I will forever be grateful to this club and Fantasyfan for introducing me to Frank O'Connor. I've read the first half of
The Best of Frank O'Connor, including five of the stories in
My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories.
In The Train is still to come.
The first story in the book,
Guests of the Nation, not on the 'approved' list, was a gut punch that is still haunting me. Unfortunately, I doubt I will ever forget it.
The Genius,
My Oedipus Complex,
First Confession, and
The Study of History were delightful, among the most entertaining short stories I've ever read. I love the way O'Connor writes, the way he thinks, the way he sees...I love Frank O'Connor.
His essays about James Joyce are not in
My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories, but it was wonderful to read them immediately after finishing
Dubliners.
Spoiler:
Joyce’s writing has all the virtues of a disciple of Flaubert; it is exact, appropriate and detached. ‘The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging, unceasing murmur.’ That is Flaubert, though the echo of the word ‘unceasingly’ is a trick of style which Joyce never tired of and had picked up probably from Pater.
But if the stories in Dubliners have Flaubert’s virtues, they have also Flaubert’s weaknesses. To be absolutely faithful to what one sees and hears and not to speculate on what may lie behind it, for fear of indulging in one’s own emotionalism, is a creed that produces obvious limitations. Two boys on the lang from school meet a man who talks to them for a few minutes; goes away and returns. What he is – a sexual maniac – what he has done in the meantime, are only suggested by the tone of his speech and the way it alters after his return. Subject value, emotional or intellectual values, do not exist; there is a certain experience to be conveyed; this is where it begins, this is where it ends – now watch me do it! This is a sort of asceticism which the average reader is incapable of, and it produces in his mind a certain feeling of stiffness, of gaucherie as though he were watching someone behave rather too correctly to be quite well-bred.
I am eager for the library to deliver
The Collected Stories of Frank O'Connor and hope that the ten stories still to be found will be among the 67 in the book. Regardless, I will read every one of them.