My Oedipus Complex Read Free Page A

attraction of the religious life for the story-teller is overpowering. It is the attraction of a sort of life lived, or seeking to be lived, by standards other than those of this world, one which, in fact, resembles that of the artist. The good priest, like the good artist, needs human rewards, but no human reward can ever satisfy him.
    But if the priest feels an unassuageable loneliness, this hardly makes him an ‘outlawed figure’ on the ‘fringes of society’. Priests were central to Irish society at the time O’Connor was describing. And quite a few others among his cast list might be surprised to discover that their maker considered them submerged and marginalized. Perhaps those priests are not so much outlawed as self-outlawed; and what O’Connor unfailingly locates is theloneliness at the heart of those who are regarded by others, and even by themselves, as normal, assimilated members of society.
    Sometimes the writer doesn’t know best. Or, at least, someone else may know best as well. As Maxwell affectionately put it in the course of one editorial disagreement, ‘Of course you are right about the story, and I am too.’ Sometimes the quest for perfection can lead to over-revision; a writer may know his work too well, and find looseness in what was naturalness. Thus O’Connor turned against most of the stories in his first collection,
Guests of the Nation
(1931), on the grounds that they were ‘extravagant’ and insufficiently revised. He excluded all of them from his first selected, and allowed only one into his second. This seems to me too harsh a judgement; these early stories – many about the Civil War – are an essential part of his work. Here are times of wrenching national division and military chaos described with the verve of a young writer and participant. The older man might have controlled them more, but then the older man might also have filtered out some of the verve.
    O’Connor’s tireless revisionism sprang from the mania and the quandary at the heart of writing: how to find the balance between life’s shapelessness and artistic form, between naturalness and control. In his finest work, this balance is effortlessly achieved (because effortfully achieved). His second wife Harriet O’Donovan Sheehy once described a revealing tic of her husband’s: ‘There was almost nothing in the world Michael coveted more than someone else’s pen or pencil and I often found several sharp pencils and a little metal pencil sharpener in his pajama pockets.’ Such is the writer’s nature: one who will look down from his rooftop into your back yard, then go part of the way with you, then hear your confession, and then steal your pencil. The contents of a pajama pocket are a give-away: about the writer’s covetousness; also about the writer’s constant readiness.
    Julian Barnes
A Note on the Selection
    O’Connor published six volumes of stories in his lifetime:
Guests of the Nation
(1931),
Bones of Contention
(1936),
Crab Apple Jelly
(1944),
The Common Chord
(1947),
Traveller’s Samples
(1951) and
Domestic Relations
(1957). He also chose
The Stories of Frank O’Connor
(1952), followed by
More Stories
(1954), which he later reworked as
Collection Two
(1964). After his death his widow, Harriet O’Donovan Sheehy, published
Collection Three
(1969) and
The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland
(1981). I have chosen thirty stories from the hundred and fifty or so these books contain. O’Connor was very attentive to the ordering of his stories within each volume; I have followed his lead, preferring a kind of overall narrative to the hazards of chronological order. So the book begins with stories about childhood; then war; then peace and adulthood; then age and death. This is not, however, intended to make the contents seem more autobiographical than they are.
    O’Connor’s letters to and from William Maxwell