The New Criterion

By outliving the century in which we were born—a century of violence and upheaval in the arts as in politics—we have gained the luxury of seeing how the great movements of the time have played themselves out. How laughable it is today to remember Khrushchev at the podium of the U.N. General Assembly, pounding his shoe on the table and shouting “We will bury you!” In evaluating the effect of twentieth-century literature on posterity, modernism’s credentials are starting to look almost as shaky as those of Communism. Literary modernism, which was once believed to carry the same cachet of revolutionary inevitability as Marxism, has not aged well. In the 1960s, when I was in graduate school, three works, The Cantos, The Waste Land, and Finnegans Wake, were considered the ne plus ultra. For me, the only one of these that can still be read for pleasure is The Waste Land, perhaps because it is a kind of drama, perhaps because Eliot’s language is so classically beautiful compared to the babblings of Joyce in Finnegans Wake and the ravings of Pound in The Cantos, who, to adopt a word from the lexicon of Vito Corleone, now seems a pezzonovante.

Whether poetry has recovered the readership it lost to modernist obscurity is a question I won’t debate here. But both in America and even more so in the United Kingdom and Ireland, fiction has turned out to have little trouble retaining its traditional audience. The ruddy vigor of the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, and the superb craftsmanship of short-story writers like William Trevor, are a tribute to the commonsensical attitude to life and literature in these islands. Novelists like Joyce and poets such as Pound did not prove to have very long coattails. Yet in 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 Best English-language Novels of the Twentieth Century. And in the academic world, Joyce continues to reign supreme—largely, I suspect, because his obscurities give academic critics so much fodder for explication and expatiation. Joyce’s reputation has risen in the Irish literary pantheon to such an unassailable place that even your taxi driver in Dublin, who, like me, has probably never been able to finish Ulysses, will still confidently tell you that this is the greatest Irish novel. And yet—granted that Joyce’s reputation rests on the novel while O’Connor’s supreme achievements are in the short story—the best Irish fiction writer of the last century was arguably not Joyce at all, but Frank O’Connor.

Among the delights of The Best of Frank O’Connor, which Julian Barnes has edited for Everyman’s Library, is the section on his criticism and literary commentary called “Writers.” O’Connor never set himself up as the anti-Joyce. Far from it, he is a self-styled “hero-worshipper.” But as an expert practitioner of the art of fiction, he was a more acute critic than the professional Joyceans:

Almost every serious critic of Joyce has felt and said the same things about Ulysses: that it is the greatest book of our time, and at the same time that it isn’t a great book at all. . . . For close on the first three hundred pages Ulysses is absolutely beyond comparison in modern literature. It is, what Joyce intended it to be, the whole of life; the complete man in the complete world.

O’Connor goes on from here to give a detailed analysis of the failure of the central episode of the novel, where Joyce exercises his unparalleled literary virtuosity just when he needs to appeal to our common humanity, in the manner of the great writers with whom he is sometimes compared—Tolstoy, Homer, and Dante, to name three. O’Connor’s critique concludes: “The book never recovers from the incompetence of the central episode . . . and it is saved from mediocrity only by the magnificent last episode which brings us back with a jolt to the mood of the first chapters, saturated with the poetry of everyday life.” I have never read a more honest and convincing account of the book that the late Terence de Vere White called “the great whale” of Irish literature.

Of equal interest are O’Connor’s reminiscences of W. B. Yeats. No one else has given us a better or more intimate picture of this great poet who can seem, in other accounts, so aloof:

When he was happy and forgot himself, animation seemed to flow over him. He sat forward, arms on his knees, washing his hands over and over, the pose sometimes broken by a loud, harsh, throaty laugh and the tossing back of the big bird’s head while he sat bolt upright in his chair gripping his lapels and raising his brows with a triumphant stare. . . . That blaze of excitement would sweep over his face like a glory, like a blast of sunlight over a moor, and from behind the mask a boy’s tense eager face looked out at you . . .

There are other gems here, including a brief but searching portrait of Michael Collins, the guerrilla genius of the War of Independence. Still, as glad as one is to have these insights and observations, criticism and biographical reminiscence were only sidelines for O’Connor. As a short-story writer, his two supreme subjects are war and childhood. Part of the brilliance of his stories about childhood is his use of first-person narration. He is a past master in employing the naïve narrator, the primary source of humor in these wonderful stories. The contrast between his childish narrator and the child’s father—clearly based on himself and his own father, an ex-soldier who worked as a navvy, or day-laborer, digging ditches and performing other rough tasks—is both very funny and touching. In “The Genius,” we see the boy trying to get someone to explain the facts of life. “I appealed to Father and he told me that babies were dropped out of aeroplanes and if you caught one you could keep it. ‘By parachute?’ I asked, but he only looked pained and said: ‘Oh, no, you don’t want to begin by spoiling them.’”

His classic “Guests of the Nation” captures the casual cruelty of war—how it opposes all that is best in human nature—better than any story I know. Two English prisoners are executed by the ira during Ireland’s War of Independence, which preceded the Civil War, when the two sides who had fought together to win their country’s freedom from the British Empire turned on each other. If O’Connor were alive today, surely he would have something to say about the brutalizing effects of the nation’s violent beginnings on the Irish psyche.

It is hard to convey through brief quotations the true flavor of O’Connor’s fiction, based as it is on an unequaled sense of pacing and spaciousness. One might sum up the quality of his work in one word: “tenderness.” Like Joyce, O’Connor found it convenient to live most of his life outside Ireland, that island which contains, as Yeats put it, “Great hatred, little room.” There is little evidence in him of Yeats’s “fanatic heart,” a heart which had no room for hatred. He is to fiction what Schubert is to music