Frank OConnor

Frank OConnor, poet, translator, playwright, and novelist, will be remembered as a master of the short story, and has a strong claim to be among the finest writers of fiction Ireland ever produced. Probably he was too productive for his own reputation: the energetic author of appealing books of travel and anthology, two coruscating volumes of autobiography, five of incisive literary criticism and an enormous number of articles of cultural comment concerning such things as the neglect of Irish monuments, the evils of censorship and compulsory Irish, and Romanesque detail in churches, his easy broadcasting style made his weathered voice familiar to thousands, and the distinctive individual voices of his many poems, plays, and stories spoke familiarly to many more. The paradox is his works are far from verbose. His bare, sinewy poetry, including some of the most vivid translations we possess from the Irish, wastes no word and collapses hundreds of years into a single phrase; his stories, composed with an economy that distils a novels worth of material into ten pages, observe a dry, often humorous penetration into our customary habits of mind, and at their best achieve a spare but heart-rending intensity, recalling W.B.Yeatss desire for literature cold and passionate as the dawn. Indeed, although Yeats and OConnor appeared to Richard Ellmann respectively last romantic and the last realist, they were not altogether different (Sheehy, 26). OConnor instead might well be described as Yeatss heir, an unruly but gifted stepson. Born at the height of the myth-ridden Irish Literary Revival, reaching adolescence in time for the hysterical excitement of the republican movement, but maturing amidst the hypocrisies and introversion of the post-1922 Irish Free State, OConnors characteristic note was always going to be disillusionment. Still, it was from Yeats OConnor learnt the habit of painstaking revision, endlessly writing and rewriting stories and poems as if to manifest an unshakeable belief in arts perfectibility. This chapter gives a comprehensive introduction to his life and his work in all genres and formats.