‘The capital, Galway, is a terrible place. It has of course St Nicholas, one of the few remaining preReformation churches; the frontispiece of a Renaissance town house erected as a gateway to the public park; and a medieval fortified house about which they tell the well-known story of the Lynch who hanged his own son when the sheriff wasn't available. At least once a year while I was director of the Abbey theatre we got a play on that. From Miss Edgeworth's account of her travels to Galway it would appear that as a theme for tragedy it was popular a hundred years ago. But even before that I had a lively hatred of the town....'
Oh dear. Just when we were all excited about getting back to some kind of normality, Frank O'Connor brings us back down to earth. Admittedly his observations were made some time ago in his book Leinster, Munster and Connaught* and were based on his belief that Galway was not a real town, let alone a city, in the true meaning of the word 'urban'. First of all, he argues, Galway is run by the 'ferocious O'Flahertys'. 'And, as if that is not enough to break the heart in any responsible community, it has the Aran Islands on its hands as well. That is not to decry Connemara, or even the Aran Islands, which are a wonderful place for those who do not suffer as badly as I do from insulaphobia. But they do not produce city-dwellers. Theirs is an exclusively agriculture culture....'
Ireland’s greatest short story writer is probably the late Frank O’Connor (1903- 1966 ). Born in Cork city, his autobiography An Only Child (1961 ) is ironically a celebration of his vivacious but fastidious mother, and their survival from his alcoholic, and at times brutal, father.
O’Connor was blessed to have had a brilliant teacher, Daniel Corkery, at Cork’s renowned North Mon school, who encouraged his learning Irish and to write.
He came to the attention of WB Yeats and George Russell (AE ) who widely praised his work. While only in his early thirties Yeats invited him to become a member, and later a director, of the Abbey Theatre, which was founded by Yeats and others of the Irish National Theatre Society, a powerful voice in the growing demands for national independence at the beginning of the 20th century.
We knew little of O’Connor’s personal struggles in the Abbey Theatre other than he gave much energy to the theatre’s affairs and wrote several plays. It was not until his book Leinster, Munster and Connaught was published in 1950 that we learned about his initial terror of Lady Augusta Gregory, a co-founder of the Abbey, the author of numerous plays performed there, and a steadfast defender and guide during the theatre’s many crises. She could be a stern administrator, and firmly held everyone to their ‘first intent’.
Trip to Coole
In his book O’Connor arrives in County Galway and gazes with pity on the ruins of Coole Park, Lady Gregory’s home. She had died in 1932, eighteen years earlier. Her home, he writes, was ‘sold by Mr de Valera’s government to a Galway builder for £500 and torn down for scrap’. Admirers of Lady Gregory will be amused at O’Connor’s memories of meeting her ladyship when he first joined the Abbey team.
‘The old lady was a holy terror; that is the only way I can describe her. On the first evening that I called at Yeats’ I also met her. She came into the drawing-room in her mantilla, and, while I warmed to Yeats, she struck cold terror into my heart. ‘In my embarrassment I told the story of an unfortunate Gaelic teacher I knew in Cork, whose only hope of collecting his salary was to put on a concert and play, and who would have got no salary at all if he produced a play which required the payment of royalties.
O’Connor was probably the first of Irish playwrights who, sometimes inadvisably, have a fondness to rewrite Russian classics. He boldly Russianised Lady Gregory’s most popular play, The Workhouse Ward, under the title of ‘Crime and Punishment’, translated from the original Russian of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Lady Gregory was not impressed. She looked around and said bleakly. ‘“And didn’t he know it was wrong?” she asked in her flat charwoman’s voice - a comment which deserves to go down in history with “We are not amused.”
Pangur the cat
‘For the rest of my life I nourished something like an inferiority complex about the old lady until long after Yeats’ death. Mrs Yeats revealed to me that he was as terrified of her as I was. She had always treated him as a talented but naughty child.
‘When at last he married and took his young wife to Coole, he felt the time had come for him to assert his manhood. No animals were permitted in Coole - which, considering what most Irish country houses are like, seems to me to be kindness to Christians - and Yeats was fond of his cat. Now that he was a married man, a mature man, a famous man, he was surely entitled to his cat. So Pangur was duly bundled up and brought to Gort. But as the outside car drove up the avenue of Coole, the married, mature, famous man grew panic-stricken at the thought of the old lady’s forbidding countenance. He bade the jarvy drive him fi rst to the stables. There Pangur was deposited until, everyone having gone to bed, Yeats crept out in his slippers and brought him up to the bedroom.
