Edwin O'Connor and the Irish-American Process

WE WERE friends for fifteen years, which seems a very short time now. The friendship was, I think, immediate on both sides, yet one of the chief results of our first meeting was the delineation of our disagreement on a whole range of matters, beginning with the preferability of salt water or fresh water and heading open-endedly toward infinity. The subjects on which we differed never grew fewer. Neither of us, I am quite sure, ever induced the other to change his opinion on anything, or expected to, or ever really wanted to. But the arguments were never tedious. Each of us knew the shutoff point.

For years we had lunch together every month or six weeks. When the lunch was in Cambridge, as it usually was, we always ate in the same restaurant and had exactly the same food. We often wondered why. Neither of us had any particular passion for mushroom omelet; neither ever ordered it anywhere else. Besides, he was a gourmet, and I, as he would be the first to agree, was not. We probably arrived at the menu out of gastronomic aspiration on my side, despair on his. In any case, it took no thought and did not delay the conversation.

I hope it was not ominous that at our last lunch he suggested we go to a Chinese restaurant. I was surprised, and reminded him of his pronouncement, delivered years ago: “Chinese food is all wet hay. There are little dishes of wet hay and big dishes of wet hay, but wet hay is all it is.” But, no, he said, it really wasn’t that bad, and besides he couldn’t face up to another omelet. So we ate chow mein and had exactly the same talk we would have had at our regular joint.

I mention this sort of thing, and our continual mild disagreements, to make plain at the start that this is a very limited depiction of him, for he was a many-sided man, with a lot of interests that I did not share, and many other friends, most of whom I did not know; and I am sure that any of these friends would describe him as accurately as I can and yet very differently. What I had in common with him was the same background: secondand third-generation, small-city, middleclass, Catholic, New England American Irish, which meant that though he came from Woonsocket and 1 from Lawrence, we could share many memories and some attitudes, and never needed to explain them. But after all, we shared these with thousands of others to whom neither of us felt drawn. A strong but by no means total similarity of temperament must have counted for more. We tended to like or dislike other Irish, past or present, for the same visceral reasons. On that we seldom disagreed.

He was very Irish. To a degree often equaled but certainly never surpassed, he had the Irish capacity for being instantaneously right on any topic that interested him, and he would thereupon argue his position with a fluent precision that filled me with envy. In part this was because he actually had thought deeply about many things; in part it was the fruit of his preoccupation with moral theology. Often, however, it was just plain instinctive response, the Irish ages speaking, and he was being automatically right just like one of his own Buckys or P.J.’s. When that happened, seldom more than a minute passed before he recognized what he was doing. Then a daffy light would come into his eye, and the argument would swiftly dissolve into a burlesque uttered in the voice and with the vocabulary exactly appropriate to some yappy little fanatic or pompous, oracular ass. This, too, with a fluent precision that filled me with envy.

When we first met I had just got myself locked into a lifetime affair with early Irish history, a matter of mistaking a mountain for a good-sized molehill due to the surrounding fog. Among the several subjects in which he then or later felt no faintest interest, early Irish history occupied a commanding place, but the spectacle of my ever growing difficulties with what, after all, I had wished on myself fascinated him, and he was at once involved. For a time he was content to listen gravely to my tentative theories about the date and structure of the corpus of genealogies or the nature of the kingship of Tara, and then to assure me of my error. “Ah, no, no, man, that won’t do at all — sheer hallucination — you’ll have to go back and work harder at it than that. Of course, whenever you want help, just ask me. But not this afternoon. Not next week either.” Presently, however, he retired from the role of mentor. Instead, I was made conscious of the threatening and rather sinister figure of Bucko Donahue, the greatest, indeed the only, living expert on Irish annals. Bucko, from whom I sometimes received enigmatic phone calls, postcards of hotel lobbies, and once a letter from Harbour Island in the Bahamas, was a small, rubbery Bahamian Negro of incredible age whose saga is much too complicated to recount here, though it is not amiss to remark that he was the only ex-slave of Bernard Baruch who was educated by the Christian Brothers solely in Latin. Somehow or other he had discovered the Irish annals, genealogies, sagas, and synchronisms, and disdaining books, had worked out all the problems in his head. He had reduced the whole lot to a luminous clarity, which when set down would fill no more than four pages. Yet he still forbore to publish, out of hatred for me.

