Books: Irish Jeer

TRAVELLER’S SAMPLES (238 pp.)—Frank O’Connor—Knopf ($2.75).

Few living writers deserve to be called natural storytellers. One of them is a lyrical, explosive, 47-year-old Irishman named Frank O’Connor. His wry, dry tales may seem, at first glance, mere fragmentary sketches. But at a closer look they reveal themselves as prime examples of stories which tell a lot by saying a little.

His latest collection, Traveller’s Samples, offers a lively display of O’Connor’s line of goods: a readiness to accept and enjoy people in all their frailty, a mocking yet unmalicious mimicry of Irish speech, and a rich instinct for whatever is sly and shrewd in Irish character.

Sometimes O’Connor takes a friendly poke at the Irish clergy, whom he usually paints as a tolerant and jolly lot; sometimes he takes a friendly look at another celebrated Irish institution: sex. He writes about it with sanity and grace. In one story a baby unblessed by law provokes a legal battle between two families, and a lawyer remarks: “The trouble about marriage in this country … is that the fathers always insist on doing the coorting.” In another story, a romantic girl chides a stolid suitor: “You don’t want to make a home for a girl till there’s nothing else left for you to do with her.”

“Coorting” is a favorite activity in O’Connor’s stories. He enjoys showing men in that uncomfortable moment when the impulse to roam clashes with the instinct to settle down. Most of the time they settle, for to the Irish, “marriage seems to come more natural.”

The best of O’Connor’s Samples is a group of stories about Irish childhood.

Tenderest of all is First Confession, the story of a boy convinced that “a fellow confessing his sins after seven years would have more to tell than people that went every week.” To an amused priest he admits his dislike of his grandmother. The priest gives him absolution and some candy, and the boy comes out, heart-lightened, feeling that “he was the most entertaining man I’d ever met in the religious line.”

The typical O’Connor story ends in an affectionate jeer at the human race, but it is the kind of special Irish jeer that warms the heart.