The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  There are only two dialects of Irish, plain Irish and toothless Irish, and, lacking a proper acquaintance with the latter, I think I missed the cream of the old man’s talk, though his English was very colourful and characteristic. But I noticed how almost every phrase he spoke was rounded off by an apt allusion. When Ansteyhurried, the Tailor, enthroned on his butter-box by the fire, reproved her and instantly followed up with the story of the Gárlach Coileánach’s mother. ‘A year is past since my mother was lost; she’d be round the lake since then.’ Or when someone spoke of a girl having a baby he came back with: ‘She’s having last year’s laugh’s cry.’ In Irish, poems, rhymes and proverbs tumbled from him literally in hundreds.

  He had all the traditional stuff – the pishogues about the fairies and the pookas, and the witch-doctors born on Good Friday and christened on Easter Sunday, whose power was entirely in their thumbs. He remembered when a cock who grew old was not killed, but plucked and put out on the mountain to die – some savage offering. All that was part of his environment, and it was probably only his fluency and sheer delight in story-telling that made him so much more impressive than other old shanachies I have met. But it was his character which kept him from succumbing to the charms of the invisible world and maintained his lively curiosity about the real one. He was excellent on the history of the parish, on the old days and the faction fights between Cork and Kerrymen which took place in these mountains. He described the Horgan family of Kenmare, whose landlord was attempting to suppress the faction fights and warned them that if they attended another they would be evicted, and how they all preferred to face the workhouse or the emigrant ship rather than let down their kinsmen. He described Sean Mor Lucy, the most powerful man ever was in these parts, with his cry of ‘Two o’clock and not a blow shtruck yet,’ coming late to the faction fight because he had met a bull and never passed a bull without fighting it. It was the same Sean Mor who was nearly beaten by a black wrestler at the fair of Macroom and was saved only by a neighbour shouting: ‘What do you stand on, Sean?’ ‘Because,’ the Tailor added to my astonishment, ‘the black man’s weakness is in his shin and his elbow.’ How, I still wonder, did folk-lore, which can never get anything right, pass on such an extraordinary bit of information as the anatomical formation of a negro’s foot?

  But the Tailor was at his best as a yarn-spinner, and I never heard a better. Unlike the usual traditional story-tellers, whose stories have been transmitted to them from previous generations and whose own creative powers seem to be non-existent, the Tailor could take a simple little incident of life in the valley, embroider it here and there with a traditional touch, and it became a masterpiece. So, for instance, with the story of the inquest in Mr Cross’s book on him, and with the story of his friend Jerry Coakley, ‘The Captain’. The Captain had a cat called Moonlighter, who, according to the Tailor, was so bleddy human that he always joined in the Captain’s favourite patriotic song, ‘We’ll plant a tree in Ould Ireland’. One night the Captain, who slept stark naked, found himself with a terrible toothache. In anguish he left his little hut and ran down the road towards the river, followed by Moonlighter. He buried his face in the icy water till the shock killed the toothache, and then, seeing that it was a fine moonlight night, he thought he might as well put in a little poaching. He caught a salmon and tossed it on the bank, but Moonlighter dug his teeth in the salmon, who gave a mighty leap which carried himself and Moonlighter back into the river, where the Captain had the divil’s own job to rescue the cat.

  The pleasantest Christmas of my life was spent in the inn in Gougane Barra, though most of the day I was with the Tailor and Anstey. On Christmas Eve the valley was like something out of a fairy-tale, with the still mountain lake mirroring the little white cottages and the little grey fields by day, and at night a hundred candles from a score of cottages. There was only one other visitor at the inn, a middle-aged woman who said she had come there for a quiet holiday. Anstey made great play of that; herself and myself to be all alone in the hotel and no wan at all to oblige the poor woman; what would she think the men of the county were like? The cottage was nearly full after supper, a row of old men sitting on the settle with their hats down over their eyes and their sticks between their knees, while the Tailor sat by the fire in front of them on his butter-box. I brought the whiskey and the Tailor supplied the beer. I have never seen the Tailor in better form. He knew I wanted the words and music of a beautiful song which had never been recorded, and he had brought down the only old man in the locality who knew it. The talk began with stories of ghosts and pookas, and then the Tailor sang his favourite song, a version of the Somerset song, ‘The Herring’.

