15

Frank O’Connor, Guests of the Nation (1931)

Frank O’Connor (1903–1966) was the pen name of Michael O’Donovan, formed by taking his own middle name and his mother’s maiden name. Guests of the Nation was his first collection of short stories, and he was to become known as Ireland’s premier writer of short fiction of his generation.1 Throughout his life his output was prolific, consisting of dozens of short stories and, towards the end of his life, brilliant translations of Irish-language poetry and studies of Irish cultural history. He grew up in the city of Cork and formed part of an intellectual coterie centred round Daniel Corkery and a group of literary-minded young people, many of whom were students at University College Cork in the second decade of the twentieth century. He had less than a decade of formal education due to the extreme poverty of his family, but as a young man he made it his business to learn from literary figures such as Corkery and his friend and fellow writer, Sean O’Faoláin. Corkery’s magnum opus, a book-length study of Irish cultural history in the seventeenth and eighteenth century (The Hidden Ireland) was the book that both O’Faoláin and O’Connor had to grapple with to arrive at their own very different takes on Irish cultural history.2 O’Connor participated in the Irish War of Independence and took the anti-Treaty side in the subsequent Irish Civil War, as did O’Faoláin. The stories in Guests of the Nation are, then, partly autobiographical and provide a valuable insight into the emotional mentalities of the young men of the time.

The title story, ‘Guests of the Nation’, has been often claimed to be one of the best Irish short stories of the century, perhaps coming second only to James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. It is a story that has often been imitated or echoed, most famously perhaps by Brendan Behan (An Ghiall, The Hostage) in the 1950s and Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game in the 1990s.3 It is strange that this young anti-Treatyite firebrand was, some years later, to write an admiring (and intriguing) biography of Michael Collins (The Big Fellow), despite Collins being the man who signed the Treaty, remarking accurately that he had just signed his own death warrant.

It seems that O’Connor was originally told the anecdote behind ‘Guests of the Nation’ while in a Free State government prison camp. Another key experience in O’Connor’s life was a tragicomic incident in Gormanstown prison camp during and after the Civil War. He had seen hideous things done by Irishmen to other Irishmen, men who had been on the same side against the British a few months earlier. As usual, the captured IRA men duplicated the government’s military structures and rules, even though they refused to recognise that government. In their own minds they were the ‘real’ government. As O’Connor often said afterwards, for a while Ireland had two semi-imaginary governments, only one of which could be real in the long run. In An Only Child, O’Connor remembered:

The first incident that revealed to me what the situation was really like was funny enough. A man … had had a disagreement with his hut-leader about the amount of fatigues he had to do, so he refused to do any more. There was nothing unusual about this of course. In an atmosphere where there was no such thing as privacy and people were always getting on one another’s nerves, it was inevitable, and the sensible thing would have been to transfer Murphy to another hut. … Murphy was summoned before a court martial of three senior [IRA] officers, found guilty, and sentenced to more fatigues. Being a man of great character, he refused to do these as well. This might have seemed a complete stalemate, but not to imaginative men. The camp command took over from the enemy a small time-keeper’s hut with barred windows to use as a prison, and two prisoners, wearing tricolour armlets to show that they really were policemen and not prisoners like the rest of us, arrested Murphy and locked him up. … I felt the imaginative improvisation could not go farther than that, but it did. Murphy still had a shot in his locker, for he went on hunger strike, not against our [government] gaolers, but his own, and – unlike them when they went on hunger strike soon after – he meant it.

