"Androcles and the Army" by Frank O'Connor (March, 1958, in The Atlantic)

My Posts on Irish Literature 

After having  read and posted on two Irish short stories over the last two days, I decided I would reinstate for my own purposes Irish Short Story Month, Year V March 2015.  This year I will just keep things simple and I will try to post on at least ten Irish short stories.

Frank O'Connor from County Cork Ireland is widely considered one of the 20th century's greatest short story writers.  His war stories like "Guests of the Nation" are his most famous but all of his work seems to focus on the life of ordinary people.

"Androcles and the Army" packs a great deal in a few pages.  Written in a comic tone, it centers on a lion tamer in a small Irish circus who decides to join the army to fight the Germans.  There are no dates in the story but I think this story is set in around 1914 as in World War II the Irish were neutral.  The story tells us how the long time lion tamer masters his charges with kindness and love.  When he decides to join the army, the circus owner is distraught.  He has to put the brutish strong man in as lion tamer.  In the climactic scene in the story, I will leave the ending untold, the lion tamer is in training at an army base in Ireland when the circus comes to the town near the base.  The reunion is just too great and totally hilarious.  There are great thematic and symbolic minefields in this story.

I read this story in the collection below

Over 700 pages long,  I think it is your best way to get into Frank O'Connor.  It does not give the dates or first publication data or have any sort of introduction, which it should but it is a very valuable resource.  (I was given a free copy)

Please share your favorite lesser known Irish short stories with us.

Mel u

   

"Christmas Morning" by Frank O'Connor (1936, originally published in The New Yorker)

"And I knew that the look in her eyes was the fear that, like my father, I should turn out mean and common and a drunkard".  From "Christmas Morning.

I admit I never heard of Frank O'Connor until I noticed Mel u has posted on a number of his stories.  He is from one of the world's great literary cities Cork, Ireland.

"Christmas Eve" was first published in The New Yorker in 1936.  I read it in Mel's copy of The Collected Stories of Frank O'Connor published by Open Road Media.

The story is told by a young boy maybe nine at the most.  He has a younger brother that is the bane of his existence.  His mother puts a very high emphasis on education even though he hates school.  His little brother, a consummate suck up excels at school and always parades his success in front of their mother.  He has to constantly hear "why can't you be like your little brother".  Their father is a drunk.  On Christmas Eve he brings home his pay and begrudgingly gives his wife a little extra for the holiday. She tells him she knows most of his pay will go to "publicans" for his drinks.  The boys are arguing about Santa Clause, is he real, how do they get in touch with him?  Older rough neighbor boys have told them Santa Clause is a fraud, it is your parents.  The boys still cling to Santa Clause.

I don't want to tell the very sad ending of this story.  O'Connor in his spare prose compresses years of misery in the close and we see the narrator learn something no boy should have to, at any age.

The Collar - Stories of Irish Priests by Frank O'Connor, 2014, Open Road Integrated Media)

James Joyce called Frank O'Connor (1903 to 1966) "The Chekhov of Ireland".   Born as Michael O'Donovan in 1903 in Cork City, Ireland, Frank O'Connor was a very prolific writer with about 150 works to his credit.   I think it is for his short stories that he is most loved now.   


O'Connor in 1918 joined the Irish Republican Army, during the Irish War for Independence.  At the end of the war he was imprisoned by the new government for about a year because of his opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 that ended the war.   

After getting out of prison, O'Connors worked as a librarian, teacher and was named as a director of the famous Abbey Theater founded  by William Butler Yeats.   In 1950 he moved to the USA to accept a teaching position.   He began to publish short stories in The New Yorker to great acclaim.   He died in 1966, he had three children and an ex-wife.   The most prestigious prize in the world for Short Stories is the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for a collection of works by one author.   It is hosted in Cork, Ireland.  Many of his highest regarded short stories centered on Irish priests and their role in society.  

Open Road Intergrated Media has just published a wonderful collection of sixteen short stories by O'Connor  that center on Irish Priests.  The Irist priest was intimately involved, especially in smaller towns, with the lifes of his parrisnors, presiding over weddings, birth, death, confessions and served as de facto moral authority figures.  To be Catholic in Ireland was also almost a political statement, standing against the nearly all Protestant elite of Ireland.  

