UCC's new Frank O'Connor website attempts to make up for past neglect of a great writer and set the record straight, writes Mary Leland
'Simple ain't easy!" said Prof Michael Steinman at the launch of University College Cork's authorised and definitive Frank O'Connor website recently. He was quoting musician Thelonius Monk as an explanation of the decline in - or absence of - Irish scholarly research into the writer's work, an absence in remarkable contrast to the academic respect shown for O'Connor in, for example, the US. Steinman, of Nassau Community College, New York, has himself been to the forefront of such studies, a fact which drew him to the attention of O'Connor's widow, Harriet Sheehy, and which resulted in a friendship that has now lasted for 25 years. It also made him one of the most likely contributors to the website, which was clicked into life by O'Connor's daughter, Liadain O'Donovan, and which, as UCC's librarian John FitzGerald explained, was initiated at the request of Harriet Sheehy herself.
For Steinman, setting the record straight and putting O'Connor online was an honour and a joy, especially as he believes that the depths of meaning in O'Connor's work are only beginning to be appreciated in Ireland.
"No man is a hero in his own land," he said. "If you do something and it looks simple, people don't respect it; everyone honours Finnegans Wake because they don't understand it."
This inauguration of the website had an air of reparation about it. Colbert Kearney, professor of English at UCC, noted that an item on the website was a newspaper article reporting the remarks made by Sean Hendrick, a friend of O'Connor's, when a bust of O'Connor by Seamus Murphy was presented to the Cork City Library in 1966. On that occasion, Hendrick had excoriated UCC for its refusal to recognise or employ the writer, a deliberate omission which seemed to him to relegate the university to the status of a glorified technical school. "In fact," said Colbert Kearney, "the neglect of O'Connor is worthy of a thesis in itself." The reasons given were many and typical: his break with Daniel Corkery ("a super-mortal sin!"); he gave himself airs; he criticised Cork; he was an immoral man; he was popular; he was successful in America; his work was old-fashioned; and, above all, there was a belief that what he did was easy.
Speaking in 1966, Sean Hendrick had said that Cork's neglect of O'Connor would be judged by future generations as hard to understand and even harder to forgive.
"Today," said Prof Kearney, "there is the possibility that we - Ireland, Cork and UCC in an ascending order of culpability - may be able to undo the damage we have done to a great writer, a man who was also a biographer and translator whose professional expertise is recognised by his fellow practitioners."
Undoing the damage has involved a major investment by UCC, where the English department has been enabled by recent structural changes to enjoy greater control over its financial affairs. Kearney explained that this autonomy has allowed the establishment of an inaugural research and teaching fellowship in O'Connor studies at a cost of €30,000 a year. Designed as a one-year fellowship renewable for three years, this has been awarded to Hilary Lennon, of the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, described by Kearney as "the outstanding O'Connor scholar of her generation".
In a further gesture of restitution, UCC, assisted by the sponsorship of Anglo Irish Bank, is also introducing the Frank O'Connor series of lectures on modern fiction, the first of which will be given by American author and O'Connor enthusiast Richard Ford on November 13th.
ALTHOUGH THE BULK of the O'Connor archive went to the University of Florida, personal letters and family memorabilia have been donated to UCC by Harriet Sheehy, who, unable to attend the launch ceremony, sent a message which was read by her stepdaughter, Liadain, and which recalled that O'Connor (who was born Michael O'Donovan in Cork in 1903) could never cure himself of the notion that he needed Cork and that Cork needed him.
"There are only about six people in Cork you could have a decent conversation with," he told her once, "and at any given time not one of them is talking to any of the others."
Among those six would have been Nancy McCarthy (later Nancy Allitt). As Harriet Sheehy is also the literary executor of McCarthy's estate, McCarthy features on the new O'Connor site and her archive is now being listed at UCC's Boole Library. Sentimentalists often refer to her as O'Connor's first love, which she may well have been. But sentimental she was not, although her stringent personal morality (which defeated O'Connor) did not hinder her enthusiasm for literature, music, film or drama. For many years she was an important member of the small circle that included Sean Hendrick and Seamus and Maighread Murphy. These are among the linkages which excite both Hilary Lennon and the website's original promoter and compiler, Boole archivist Carol Quinn (who worked with designer Conall Ó Murchadha).
Intended to be a record of Cork as well as of O'Connor, the website (which will be continually updated and expanded) includes video and taped recordings of the writer reading his own work as well as photographic material, essays and a bibliography. It is also, as John FitzGerald noted at the launch, the first website based on UCC's archival holdings and the first step in the creation of a virtual archive which would make the resources of the Boole known and accessible on an international scale and as a citable source.
That's the element most important to Harriet Sheehy, who was disturbed by the growing number of inaccurate and even spurious websites devoted to her first husband. All the same, she says, O'Connor would have shied away from a computer like a skittish horse "and I feel certain I would never have persuaded him to access anyone's website, including his own".
www.frankoconnor.ie