Irish Tales
A Set of Variations.
by Frank O'Connor.
Knopf. 338 pp. $6.95.
The Irish have an insidious gift for making their national failings attractive. This collection of twenty-seven stories of Frank O'Connor, written between 1957 and his death in 1966, presents us with a stifling petitbourgeois society which seems deliberately organized to starve the mind and the emotions. Young people, crippled by poverty and sexual timidity, wait for their parents to die in order to marry; illegitimate children dream and mourn over families they never know; middle-aged bachelors nest with their mothers; priests live and die in terrible loneliness. Through all the stories runs the ubiquitous influence of the Church—like drink, a curse of the Irish. And yet somehow, this depressing material is turned in O'Connor's stories to charm. The bigots and celibates and drunks seem to be winking over their shoulders at us, whispering “It's all right, you know, we're Irish.” There is almost nothing they won't try to pass off as mere eccentricity. In “A Life of Your Own,” a policeman is called in by a girl who has come home to find her house broken into, a pair of panties missing, and “I love you” scrawled above the bed in lipstick. “ ‘ . . . If I was you, Miss Harty, I wouldn't worry my head about him,’ ” says Sergeant Lenihan kindly. “ ‘Sure, after all, what is he, only a poor harmless sexual maniac? The country is full of them.’ ”
A musical-comedy Ireland lies just beneath the surface of the stories; even the best of them dissolve at some point into whimsy or sentimentality. In the title story, “A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme,” Kate Mahoney, a rough, loving old woman, becomes foster mother to two illegitimate children and through them triumphs over age and loneliness, loving the boys so fully that on her death bed she honestly believes they are her own. The story is touching, and it is delightful to listen to Kate talk to the children: “ ‘Oh, you poor putog, you're perished,’ ” she sighs: or “ ‘He have the heart scalded in me. I'd want ten eyes and hands, picking things up after him. . . . Go on, you little gligeen!’ ” Yet finally the story goes on too long, Kate and the situation are worked too hard, and one begins to resent the rather calculated way one's feelings are being played upon. “A Minority” is about two Protestant boys in a Catholic boarding school. Denis Halligan gets tired of being left out and decides to convert, but Willy Stein, a tough, anti-social boy, clings stubbornly to his Protestantism, a lone outcast. Later Denis finds out that Willy is not even a real Protestant, but a Jewish refugee; the priests have only told him he is a “Proddy” to spare him the jeers of the other boys.
. . . alone and despairing, he still clung to a faith that was not his own for the sake of a father and mother he had already almost forgotten, who had been murdered half a world away and whom he would never see again. For a single moment Denis saw the dirty little delinquent whom everybody pitied and despised transfigured by a glory that he himself would never know.
The idea of the story is wonderful, but it is weakened by this fulsomely explicit statement of it and by the endearing cuteness of both boys, which prevents the reader from feeling the reality of Willy's pain and isolation.
Something in O'Connor's technique, and ultimately in his temperament, keeps us at a distance from his stories and muffles their intensity. Character and motivation are approached from the outside, often merely described or summarized in a way that seems perfunctory and superficial. Moreover, the narrative is usually spread out over a long period of time, often many years, so that the dramatic focus is widened and blurred and our attention is turned to the voice which provides the continuity. Like the teller of the tale in the Irish oral tradition to which he was indebted, O'Connor is the most convincing presence in his own stories. The personality that informs his fiction is an extraordinarily attractive one; it is tolerant, humane, and indestructibly hopeful. Yet in its commitment to what is good and redeeming in human nature, there is a lack of understanding of moral ambiguity, of passion, of the depths beneath the surface of behavior. Because the possibilities of pain and darkness in life are not fully realized, the note of affirmation on which the stories end seems facile and heartwarming, like human-interest items in the newspaper. When cruelty and evil appear, they are somehow made innocuous by the narrator's good-humored wisdom. Sex, as an action or a passion, is almost entirely absent, though its telltale result does appear in the person of an occasional illegitimate child. Like a kindly confessor, O'Connor seems to see it as a failing to which the best of us may now and then be subject.
_____________
It is interesting to compare this last collection with O'Connor's first book of stories, Guests of the Nation, published in 1931 when he was twenty-eight. The narrative manner of the early stories is less accomplished; some of them have a rough, anecdotal, fortuitous quality, depending on a remarkable character or a trick of fate, as though the plot had not fully achieved organic form. They deal mostly with the experience of the civil war of 1922, with its random violence and reckless cruelty and idealism. Like the later stories, they are funny, but their humor is of a more primitive, even macabre, kind—it is constantly in the presence of death. And yet they are full of a harsh, mysterious beauty and excitement. Set in dank miserable cottages, in Free State prisons, in barns and lanes and during midnight ambushes, they all seem to take place in a darkness illuminated by occasional brilliant flares of poetic feeling. “Nightpiece with Figures” is typical of the mood of the volume. In this story four young IRA soldiers are hidden in a convent barn by two nuns, an old Gaelic-speaking lay sister and a beautiful young choir nun, who stands in the glow of a lantern and speaks to them passionately and unforgettably of Ireland. Throughout these stories, there is a kind of tension between realism and romanticism, between an Ireland full of misery and drunkenness and brutality, and the ideal, almost mystical Ireland of the two nuns. Yet the writer seems very close to his subjects; the literary self-consciousness of the later stories is absent.
Frank O'Connor wrote great stories, masterpieces such as “Guests of the Nation,” the brilliant title-piece of the first volume, and “Uprooted,” a beautiful story where he touches an authentic source of feeling in Irish life, the mysterious imaginative power that breaks out in the music and the wild metaphorical extravagance of Irish speech. But for the most part, intensity and passion went out of his work over the years, and a layer of charm came over it. Some of the later stories are irresistibly comic, particularly those about Larry Delaney, the prissy kid who gets kicked out of his mother's bed in “My Oedipus Complex,” finds out where babies come from in “The Genius,” and drinks his father's pint in “The Drunkard.” They rely increasingly, however, on a somewhat too ingratiating wit and on stereotyped notions of the humor and pathos of Irish life. This last volume contains some good and entertaining stories, but little to remind us of the author's best work. What remains is principally the music of the narrator's voice, and the genuine sweetness of personal temper that informs everything Frank O'Connor wrote.
