The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  Dublin is a pleasant town in the sense that whether you have money or not, or whether you are famous or not, you can know everybody worth knowing, and everybody worth knowing will know you. If an attaché in one of the embassies wants me to meet some visitor and I am not at home, he can ring up my favourite teashop, and if the waitresses don’t know where I am, the old man who sells papers at the corner of Grafton Street certainly will.

  And except for the waitresses and busmen, they all call me by my Christian name! That is one of the few rigid conventions of a highly unconventional society. Dublin has never forgiven Yeats for not having allowed it to call him ‘Willie’. I have long given up struggling against it, and even defend hotly a member of the new government who insists on his senior officials calling him ‘Seán’. This is a convention that interpenetrates the whole of Irish life. Once in England a priest friend told me of another priest, an old man, who came to him in tears because their English bishop didn’t like him and was about to get rid of him. ‘But why do you say that, Dan?’ ‘Oh,’ groaned the old man, ‘he wrote me a terrible letter! A terrible letter!’ ‘But what did he say?’ ‘Oh, it isn’t what he said so much as the way he said it – he began Dear Murphy.’

  I knew exactly what the old priest felt, because in Ireland it is always the personal element that counts, the fact that there are people whom you call by their Christian names who will be prepared to help you in any difficulty. To live comfortably in Dublin you need to know a doctor who knows a specialist or two; a solicitor who knows a counsel; a Catholic priest; a man in each goverment department and a few men in the principal businesses, and you need to know them all by their Christian names.

  As the American scholar Conrad Arensberg points out in the best book ever written on Ireland, The Irish Countryman, the whole of Irish lift centres about this personal element. You don’t buy in the best or cheapest shop. You buy from a shopkeeper with whom your family stands in that particular relationship; he marries a country girl and attracts other customers who stand in the same relationship with his wife’s family, and when the relationship is exhausted, the business changes hands. The visible sign of the relationship is your debit balance. You pay money ‘off’ the account, but you never pay off the account itself except as a declaration of war.

  In the abstract, of course, it is a terrible system. All abstract considerations like justice, truth and personal integrity melt before it. Year after year the bishops denounce the sin of perjury, but it simply has no effect; the overriding element is always the personal relationship, and people simply do not regard perjury committed on that score as a sin at all. Lawyers tell me that the only place in Ireland where you can expect testimony that is not perjured is Wexford, which has a strong English racial backbone, but my own experience of Wexford was rather different. I was misguided enough to ask an old man the way (a thing you must never do unless you already know the way and are merely in search of copy).

  ‘Are you married?’ asked the old man in the way old men in Ireland have of plunging off at a tangent.

  ‘I am not,’ I said with resignation.

  ‘Don’t ever marry a girl without feeling her first,’ said the old man firmly. ‘The parish priest will tell you differently, but priests have no experience. There was a man in a house near me that married a girl like that, and the first night they were together, whatever occasion he had of grabbing hold of her, he felt the child jump inside her. I would never marry a girl without feeling her first, and I would never give information about a neighbour.’

  ‘You’re a man of high principles,’ said I.

  ‘I am,’ said he. ‘There was another man living near me that got into trouble about a man that was shot. The police came and asked me questions about him but I put them astray. I never give information about a neighbour.’

  As I said, in the abstract it is a terrible system, but in practice it has enormous advantages, for real loneliness is very, very rare, and suicide so exceptional that it is always like a slap in the face for the whole community. An Irishman’s friends have been very remiss if he ever achieves suicide.

  The farther west you go, the stronger this personal element becomes, the weaker the abstraction of law. Sometimes, sitting in a country cottage, listening to the conversation, noting the stresses and the elaboration of personal implications, I have the feeling of listening to people speaking a foreign language. I know one Englishman who thinks the world begins and ends in a certain parish in Donegal, where, on Christmas Eve, the police politely sent up word to the pub where he was staying that they would have to raid it at eleven, and would the customers mind going across the fields to another pub which they wouldn’t be raiding until half past eleven. So at eleven all the customers trooped over the fields in the darkness, and at half past eleven back they came after collecting the customers from the other pub, and at midnight the police solemnly retired to their barracks with the whiskey thoughtfully supplied by the two publicans.

  I notice it most of all in Donegal. Once, a friend and I walked too far and called at a village post office to inquire if there was a bus back. There was no bus – as you will have gathered, there rarely is – but the postmistress sent out a little girl to inquire if any car was leaving the village that evening. None was, so, in spite of our protests, she rang up the next village; no car was leaving that either. At this she proceeded to give the other postmistress a bit of her mind, and in what must have been an apologetic tone, the other suggested a third village from which MacGinley’s car usually set out about that hour. But when, on ringing up, our postmistress discovered that MacGinley’s car was broken, there was hell to pay. She immediately rang the police in the nearest town, and ordered them to stop the first car coming in our direction and tell the driver to pick us up. He did, too, and there was no damn nonsense about obliging anyone.

  Let me recount one further incident which haunts my memory, perhaps because I have never solved the mystery behind it. Once some friends and I saw from the road a handsome Georgian house among the trees. A certain lack of symmetry suggested to me that it was only a screen, and that behind it was an older manor house, so we went up the drive to see. Through the open window of a ground-floor room a Tibetan mastiff howled for somebody’s blood – preferably ours.

