Frank O’Connor was, as some would have it, Ireland’s master storyteller. Short stories of his, such as the tragic Guests of the Nation, are immovable objects in the national literary canon.
In the introduction to a book of essays about the Corkonian in 1969, Harold MacMillan, former Prime Minister and chairman of the publishing house whose relationship with O’Connor stretched back to bringing out his first book in 1931, heaped praise on “the young Irish rebel and the mature friend of wartime Britain, the eccentric librarian, the enthusiastic man of the theatre and the meticulous self-taught scholar, the sonorous translator of Irish poetry and the superlative short story-writer, the inspiring master lecturer and the dogged master of the seminar. All were unquestionably the same unique and original man.”
As Catholic Ireland recedes from view at a rate of knots, O’Connor (1903-1966) is one of those writers we might turn to in order to understand and remember it better. He was a critic of the Church, but a thoughtful one; and the intricacies of his argument with Irish Catholicism may best be summed up in an act of editing rather than writing. I am thinking of the three poems that bring to an end an anthology that O’Connor compiled called A Book of Ireland.
The first of these, “To a Boy”, is an anonymous Irish lyric of the 16th century, translated by O’Connor himself. It concludes:
So let all learning in;
Be pure in mind and breast
For the voice that speaks to the heart
Pleases the Master best.
As O’Connor and his peers saw it, while Catholic Ireland may have excelled in vaunting and enforcing purity, it would not strike a healthy balance and “let all learning in”, thus cutting the country off from the broader tides of European humanism.
The second last poem in the collection comes from the 18th-century, “Prayer at Dawn” by Diarmuid O’Shea, in which the poet berates his own “senseless soul” for abandoning the prayerful habits of early morning learnt in childhood and succumbing instead to godless torpor. Here O’Connor is, I think, anticipating the time when Ireland would abandon her religion. As with the speaker in O’Shea’s poem, something precious would be lost.
Nevertheless, “Joy Be with Us” by James Stephens brings the sequence, and the book, to a close with a fanfare for the new age, urging the Irish, despite the risks and losses, to “take the wind” towards an uncertain future. The final lines are: “Now it is dawn, / And we away. Be with us Mananaun.” Tellingly, Manannán mac Lir is a seafaring figure from ancient mythology, from Ireland’s pre-Christian past.
O’Connor was a cradle Catholic, brought up in a world of grinding urban poverty that was also a world of prayers, devotions and holy pictures. My inkling has long been that respectability and religious authority grew so dominant in Ireland because, subconsciously, they were felt to be the forces that would prevent poverty and coarseness from devouring society whole, from returning it to the abyss of the 19th century. They were also the forces that would allow the colonised to look their English overlords in the eye and proclaim equality – superiority, even.
Wherever the truth might lie, O’Connor saw the practical, institutional ramifications at close quarters through the life of his mother, Minnie, who grew up in the orphanage of the Good Shepherd Convent in Cork city. Her life was brutally hard and riven with tragedy, yet she maintained a gentility and gaiety in the face of things that both puzzled and charmed her son, who loved her dearly.
Minnie would often return to the convent to visit her old friends among the nuns. Her family was repeatedly brought to the brink of utter destitution by her husband’s drinking bouts and, when things were not going well at home, Minnie was given small gifts of money and clothes by Mother Blessed Margaret, whom O’Connor himself came to know and love.
The regime at the orphanage was severe by any modern, humane standard. Yet this orphan child of a labourer and a country girl was given an education that meant she could read Shakespeare right through while on her first stint of domestic service in the home of a down-at-heel Protestant family.
In An Only Child, the first volume of his autobiography, O’Connor recounts the inflexible treatment of Maria Condon, the daughter of one of the “fallen” women living in the “penitentiary” that also formed part of the convent. In a foreshadowing of the arguments about Catholic Ireland that have raged in recent decades, Frank O’Connor saw a women and her mother “whose innocence had been blasted by an introverted religion”.
His own gentle mother, though, refused to budge. The nuns, she insisted, “did what they thought was right”.
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