Today I want to talk a bit about two of O'Connor's most famous priest stories, both in the collection.

"News for the Church" - 1958

As the story opens a young woman enters the confessional.  The priest asks her when her last confession was and she tells him last week.   He wonders why such a young woman would feel she had to confess so often.   He asks her what her sins are since her last confession and he lectures her when she confesses to bad language and he gives her some good advise when she tells him she got drunk.   He tells her a bit of a drink is OK, he likes it himself but to much can cloud the judgment.  Then he is shocked when he says "what else" and he says "I had carnal intercourse with a man, father".  Here is the ensuing conversation.


"You what?"  he cried incredulously.  You had carnal intercourse with a man?  At your age?   


"I know", she said with a look of distress. "It's awful".


"It is awful" he replied slowly and solemnly, "And how often did it take place?"


The priest cannot get over his shock.   He is very offended that this strange to him woman has come in to his confessional and put the burden of thinking about this on him.    He begins to go out of his way to humiliate the woman.  He makes her give him a detailed description of exactly what she and the man did, he is himself a virgin.   The priest does all he can think of to degrade the woman and destroy her self respect.   


There is little good to be said about the priest in this story.   As the story ends the priest sees  the young woman walking out with her head held low and he gets an ugly moment of pleasure from it.   I wondered what the woman thought and how many other people the priest had abused while hiding behind his collar.   We wonder what internal misery drove him to act as he did.  

"An Act of Charity" (May 6, 1967-in The New Yorker)

"An Act of Charity", published shortly after his death, is a very interesting story that shows a lot about how priests used their authority in a small community to wield power and enforce their will on those perhaps reluctant to do as they wanted.  O'Connor depicts his priests as being "human" and one of the ways of doing that, in Ireland, is to give them a fondness for whiskey.  The central priest in this story likes two good sized drinks before dinner.  He prides himself on his "professionalism".  I think this means he did things by the Vatican book and tolerated nothing that might make the church look bad, especially the suicide of another priest.  A fellow priest has shot himself.  The priest central to the story wants the local doctor to certify it was death by natural causes so the burial can take place on consecrated grounds.  I will leave the resolution of the conflict untold.  

Both of the priests in these stories have a kind of bullying "chain pulling" manor.

One of, some say the dominant, themes of Irish literature is that of the weak or missing Irish father.  The stories this collection help us understand the role of the Catholic priest in undermining the Irish father.

I highly recommend The Collar - Stories of Irish Priests by Frank O'Connor.  For sure O'Connor belongs among the greatest of all short story writers. 

This book was published by Open Road Intergrated Media. They offer a very  diversified fairly priced selection of works.  I recommend you take a look at their  very well done webpage

  http://www.openroadmedia.com/

Mel u

Guest Post by The Typists Pen "The Bridal Night" – Frank O’Connor

March 1 to April 7

Guest Post by The Typists Pen

"The Bridal Night" – Frank O’Connor

ISSM3 has been extended until April 7-plenty of time for you to participate-e mail me if you are interested.

The Typists Pen is a superb blog focused on reviewing plays, books and short stories. Above all else they are heavily devoted to the Irish short story. The Typists Pen is one of my fundamental sources of reading ideas and insight in that area. Last year for ISSM2 they did a post on Kevin Barry's collection of short stories, Dark Lies the Island (you can read it here) and I am very honored that they have returned this year with a post on one of the stories of Frank O'Connor.

Guest Post by The Typists Pen

"The Bridal Night" – Frank O’Connor

In the Frank O’Connor short story The Bridal Night we have the theme of loneliness, despair and city versus country. The story begins with an unnamed first person narrator telling the reader about an old woman called Mrs Sullivan. Mrs Sullivan is sitting by some rocks along the west coast of Ireland and the narrator while out walking decides to sit down and talk to her. Immediately the reader is told how lonely Mrs Sullivan is. She has only one son, Denis and he is no longer living with her having been brought to the asylum in Cork twelve years previously. Since then Mrs Sullivan has been on her own and only seen her son once and that was five years ago.