  We knocked and the door was opened by a pleasant elderly woman who invited us in. The hall was magnificent. After a while a timid elderly man appeared and agreed to let us look over the house, but first he had to put the mastiff away – ‘we keep him for protection’. We enthusiastically agreed that the mastiff should be put away. There were obviously no servants. The two old people, brother and sister, were alone in this house and as frightened of us as we of the dog.

  It was only after they had shown us the splendid panelled interior that it began to dawn on them that we had no intentions on their lives. Really, people were very nice! They had recently had a fire and the neighbours had come and helped to put it out! We introduced ourselves and they did the same. They bore a famous Norman name – let us call it De Courcy.

  ‘You’re here a long time then?’

  ‘Oh, yes, since the Twelfth Century. The chapel is Twelfth Century. Perhaps you’d like to see it?’

  They led the way across the avenue, and there, under the trees, was a ruined chapel. It made me more certain than ever that the place was a converted manor house. They kept the chapel beautifully; the floor cemented, a modern religious statue inside the door, a beautiful mediaeval Virgin and Child on the altar.

  ‘You see,’ said the old man. ‘Twelfth Century.’

  ‘Fifteenth, surely,’ I said, looking at the details of the windows.

  ‘Oh, I think not,’ he said, getting very rattled. ‘Father—said it was Twelfth Century. We found some tiles when we were cementing the floor. Perhaps you could tell from those.’

  He produced the tiles and they put my nose badly out of joint, because they were undoubtedly Twelfth Century. It emerged in conversation that the old couple owned no l
and but the little field behind the house. By this time they had begun to perceive that instead of plotting to murder them we were rapidly falling head and ears in love with them, and, growing more and more reckless, they insisted on our remaining for drinks. They began to think up other things to detain us. The dove house? Were we interested in dove houses?

  ‘Or perhaps you’d like to see our courtyard?’

  I nearly replied, ‘Would we hell!’ A man who has made a fool of himself about a little thing like dating a chapel needs something to restore his confidence, and the courtyard proved conclusively that the house was an old manor house.

  I could scarcely wait to get home to look it up. There it was in the reference books, all right; old manor house, reconstructed in the early Eighteenth Century by some Cromwellian whose name you could chain a Bible to. But of the De Courcys not a word!

  To this day I don’t know what the story is; brother and sister with a Norman name, without land or servants, in a reconstructed manor house going back long before Cromwell. Are they the last of the original Norman owners? How on earth did the house come into the possession of these people and why did they want to own it?

  I don’t know, but I feel that if I did, it would make all this history unnecessary, because all Ireland would be in it. Its romance would be the romance of Irish history. No one who does not love the sense of the past should ever come near us; nobody who does, whatever our faults may be, should give us the hard word.

  6 BETTER QUARRELLING

  PREFACE

  O’CONNOR WAS that demographically unlikely thing in the Ireland of his time, an only child. And he was a writer who believed that the short story found its best focus as an expression of ‘the lonely voice’. But he was also an observer of what the rest of Ireland believed itself to be, so he both understood and portrayed the dynamics of large wrangling families, of parochial village life, of the hugger-mugger city. ‘It is better to be quarrelling than lonely,’ as the saying has it. In 1949, he wrote in Holiday magazine that ‘real loneliness [in Ireland] is very, very rare, and suicide so exceptional that it is always like a slap in the face for the whole community’.

  One lonely voice is a monologue; two lonely voices are a quarrel; a dozen enough for a novel. O’Connor wrote wonderfully well about sibling rivalries, fluctuations of friendship, the emotional pragmatism that lack of choice entails, and the quarrels that echo through villages and down generations. That he did so in the short story rather than the novel is less to do with the nature of Irish society than with the nature of his own particular genius.

  From MY FATHER’S SON – FIRST FICTION

  FOR THE first two or three years in Dublin, I organized my library and wrote two books: Guests of the Nation, the book of Civil War stories from lodgings in Ranelagh; the novel, The Saint and Mary Kate, from my first flat in Anglesea Road, which was neither cheerful nor comfortable, but where at last I had my own books, records, pictures and furniture about me. I still considered myself a poet, and had little notion of how to write a story and none at all of how to write a novel, so they were produced in hysterical fits of enthusiasm, followed by similar fits of despondency, good passages alternating with bad, till I can no longer read them.

  All the same, for all its intolerable faults, I knew that The Saint and Mary Kate was a work of art, something I had never succeeded in producing before, and as I wrote it, I read it aloud to Mother, who either went into fits of laughter or looked puzzled and said restlessly, ‘Well, aren’t you a terrible boy!’ It became the principal argument of the pious Catholics against me, and at one library conference in Cork I had to sit and listen to a denunciation of it as a scandalous and heretical work by the editor of the ‘Three Thousand Best Books’, who was so drunk that he could not stand straight on the platform.