“God almighty, John, I don’t know what you’ve done to offend him. Maybe you did nothing at all. He’s like that — touchy — seething with passion. But I tell you I’ve never seen any human being regarded with the unspeakable loathing he feels lor you. He’s just waiting till you’re ready to publish. Then he’ll bring out his four pages and make an utter fool of you. I keep telling him the things you tell me, and you should see the little fellow laugh. He gets hysterical. The tears rolling down that little shrunken face of his and the evil glinting in the tiny little eyes. Oh, I tell you, John, it frightens me!”

Bucko’s one letter contained libelous aspersions on two of my most respected colleagues, one of whom was reported as playing split weeks as master of ceremonies at a Jersey City burlesque house, the other as set right by a night in the Harbour Island drunk tank after he was caught “sneaking around the Anglican church doing push-ups every morning.” Most of the rest will bear quotation.

My dear Kelleher,

It’s all cod, you know, this work you’re doing on the Annals. Mother of God, I’ve been through it all a dozen times —the first time I went through the whole business it took me nearly a week. A week lost, is what I say now. Here I was down here in God’s glorious sunshine, and all I was doing was racing through the biggest barrelful of hogwash I’ve ever come across. I reject the Annals in toto for two reasons. First, it was all swiped from the Jews. Second, it’s all crap anyway. . . .

Well, you just keep right on with your work if you can keep fooling the Harvard lads. I’ve got no respect for them myself. A few of them come down this way now and again; if we catch them we feed them to die turtles. . . .

I’ve met O’Connor: A HELL OF AN IMPRESSIVE MAN. IF WE HAD MORE LIKE HIM A SENSIBLE MAN COULD LIVE IN THE WORLD TODAY.

Erin go ha ha

And the signature in a huge, ominous, shaky scrawl.

Then Bucko took to dying at fairly short intervals. His last demise, about five years ago, was when he was eaten by a sea turtle while sleeping under water. I took that as rather a compliment. It was not often that I had any influence on an O’Connor creation, but the sleeping under water bit obviously came from the story of Mac dá Cherdda, one of the two idiot saints of Ireland and one of the few seventh-century Irish personages whose tale Ed ever listened to with interest.

Of course Bucko was not the only one who now arrived to threaten or bother me. There was a whole menagerie of characters who communicated only by telephone. One night I answered the phone to hear a high-pitched, ancient Irish screech on the other end. This time he was an eighty-yearold maniac, somebody like Mother Garvey in The Last Hurrah. “Hello!” he shrilled. “Is this Profissor Kay-le-her, the great authority on I-rish histhry and I-rish ge-ne-al-o-gy?” As usual I played back. “It is, begor,” I said, matching his voice and pitch, “the virry man.” “Well, now, then, Profissor, I have a quistion for you. I have here a virry old and most valuable book, The History of Ireland by Abbé Mac Geoghegan and John Mitchel, and the quistion I have to ask you is . . .” Suddenly I realized, My God, this isn’t Ed! And I hadn’t sense enough to keep to the screech and the brogue I started with, but dropped my voice to its natural level. Great explaining and apologizing had to be done before I got shut of that call, There were more hazards in being a friend of Ed’s than were known to the uninitiated.

