Frank O'Connor Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Geoffrey Stokes

Critical Essay by Geoffrey Stokes

Attempting to explain the Irish affinity for the short story, critics have been overly fond of the shanachie. Thus the potato-headed condescension from Charles Poore decorating the jacket of Frank O'Connor's Collected Stories: "One of the great Irish storytellers…." Not so. Though O'Connor often read his stories over Irish national radio, he was one of the great Irish story writers, a compulsive and even finicky craftsman who put a ten-page tale through thirty or forty drafts before letting it escape him, and that for only a moment or so. Rather like Auden endlessly tinkering among his poems, O'Connor took each major republication of his work as a chance to sneak in yet another revision. There is an illusion of spontaneity, a sense of overheard pub talk miraculously being as wonderful as the Irish Tourist Board would have us believe it is, but only an illusion….

[C'Connor's hallmark is] precise and...
(read more)