In the preface to this first complete biography of Irish author Frank O’Connor, James Matthews remarks that one would only write about Michael O’Donovan because of what he wrote under the name of Frank O’Connor, for O’Connor himself agreed with William Butler Yeats that what one writes is indeed a self-portrait. Such an assumption might well be the basic justification for any biography of a literary figure. The primary interest in reading such a biography usually lies not in the intrinsic interest of the life story itself, except for those writers who take on celebrity status, but rather is based on the conventional assumption that one can better understand the art of the writer by understanding his life. Such an assumption begs many questions in the rarefied realm of literary criticism these days, but they are not questions with which James Matthews concerns himself. Instead, what he has written here is a quite conventional and traditional biography of an author, with the primary emphasis on life events rather than on criticism of the artist’s works.
What Matthews searches for here is what Leon Edel once called “the figure under the carpet”—that is, the unifying myth that gives structure to the fragmented nature of a human life. Unlike Edel in his monumental five-volume study, Henry James (1953-1972), however, Matthews does not tightly weave together the artistic production of O’Connor with his life. The approach is more narrative in method, with periodic stops to discuss the works when appropriate. The unifying themes that give structure to Matthews’ book spring more from the narrative of the life than from the analyses of the books; indeed, as Matthews suggests, it can be said that Frank O’Connor lived a good story.
Given such promising material, Matthews tells the story in an interesting and entertaining way. Although the work is well documented, with sixty pages of small-print end notes, the reader can easily ignore these and proceed with the narrative. The text itself is not cluttered with references but rather develops from the narrative point of view of one who has thoroughly familiarized himself with the events of O’Connor’s life and views it all from a more or less objective retrospective standpoint. One does not get the impression of a distinctive controlling voice here, as one does, for example, in Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce (1959). The narrative strategy is a fairly simple one of charting the crucial events of O’Connor’s life in relatively autonomous blocks or life stages indicated by such chapter titles as “From Cork to the World’s Side,” “Retreat to Woodenbridge,” “On Sandymount Strand,” “The Visiting ’Perfesser,’” and “Exile’s Return.” The biography reads quite nicely as a story of one man’s life and as such is fully as engaging as fiction—a blurring of the two realms that O’Connor himself would have appreciated.
Because his purpose is to re-create a life, rather than to analyze or meditate on it, Matthews focuses primarily on events, making generalizations about O’Connor’s psychic life only sparingly and then only in terms that seem easily justifiable—for example, that O’Connor was somewhat of a “mommy’s boy,” that he attached a value to girls beyond proportion, that he exaggerated his own desire, and that he saw external reality through a veil of literature. In fact, many of the generalizations Matthews makes characterize O’Connor as a sort of stereotype of a child of his culture and as the typical artist as a young man. For example, Matthews admits that the image of his mother as gentle and saintlike and his father as hard-drinking and bellicose seems an Irish archetype. As is typical of the narrative literary biography, Matthews makes use of fictional techniques to sustain his narrative. As opposed to Leon Edel, however, who made use of Jamesian novelistic devices typical of his subject, Matthews faces the problem of trying to write a unified life of a man who artistically captured reality in the revealing illuminations of the short-story form. Perhaps for this reason, Matthews says that writing a life of O’Connor is like circling a stranger’s house and peering inside, never being able to enter but having to content oneself with momentary glimpses from many angles.
Although Matthews focuses primarily on narrative, this is not to say that he neglects discussions of O’Connor’s works; it is rather to say that he is much stronger when spinning O’Connor’s life story than when analyzing O’Connor’s own storytelling skills. Matthews often oversimplifies O’Connor’s fiction to show how it is illustrative of his life. For example, the child’s relation to the father in O’Connor’s best-known works, such as “My Oedipus Complex,” “Man of the House,” and “The Drunkard,” present an image of the father in a more complex way than Matthews’ simple judgment of O’Connor’s bitterness toward the man would suggest. O’Connor’s relationship with his father was surely an important one, even if negatively indicated, for much of the early part of the biography indicates O’Connor’s search for a surrogate father figure, one who would represent either an intellectual mentor or a truly Irish precursor. The most important of these figures are Daniel Corkery, O’Connor’s early teacher at Saint Patrick’s School; Æ (George Russell), who introduced O’Connor to Dublin intellectual life; and of course, Yeats, who was at the time the center of that intellectual life.
