Tim,’ agreed my father. ‘And before ever it was heard of, you and me gave this bandroom its first coat of paint. But every man is entitled to his principles, and I don’t want to stand in your light.’

  ‘You see how it is, Mr Doyle,’ said the bandmaster appealingly. ‘We had others in the band that were of Mick Twomey’s persuasion, but they left us to join O’Brienite bands. Mick didn’t, nor we didn’t want him to leave us.’

  ‘Nor don’t,’ said a mournful voice, and I turned and saw a tall, gaunt, spectacled young man sitting on the window sill.

  ‘I had three men,’ said my father earnestly, holding up three fingers in illustration of the fact, ‘three men up at the hours on different occasions to get me to join other bands. I’m not boasting. Tim Ryan knows who they were.’

  ‘I do, I do,’ said the bandmaster.

  ‘And I wouldn’t,’ said my father passionately. ‘I’m not boasting, but you can’t deny it: there isn’t another band in Ireland to touch ours.’

  ‘Nor a cornet player in Ireland to touch Mick Twomey,’ chimed in the gaunt young man, rising to his feet. ‘And I’m not saying that to coddle or cock him up.’

  ‘You’re not, you’re not,’ said the bandmaster. ‘No one can deny he’s a musician.’

  ‘And listen here to me, boys,’ said the gaunt young man, with a wild wave of his arm, ‘don’t leave us be led astray by anyone. What were we before we had the old band? Nobody. We were no better than the poor devils that sit on that bridge outside all day, spitting into the river. Whatever we do, leave us be all agreed. What backers had we when we started, only what we could collect ourselves outside the chapel gates on Sunday, and hard enough to get permission for that itself? I’m as good a party man as anyone here, but what I say is, music is above politice.… Alderman Doyle,’ he begged, ‘tell Mr Redmond whatever he’ll do not to break up our little band on us.’

  ‘Jim Ralegh,’ said the alderman, with his red-rimmed eyes growing moist, ‘I’d sooner put my hand in the fire than injure this band. I know what ye are, a band of brothers.… Mick,’ he boomed at my father, ‘will you desert it in its hour of trial?’

  ‘Ah,’ said my father testily, ‘is it the way you want me to play against William O’Brien?’

  ‘Play against William O’Brien,’ echoed the alderman. ‘No one is asking you to play against anyone. As Jim Ralegh here says, music is above politice. What we’re asking you to do is to play for something for the band, for the sake of unity. You know what’ll happen if the backers withdraw? Can’t you pocket your pride and make this sacrifice in the interest of the band?’

  My father stood for a few moments, hesitating. I prayed for once he might see the true light; that he might show this group of misguided men the faith that was in him. Instead he nodded curtly, said ‘Very well, I’ll play,’ and sat down again. The rascally alderman said a few humbugging words in his praise which didn’t take me in. I don’t think they even took my father in, for all the way home he never addressed a word to me. I saw then that his conscience was at him. He knew that by supporting the band in the unprincipled step it was taking he was showing himself a traitor to Ireland and our great leader, William O’Brien.

  Afterwards, whenever Irishtown played at Redmondite demonstrations, my father accompanied them, but the moment the speeches began he retreated to the edge of the crowd, rather like a pious Catholic compelled to attend a heretical religious service, and stood against the wall with his hands in his pockets, passing slighting and witty comments on the speakers to any O’Brienites he might meet. But he had lost all dignity in my eyes. Even his gibes at Scabby Doyle seemed to me false, and I longed to say to him, ‘If that’s what you believe, why don’t you show it?’ Even the seaside lost its attraction when at any moment the beautiful daughter of a decent O’Brienite family might point to me and say: ‘There is the son of the cornet player who betrayed Ireland.’

  Then one Sunday we went to play at some idolatrous function in a seaside town called Bantry. While the meeting was on my father and the rest of the band retired to the pub and I with them. Even by my presence in the Square I wasn’t prepared to countenance the proceedings. I was looking idly out of the window when I suddenly heard a roar of cheering and people began to scatter in all directions. I was mystified until someone outside started to shout, ‘Come on, boys! The O’Brienites are trying to break up the meeting.’ The bandsmen rushed for the door. I would have done the same but my father looked hastily over his shoulder and warned me to stay where I was. He was talking to a young clarinet player of serious appearance.

  ‘Now,’ he went on, raising his voice to drown the uproar outside. ‘Teddy the Lamb was the finest clarinet player in the whole British Army.’

  There was a fresh storm of cheering, and wild with excitement I saw the patriots begin to drive a deep wedge of whirling sticks through the heart of the enemy, cutting them into two fighting camps.

  ‘Excuse me, Mick,’ said the clarinet player, going white, ‘I’ll go and see what’s up.’

  ‘Now, whatever is up,’ my father said appealingly, ‘you can’t do anything about it.’

  ‘I’m not going to have it said I stopped behind while my friends were fighting for their lives,’ said the young fellow hotly.

  ‘There’s no one fighting for their lives at all,’ said my father irascibly, grabbing him by the arm. ‘You have something else to think about. Man alive, you’re a musician, not a bloody infantryman.’