To be sure, there were also calls made in his own character. He read The Last Hurrah over the phone, bit by bit, and I remember the night we agreed happily that he had a best seller that could not miss. We were united, too, in one large miscalculation, expecting that he would be denounced by angry old priests from a thousand pulpits and that every Irish society in the country and most of the Holy Name Societies would pass resolutions condemning him for a dirty bird and a fouler of his own nest. When the book came out, he got hundreds of letters, and, if I recollect aright, only sixteen took the expected line. Instead, he was thanked again and again lor the accuracy and fun of his book, and Catholic colleges showered him with invitations to speak. Unbeknownst to us, unnoticed till then by anybody, the public humorlessness that settled down over the American Irish about the turn of the century when the Irish societies drove the Irish comedians off the stage had silently lifted, The Irish could laugh at themselves again. Unfortunately by that time there was not a hell of a lot left to laugh at.

Most of his humor is backward-looking — the old people’s dinner-table talk in The Edge of Sadness, for instance — reminiscence or survival of a generation in which character had such free play that what now seems wildly exaggerated or eccentric was nothing out of the ordinary. How much of the comedy in The Last Hurrah is actually in Skeffington’s recollections; how much more of it is exemplified in characters like Ditto Boland or Cuke Gillen, who, blessedly all unwitting, are on the verge of extinction. The young are seldom funny: indeed, the younger, distinctly the unfunnier. One could cite, to be sure, the boobish “reform” candidate, Kevin McCluskey, with his telegenic family and his rented telegenic dog, but McCluskey is not funny as an individual and there is nothing very merry about what he fronts for. The only real exception is Father Danowski, the baroque Polish curate in The Edge of Sadness. He is funny enough. And he is treated with the underlying tenderness otherwise reserved for the old folks. But then, though he is little more than a boy, he belongs as a Polish American to a generation roughly equivalent to that of the narrator’s Irish-American father — a fact which I am not certain occurred to his author.

In most ways Ed O’Connor was a present-minded man. He was urbane, well informed, concerned with politics as a citizen, full of the sense of how much needs desperately to be done here and now, and always very interested in the young. He was impatient with sentimental, unhistorical praise of the good old days. Like Goldsmith, whom he admired, he was a very sane writer, well aware of abnormality and viciousness but dealing by preference with that smaller, more ordinary range of aberrations which we count as reasonably normal human conduct. I think that one of his fundamental assumptions was that the human mixture in every age and clime had about the same general proportions of decent men and rogues and fools. But he did not assume that every age or every phase of society inhibited or, alternatively, called forth and rewarded the same qualities and responses, borne were definitely more inclined toward evil than others. Some were relatively good — like the society we both had known as boys.

It was not only his humor that was backwardlooking. He looked back, too, for his standards of normality. Or he seemed to. In his books the basic recurrent pattern is of something coming unexpectedly to an end, generally something complicated and of long standing. To the casual eye it has appeared sound, but now as it starts to come apart the observer (the narrator) realizes that actually the signs of approaching dissolution have been all about and unmistakable, most noticeably a blind, self-satisfied irrelevance to present conditions. If the observer then turns to what is now not so much beginning as emerging, already largely developed, from under the wreckage, he is likely to feel no more than a very wary hope. The newly emergent may offer fresh promise, but it is a promise strictly limited by the weaknesses of this fallen flesh. After all, the old, too, was once new and shiny and full of ruthless vitality, and blindly, selfsatisfiedly unaware that no generation escapes the consequences of original sin.

You may wonder, where is the hope or normality in that? Well, it is not either in the new, which has not yet life’s lessons, or in the old, which by this time has forgotten them. The normality he was looking for was the mature complexity of the ordinary; and you look for that somewhere in the middle of the process. He and I first knew the Irish-American process toward the end of its heyday. Our parents knew it in its prime. When we had grown up we knew that that phase of society, though it looked eternal to us as boys, was transitioaal in the extreme, and could not have lasted long under any circumstances. It had come into being about the turn of the century when a modest prosperity had become general among the Irish, most of whom by then had been born and educated here. Many symptoms signaled its rapid demise — the rise of the funeral home and the destruction of the wake; the death of the old people, the last links with that vanished mid-nineteenth-century Ireland from which we were all originally recruited; the disappearance of the genial, uncomplimentary nicknames; and finally, the lack of any continuing force, like discrimination, or afterward the resentment of remembered discrimination, strong enough to hold the society together from without or within. Whatever happened, there came a time when nobody felt very Irish anymore, or had much reason to. By the late 1940s that society was practically all gone. The people were still there; their lives were, if anything, more complicated than ever; but not in terms of the familiar, habitual complexity ing he regretted.