The IRA then called a meeting and denounced Murphy for defying majority rule. O’Connor felt this was a bit thick for men who were in prison for defying majority rule, the vast majority of Irish people being in favour of the Treaty of 1921–22. He was the only vote in favour of Murphy among the entire body of prisoners. Revealingly, he remembered, ‘Later in life I realized that it was probably the first time I had ever taken an unpopular stand without allies.’4

A growing collective sense of the absurdity of their situation eventually broke a hunger strike ordered long after the main body of the anti-Treatyite armed forces had given up and gone home on de Valera’s instructions. The government deliberately let the republican prisoners go home in dribs and drabs, so as to cause no great stir or demonstration. Interestingly, the government also usually let them out under cover of darkness, so that they could slink home unobserved. The young men commonly feared ridicule, particularly on the part of young women. Eventually O’Connor was released. When he got home to Cork, his mother stared at him, burst into tears and said, ‘It made a man of you!’5

‘Guests of the Nation’ concerns a group of west Cork IRA men during the Irish War of Independence, or ‘the Tan War’ as many of its veterans called it. Two English soldiers are captured and held hostage in a remote cottage to be shot if IRA captives in Cork Jail are executed by the British. The Englishmen charm the old lady who owns the cottage and do her chores for her. They play cards with the IRA lads and argue about religion and the possibilities of an afterlife, rather like young people anywhere and anywhen. They become friends. The British in Cork city hang their own prisoners, and the IRA commanding officer announces that the two soldiers are to be shot in retaliation. They meet their fate calmly, and the IRA OC (interestingly named Donovan, almost having O’Connor’s real name) shoots them. Donovan is the only one of the young IRA men who really hates the English. The last two sentences in the story are among the best-known passages in Irish storytelling. After the killing:

Noble says he saw everything ten times the size, as though there were nothing in the whole world but that little patch of bog with the two Englishmen stiffening into it, but with me it was as if the patch of bog where the Englishmen were was a million miles away, and even Noble and the old woman, mumbling behind me, and the birds and the bloody stars were all far away, and 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 about again.6

O’Connor distanced himself from Corkery in later life, dissenting in particular from the older man’s dismissive and rather po-faced hostile judgement of a bawdy eighteenth-century poem, Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheadhon Oídhche; O’Connor’s translation of which was banned in 1946. O’Connor’s final confrontation with his old mentor did not occur until after his own death in 1966. The Backward Look, his own scholarly assessment of the Gaelic literary tradition, was based on a series of lectures he gave in Trinity College Dublin and was published posthumously.7 At one point he remarks with a characteristic blunt extravagance, ‘Unlike Daniel Corkery, who wrote a very lyrical and wrong-headed book on it, I can see nothing to admire in Irish eighteenth-century poetry.’8 Elsewhere in the book he describes the much-revered Táin Bó Cuailgne as ‘a simply appalling text’ and essentially a palimpsest of different versions and unconnected tales all thrown together over several hundred years.9 This is tacitly a snipe at Patrick Pearse’s extravagant claims for the old saga half a century earlier, another backward look of a more personal kind.

O’Connor became utterly anti-militarist after the Civil War, and became publicly convinced of the futility and evil of the entire Irish tradition of ‘freedom struggle’. Several of the stories in Guests of the Nation combine a young man coming of age and realising the pointlessness of the IRA campaigns. In ‘September Dawn’, for example, during the Civil War two young IRA men evade Free State soldiers and eventually hole up in an old woman’s house, where, unexpectedly, the more thoughtful and shyer of the pair finds love. It is a beautifully handled little story.10 A similar epiphany occurs in ‘Soirée Chez Une Belle Jeune Fille’.11

Like many another young man in Ireland over the last hundred years, prison was the nearest he ever got to a university education. Like the very different Seán Lemass or Brendan Behan, incarceration forced him to read rather than engage in unthinking action and derring-do, and induced him to ponder the old question asked by every exasperated Irish parent of a wild and wayward child, ‘What in the name of the good God do you think you are trying to do?’ In a way, O’Connor’s writings contain, among much else, an extended set of answers to that question, a question he is tacitly setting the Irish people and Irish political leaders. As late as the early 1960s, in a lecture on William Butler Yeats, he gives pride of place to an entertaining anecdote recounted by George Russell (‘AE’) about the great poet:

As if it weren’t enough, Yeats was also a member of a secret society called the Irish Republican Brotherhood. I was very curious to know how he got on with that group, and one night he replied: ‘Oh, they were always sentencing one another to death. Once a man arrived at my house from London, raging because he had been sentenced to death by the Dublin branch. I told him not to worry because there was no danger, but that only made him angrier. “Danger?” he said “Do you think I’m afraid of what that crowd might do to me? It’s the insult, man; the insult!”’12

