Word: connore
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...most difficult tasks a writer can undertake, to write the truth about himself and about his mother, Frank O'Connor has chosen to tell a plain tale that succeeds better as work of the imagination than most fiction. He writes out of that typical Irish condition, self-exile -O'Connor lives in Palo Alto, Calif.-but the pipes of nostalgia are muted. Indeed, his chosen adjective for the old sod is not "green" but "mediocre...
...story concerns the pitiful boyhood and youth of Michael O'Donovan (Frank O'Connor is a pen name) in a wet, ruined, pious and oppressed Cork slum. Young Michael was heir to every misery that could afflict a boy: bad teeth, bad eyes, failure and constant canings at school, disgrace in his first wretched jobs, and the horror of a miserly, sententious and drunken father. James Joyce's squalid boyhood in Dublin was a princely origin compared with the Tartarean depths of little Mick O'Donovan's life in Cork. Yet by some miracle...
...other miracle involves the saintly character of his mother, Minnie O'Connor, who from the time she left a church-run orphanage at 14 had known nothing but the life of a slavey, sometimes unpaid, in households selected by the nuns for Catholic respectability rather than the real virtue of charity. In telling the life of this simple, devout soul, her son avoids the curse of self-pity that afflicted even such masterly performers as Samuel Butler, Rousseau and Stendhal, not to speak of a swarm of modern confessionists. After writing his mother's life-partly, of course...
...freight clerk, he spoke that night in his self-taught Gaelic to a Gaelic League meeting on the character of Goethe. In short, a hopeless case. If ever a man became a writer because there was nothing else in the world he could do, it was Frank O'Connor...
...most acceptable to the nonpartisan. The Corkite republicans had their generals (milkmen and cobblers in private life), their officers' mess, and even a cannon with homemade shells. But they had no front line. By the time they established this military necessity, it was Sunday, recalls O'Connor, and "after his longing for Mass, an Irishman's strongest characteristic is his longing for home and Mother, and anyone who knew his Ireland would have guessed that on that fine summer morning our whole front was being pierced in a dozen places by nostalgic enemy soldiers, alone...