Books: Mother & Son

AN ONLY CHILD (275 pp.)—Frank O’Connor—Knopf ($4.50).

In two of the most difficult tasks a writer can undertake, to write the truth about himself and about his mother, Frank O’Connor has chosen to tell a plain tale that succeeds better as work of the imagination than most fiction. He writes out of that typical Irish condition, self-exile —O’Connor lives in Palo Alto, Calif.—but the pipes of nostalgia are muted. Indeed, his chosen adjective for the old sod is not “green” but “mediocre.”

The story concerns the pitiful boyhood and youth of Michael O’Donovan (Frank O’Connor is a pen name) in a wet, ruined, pious and oppressed Cork slum. Young Michael was heir to every misery that could afflict a boy: bad teeth, bad eyes, failure and constant canings at school, disgrace in his first wretched jobs, and the horror of a miserly, sententious and drunken father. James Joyce’s squalid boyhood in Dublin was a princely origin compared with the Tartarean depths of little Mick O’Donovan’s life in Cork. Yet by some miracle—or rather two of them —the grown man manages to present not a foul autopsy on his dead life but a gay ballad at his own wake.

The Fey Side. The first miracle involves his own nature. He lived in dreams, and as a man of 58 he still knows the boyhood truth that all children are slightly daft and that imaginative children are plain off their rocker. In the midst of this Cork slum, screaming with malice, he lived among “Invisible Presences”—imaginary young aristocrats at British public schools about whom he read in penny weeklies of the sort that excited the wrath of Etonian George Orwell. Through these stories, barefoot Mick was initiated into the code of the young English gentleman. Naturally it got him into a lot of trouble—when he “owned up to” his own school crimes or refused to “tell on” others, he would get extra cane. But for the time being, playing cricket in the clouds was the only way out of Cork. These Etonian fancies were to him what the drink was to his father.

The other miracle involves the saintly character of his mother, Minnie O’Connor, who from the time she left a church-run orphanage at 14 had known nothing but the life of a slavey, sometimes unpaid, in households selected by the nuns for Catholic respectability rather than the real virtue of charity. In telling the life of this simple, devout soul, her son avoids the curse of self-pity that afflicted even such masterly performers as Samuel Butler, Rousseau and Stendhal, not to speak of a swarm of modern confessionists. After writing his mother’s life—partly, of course, as she told it to him—O’Connor has no pity left to spend on himself. “The gutter where life had thrown her was deep and dirty,” he notes. But, like her son, Mother was a bit on the fey side. With the innocence they shared, they forded the gutter undirtied. A quality that O’Connor variously calls “gaiety,” “simple-mindedness” or “belief in the world of appearances” made for survival against the O’Donovan strain, which was morose, complicated and given to inward broodings.

Goethe & Gaelic. The tension between these two strains adds a dimension of art to the superficially farcical misadventures of Michael O’Donovan. The naive hero is no new thing to fiction, but seldom has the type been told from within, nor has his intrinsic comedy been so unforced. Michael had-secretly accumulated a weird library from bookstore trash boxes, and its contents filled his mind, but nothing fitted anything he had to do in the world. Thus, when fired from his first good job as the world’s worst railway freight clerk, he spoke that night in his self-taught Gaelic to a Gaelic League meeting on the character of Goethe. In short, a hopeless case. If ever a man became a writer because there was nothing else in the world he could do, it was Frank O’Connor.

The Troubles—the Irish civil war of 1922 between the intransigent Irish republicans and the Free State government, which had accepted a patched peace with Britain—found the 19-year-old “out” with the republicans. His account digs up no buried hatchets, which makes this, of all other memoirs of the Troubles, the most acceptable to the nonpartisan. The Corkite republicans had their generals (milkmen and cobblers in private life), their officers’ mess, and even a cannon with homemade shells. But they had no front line. By the time they established this military necessity, it was Sunday, recalls O’Connor, and “after his longing for Mass, an Irishman’s strongest characteristic is his longing for home and Mother, and anyone who knew his Ireland would have guessed that on that fine summer morning our whole front was being pierced in a dozen places by nostalgic enemy soldiers, alone or in force, all pining to embrace their mothers and discover if the cow had calved.” Eventually, the author himself began to long for home and Mother; aided by his native humor, he let go the “Shelleyan fantasy” of the Cork rebellion and settled in Dublin, with Mother, to try his hand at writing.

Frank O’Connor’s early life of Michael O’Donovan belongs with the best of its kind. It is that of a man who has made his life important to others simply because he has written about it with art. It is also a specimen of that mythical work for which the U.S. public is said to hanker—the tragedy with a happy ending.