  ‘I’d sooner be that than a bloody turncoat, anyway,’ said the young fellow, dragging himself off and making for the door.

  ‘Thanks, Phil,’ my father called after him in a voice of a man who had to speak before he has collected his wits. ‘I well deserved that from you. I well deserved that from all of ye.’ He took out his pipe and put it back into his pocket again. Then he joined me at the window and for a few moments he looked unseeingly at the milling crowd outside. ‘Come on,’ he said shortly.

  Though the couples wer
e wrestling in the very gutters no one accosted us on our way up the street; otherwise I feel murder might have been committed. We went to the house of some cousins and had tea, and when we reached the railway station my father led me to a compartment near the engine; not the carriage reserved for the band. Though we had ten minutes to wait it wasn’t until just before the whistle went that Tim Ryan, the bandmaster, spotted us through the window.

  ‘Mick!’ he shouted in astonishment. ‘Where the hell were you? I had men out all over the town looking for you! Is it anything wrong?’

  ‘Nothing, Tim,’ replied my father, leaning out of the window to him. ‘I wanted to be alone, that’s all.’

  ‘But we’ll see you at the other end?’ bawled Tim as the train began to move.

  ‘I don’t know will you,’ replied my father grimly. ‘I think ye saw too much of me.’

  When the band formed up outside the station we stood on the pavement and watched them. He had a tight hold of my hand. First Tim Ryan and then Jim Ralegh came rushing over to him. With an intensity of hatred I watched those enemies of Ireland again bait their traps for my father, but now I knew they would bait them in vain.

  ‘No, no, Tim,’ said my father, shaking his head, ‘I went too far before for the sake of the band, and I paid dear for it. None of my family was ever called a turncoat before today, Tim.’

  ‘Ah, it is a young fool like that?’ bawled Jim Ralegh with tears in his wild eyes. ‘What need a man like you care about him?’

  ‘A man have his pride, Jim,’ said my father gloomily.

  ‘He have,’ cried Ralegh despairingly, ‘and a fat lot any of us has to be proud of. The band was all we ever had, and if that goes the whole thing goes. For the love of the Almighty God, Mick Twomey, come back with us to the bandroom anyway.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ shouted my father angrily. ‘I tell you after today I’m finished with music.’

  ‘Music is finished with us you mean,’ bawled Jim. ‘The curse of God on the day we ever heard of Redmond or O’Brien! We were happy men before it.… All right, lads,’ he cried, turning away with a wild and whirling motion of his arm. ‘Mick Twomey is done with us. Ye can go on without him.’

  And again I heard the three solemn thumps on the big drum, and again the street was flooded with a roaring torrent of music, and though it no longer played for me, my heart rose to it and the tears came from my eyes. Still holding my hand, my father followed on the pavement. They were playing ‘Brian Boru’s March’, his old favourite. We followed them through the ill-lit town and as they turned down the side-street to the bridge, my father stood on the kerb and looked after them as though he wished to impress every detail on his memory. It was only when the music stopped and the silence returned to the narrow channel of the street that we resumed our lonely way homeward.

  3 WRITERS

  PREFACE

  FOR ANY Irish prose writer of O’Connor’s generation, there was a preliminary and pressing question: James Joyce. Exemplar, liberator, great yet ignorable one-off, crushing presence, artistic warning? O’Connor wrote several times about Joyce, veering from the highest admiration to the sternest disregard; in doing so, he was also elaborating his own aesthetic. Joyce as the delineator of daily life, of the ordinary Ireland O’Connor also took as his subject – the Joyce of the first three hundred pages of Ulysses – this he revered along with everyone else. The Joyce which ended in the grotesque unreadability of Finnegans Wake, and which got there via increased aestheticism, over-formal planning, obsession with the word rather than life itself, the Joyce whose Ireland remained frozen as a young man’s view: all this O’Connor disapproved of. ‘I think I like the instinctual as against the intellectual,’ he wrote to the American critic Harvey Breit. ‘As a writer I like the feeling I get when some story which I’ve been trying to bring up in the right way gets on its own feet and tells me to go to hell. You don’t imagine any story in Dubliners told Joyce to go to hell, do you? It wouldn’t have the nerve. I’m for the democratic way of life, in literature as in politics. Writers are leaders, not dictators.’

  The other writer O’Connor kept coming back to, though for personal as much as artistic reasons, was Yeats. The poet was like a second, literary father to him: though no easier to have around in Dublin than the old soldier Michael O’Donovan had been in Cork. Yeats was O’Connor’s literary patron, encouraging and bullying, inspiring and exasperating; he published (and interferingly rewrote) O’Connor’s translations from the Irish, and was a toweringly manipulative presence when O’Connor was director of the Abbey Theatre. As with O’Connor’s blood father, they were still quarrelling until the day Yeats died.

