A READER uninterested in biography might conclude, from a lengthy survey of O’Connor’s fiction, that he never left Ireland in his life. On learning that he loved France, knew England well, and had lived in the United States for many years, the same reader might conclude that it was native caution which restricted his topographical range. The truth is more complicated. ‘I prefer to write about Ireland and Irish people,’ he explained in the New York Herald Tribune in 1952, ‘merely because I know to a syllable how everything in Ireland can be said; but that doesn’t mean that the stories themselves were inspired by events in Ireland. Many of them should really have English backgrounds; a few should even have American ones.’
Some writers seek universality by ranging the world, by depicting the different cultures they claim or hope to have assimilated. O’Connor went in for a kind of reverse universality: the importation into Ireland of stories picked up elsewhere. Thus in early 1955 he was living in Annapolis with his wife Harriet, who later recalled how Annapolitans had provided him with themes for three of his stories: ‘ “The Man of the World” from my cousin, “Music When Soft Voices Die” from the memories of my first job, and “The Impossible Marriage” from a friend of my mother’s.’ The universality of a story lies in its truth, not in its language or circumstances. O’Connor liked to quote the story of Lord Edward Fitzgerald meeting an aged Native American woman who told him that, as far as she was concerned, humanity was ‘all one Indian’.
But Abroad wasn’t merely a source of Irishable stories. The Ireland O’Connor knew and wrote about, though cut off from the rest of the world, was also marked by generations of exile. Poverty, famine and repression had meant parochialism and enclosure, but also emigration. The Irish went to England to work, and to America to start life again. To write about Ireland therefore also meant to write about the longing for departure, the pain or pleasure of absence, and the mixed blessing of return. ‘Michael’s Wife’, O’Connor’s great story of return, is here followed by the author’s account of its origin: not in order to ‘explain’ it (though to some extent it does), but as an example of how the writer sees what others – even those centrally involved – may miss in their own story.
Abroad was also where O’Connor earned money – had he been obliged to exist on his Irish earnings he would have been impoverished – and a renown which confirms that fiction travels because of its art and truth rather than its location. In the late 1950s he was flying home from Paris when the Commissioner of Police at Le Bourget recognized him, proudly identified himself as a reader, and personally escorted the writer and his wife through the airport controls. The part which pleased him the most was being addressed as ‘maître’. Even more flatteringly, when John F. Kennedy opened the School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks Airforce Base on 21 November 1963, he found a metaphor for the space race in An Only Child: ‘Frank O’Connor, the Irish writer, tells in one of his books how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their caps and tossed them over the wall – and then they had no choice but to follow them.’ Three days later, O’Connor wrote in the Irish Independent: ‘On Thursday night I was called to the telephone to hear: “President Kennedy is quoting you in San Antonio, Texas”; on Friday night I was called to the telephone to hear: “President Kennedy is dead”.’