  And phwat do you think I made of his belly?

  A lovely girril, her name it was Nelly,

  Sing falderol, falal, falal.

  And what do you think I made of his back?

  A lovely boy, his name it was Jack.…

  Then it was the turn of the other old man, and he hummed and hawed about it.

  ‘ ’Tis a bit barbarous.’

  ‘Even so, even so,’ said the Tailor, who had his own way with censorships, ‘ ’twasn’t you made or composed it.’

  When the evening was fair and the sunlight was yellow

  ‘That’s a powerful line,’ interjected the singer after the Gaelic words buidheachtan na gréine. ‘There’s a cartload of meaning in that line.’

  When the evening was fair and the sunlight was yellow

  I halted beholding a maiden bright,

  Coming to me by the edge of the mountain;

  Her cheeks had a berry-bright, rosy light;

  The honey-gold hair down her shoulders was twining,

  Swinging and billowing, surging and shining,

  Sweeping the grass as she passed by me smiling,

  Driving her geese at the fall of night.

  The tune was exquisite and there was nothing in the song you could call barbarous except the young woman’s warmly expressed objection to sleeping alone instead of having a companion to ‘drive the geese’ with her. But with the whiskey it loosened the tongues of the old men, and they quoted with gusto the supposed dying words of Owen Roe O’Sullivan and told scandalous stories about the neighbours, and then the Tailor sang his party piece about the blacksmith:

  John Riordan was well-known in Muskerry

  For soldering old iron and the fastening of shoes,

  And all the old ladies in the range of the valley

  Knew the click of his hammer on their ticky-tack-toos.

  Late that night as we stumbled out along the little causeway from the cabin to the road one of the old men slapped me vigorously on the shoulder and roared: ‘Well, thanks be to the Almighty God, Frinshias, we had wan grand dirty night.’ I admit that at the time I was a little surprised, but, remembering it afterwards, I felt that to thank God for a good uproariously bawdy party was the very hallmark of a deeply religious mind. I don’t know, but I commend the idea to moralists.

  But then a young man from London came to live in the neighbourhood, to whom the Tailor became deeply attached, and Mr Eric Cross began to write down his stories and sayings in a little book which appeared as ‘The Tailor and Anstey’. For those of us who knew the old couple it is beyond criticism, for it preserves them for us in all their warmth and humanity. That the Tailor saw nothing wrong in the idea of a book goes without saying; he no more minded it than he would have minded an airman or a Chinese. But I still blame myself for not realizing that to all good Irishmen a book is anathema. Mr de Valera’s Department of Justice banned the book as being ‘in its general tendency indecent’. Then three priests came to the cabin one day, and that dying old man was forced to go on his knees and burn his own copy of the book at his own hearth – ‘eight and sixpence worth,’ Anstey continued to echo mournfully. To her eight and sixpence was a week’s income. This was followed by a boycott; the cottage where night after night you had seen a half-dozen men sitting on the settle with their hats over t
heir eyes was shunned as if it had the plague.

  Yet in Ireland there were professors, priests, folk-lorists by the hundred who had accepted the hospitality of that kind old couple, and been glad to listen, as I had, to the ‘indecent’ talk round the fire at night, and none of them had the courage to protest but one pious Catholic reviewer in the Sunday Independent, who had enthused over the book on its appearance and had the courage to repeat his statements word for word when the campaign against it began.

