"I saw life through a veil of literature." This statement in his autobiography defines something important about Frank O'Connor. After writing, reading was his most consuming activity. He read without method or grace, because he was both a writer and a self-taught person. Since he knew what he liked and disliked, he seldom hedged his bets. Thus, when he wrote about literature he often seemed too opinionated, too flamboyant. But as Richard Ellmann has noted, O'Connor "thought he was stating conclusions that nobody in his right mind could miss. The strength of The Mirror in the Roadway and The Lonely Voice comes from this assumptive power. It begins in close observation, of course, but then, in an almost visionary way, renders writers, objects and themes malleable." O'Connor didn't just read books, he collaborated with them.
Like everything else he wrote, O'Connor's "literary criticism" reveals as much about him as what he happens to be writing about…. O'Connor's literary biases are seldom hidden; he has no use for Art that imposes itself upon Reality, that constructs its forms a priori, or that assumes to enlighten belated races. The distinction between living and museum art appears over and over again in his writing. Academic or aesthetic literature plays to pure intellect in the rarefied atmosphere of the private soul. Instinctive or folk literature plays to impure emotions in the clamorous, unpredictable, and ultimately ephemeral world of the communal marketplace. In The Road to Stratford, for instance, he says, "Jonson was Joyce to Shakespeare's Yeats, the literary theorist as opposed to the natural instinctive writer." (pp. 23-4)
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