While still sitting by the rocks Mrs Sullivan tells the narrator why she thinks Denis ended up in the asylum and why they are separated. The reader learns about a young woman called Winnie Ryan who came to teach the local children and in her spare time would sit in one of the hollows by the coast and read a book or write some letters. Denis had seen Winnie as he was working and in the evenings he would spend time sitting with her, the two talking together. Mrs Sullivan tells the narrator that ‘the neighbours could make nothing of it, and she being a stranger, with only the book Irish, they left her alone.’ This statement is important because it in some ways highlights to the reader that Winnie is different to others (city versus country), Irish is not her first language. The reader also learns that Winnie has money, something that the neighbours don’t have, again O’Connor separating city and country.

In jest Winnie had told Mrs Sullivan that ‘Denis is my beau,’ and though Denis and his mother both knew that Winnie was only joking it soon became clear to Winnie that Denis was after more than just her company. She stopped going to the hollow and any time that she did sit by the coast she made sure that she brought some of the school children with her. Despite this Denis would search the coast, looking to find the new spots that Winnie was sitting by. When he did find her it is then that Mrs Sullivan tells the narrator ‘the madness’ came over her son. Denis would just sit down beside Winnie, chewing some grass and not speaking till Winnie got up and left him. It becoming obvious to the reader that Denis had fallen in love with Winnie but the love was not reciprocated.

Things got worse for Mrs Sullivan, particularly at night when she ended up following Denis as he went walking along the coast looking for Winnie (idea of despair). A worried Mrs Sullivan started praying that if anything were to happen to Denis that it would happen while she was still alive. As if her prayers were answered the reader finds that the next night Denis woke up screaming (again the idea of despair) and Mrs Sullivan tried to hold him down but she was unable to do so. She called on her neighbour Sean Donoghue who went to the cottage with his two sons and they tied some rope around Denis, tying him to the bed. Sean telling Mrs Sullivan that he’d stay the night with her till the doctor came in the morning.

The next morning Denis asked his mother to loosen the rope, which she did. This action is important because it is the beginning of Denis being ‘freed.’ When the doctor came he told Mrs Sullivan that it would be the next day before anyone was able to come and take Denis away. Later that night Denis started to call out for Winnie, just as he had the previous night. In an act of desperation he told his mother to get her. Hoping that it would calm him down, Mrs Sullivan sent Sean to get Winnie though she suspected that Winnie might be too afraid to come. To Mrs Sullivan’s surprise Winnie did come to the cottage and went into the bedroom to sit beside Denis. As Denis was lying in the bed he asked Winnie to sleep beside him. Again to Mrs Sullivan’s surprise Winnie agreed to do so; telling Mrs Sullivan that it would cause no harm and that Denis would quietly fall asleep. Winnie’s actions are important because it shows the reader that she wasn’t concerned about what people would think of her, again she is different from others (city versus country again).    

O’Connor ends The Bridal Night with the reader finding out that that the next morning after Denis woke up, Winnie promised him that she’d return that evening. A calm Denis fell back asleep and despite it being clear to Mrs Sullivan that Denis was going to the asylum and wouldn’t see Winnie again she was relieved that the despair had finally left her son. She got on her knees and thanked Winnie for what she had done telling the narrator that Winnie earned the respect of the neighbours for helping Denis, O’Connor in some ways bringing city and country together albeit at the expense of the ‘mad’ Denis Sullivan.

End of Guest Post

I offer my great thanks to Ben of the Typists Pen for this very insightful guest post. I strongly suggest any one who wants to learn more about Irish literature follow his blog.

Mel u

"Laughter" by Frank O'Connor

"Laughter" by Frank O'Connor (1931, 14 pages)

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

"A Story by Maupassant" by Frank O'Connor

"A Story by Maupassant" by Frank O'Connor   (1953, 12 pages)

March 1 to March 31

Event Resources

Please consider joining us for the event.  All you need to do is complete a post on any Irish Short Story or related matter and let me know about it.  I will publicize your post and keep a master list. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. 