  George Russell enthused about it, not with the enthusiasm of a schoolteacher whose favourite pupil has passed an examination with honours, but with that of an inhibited man who rejoices in any sort of emotional outpouring – the excitement he displayed over Hugo and Dumas. He was passionately inquisitive about the character of the heroine, and a dozen times at least brought the conversation round to what she would be like to live with. This was something I didn’t know myself, because I wasn’t really writing about any woman in particular – I didn’t know enough of them for that – but about that side of women that appealed to me – the one that has no patience with abstractions. I, of course, was full of abstractions.

  From THE SAINT AND MARY KATE

  PHIL HAD to admit that as Mary Kate grew older she displayed a distressing lukewarmness about the fierce modesty with which he surrounded himself. She even enjoyed the letter which he brought her from Gregory. Which led them into a peculiar discussion, during which Mary Kate made the most dramatic advance of her life, by announcing that she thought a lot of talk was made about nothing, and, personally, if Phil, for instance, wanted to kiss her she wouldn’t mind.

  Then she looked away and tried to pretend that she did not know how furiously she was blushing, and Phil’s eyes sank to the floor and he blushed too. There was a dreadful moment of suspense.

  ‘No,’ he said at last; ‘if I kissed you it would mean I was going to marry you.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t,’ she retorted promptly. ‘You could kiss a girl without marrying her.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ he said between his teeth. ‘I’d never kiss a woman I hadn’t made up my mind to marry.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Because it wouldn’t be fair to marry some one else after.’

  She determined not to let him see how this thrust had gone home.

  ‘But suppose the girl wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘I’m not thinking about her. I’m thinking of the woman I’d marry.’

  ‘But she might have been kissed before that.’

  ‘Not if she was my wife,’ said Phil flatly without looking up, his face grown redder than ever. ‘I’ll never marry a woman that isn’t like my own mother, and I’d expect it of her that she’d be as I’d be.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s silly,’ said Mary Kate, a little wave of perturbation and jealousy mixed rising within her. ‘You wouldn’t expect any girl to be like your mother.’

  ‘I would,’ he maintained obstinately.

  ‘But if she was like your mother no one would want to marry her,’ she exclaimed with exasperation.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because no one marries mothers,’ she replied hotly. ‘You marry girls, not mothers.’

  ‘Well, they become mothers, don’t they?’ he demanded.

  ‘They do,’ she admitted reluctantly, ‘they do.’ Adding as an afterthought, ‘Not to their husbands, though.’ Which, even if accidental, was a considerable piece of psychology.

  But this conversation left them both disturbed. Phil was disturbed because her words when he repeated them later to himself made him hot all over and made his skin so sensitive that the pillow against his cheek was momentarily transformed into the cool fresh cheek of Mary Kate, and when he laid one hand lightly on another and stroked it, it was as if he were stroking some one else’s hand, and the fingers that were his own seemed cool and twig-like, reminding him of Mary Kate’s long translucent fingers resting on the edge of his table. He shivered with longing, and twice that night he had to get up and kneel in prayer to bring his vagrom imaginations under control.

  For Mary Kate it was even worse. She had already gone through most of what Phil was going through only without his sense of guilt. And now she had to go to bed, her ears still hot with his cruel snub, and with the knowledge that unless she stayed unkissed for as long as Phil’s fidgets continued (an utter impossibility, she recognized) she would forfeit her chance of being his wife; and even if she were to practise her will power to that extent (it seemed still more impossible when you thought it out in terms of will power) there was always the still greater chance of the respectable woman of forty-five or so who would somehow remind him of his mother. Like
Dona Nobis, for instance! Mary Kate had no grudge against Dona Nobis, but the respectable woman of forty-five she pictured as a pious woman with one tooth.

  It was a great curse, she thought, tossing restlessly in her bed, to fall in love for the first time with a boy whose tastes in women ran to motherhood, and who attached to kissing an importance out of all proportion to the event. Well, it was his own fault, she decided bitterly, finding the bed too hot for her; he couldn’t say but that she had given him his chance, and when he had married his old woman and grown tired of her she would tell him so.

  She pictured herself stepping into a motor-car beside a handsome young man in grey tweeds, when Phil walked up worn and old, a long streak of grey through his hair. And she would say (very sprightly of course and with no sign of grief), ‘Well, Phil, I suppose you sometimes think of the night I offered to let you kiss me?’ And since she suddenly found herself sobbing as she said this, and tears were a great relief, she allowed her imagination to build whole castles of such lachrymose stuff. She would be found dead, and Phil would lament over her and remember that he had not taken the chance to kiss her in life, and kiss her now that she was dead.

  She sobbed at great length, and found herself considerably more cheerful.

  She got up, and as she walked across the squeaking floor, her little feet shining ghostlily at her from under the sweep of her nightdress, the toes caught up, and warming one another in an instinctive embrace, she decided that Phil might go to blue blazes, and for her part she was not going to worry her head about him any more. The point was that she was getting too old to be going on like this (the night was cold) and she wanted a boy. If she couldn’t have Phil, well, she couldn’t, and any other boy would do just as well (it was queer how you could make up your mind like this at night) – and every one admitted she was a beauty, and boys already looked back at her when they met her in the street (Phil was a little fool).