Frank OConnor - My Fathers Son (Irish Studies Series)
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Frank OConnor, at twenty-three, comes out of the internment camp where he had been imprisoned as an Irish revolutionary, and plunges into the burgeoning intellectual-political ferment of Dublin in the 1920s. In this book, he re-creates his years as a young writer, providing as he does so a portrait of an era.
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Originally published in 1968 by Macmillan and Company Limited.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O'Connor, Frank, 19031966. My Father's Son / Frank O'Connor. 1st Syracuse University Press ed. p. cm. (Irish studies series) Originally published: New York : Macmillan, 1968. ISBN 0-8156-0564-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. O'Connor, Frank, 19031966. 2. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 18651939-Friends and associates. 3. Authors, Irish20th centuryBiography. 4. IrelandIntellectual life20th century. 5. LibrariansIrelandBiography. 6. Abbey Theatre. I. Title. II. Series. PR6029.D58 Z47 1999 823'.912dc21 [b] 98-41806
Manufactured in the United States of America
Page 5
CONTENTS
I Rising in the World
9
II The Provincial in Dublin
59
III The Abbey Theatre
145
IV The Death of Yeats
179
Page 7
When Frank O'Connor died on 10 March 1966, he had not completed this second volume of his autobiography, My Father's Son. Much of it existed in early drafts, some of it in separate pieces. We are indebted to Dr Maurice Sheehy of University College, Dublin for comparing the different drafts and producing the present text.
Page 9
PART ONE RISING IN THE WORLD
Page 11
1
At the age of twenty I was released from an internment camp without money or job. The Civil War had just ended, and since I had taken the loser's side I found that ex-gaol birds like myself did not get whatever positions were available under the new government. But all teachers were now required to learn the Irish language, so for a few months I taught Irish to the teachers at the local Protestant school in Cork - St Luke's. This brought in only a few shillings a week, but I now knew how to teach and I liked the work.
I also liked Kennelly, the headmaster, an irascible little Kerry-man who wore pince-nez. I suspect he was a fearful bully and disciplinarian because he always snapped at everyone who came near him, including his pretty daughter, and snapped loudest of all at the school manager, Canon Flewett.
'All clergymen are the same, Mr O'Donovan,' Kennelly would say as he saw me part of the way home. 'Catholic, Church of Ireland or Presbyterian, you can never trust any of them.'
It was part of his innocent vanity that I could never teach him Irish because he remembered it all perfectly from his childhood in Kerry. But he was a man with a real flavour, and I enjoyed watching him when someone got him mad, keeping what he thought was a perfectly expressionless face, though his little nose took on an autonomous life and expressed a whole range of emotions that no pince-nez could stand up to. In spite of his snappiness he was extraordinarily gentle with me; he even brought me home once or twice to supper with his wife and daughter, but I was so embarrassed that I do not even remember what nonsense I talked; and when he saw me home it was to advise me in a fatherly way to have nothing more to do with politics.
Page 12
'With you it's not a question of politics,' he said, referring delicately to the fact that I was still wearing Father's old trousers. 'It's a question of how much a man can take, and you've taken enough. You can't afford to take any more.'
One of the pleasantest revelations that life has offered was that on his retirement that stout anti-clerical rushed himself into Holy Orders and worked gallantly as a missioner in the East End of London through the blitz. All Irish anti-clericals are spoiled priests, and you must never trust any of them.
Late in 1923 my old teacher Daniel Corkery told me that Lennox Robinson, the dramatist, who was now Secretary of the Irish Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, was organizing rural libraries and looking for young men and women to train as librarians. The moment he said it I knew that this was the very job for me and that I was the very type of person Robinson was looking for. It was not so much that I wanted to be a librarian, or even knew what being a librarian meant; it was just that never in my life had I had enough books to read and this was my opportunity.
I met Robinson in the restaurant of the Cork railway station at Glanmire, where he was waiting for a train to Dublin and drinking double brandies. He always looked like someone's caricature of him, long and mournful and disjointed, as though at some time he had suffered on the rack, and he had a high-pitched, disjointed voice that sounded like someone's reading of an old maid's letter from Regency times, with every third word isolated and emphasized.
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