  

1903 to 1966

James Joyce called Frank O'Connor "The Chekhov of Ireland".   Born as Michael O'Donovan in 1903 in Cork City, Ireland, Frank O'Connor was a very prolific writer with about 150 works to his credit.   I think it is for his short stories that he is most loved now.   

O'Connor in 1918 joined the Irish Republican Army, during the Irish War for Independence.  At the end of the war he was imprisoned by the new government for about a year because of his opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 that ended the war.   

After getting out of prison, O'Connors worked as a librarian, teacher and was named as a director of the famous Abbey Theater founded  by William Butler Yeats.   In 1950 he moved to the USA to accept a teaching position.   He began to publish short stories in The New Yorker to great acclaim.   He died in 1966, he had three children and an ex-wife.   The most prestigious prize in the world for Short Stories is the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for a collection of works by one author.  

"Join Us"

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).    O'Connor's said the best short stories of de Maupassant all were about prostitutes and his own story entitled "A Story by Maupassant" deal with just that.    

(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".)

"A Story by Maupassant" is set in Dublin and is narrated by a man we first meet when he is in his late teens or early twenties.  He and his friend Terry loved to stay up all night and debate the great issues of the world, especially literature.   One of their bones of contention was the work of de Maupassant.  Terry felt his work was not real literature  little more than sensationalism,  emotion based stories.  His friend said who cares if they are literature or not (what ever that may mean) they represent real life.   Here is Terry's judgment on him:

"But Maupassant is slick and coarse and commonplace. Are his stories literature?’ ‘Ah, to hell with literature!’ I said. ‘It’s life.’ ‘Life in this country?’ ‘Life in his own country, then.’ ‘But how do you know?’ Terry asked, stopping and staring at me. ‘Humanity is the same here as anywhere else. If he’s not true of the life we know, he’s not true of any sort of life.’ "

Soon each of the men get a job, Terry as a teacher and the narrator in an office.  They do not see each other very much as each gets involved with his life.    Terry had never been much of  a drinker but one day the narrator saw him leaving a very low down sort of pub looking very ragged.  He assumed he was drinking in secret.   Now the men are forty, Terry's mother has just died and he and his sister live together.

One day a police Sargent he knows knocks on his door and asks him if he can talk to him about a very confidential matter involving his friend.   It seems his friend has become to take up with prostitutes.  Any kind of sex outside of marriage was seen as a horrible sin.

He goes to his friends house to confront him with this to try to help him.  The friend has just returned from six weeks in Paris.  He notices a large volume of the short stories of Maupassant, in French, on the man's book shelves.  Terry tells him he now knows Maupassant was in fact a great writer. He learned this from a woman he met in Paris, on the streets.  

     

There is true brilliance in these lines:

‘A funny thing about those books,’ he said. ‘This woman I was speaking about, I thought she was bringing me to a hotel. I suppose I was a bit muddled with drink, but after dark, one of these places is much like another. “This isn’t a hotel,” I said when we got upstairs. “No,” she said, “it’s my room.”  ’ As he told it, I could see that he was living it all over again, something he could tell nobody but myself. ‘There was a screen in the corner. I suppose it’s the result of reading too much romantic fiction, but I thought there might be somebody hidden behind it. There was. You’d never guess what?’ ‘No.’ ‘A baby,’ he said, his eyes boring through me. ‘A child of maybe eighteen months. I wouldn’t know. While I was looking, she changed him. He didn’t wake.’

The two friend begin to debate how Maupassant would have ended his encounter with the woman had it been an episode in one of his stories.   

   

I read this in The Best of Frank O'Connor edited by Julian Barnes, an excellent book.

Mel u

"News For The Church" by Frank O'Connor

"News For the Church" by Frank O'Connor (1958, 11 pages)

Irish Short Story Week

March 11 to May 1

April 1 to April 6

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week Year Two, March 12 to March 31.   All you need do is post on one short story by an Irish author and send me a comment or and email and I will include it in the master post at the end of the challenge.  

I listened to Galway Bay F.M. 95.8 Radio, playing tradition Irish music while writing this post.   I recommend it if you like background music with your Irish Short Stories.    

