Some thoughts on the short fiction of Frank O’Connor

How has your quarantine reading been going? Are you tackling those big doorstops that you’ve always meant to get to or is your attention span only focused enough for micro short fiction? Have you preferred to lose yourself in escapist fiction, bend your mind with the experimental stuff or face up to facts with realism? 

 Of course, there are no right answers here, and in my case, I will most likely find myself touching several of those bases. To begin with, I spent the first month of quarantine reading Frank O’Connor’s Collected Stories. As much as I could focus and immerse myself in the world of his short fiction, I immensely enjoyed this experience.   

The Collected Stories opens with arguably his most famous story, “Guests of the Nation.” It’s a stunner. A group of Irish Republican soldiers are guarding a couple of captured British soldiers. The banter between the two groups is easy going. The narrator of the story enjoys the Brits’ easy going humor and their political debates—one of them is a socialist who sees the strife in Ireland through a class conflict lens. It is assumed by all that the soldiers are being held for a prisoner exchange. The story turns when the order comes down to execute the Brits in retaliation for the killing of Irish soldiers.

The narrator and his colleagues are stunned by the order though they reluctantly carry it out. The unfolding horror of the execution is portrayed in an understated, matter of fact manner. It is a masterful story that will remind Isaac Babel readers of his Red Army stories. As it so happens, Babel was a stated influence on O’Connor’s writing. While there are a few other Republican Army stories in this collection, the bulk of them are more domestic tales based in the either in the city of Cork or in the countryside. Among my favorites are the ones based on his childhood. The most famous of these is “My Oedipus Complex,” a wry tale of the battles that a mother-attached boy wages with his just returned from the war father. A twist at the end of the story makes for high ironic comedy.

 O’Connor is especially strong at capturing the viewpoints of children—their selfishness and anxieties. The boys are often closer to the mothers though yearning for attention from their often alcoholic fathers (a persistent theme in O’Connor’s fiction). His depiction of girls and women in general is quite fascinating. On one level they appear to be mean, bitchy, and closed off, intimidating, if not terrifying the boys and men who encounter them. The usually male narrators frequently make wry comments about the difficulty of women’s attitudes and behavior, which certainly should be interpreted as misogynistic, but not necessarily reflective of the author’s beliefs. 

 In fact, a sustained reading of O’Connor’s work has led me to believe that his female characters are presented with deep sensitivity, and that the sometimes boorish attitudes of his narrators are meant to be taken with a good dose of irony.  

The position of women in O’Connor’s stories is difficult. They are constrained by the church and its draconian attitudes, as well as often self-absorbed, bitter, unreliable, and the aforementioned frequently alcoholic men. In various instances they use their intelligence or patience or faith to endure their difficult circumstances. In the course of these stories, which are arranged chronologically in order of publication, O’Connor’s skill in portraying women deepens in subtlety and psychological richness grows—so it seems to me anyway.

One of the most fascinating of his “relationship” stories is “There Is a Lone House,” in which an unnamed woman with a family secret who lives alone takes in an unnamed younger man who is a wandering laborer. The man does work for the woman in exchange for shelter. In time they become lovers. Eventually the man grows restless, but he eventually returns. Their relationship is passionate and contentious. It changes both of them but it’s complicated, as defined in this passage.

“It seemed a physical rather than a spiritual change. Line by line her features divested themselves of strain, and her body seemed to fall into easier, more graceful curves. It would not be untrue to say she scarcely thought of the man, unless it was with some slight relief to find herself alone again. Her thoughts were all contracted within herself.”

 On one level, this is the woman’s sexual reawakening, triggered perhaps by her unnamed lover’s virility, but it is sustained and deepened by her own reserves and emotional intelligence, as the man discovers time and again: “He had felt in him this new, lusty manhood, and returned with the intention of dominating her, only to find she too had grown, and still outstripped him.” The pair’s path to mutual respect and accommodation is hard won and solid in spite of the revelation of the woman’s secret (I won’t give it away). Dignity, self and mutual respect, are achieved in this impressive story of the growth of a mature relationship.

O’Connor’s later stories (this collection presents them in chronological order of publication) are largely focused on death. My favorite of these tales is “The Story Teller,” in which a young girl’s beloved, tale spinning, seemingly pagan grandfather is dying. He has scandalized his more religious children with his scorning of the church and his embrace of Irish folklore and stories. Afric, the little girl, fully expects her grandfather to be borne away from life by the mysterious figures in the tales that he has enchanted her with. She ignores the judgmental comments of her family members as they speak of their patriarch’s lifelong blasphemy as she keeps the faith in her grandfather’s stories. However, no magical moments happen as her grandfather quietly slips away.

“There was no farewell, no clatter of silver oars or rowlocks as magic took her childhood away. Nothing, nothing at all. With a strange choking in her throat she went slowly back to the house. She thought that maybe she knew now why her grandfather had been so sad.”

It is a bittersweet, if not crushing moment in a little girl’s life, but perhaps also a statement of purpose of the writer’s life: forging ahead with the work of storytelling in the face of inevitable disappointment and decline. Good practices to consider in the midst of a grim pandemic. And what a pleasure and comfort to muse on these notions while reading these wonderful stories. 

I just finished Zora Neale Hurston’s recently published collection of stories,Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stickwith an introduction by Hurston scholar, Genevieve West. As is my habit, I read the stories first and then the introduction after (more on that practice later).

A number of the stories in this collection were recently rediscovered in small publications from seven or eight decades ago. Most of Hurston’s well-known fiction is set in her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, a patch of earth that she makes her own as much as Faulkner makes Yoknapatawpha County the center of his fiction, as Tayari Jones observes in the book’s foreword (yes, there’s a foreword too). 