‘Yet till the day she died he secretly nursed the hope of being able to treat her as an equal. Nobody who had ever been squelched by her could realise the relief with which I heard this...’
'Tuam will find me'
As for the busy town of Tuam, O'Connor has no patience at all. 'Tuam is even worse, much worse. Once in a Dublin bookshop I saw an ecclesiastical dignitary buying a book.
"Of course, " said the assistant, " I can make an effort to get you the complete poems."
"I'd be very glad if you could try," said the ecclesiastical dignitary. " You know the address. Tuam will find me."
My curiosity as to what sort of poetry people would read in a hole like Tuam was too much for me. I am afraid I stole up behind to get a look at the book.
"Of course," the assistant said enthusiastically, "just as poetry this is a very good selection."
"I don't mind the poetry," said the ecclesiastical dignitary wearily." It's the crossword clues I want. They use Kipling such a lot in the puzzles."
Seduced by poetry
But for all his mockery O'Connor is seduced by our poetry. 'The poetry is still there, though the schools are at their task of destroying one tradition without being able to provide sufficient of another to fill the vacuum they create.'
Yet, he relates, that it was a school inspector in Connemara who offered sixpence for the best song the children brought in from home who gave O'Connor the original Irish of 'How Well for the Birds,' which he translates:
How well for the birds that can rise in their flight
And settle together on the one bough at night;
It is not so with me and the boy of my heart,
Each morning the sun finds us rising apart.
O'Connor is moved by the verse. He observes that the poetry of the west of Ireland is very different from the 'over elaborate rhyme-schemes and pseudoliterary conventions' found in the poems of Cork and Kerry.
'The poetry of the west is almost pure folk poetry... here it is almost shapeless; it drifts like mist..' He recalls that he was taking 'a rather tough love song' from a young girl whose grandfather had been a well-known story-teller. The girl's grandmother came into the room carrying a load of sticks, and sat down. When the child had finished the old woman began a song of a girl who gave her virginity too easily:
Éiri' is cuir fál ar an bpáirc a mhill tu aréir,
Má théigheann na ba sa bhfásach is fánach ar an bhféar .
(Arise and put a fence about the field you spoiled last night.
If the cows get into the meadow, 'twill go hard upon the grass ).
'That is the sort of thing which can happen to you still in Connemara, and nowhere else I know of in western Europe, unless it be in the Scottish islands.'
O'Connor got into conversation with a Mayo tramp, who asked him if he had visited Killeadan, where the poet Anthony Raftery was born?
Before O'Connor could reply, the man drew himself erect and quoted in Irish:
"If I could stand in the heart of my people
Old age would drop from me and youth would come back..."
Referring to the great burst of energy that emanated from the writers and artists who had gathered at Lady Gregory's Coole Park at the beginning of the century, O'Connor believed that 'it was only from these western counties that so romantic a literature could have sprung. A little civilisation would have upset it.'
NOTES:
*Published by Robert Hale and Co, London, 1950.
O’Connor resigned from the Abbey after the death of Yeats. From the 1930s to the 1960s he was a prolific writer of short stories, poems, plays and novellas, which included Guests of a Nation (1931 ), The Common Chord (1947 ), An Only Child (1961 ), My father’s Son (1968 ), numerous essays and articles in the New Yorker, and the Sunday Independent, and The Bell, many of which are extraordinarily amusing. He famously translated Brian Merriman’s Cuírt na Meán Oiche (The Midnight Court ), which was banned.
His love life was complicated. He married firstly a divorced Welsh actress, Esther Evelyn Bowen, which was not a popular choice in the Catholic Ireland of the time. It eventually ended in divorce, and self exile in America, where he lectured, and was a much loved broadcaster. He married secondly, an American, Harriet R Rich. Frank O’Connor was the father of five children.
He was a fighter too. He commented critically on many aspects of Irish life, including governmental policy on education, health, and language. He also began a lifelong campaign for the preservation of national monuments, whose neglect and decay he deplored. The same concern dominates his travel books Irish Miles (1947 ), and Leinster, Munster and Connaught (1950 ).
Additional sources include an essay on Frank O’Connor in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, by Ruth Sherry.
Listen to Tom Kenny and Ronnie O'Gorman elaborating on topics they have covered in this week's paper and much more in this week's Old Galway Diary Podcast.
