March 1 to March 31
Frank O'Connor
Sept 17, 1903 to March 10, 1966
Born Cork, Died Dublin
Frank O'Connor died forty six years ago today, in Dublin. I learned this is an article in The Manchester Guardian by Julian Barnes. Barnes, whose The Best of Frank O'Connor is my primary source of reading material by and about O'Connor, says that O'Connor is read and admired more in America than in his native Ireland. Barnes offers a few reasons for this such as he long periods O'Connor lived outside of Ireland, his publication of his best work in The New Yorker, and the terrible things he at times said about Ireland. I do not know if these things are correct or not but in the author Question and Answer Sessions for ISSM3 several people have listed him as among their most admired short story writers. As to the negative things he said about Ireland, this seems a family quarrel, one motivated more by too much love and very high expectations rather than indifference.
Frank O'Connor is the author of the only book on short stories worth reading, The Lonely Voice: A Study in the Short Story (1962). I have read parts of it numerous times. There are some maddening things in the book, O'Connor was a man of strong opinions from a time before "political correctness" took over in the universities and some of the things in the book that he says about Gays, Jews, and Women will put people off but I do not think he meant anything malicious by them. I think a very good course in the short story could be devised by reading all the public domain short stories mentioned by O'Connor with him as our first look. (There is more on The Lonely Voice in my post on it. If you love the short story, you will love it more after you read this book, or at least I did).
Last year during Irish Short Story Week Year Two I posted on two of the short stories of Frank O'Connor,"Guests of the Nation" and "The Majesty of the Law". Last week I read his fascinating "A Story by Maupassant" . Maybe he admired Turgenev more and was in awe of Joyce, but I think he loved de Maupassant above all other short story writers.
Julian Barnes and others say the best of the short stories of O'Connor (Barnes says there are about 150 of them) concern the Irish War for Independence. I think his two most famous short stories are "Guests of the Nation" and "The Majesty of the Law".
I am posting today on another of his wartime stories, "Laughter". I am doing this in observation of the anniversary of his death (and I also want to let interested readers know about the article by Julian Barnes). "Laughter" is a fascinating look at some of the foot soldiers involved in the Irish War for Independence. This was not really a march off to war kind of event, at least on the Irish side. Combatants needed places to hide and it was often their mothers and grandmothers who sheltered them. One of the central characters in "Laughter" is a grandmother, one who makes bombs and keeps a loaded pistol under her shawl. We also see how the violence created a kind of self-feeding machismo in which a reckless disregard for your own safety and a love of killing the enemy was the mark of manhood and patriotism. Some say the IRA, in which O'Connor was active and for which he went to prison, was the world's first terrorist organization. You can see in this story the violence was very random. One of the characters in this story, described as a "Hare-lip", and not taken seriously by the IRA when he wants to join because his impediment causes him to speak in a non-standard fashion and they infer from this that he is mentally slow seems kind of an odd figure. The most powerful element of the story, for me, was the grandmother. Because of the nature of this war, she was able to be an important part of the IRA.
The wonder of this story is it lets us see what it was like to be an IRA foot soldier, without elevating them to the status of heroes. They were just people who wanted to be free and hated their oppressors. If there should be future Irish Short Story Months, Frank O'Connor will always be included.
Mel u
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