When O’Connor left provincial Cork for Dublin, it was a world for which he was emotionally, if not socially, ready. For Matthews portrays his childhood as one in which he was a sickly and frail misfit among the other boys in the slums of Blarney Lane, rejected as a sissy and a snob, a child who lived primarily in his fantasy world and who later depicted this world in stories of children who were caught in dilemmas precisely by taking their fantasies and their reading too seriously. After being initially accepted into the world of the Dublin literati, Michael O’Donovan, at the age of twenty, adopted his middle name and his mother’s maiden name and affected the role of the poet, buying a broad-brimmed black hat and sitting proudly all day in an outdoor café as if to verify to himself and announce to the world his new status.
O’Connor’s brief stint with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the springtime revolution and the Civil War is not highly emphasized by Matthews, although the experience does form the basis for “Guests of the Nation,” his first unqualified success as a writer and perhaps his best-known story. Matthews suggests that instead of being politically committed, O’Connor saw the revolution through a veil of literature; after his brief imprisonment by the Free State soldiers, he left the conflict, his romanticism disillusioned.
O’Connor’s life as a man, says Matthews, began with his life as a writer, when he took on his new name, met Æ, began to write reviews and poems for the Irish Statesman, and attempted to revive drama in Cork. This life began to quicken, moreover, when he left Cork for Dublin to become a librarian there between 1928 and 1938, his most productive years as a writer. Although Matthews does indeed discuss the stories in O’Connor’s first book, Guests of the Nation (1931), as well as his first novel, The Saint and Mary Kate (1932), much of the emphasis during this period of O’Connor’s life falls on his somewhat shy and chaste courtship with the reluctant Nancy McCarthy, his struggles with the library, and his awkwardness and gauche behavior in society. After Nancy’s marriage to another man, O’Connor, at age thirty, suffered a collapse, only to be followed by a new creative outburst that resulted in his collection of stories Bones of Contention (1934).
O’Connor’s work with the Abbey Theatre, his relationship with Yeats and Æ, and his courtship of Evelyn Bowen, a Welsh actress, are detailed in this section. His marriage to Evelyn in 1939, the death of Yeats, and the passing of the Abbey Theatre mark, says Matthews, the passing of O’Connor’s innocence. At this point, at the age of thirty-four, O’Connor retired from library service and retreated to a small mountain village to begin full-time writing. His first son, Myles, was born, and his second novel, Dutch Interior (1940), was published, and all seemed well. Nevertheless, Matthews suggests that this was simply the lull before the storm, for the year 1940 marked the beginning of a decade of disgrace and doubt for O’Connor.
During the early 1940’s, O’Connor made trips to England to appear on the BBC to do a series on drama, returned to Dublin to write his Ben Mayo columns for the Sunday Independent, and reached the height of his short-story career with the publication of Crab Apple Jelly (1944). His personal troubles began when, on one of his trips to England, he met and fell in love with another woman and fathered an illegitimate child by her. O’Connor’s life here took on the aura of soap opera as he bounced back and forth between Evelyn and Joan, with both of them even living together with him in Ireland at one point. After Evelyn left him—and there ensued a long, involved, and bitter divorce and settlement battle—he went to live with Joan in London. Matthews states that during this period, O’Connor was constantly on the edge of madness.
O’Connor’s stint as a visiting lecturer in the United States, first at North-western University and then at Harvard University, seemed a welcome escape from his romantic and domestic problems—that is, until his romanticism perhaps took over again, and he became involved with a young student, Harriet Rich, in the United States. After the divorce from Evelyn became final, Joan learned about Harriet and left O’Connor. Thus, at age fifty, O’Connor married the young student, not yet thirty, who, according to Matthews, brought some peace and order to his life.
Given the narrative nature of Matthews’ biography, which depends on the novelistic technique of narrating conflict-ridden events, it is inevitable that the sustaining interest of the book should slacken after the account of O’Connor’s marriage to Harriet. During the latter part of his life, O’Connor wrote significant critical studies of the novel, the short story, and William Shakespeare. Because Matthews’ analytical skills are not as incisive as his narrative techniques, however, the latter part of the biography loses interest. O’Connor’s death from a heart attack at the age of sixty-three, although recounted poignantly, assumes the effect more of a sort of fading away than a climax. The death of O’Connor marks the conclusion of the book. Matthews spends little or no time meditating O’Connor’s work as a whole or the reputation he has since established.
One can quibble about such an omission, however, only if one expects Matthews to perform the critical task—that is, only if one faults this biography for not being an analytic study rather than the superb narrative re-creation of a life that it is. What Michael O’Donovan wrote under the name of Frank O’Connor may not be further explained by what James Matthews has written, but it certainly is given a sense of originating in the presence of a life concretely lived.