Everyman’s voice

Frank O’Connor was once stopped on the road west of Kinsale by a man who said to him: ‘I hear you’re a famous writer. I’d like to be a famous writer too, but ’tis bloody hard. The comma and the apostrophe are easy enough, but the semicolon is the very divil.’ The man was wrong, of course: the ability to punctuate, and even to spell, correctly are often missing from some of the best writers. What counts is the ability to be on that road, allow yourself to be stopped, listen to what the man says, remember the voice, and know when and how best to use it. O’Connor’s art was that of a man who travels his native Ireland at the speed of a bicycle, happy to pause and listen, slow to come to a general conclusion, preferring the particular instance and the gradually revealed truth.

Mrs W. B. Yeats used to address him as ‘Michael-Frank’, an affectionate combining of his birth-name (Michael O’Donovan) and his pen-name. But that brief hyphen is also an indicator of the proximity between his personal and artistic selves. In some writers, the artistic self is separated off from the daily one: Jekyll closes the study door and turns into Hyde (or, sometimes, vice versa). O’Connor, while containing paradoxes and contradictions as any artist does, was much less of a bifurcated spirit than most. What he was lay very close to what he did; his fiction and non-fiction have similar contours and spirit. And to read the totality of his work is to discover multiple criss-crossings between books, with the same stories alluded to and retold.

But such repetitions, when they occur, don’t feel like a writer recycling his material. Instead, the reader is more likely to smile in affectionate recognition as the stories of the Tailor and Anstey, or Mrs Yeats and the next-door dog, or Lord Edward Fitzgerald and the Native American woman, come round again.