  But the one man who really took up the case was no advocate of Gaelic Ireland, but a Southern Unionist, Sir John Keane. He raised it in the Senate, and Mr de Valera’s stalwarts, no longer content with attacking the book, attacked the old couple about whom it was written – ‘a dirty old man’ and ‘a moron’. Nobody who does not know the Irish countryside can realize the extent of the tragedy which descended on that old couple at the end of their days. ‘When people are as old as we are there is little more the world can do to them,’ the Tailor said, masking his grief with philosophy. But Anstey had never learned philosophy. You could see the old woman was eating her heart out.

  Then the Tailor died, the happy, holy, peaceful death which anyone who knew him would have expected for him; Anstey went to the District Hospital, and there she too died. And then when Mr de Valera’s buffoons had made laughing-stocks of themselves by banning several works of Catholic piety, and even to conciliate their own supporters had to invent some machinery for ridding themselves of the odium they had brought on their country, they established a Censorship Appeal Board.

  And, lo and behold! it was instantly discovered that ‘The Tailor and Anstey’ was not, after all, an indecent book and might safely be put into the hands of anybody. Strangely, up to that moment not one member of that Appeal Board had felt it necessary to express any view about the book when it might have meant so much to a poor old man and woman. When they did nerve themselves to speak it was too late. No friend or neighbour could come rushing up the Gougane Barra road to tell the Tailor that he was not after all ‘a dirty old man’ and Anstey that she was not ‘a moron’.

  But one lesson it did teach me, and others too, I think: that it would be far better that the language and traditions of Ireland should go into the grave with that great-hearted couple than that we should surrender our children to the professors and priests and folk-lorists.

  4 LONELY VOICES

  PREFACE

  THOUGH O’CONNOR published two early novels, his principal output over the thirty-five years of his writing life was the short story. He disliked the way the novel was developing in the first part of the twentieth century: he thought it was becoming overtechnical, and he especially disapproved of the ‘twenty-four-hour novel’ introduced by Joyce and Virginia Woolf. ‘Everyone was publishing twenty-four-hour novels at the time, and the unities had at last been brought back into literature. As if the unities mattered a damn, as though what you wanted in the novel wasn’t the organic feeling of life.’ For O’Connor, a novel was a piece of fiction in which characters were tested through time; therefore Ulysses and its like were novels which instead of being ‘a development, an extension into time’ were merely ‘an extension sideways’. Elephantinely misconceived short stories, in other words.

  In his approach to writing, O’Connor was firm-minded, even dogmatic, but never theoretical. His favourite line from Goethe was, ‘Grey, my dear friend, is all your theory, and green the golden tree of Life.’ Nevertheless, all writers develop over time a collage of certainties, and a tendency to generalize outwards from their own work; while those who work in academe, as O’Connor did, are perhaps more likely to be tempted by the notion of a unifying theory. In O’Connor’s case, this was first pronounced in a lecture series at Stanford in 1961, and published in 1963 as The Lonely Voice. The novelist Russell Banks described the effect on him of what has become a classic textbook in American writing schools: ‘When at last I read The Lonely Voice … the effect on me at 37 was like the effect on me at 27 of Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and at 17 of Pound’s ABC of Reading: gratitude for having received sound instruction and profound annoyance with myself for not having got it sooner.’

  O’Connor’s central thesis is that ‘There is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel – an intense awareness of human loneliness.’ The story is especially good at dealing with ‘submerged population groups’, which helps explain its strength in America, where such groups abound. Thus the form’s characteristic personnel consists of ‘outlawed figures wandering at the fringes of society’. Though by O’Connor’s own definition, almost every single story he wrote might qualify for this section, the ones that follow are those which deal most directly with the lonely, and the voices the writer gives to them.

  THE PROCESSION OF LIFE

  AT LAST his father had fulfilled his threat. He was locked out. Since his mother died, a year ago, it had been a cause of dire penalties and direr threats, this question of hours. ‘Early to bed,’ his father quoted, insisting that he should be home by ten o’clock. He, a grown boy of sixteen to be home at ten o’clock like any kid of twelve! He had risked being late a dozen times before, but tonight had cooked it properly. There was the door locked against him, not a light in the house, and a stony ear to all his knockings and whisperings.