During the Second World War O’Connor worked in both Ireland and England, desperately trying to earn a living because he was prevented from working on Radio Éireann by John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin. This was because he was living in sin, in the phrase of the time, with a woman who was not married to him. McQuaid considered him to be giving a bad example. Many Irish writers, including John McGahern some decades later, were persecuted directly or indirectly by McQuaid. As ‘Ben Mayo’, O’Connor had a column in the Sunday Independent. At one stage a priest came to the hall door and informed O’Connor’s girlfriend that Radio Éireann had been forbidden to employ either of them. The priest was challenged to prove it. The following day a one-week contract with Radio Éireann fell through the letter-box.

After the war, despite many rejections, O’Connor began to sell stories regularly to American magazines. The Americans paid very well, and he struck up a warm friendship with Bill Maxwell of the New Yorker. Their correspondence survives and has been published. It is, among other things, a practical manual on how to write for magazines, and displays the fruits of a great intellectual friendship. Maxwell used to wonder quietly how O’Connor put up with Ireland at all. Eventually O’Connor married an American girl. By the mid-1950s, his boat had come in and he seems to have achieved some kind of peace and happiness, having escaped financially from his Irish entrapment.

O’Connor used his strong sense of the absurd to ridicule not only the often bizarre antics of Irish republicanism, but the similarly weird anti-intellectual antics of Irish governmental leaders. For example, he loved to harp on the fact that his translation of Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheadhon Oídhche (The Midnight Court) was banned in Ireland for being in general tendency indecent and obscene, while chunks of this marvellous poem in the original language were included in every schoolchild’s Irish-language poetry book. The censorship, however, survived O’Connor by one year and a general lifting of the bans was effected in 1967 by Brian Lenihan; Irish censorship was felled not just by O’Connor’s public assaults on it but also by the weight of its own absurdity.

Many of O’Connor’s short stories were, by the standards of the time and place, relatively sexually explicit. He was preoccupied with the human condition, a condition whose central constituent was loneliness, a loneliness that can be assuaged although not cured by sexual love. This got him into trouble with the censorship people again and again, and fuelled his vitriol against them. He found himself at odds with Irish society in many ways, not least his avoidance of public houses, probably for fear of his father’s chronic alcoholism. He quarrelled with Patrick Kavanagh and Brian Nolan (Flann O’Brien), and eventually had a breach even with O’Faoláin. O’Connor and O’Faoláin both wrote books on the short story as an art form, O’Faoláin’s The Short Story appearing in 1948, O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice being published in 1962.13 O’Faoláin’s book contains an admiring commentary on one of O’Connor’s stories (‘In the Train’). Despite their quarrels and differences, O’Faoláin was grief-stricken at O’Connor’s sudden death, as though part of himself had died. Both writers espoused a theory that in Ireland it is almost impossible to write a first-rate novel, as Irish society is unsettled and shifting. In such a shapeless and incoherent society, the short story finds a role for itself more readily. It is not clear even fifty years later whether Irish society has yet achieved any shape or coherence.

TG

Notes

1Frank O’Connor, Guests of the Nation [1931] (Swords: Poolbeg, 1979).

2Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland (Dublin: M.H. Gill & Sons, 1924).

3James Matthews, Voices: A Life of Frank O’Connor (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983), p.72.

4Frank O’Connor, An Only Child (London: Macmillan, 1958), pp.256–7.

5Ibid., p.274.

6See O’Connor, Guests of the Nation, p.18.

7Frank O’Connor, The Backward Look (London: Macmillan, 1967).

8Ibid., p.114. (The book is, of course, The Hidden Ireland.)

9Ibid., pp.30–52.

10Ibid., pp.46–55.

11See O’Connor, Guests of the Nation, pp.130–44.

12See O’Connor, The Backward Look, pp.165–6.

13Sean O’Faoláin, The Short Story (Cork: Mercier, 1948); Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice [1962] (Cork: City Council, 2003).