A lot of our talk was swapping stories about all that. Many of his were used, more or less altered, in his books — but that well was deep and full, as would soon have been apparent.

When he died he was happily at work on two novels at once. One was to be built around the narrator’s recollections ol boyhood, thirty-five years ago. The passages he read over the phone were about the boy sitting on the backstairs of his grandfather’s drugstore, listening to the discussions between the grandfather and the men who dropped in daily to talk and argue. That, plainly, was going to be a very tender novel. The other, as he described it, was to be about a cardinal-archbishop, a man of eighty, neither a reactionary nor a fervent ecumenicist, who finds himself wondering at times whether he is simply presiding over the end of the whole show, and later realizes that he is only at the beginning of an act. Judging by what he wrote of it, it would have been a strong, densely constructed book, and in all likelihood the funniest since The Last Hurrah.

While O’Connor’s belief in Catholicism never lessened, he was finding the Church increasingly discomforting. He remarked that he had been all for liturgical reform in theory but had not counted on a Mass in English that demanded of the communicant a tin ear. Like his fictional cardinal, he was no reactionary. He knew in detail the necessity for reform. He was keenly aware, too, that essential change had been delayed so long and was so poorly prepared for that what should have come as rich, healthy development arrived with the simplicity of an avalanche. He spoke feelingly of development. Newman was his hero. By nature he was hostile to all urgers of formulas lor attaining perfection in one or two glorious installments. Yet his irritation at what he considered the largely needless disruption of cherished rituals was felt not so much for himself as lor older people, especially old priests who asked only to be allowed to continue the old liturgy and devotions, as privately as possible, for the remainder of their own lives, and were refused. For them he had deep sympathy. For himself, though he resented being deprived of the familiar and habitual, rich in associations gathered since childhood, he could get along, even if it meant shopping around for the “least offensive Mass.” As a matter of fact he could have got along on harder fare even than that. His faith was in no danger.

I think that the general shape of the cardinal novel can be deduced from the less than thirty pages he finished. It would be a continuation and deepening of the movement already strongly defined in his best novel, The Edge of Sadness, a movement toward the future rather than to a fondly remembered past. It would be the record of a subconscious search for essentials and of the repeated, astonished discovery that these are not at all what or where one had always taken lor granted. It would be the discovery of the ubiquity of grace in small and unprepossessing packets. And thus a justification of faith.

Near the opening of the fragment the cardinal discovers that he has cancer and has but a few months, possibly only a few weeks, to live. He is a bit shocked but not surprised. Nothing surprises this experienced old stoic very much, least of all his realization of how often he is mistaken in his impressions and assessments, for he has no pretensions to infallibility, and he knows that however uncertain he may be in these days of reform and revolution within the Church, everybody else is equally so. All is drifting and changing. No man is really in control.

Without altering his routine he sets about putting his house in order. But how? “The archdiocese was in fairly good shape; he was not a bad administrator, he knew that, and twenty years ago, he reflected, he would have felt confidence and even pride in what he was leaving behind him. Now he was not so sure. Suddenly the new age had come in, and with it had come the new demands: had he met them? At all? What would his successor find?”