  By turns he felt miserable and elated. He had tried sleeping in a garden, but that wasn’t a success. Then he had wandered aimlessly into the city and been picked up by a policeman. He looked so young and helpless that the policeman wanted to take him to the barracks, but this was not included in his plans for the night. So he promised the policeman that he would go home directly, and no sooner was he out of the policeman’s sight, than he doubled down the quay at the opposite side of the bridge. He walked on for at least a mile until he judged himself safe. The quays were lonely and full of shadows, and he sighed with relief when he saw a watchman’s fire glowing redly on the waterfront. He went up to it, and said good-night to the watchman, who was an oldish, bearded man with a sour and repulsive face.

  He sat in his little sentry-box, smoking his pipe, and looked, thought Larry, for all the world like a priest in the confessional. But he was swathed in coats and scarves, and a second glance made Larry think not of a priest but of some heathen idol; his face was so bronzed above the grey beard and glowed so majestically in the flickering light of the brazier.

  Larry didn’t like his situation at all, but he felt his only hope was to stick near the watchman. The city smouldering redly between its hills was in some way unfamiliar and frightening. So were the quays all round him. There were shadowy heaps of timber lying outside the range of the watchman’s fire, and behind these he imagined all sorts of strange and frightening things. The river made a clucking, lonely sound against the quay wall, and three or four ships, almost entirely in darkness, swayed about close to the farther bank. He heard the noisy return of a party of sailors from across the water, and once two Lascars went past him in the direction of the bridge.

  But the watchman did not seem to welcome Larry’s company as much as Larry welcomed his. He was openly incredulous when Larry said he had been locked out.

  ‘Locked out?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Then why didn’t you kick up hell, huh?’

  ‘What’s that, sir?’ asked Larry, startled.

  ‘Why didn’t you bate the door and kick up hell’s delights?’

  ‘God, sir, I’d be afraid to do that!’

  At this the watchman started blindly from his box, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and swaying about in the heavy fumes of the brazier.

  ‘Afraid?’ he exclaimed scornfully. ‘A boy of your age to be afraid of his own father? When I was your age I wouldn’t let meself be treated like that. I had a girl of me own, and the first time me ould fella’ – God rest him! – tried to stop me going with her I up with the poker, and hit him such a clout over the poll they had to put six stitches in him in the Infirmary after.’

  Larry s
huddered.

  ‘And what did he do then, sir?’ he asked innocently.

  ‘What did he do then?’ growled the watchman. ‘Ech, he was a quiet man after that I tell you! He couldn’t look at me after in the light of day but he’d get a reeling in his head.’

  ‘Lord, sir,’ said Larry, ‘you must have hit him a terrible stroke!’

  ‘Oh, I quietened him,’ said the watchman complacently. ‘I quietened him sure enough.… And there’s a big fella’ like you now, and you’d let your father bate you, and never rise a hand in your own self-defence?’

  ‘I would, God help me!’ said Larry.

  ‘I suppose you never touched a drop of drink in your life?’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘And you never took a girl out for a walk?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Had you ever as much as a pipe in your mouth, tell me?’

  ‘I took a couple of pulls out of me father’s pipe once,’ said Larry brokenly. ‘And I was retching until morning.’

  ‘No wonder you’re locked out!’ said the watchman contemptuously. ‘No wonder at all! I think if I’d a son like you ’twould give me all I could do to keep me hands off him. Get out of me sight!’

  Terrified at this extraordinary conclusion, Larry retreated to the edge of the circle of light. He dared not go farther.

  ‘Get out of me sight!’ said the watchman again.

  ‘You won’t send me away now, sir?’ asked Larry in despair.