Happy Realism: Frank O'Connor Approaches Life

During Harvard Summer School, when Frank O'Connor discusses the nineteenth century novel, he does not disguise the fact that the only thing he thinks worthy of writing about is "the common feelings of common life." Esetericism he says may be perfectly well written but it has no more substance than a toy balloon. But O'Conner, unlike the great majority of realists, carries his theory further than his material. His is a common, clean response to the common feelings of common life. There are few, if any, symbols in his work; there is no prediction of doom. Frequently he allows himself a laugh at his characters, but is a healthy laugh and not a snicker.

About Ireland

O'Connor's refreshing interpretation of realism is eminently illustrated in the new collection entitled simply More Stories.

Although his stories are set in Ireland, and his characters say "Begor" rather than "Good Lord," O'Conner's nationalism merely adds spice to the staple of universality that marks his characters and situations. Money and sex, religion and childhood are the problems with which he confronts his people. And they either solve them or they do not, depending on their personality which has been presented more or less explicitly. For example, in a story called Masculine Protest, a boy runs away from home after a quarrel with his mother and returns the next day. Yet he has solved one of the main problems of childhood by the fact of running away: "Dad too had once run away from home, and for some reason--perhaps because the bank was shut, or because he was hungry, tired, and lonely--he had come back, but their protest remained to distinguish them from all the others who had never run away. It was the real sign of their manhood. I never ran away after that. I never felt I needed to."

The Frying Pan is of a different sort. Catholic priest and the wife of his best friend quite suddenly find that they are in love with each other. Here is where a naturalist would lead his characters into the widest fights of criticism: the unfortunate, quite passionless husband would be painted in a pitiless, scoffing manner, and certainly the love scenes between priest and wife could be ignored in all their sordid and demented glory. But O'Connor merely comments, "He (the husband) as he really was, a man at war with his animal nature, longing for some high, solitary existence f the intellect and imagination. And he know that the three of them, Tom, Una, and himself, would die as they had lived, their desires unsatisfied."

Humor never disappears for long in Frank O'Conner's work. It is a sympathetic, almost humble humor which is as much written for the object as at him. "There are a lot of things old bishops have to put up with besides old age, loneliness, and lack of domestic comforts, and the worst of these is coadjutors. To be God Almighty tagged on you to see that your justice and morality are the proper kind, is a more than human ordeal."

O' Connor's prose is most interesting. Sometimes it seems to hover between a clinched thought and a profundity, and then lights invariably on the latter's side. There are many trite lines in his exposition, but he uses them to advantage, and they seem to enhance rather than detract from a description. It is unwise to think that he is consciously striving for an idiom, because his range of character cannot be so confined. Perhaps the best that can be said of this prose is that it is intriguing. It is also wonderfully readable.

More Stories is a series of photographic slides. But these slides have been lopped off at either and like a photograph: there is a triple dimension and a color in them that is limitless. Each is relative to a living condition; each living character has a living type in reality. It is this retouching of the slides that reveals the brilliance of Frank O'Connor.