Naturally he wonders who his successor will be. Much of the rest of the book, I imagine, would have been taken up with the possible candidates and their supporters and enemies; and O’Connor’s gifts for character-drawing would have got great exercise from this parade — the worried conservatives and hopeful liberals, the opportunists and speculators, the idealists, the honestly bemused, the plain good men and elegantly trimmed trimmers, the impressive empty barrels, the cocksure expositors of the wave of the future, the slit-mouthed reactionaries, the plentiful boobs and nitwits, lay and clerical — all vocal, all variously but equally wrong or inadequate. About these, about himself, about the Church, the cardinal, often mistaken and seldom wrong, would make discovery after discovery, and no longer without surprise. At the end, I think, he would be unworried, for though he would have come to understand that while the tide of change has only begun to flow, and no man can say what, if any, of the familiar landmarks it will leave, all that it can do to the essentials is to reveal them anew, for a while, not to destroy them, and that it is given to no man to say exactly what the essentials are. Then a final mistake would come to light, that the diagnosis was wrong, that he has not got cancer. And this would not matter a great deal, for he will die soon anyway, a thing of moderate moment in the life of a man who has done his best and has trust.

The Edge of Sadness already offered proof that O’Connor’s looking backward for the good was more apparent than real. He was no sentimentalist. If he looked at the immediate future with mounting concern, as I think most sensible men do, he was not afraid of it and had no thought but of the need for getting on with the search for justice. Least of all did he imagine that the good men became scarcer when Irish America began to evaporate into the haze of history.

Like most humorists he was anything but a bouncing optimist. Many indeed were the men and slogans on which he turned a bleak eye: the God-love-you-boy-and-keep-the-faith kind of irishman with a heart like an ice cube; all social climbing, but particularly the Yankee variety; the sort of people who swarm together publicly to give each other medals for inter-something tolerance; what passes for politics in this Commonwealth; what passes for social responsibility with some Boston bankers; the cry that we — Irish or Italian or whoever — made it on our own, and so could the Negroes if they had the gumption. And of course the war — another matter on which we disagreed.

Yet he was equally far from pessimism: Mark Twain’s anguished despair of the God Damned Human Race. There is a passage in The Edge of Sadness that I think exactly expresses his enduring assessment of human nature.

We all share in a shattering duality — and by this I don’t mean that soggy, superficial split that one so often sees: the kind of thing, for example, where the gangster sobs uncontrollably at an old Shirley Temple movie, I mean the fundamental schism that Newman referred to when he spoke of man being forever involved in the consequences of some “terrible, aboriginal calamity"; every day in every man there is this warfare of the parts. And while this results in meanness and bitterness and savagery enough, God knows, and while only a fool can look around him and smile serenely in unwatered optimism, nevertheless the wonder of it all is to me the frequency with which kindness, the essential goodness of man does break through, and as one who has received his full measure of that goodness, I can say that for me, at least, it is in the long succession of these small redemptive instants, just as much as in the magnificence of heroes, that the meaning and glory of man is revealed.

That of course is a fictional character speaking, but it has the inflection of his own voice and thought.

He was a good man. He was one of the freest men I have ever known, and doubtless because of that, one of the gayest. I am afraid I have made him seem an unwontedly sober, if not indeed a somber, figure. In fact I have scarcely a memory of him which has any such shadow on it — in token whereof, this last one.

We were crossing the Public Garden one day just alter The Last Hurrah made the best-seller list, when he was set upon by a newly warm friend who had to express his delight with his pal’s success. However, he admitted to critical reservations, too. “The book goes great, Ed, up to where Skeffington starts to die, but after that it sort of trails off. The old punch goes out of it.”

Ed’s eyes waltzed and he drew a short breath, familiar signs of inspiration. “George,” he said, “I might have known you’d see that. Of course you’re absolutely right. As a matter of fact, I’ve just written a new ending, for the movie version. This time Skeffington doesn’t die alter the election. He enters the priesthood. Mother Garvey gets ordained too. Then years go by, and Skeffington is the oldest living monsignor in the archdiocese, and he’s celebrating Easter Mass at the cathedral, with Mother Garvey as his deacon. When he raises the Host at the consecration, the camera follows his hands. But it doesn’t come down again. It keeps going up and up, slowly; and you see the shafts of light coming down from the chancel windows; and then you begin to hear organ music, and then the angels singing, faint and far away. Skeffington and Mother Garvey have dropped dead together. Right on the altar.”

“Jee-sus, Ed!” said the critic reverently. “Now you really got something!”