  O’Connor knew all the Irish writers of his day, and had firm views on most of them; few provoked as much affection as ‘A.E.’ (George Russell). But literature did not just take place for him in the quarrelsome sophistications of Dublin, or in Parisian exile; it lay also in the oral, the folk, the Gaelic traditions of the countryside. He retold the story of ‘The Tailor and Anstey’ many times in his work, and – apart from its intrinsic interest – there are perhaps two reasons why O’Connor couldn’t keep away from it. First, it is about the collision between a joyless, disapproving modern state and a free yet harmless individual of no means or influence; it is clear where O’Connor’s sympathy would lie. Secondly, it is a story of censorship; and O’Connor was himself often banned under the cultural policy of the Irish government. The twenty-first-century reader might well be honestly baffled at the notion that O’Connor’s stories ran foul of any censorship board. If so, this would be to grossly underestimate the oppressive puritanism and grey mediocrity of church and state at that time. ‘A country ruled by fools and blackguards’, he once called it, where life was ’emptiness and horror’. This was also, of course, his subject-matter.

  Introduction to A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

  A PORTRAIT of the Artist as a Young Man should be compulsory reading for every young man and woman. I doubt if I was seventeen when I read it first, in a copy removed from the Students’ Library at University College, Cork, because of its indecency. Though I had had a more sheltered childhood than most boys, I wasn’t in the least shocked or disturbed by it. I felt too strongly that Joyce had understood as no one else seemed to do the problems of the serious adolescent growing up in squalid circumstances. Young people are like that. What they get out of a book is more often what they need for their own adjustment to life than what the author intends. What I got out of Dostoevsky at the same time was not the sadism – I never noticed it – but a realization that the lies I told almost automatically were more comic than serious, and this gradually made me stop telling lies at all.

  After this, Joyce was the Irish writer who influenced me most. I came on Ulysses also in an erratic way and was moved and excited by everything in it that dealt with Stephen Dedalus, not so much by the chapters that dealt with Bloom. From what I knew of Russian fiction I got the impression that Bloom was a flat figure. I still find him rather flat. When ‘Work in Progress’ – later titled Finnegans Wake – began to appear in print, I learned parts of it by heart and wrote in praise of it in The Irish Statesman, though the editor, George Russell, tried in private to restrain my enthusiasm. ‘You shouldn’t say Joyce is a genius, you know,’ he said reprovingly. ‘An enormous talent, of course; a colossal talent, but not a genius. Now, James Stephens is a genius.’ In those days I looked down on Stephens and repeated Russell’s verdict with derision; which shows not only that you can’t put an old head on young shoulders but that you shouldn’t try.

  I even made a youthful pilgrimage to see Joyce and liked him a lot, though I was disturbed by the remark he made when I was leaving. The story of the cork frame has been argued and argued by Joyceans since Desmond MacCarthy first printed it, and the reader must argue it for himself. I had admired an old print of the city of Cork in a peculiar frame and, touching the frame, asked ‘What’s that?’ ‘Cork,’ said Joyce. ‘I know that,’ I said, ‘but wh
at’s the frame?’ ‘Cork,’ replied Joyce. ‘I had great difficulty in getting a French frame maker to make it.’

  The main significance of that silly little anecdote relates to myself, for after that I began to see cork frames all over Joyce’s work, and they always gave me the same slight shock I got when he said ‘cork’ for the second time. Finnegans Wake was the first book of his I lost interest in, because, though I knew it much better than those who criticized it, I always had a lingering doubt whether what I was defending was really supreme artistry or plain associative mania. Later, I stopped rereading great chunks of Ulysses which had always bored me – the parodies, the chapter of errors, the scientific catechism – till I was left with only 25 per cent of the book and had to admit that Joyce not only had no sense of organic design but – what was much worse – no vision of human life that had developed beyond the age of twenty-one.

  On the other hand, I began to see that he was the greatest master of rhetoric who had ever lived. By rhetoric I mean the technique of literary composition, the relationship of the written word to the object. This, I think, is the aspect of A Portrait of the Artist that should appeal most to middle-aged people. His brother, Stanislaus, was shocked when Joyce told him that he was interested in nothing but style, because Stanislaus was a moralist, and his principal interest was in the material and the viewpoint. But Joyce was telling the literal truth; by that time he had ceased to care for anything but the art of writing.

  It had not always been so, and this was the tragedy of the relationship between those two brilliant brothers, as it so often is between two strong characters who grow up side by side, mutually dependent. There had been another James Joyce, much closer to Stanislaus, and whom only Stanislaus remembered – poor, angry and idealistic – and to him the material had mattered intensely. One can find this earlier Joyce in Stephen Hero, a fragment of the rejected early draft of A Portrait of the Artist. Before its publication, I had been hearing of it for years from acquaintances. One of them had told me it was written in the manner of Meredith, and, indeed, it contains a number of awkward ironic references to the hero, like ‘this fantastic idealist’ and ‘this heaven-ascending essayist’, which recall Meredith at his archest. But it is not the style of Stephen Hero that matters, for it has none; it is the rage, the anguish, the pity, the awkwardness in it. I remember thinking when I read it first, ‘This is the worst book ever written, but after it I shall never be able to read A Portrait of the Artist again.’