James Joyce called Frank O'Connor "The Chekhov of Ireland".   Born as Michael O'Donovan in 1903 in Cork City, Ireland, Frank O'Connor was a very prolific writer with about 150 works to his credit.   I think it is for his short stories that he is most loved now.   


O'Connor in 1918 joined the Irish Republican Army, during the Irish War for Independence.  At the end of the war he was imprisoned by the new government for about a year because of his opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 that ended the war.   

After getting out of prison, O'Connors worked as a librarian, teacher and was named as a director of the famous Abbey Theater founded  by William Butler Yeats.   In 1950 he moved to the USA to accept a teaching position.   He began to publish short stories in The New Yorker to great acclaim.   He died in 1966, he had three children and an ex-wife.   The most prestigious prize in the world for Short Stories is the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for a collection of works by one author.   It is hosted in 

"Join Us"

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).


I posted earlier during Irish Short Story week on two of the short stories of Frank O'Connor, "Guests of the Nation" and "The Majesty of the Law".   I did a search of the Kindle edition of The Best of Frank O'Connor selected and introduced by Julius Barnes on the term "priest" and got over 100 results.   


"News from the Church" gives us an intimate look at what goes on inside a confessional when a nineteen year old girl confesses she has had sex with a man she barely knew, as seen from the point of view of a sixty year old priest.   The priest had a reputation as a liberal easy confessor, often to take to task by the other priests as to easy.   The priest is not a perfect man.   He hates the English, the Irish government and the middle class.

"The last priest that heard my
confession, left the church the next day"-Carmella

As the woman enters the confessional he asks her when her last confession was and she tells him last week.   He wonders why such a young woman would feel she had to confess so often.   He asks her what her sins are since her last confession and he lectures her when she confesses to bad language and he gives her some good advise when she tells him she got drunk.   He tells her a bit of a drink is OK, he likes it himself but to much can cloud the judgment.  Then he is shocked when he says "what else" and he says "I had carnal intercourse with a man, father".  Here is the ensuing conversation.




"You what?"  he cried incredulously.  You had carnal intercourse with a man?  At your age?   


"I know", she said with a look of distress. "It's awful".


"It is awful" he replied slowly and solemnly, "And how often did it take place?"


The priest cannot get over his shock.   He is very offended that this strange to him woman has come in to his confessional and put the burden of thinking about this on him.    He begins to go out of his way to humiliate the woman.  He makes her give him a detailed description of exactly what she and the man did, he is himself a virgin.   The priest does all he can think of to degrade the woman and destroy her self respect.   


There is little good to be said about the priest in this story.   As the story ends the priest sees  the young woman walking out with her head held low and he gets an ugly moment of pleasure from it.   I wondered what the woman thought and how many other people the priest had abused while hiding behind his collar.   


The next story I will post on for The Stories about Priests Mini-Event will be "The Priest" by Colum Toiban.

Mel u

Frank O'Connor: Two of His Most Famous Short Stories

"Guests of the Nation" (1931, 12 pages)
"The Majesty of the Law" (1936,  9 pages)

Irish Short Story Week Year II

Frank O'Connor Day

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week Year Two, March 12 to March 31.   All you need do is post on one short story by an Irish author and send me a comment or and e mail and I will include it in the master post at the end of the challenge.  

I listened to Galway Bay F.M. 95.8 Radio, playing tradition Irish music while writing this post.   I recommend it if you like background music with your Irish Short Stories.    

James Joyce called Frank O'Connor "The Chekhov of Ireland".   Born as Michael O'Donovan in 1903 in Cork City, Ireland, Frank O'Connor was a very prolific writer with about 150 works to his credit.   I think it is for his short stories that he is most loved now.   


O'Connor in 1918 joined the Irish Republican Army, during the Irish War for Independence.  At the end of the war he was imprisoned by the new government for about a year because of his opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 that ended the war.   

