The Best of Frank O'Connor by Frank O'Connor & Julian Barnes

Author:Frank O'Connor & Julian Barnes [O'connor, Frank & Barnes, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307269041
Amazon: 0307269043
Barnesnoble: 0307269043
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Published: 2009-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

5 IRELAND

PREFACE

IN 1958 O’CONNOR was interviewed by the Paris Review in his Brooklyn apartment, which had a view across the river to lower Manhattan and the New York Harbor. On the writer’s table, the interviewer noted ‘a typewriter, a small litter of papers, and a pair of binoculars’. O’Connor explained that the binoculars were for watching liners ‘on the way to Ireland’. He added that he returned there once a year, and that if he didn’t, he would die.

O’Connor was profoundly attached to the land of his birth: to its traditions and history, its landscape, archaeology and culture, its lunacies, its smells and sounds, and above all, to its people. He loathed sentimental Irishry, and as his second wife Harriet Sheehy recalled, ‘He nearly threw up when an American hotel operator said, “Top of the morning to you, Mr O’Connor”.’ But he was fascinated by, and cared deeply about, the rural and small-town folk he turned into characters in such stories as ‘The Majesty of the Law’, ‘Uprooted’, or ‘In the Train’. Many of his stories were first published in the New Yorker, then perhaps the world’s most sophisticated magazine; but he was writing them ‘for the man and woman down the country who reads them and says, “Yes. That is how it is. That is life as I know it.” ’

O’Connor had many harsh things to say about Ireland, about the moral stagnation and intellectual repression of both Church and State. He wrote a weekly newspaper column in which he frequently attacked the government for neglecting the high crosses and the ruins of romanesque churches, for allowing Georgian houses to be knocked down, and for its censorship policy. He suffered from this himself: much of his work was banned for its ‘general indecent tendency’. In theory, Ireland was the perfect place for a writer to work; and yet – even leaving aside the matter of censorship – the country’s bureaucracy made it near-impossible. ‘A writer must fight and think and waste his time in useless efforts to create an atmosphere in which he can exist and work.’

But such professional exasperation only emphasized the attachment O’Connor felt to all that was non-official Ireland. He wrote three topographical books about the country – though category is a fairly fluid concept with O’Connor; there are times, reading his Leinster, Munster and Connaught, when you feel you might have wandered into the beginning of a short story (and sometimes, of course, you have). He tried to make sense of Ireland’s fractured history, and the literature it produced, in The Backward Look; and he sought to preserve and convey the literary past in his translations of Irish poetry, of which he published five volumes. The collection Kings, Lords & Commons, includes two of the great long Irish poems, ‘The Midnight Court’ and ‘The Lament for Art O’Leary’; also verse high and low from 600 AD to the nineteenth century. The notes at the head of the poems that follow are the translator’s own. ‘Kilcash’

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