Besides presenting a number of Hurston’s stories that have remained in obscurity for years, this collection also reveals an aspect of her work that is not generally known. A number of the stories are set in Harlem (for example, her two mock biblical stories, both titled “The Book of Harlem”) among the community of African Americans that made the Great Migration northward from southern places such as Eatonville. These rural southern greenhorns are vulnerable to smooth talking city slickers and seducers, though sometimes they come out on top. These stories have the same flavor of folklore and community triumph, tragedy, and humor as her more well known works in rural settings. And when I say humor, I mean it, there are many laugh out loud moments in these stories. 

These stories were published over a decade plus in various periodicals (or not at all in her lifetime), and demonstrate her growth as a fiction writer, not least among them the evolution of her depiction of African American dialect on the page. Her flair for dialogue is always vivid, and as I said above, frequently hilarious when that was her intention, as in this line from the story, “Sweat”: “She don’t look lak a thing but a hunk uh liver wid hair on it.” Pretty difficult to get that image out of one’s mind. Yet this funny line is in the middle of a story about a man who beats his wife horribly and cheats on her. Spoiler alert: she gets her revenge in a very brutal way. It’s an extraordinary story. 

I am merely scratching the surface here. Although not all of these stories are stone classics, they are all worth reading for their wit, feeling, atmosphere, characters, and ideas. Zora Neale Hurston’s work is squarely rooted in African American life whether in the rural south or in Harlem. She had the extraordinary ability to set a scene in just a few words, to dramatize conflict between characters using subtle shifts in tone, and of course there is always the great humor. And of course she was a great feminist icon by just practicing her art with courage, heart, and confidence in a so-called “man’s world.” I plan on reading a lot more of her work going forward. 

And speaking of forward and forewords, I very much enjoyed Genevieve West’s informative introduction. Perhaps I would have gained more from these stories had I read it first, as was intended, but that wasn’t how I did it. 

When I enter a novel or story for a first reading, I am as tentative as I am entering a party, trying to figure out who is who and getting into the rhythm of the gathering. Maybe not the best analogy since I am a shy person who feels anxious in crowds, but I also feel a certain degree of anxiety when reading a piece of fiction for the first time. Am I following the thread of the plot? Who is this or that character?  Am I picking up on the themes/metaphors/symbols of the story? Am I doing right by this author?

Continuing with this shy person at a party analogy we might observe that it is nice to have a friendly face to introduce us around to the various strange faces or at least give us a road map to the social situation. Therefore, I submit that a well written and thoughtful introduction to a book can be, well, a nice introduction to the characters, plot, themes, author’s intentions, etc. It can help us cut through the confusion, to reduce the anxiety of where am I, who is this, what’s going on? 

Here is where matters become complicated: despite my “anxiety” and confusion when getting into an unfamiliar work of fiction, I am more brave venturing into that alien territory than I am in a social gathering. I flatter myself that I have enough intelligence, sensitivity, reading experience, and scholarly training to get my bearings when I am reading a work that is new to me. 

As I said above, there is a lot of value in a well written and informed introduction. It can open up a text in a meaningful way. It’s a good way to enter the party, as it were, but in books as in life, I usually loosen up in the course of reading the book and go back to the introduction at the end, which is what I did with Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick. 

Forward and foreword!

I recently read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. I was eager to get to it after having such an outstanding experience reading his collected stories. Many of the stories that I most enjoyed were composed during the years that Fitzgerald was struggling with that novel, not to mention with his alcoholism, his wife Zelda’s mental illness, and a constant need of funds. 

It is difficult to ignore the details of Fitzgerald’s life when dipping or diving into his work, or at least it is for me. It is doubly difficult to separate the facts of his life from his fiction when the material at hand is so heavily autobiographical. When we watch the main protagonist of the novel, Dick Diver, go to pieces due to excessive drinking, involvement in his wife’s therapy (he’s not only her husband, he’s in charge of her treatment!), love affairs, and self-absorption, we can’t help but think of the soap opera that was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life.

Dick Diver was based on Lost Generation painter, aesthete, and man on the scene, Gerald Murphy, but mainly Fitzgerald himself. Perhaps the initial impression we are given of Dick, as seen through the eyes of his eventual paramour, Rosemary, is the Murphy influence, “He seemed kind and charming—his voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her, unroll an endless succession of magnificent possibilities”

By novel’s end, Dick is a beaten man, exhausted by alcoholism, his romantic affairs, and his relationship with his mentally ill wife, Nicole. The man who strode about so confidently on a French Riviera beach when Rosemary first met him, is five years later on that same beach, a broken man who is too weak and exhausted to perform a physical stunt that he had once performed with ease. That this humiliating episode happens in front of the now recovered Nicole, who is engaging in a hot affair with another man, as well as an older and less starry-eyed Rosemary. The existential and sexual impotence of Dick Diver (pun intended?) is complete. If the glamourous Dick of the beginning of the novel is based on Murphy, the Diver of the end of the novel is the battered Fitzgerald.

I must admit that I struggled to get through Tender is the Night. It is frequently brilliant and very moving at its conclusion—its autobiographical details make it doubly so for me—but I had to drag myself through certain sections. I think this mainly due to a sort of Fitzgerald overdose that I experienced after eight hundred fifty pages of his short stories. Sometimes you have to put that box of candies down after you’ve gorged yourself, however I didn’t in this case and as a result I didn’t give Tender Is the Night the attention it deserved.

I plan on reading more Fitzgerald shortly, but I will give Scott a short break before I dive into Gatsby and maybe the first two novels. And of course, there are the short stories that weren’t included in the gigantic collection…