Anton Chekhov

After getting out of prison, O'Connors worked as a librarian, teacher and was named as a director of the famous Abbey Theater founded  by William Butler Yeats.   In 1950 he moved to the USA to accept a teaching position.   He began to publish short stories in The New Yorker to great acclaim.   He died in 1966, he had three children and an ex-wife.   The most prestigious prize in the world for Short Stories is the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for a collection of works by one author.   It is hosted in 

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).

William Trevor included "Guests of the Nation" in his magnificent anthology, The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories and O'Connor included this in his own anthology, Classic Irish Short Stories so I think it is safe to say it is one of his best regarded stories.    

A lot of what I know about Frank O'Connor comes from the very well done introduction to The Best of Frank O'Connor by its editor, Julian Barnes and he indicates that O'Connors very young experience as a soldier (he joined the IRA at 15) shaped much his outlook on life and his writing.   

"The Guests of the Nation" is an amazing story about the horror of war with all its incumbent cruelty.  The guests of the nation are two young English soldiers being held as prisoners of war during the War for Irish Independence.   One of the men is very out going and talkative and is friends with all of the Irish soldiers holding him captive.   The other man is quieter but he befriends is a very touching way an elderly Irish lady with no one to help her.   Some of the young soldiers know why they have the captives, if the English shoot any of the captive Irish Soldiers, these  men will be shot  in retaliation.   Here are the last lines of this haunting very honest story

"I was somehow very small and very lost and lonely like a child astray in the snow. And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same".

"The Majesty of the Law" is a simple story about respect and pride and the price one sometimes has to pay for these things.     It is about an old code of honor which might have been passing into relevancy as the horrors of WWII began to overtake Europe.   I loved the opening of the story as it gives us such a great feeling for the central character of the story.

"Dan looked after his mother while there was life in her and after his death no other woman crossed his threshold.   Signs on it, his house had that look".

I do not want to tell much of the plot of this story but it is a very moving tale about a man from a the fringes of society, someone with no one to speak for him, a lonely man.   It is this that O'Connor says is the theme of the most powerful short stories and for sure both of these stories fall under that description.

One story is about an old man whose future is ruined by his own pride.  The sad thing is no body even pays any attention to him.   The other story is about young men used as pawns in a larger theater.  

Frank O'Connor is one of the greatest of all short story writers.   

Please share your experiences with Frank O'Connor with us.

Mel u

"Misery" by Anton Chekhov versus "The Life of Ma Parker" by Katherine Mansfield

"Misery" by Anton Chekhov (1886, 5 pages, translated by Constant Garnett)
"The Life of Ma Parker" by Katherine Mansfield  (1921, 4 pages)-a second look

A Look at One of Tolstoy's Favorite Chekhov Stories

and
How wrong is Frank O'Connor 
about Katherine Mansfield?

Frank O'Connor in The Lonely Voice:   A Study of the Short Story says some things about Katherine Mansfield that seem, I read them a second time, very nasty, homophobic, sexist and just flat out stupid.   Ordinarily I just dismiss such views but O'Connor is too brilliant to really allow me to do that.   O'Connor writing in his 1960 lectures (published in 1961) says of Mansfield

"Most of her work seems to me to be that of a clever, spoiled, malicious woman.   Though I know nothing that would suggest she had any homosexual experiences, the assertiveness, malice, and even destructiveness in her life and work make me wonder whether she hadn't"

Speaking of Mansfield's numerous relationships with men he says "but the idea of experience by which she justified them is a typical expedient of a woman with a homosexual streak who envies men and attributes their imagined superiority to the greater freedom with which they satisfy their sexual appetites".

He says Mansfield has the worldliness of permanent adolescence...that she is always writing about her amorous orgies..there is one quality that is always missing in almost everything she wrote and that is "heart".   He says Mansfield has no more a feel for the poor than Dickens does.   He says to Mansfield the lower classes are merely people with improper pronunciations.  

Frank O'Connor says, and no one would argue with this, that Mansfield was heavily influenced by Chekhov  (1860 to 1904-Russia.)   Mansfield may well have in one case taken the plot of an at the time untranslated Chekhov story and used the plot lines to create her own story without giving Chekhov credit.   Mansfield scholars say there is proof of this and I accept it.   I do not see it as a "big deal" though in a perfect world such things should not happen.  O'Connor jumps from this one fact to assuming that any Mansfield story that in any way resembled a Chekhov story is basically a lifted plot.   

"Misery" was one of Leo Tolstoy's favorite Chekhov stories.   O'Connor says it is among his very best stories.   I really found it a powerful look at the very deep sadness in the life of a Russian horse cab driver.   As the story opens the cab driver has just picked up a fare.    As he drives he tries to tell his customer (being able to afford a horse cab already sets you out as having a bit of money) that his son, all he had in life, has very recently died.   His passenger basically says :"Oh too bad but watch how you are driving".     His next passengers are three young men out for a night on the town.    In a really masterful scene which helped me see a bit of the greatness of Chekhov, the young men knowingly offer him an unfair fee for their proposed cab ride and he accepts it.   The young men are abusive to him throughout the ride.   We know he has always been abused by his customers.   He needs badly to talk to someone about his son's death.   The three men, death is so remote to the young, could not care less and basically tell him to mind the road and not to blather on.   At the end of the story, he tells his horse what has happened.   

"The Life of Ma Parker" by Katherine Mansfield (1888 to 1923-New Zealand) (I posted on it in October, 2010) is about a seemingly ancient maid doing her once a week cleaning job in the house of a what is called a "literary gentlemen".    (I am sure this gentlemen is probably meant as a jibe at someone in Mansfield's life but I do not know who-If  you do please leave a comment or e mail me.)   Ma Parker (as everyone calls her) her was sent into service at 14 as  scullery maid to a cruel cook, had 12 children half of whom died as children, and a life of hard work cleaning up after others.   I do not see how O'Connor can say Mansfield knew nothing or felt nothing for the poor.   (Maybe O'Connor knew her father was the chairmen of the Bank of New Zealand and just saw Mansfield as poor little rich girl playing at artistic poverty-maybe he was jealous of her as by 1960 her readership far exceeded his own).   After reading the story for a second time I would now change my post on it a bit but basically I stand by what I said last year.   There are other stories like "A Cup of Tea" that amply show that Mansfield could portray the poor without condescension.   As to O'Connor's claim that the stories of Mansfield do not at all deal with members of "submerged groups" this seems almost blind.    Many of Mansfield's  stories are about a single woman without great means trying to live in a country or a place that is not her home.   The fact that Mansfield had a way out of her poverty if she wanted it is probably why O'Connor feels her stories are inauthentic.   I think O'Connor goes too far in wanting an author to somehow earn the right to produce their stories by their own life.    It is as if one cannot write a story set in a war if one has not been in a war.  


O'Connor also makes the common mistake of seeing her work as somehow reaching an artistic peak just before she died.   This is just reverse literary engineering.   It was interesting to learn from O'Connor how the literary world viewed Mansfield's husband John Middleton Murry.   O'Connor does love some of Mansfield's work (I know I am myself going to be prejudiced against anyone who says anything bad about Katherine Mansfield so I try to discount my feelings) and says "The Prelude" is among the best short stories ever written.


I totally endorse both of these stories.   You can ponder the claim that Mansfield lifted her plot from "Misery".


You can read "Misery" HERE

There is a link to "The Life of Ma Parker" in my post on it.

I know I need to read much more Chekhov and I hope to over the next 12 months.

Please feel free to leave a comment  about my opening question.

O'Connor is a brilliant expositor of the short story, especially when it is by a  writer of the type he is comfortable with.     It is kind of a sad irony to me that O'Connor focuses so much on "submerged groups" in his analysis of  the short story but so full of prejudice against Jews and women who dare to assert themselves

People are a product of their times.   Still I find it hard to imagine in 1960 in Stanford University in California people did not feel inclined to walk out on him.

I still endorse the reading of The Lonely Voice-A Study in the Short Story.   Parts of it are really brilliant and inspired me to read on and on in the short story.   I learned a lot from his book even though I think he is very wrong about  much of what he says about Mansfield.    I think O'Connor even though he was lecturing in 1960 was thinking in 1930.

 OK enough bashing-if anyone has read this far please say hello!

Mel u