This Day in Literary History (Edwin O’Connor, Master Chronicler of Irish America, Dies)

March 23, 1968—Worried about being financially overextended one decade after his most successful work, Edwin O’Connor, who chronicled the seriocomic transition of descendants of Irish emigrants to the U.S. in The Last Hurrah and other novels, died of a stroke at age 49 at his home on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue. Despite considerable literary gifts, the Pulitzer Prize winner's standing in American literature did not long survive him.

The Last Hurrah, his most popular work, entered the language as shorthand for an old-style politico in his final campaign. (It was based on longtime Boston Mayor James Michael Curley.) Its vivid depiction of the end of the era of urban machine politics led to it joining other, far more prosaic conventional histories on the syllabus of an American Urban History course I took at Columbia University more than 30 years ago. The honor (which, I hope, was repeated elsewhere in academe) was well-earned. But I’m afraid that it only underscores that O’Connor is known--unfairly, I believe--for only one book.

Why has O’Connor fallen into obscurity while other fiction writers of his generation have not only maintained their sales, but seen them soar? Several reasons, I think, account for this sorry state of affairs:

* His life lacked the personal pathology, and even element of tragedy, that interests Hollywood. He was not a substance abuser, a philanderer, a hater. He did not labor in the face of a life-threatening disease, as did another O’Connor whose fame subsequently surpassed his, Flannery. At worst, it seems, he might have been afflicted with mild melancholy, brought on by some financial extravagance (a Porsche and a custom-made Cape Cod summer house). When biographer Charles P. Duffy interviewed his family, friends and associates, nobody seems to have had an unkind word to say about him. In short, Woody Allen would never have included him among the flamboyant, tortured geniuses of Midnight in Paris.

* He was almost guaranteed to be taken down a peg after so much early success. “A literary intellectual objects to nothing so much as a best-selling book that also possesses real merit," wrote critic Edmund Wilson. Wilson, a friend of O’Connor, knew his kind well. Critics have consigned O’Connor to the ranks of the middlebrow along with the likes of John Marquand and James Gould Cozzens.

* His brand of realistic fiction fell out of favor with critics, if not readers. Those postwar American novels enshrined in academe have often been associated with the Beat (Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch) and postmodernism (Thomas Pynchon) movements. Other novelists who produced their best work in the Fifties and Sixties—Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Richard Yates—won subsequent acclaim for darkly satiric looks at American life that rested on a foundation of deep pessimism. While all of O’Connor’s work, in some way or other, relates to loss, however, they do not fundamentally question the premises of American life.

* He didn’t have the time to build a deeper legacy. Aside from The Oracle and a children’s book, O’Connor completed four major novels in his lifetime. Novelists such as Philip Roth and William Kennedy have had more than four decades from their first novels to their latest—plenty of time to create an entire body of work that can be analyzed and appreciated. O’Connor had fewer years as a published novelist—17—than even F. Scott Fitzgerald. Recent experiences (marriage at age 44) and sweeping changes in the culture (Vatican II’s impact on American Catholicism) would have added even greater depth to his work.

* His titles, except for The Last Hurrah, were not memorable. The Edge of Sadness sounds depressing. All in the Family is easily confused with the Norman Lear sitcom, even though it predated it by four years and had nothing to do with it. I Was Dancing says nothing. To win fame in American literature, it sure doesn’t hurt to have a title that is symbolic (The Sun Also Rises), richly apropos (John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra), or simply quirky (Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s).

I used the occasion of O’Connor’s birth in 1918 for a prior post, but that hardly seems to have exhausted what can be said about his life and work. Even all that I’ve written till now here does not do so. It might be instructive, then, to compare and contrast him with another Irish-American writer at the height of his fame at the same time, John O’Hara. 

O’Hara won the National Book Award for Ten North Frederick, while O’Connor appears the following year to have been a runner-up to the eventual Pulitzer Prize winner, Mackinlay Kantor’s Andersonville. (The one he received five years later for The Edge of Sadness is often considered a consolation prize.) Both books were turned into 1958 films starring aging male screen legends (Spencer Tracy, with Hurrah; Gary Cooper, for Frederick). Both novels dealt, in one fashion or other, with politics—Hurrah, as its main subject, and Frederick, as the field that proves the undoing of its protagonist. Both took their inspiration from real-life characters: Hurrah, obviously, as a roman a clef about Mayor Curley, and Frederick, a good deal less so, as a what-if exercise: i.e., what if Franklin Roosevelt, instead of being a patrician upstate New York Democrat with a keen interest in public office, had been a patrician Gibbsville, Pa. Republican who developed this same interest in midlife?

Both O’Connor and O’Hara were the sons of doctors, not only providing them with access to a good education and contact with the middle and even upper classes, but also, perhaps, with the genetic predisposition of one on whom nothing is lost. 

Moreover, both men exhibited an ear for dialogue so keen that they paid too much attention to those who insisted they should try their hand with plays. Aside from Pal Joey (he wrote the book for the Rodgers and Hart musical), O’Hara, according to biographer Matthew Bruccoli, worked on 16 plays from 1940 to 1970, with hardly any being produced. O’Connor’s involvement was more of a one-off, but also more disastrous: I Was Dancing, which lasted through only 21 performances on Broadway in 1964 and achieved equally lackluster sales as a novel (though it did win an extremely warm appreciation from Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley several years ago).

The most outstanding personal qualities of both men might have been loyalty. Though infamously cranky, O’Hara adored his second and third wives, and was devoted to such writer friends as Philip Barry, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. O’Connor, a liberal Democrat thrilled that fellow Irish-Catholic New Englander John F. Kennedy was elected President, nevertheless broke off a White House dinner invitation from JFK because he was courting the woman who became his wife.

Yet the distinctions between the two were also significant. Born 13 years before O’Connor, O’Hara came of age during the Roaring Twenties and Great Depression, much of which he spent in brawling and drinking. His first novel, Appointment in Samarra, created during that extended lost weekend, won him commercial success at age 29. O’Connor, exposed to a wonderfully charismatic college English professor who squandered his talent because of alcoholism, became a teetotaler thereafter. His first novel, The Oracle, about a conservative radio idol (think Rush Limbaugh, but up one level intellectually), appeared when he was 33, but it was a slight apprentice work. He did not really hit his stride until The Last Hurrah five years later.

While both writers worked immensely hard, their speed varied greatly. O’Hara might have blown through one journalism job after another in his 20s, but the experience left him with a great facility for meeting deadlines. Particularly in his short stories, the architecture of the pieces seemed to have been assembled almost completely in his head by the time he sat down to his typewriter, so that he could crank them out within a few days. O’Connor would work a sentence over and over, until it finally took the form he wanted.

As much as anything, their attitudes toward Roman Catholicism sharply differentiated O’Hara and O’Connor. O’Hara, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, lapsed from Catholicism in youth and never looked back. The few priests who show up in his Balzacian fictional corpus seem included more to make sociological points (how their brand of alcohol differentiates them from rich and poor alike) or to shock (one gets drunk and has sex with a married woman—not shocking now, but perhaps so  in 1969, when Lovey Childs appeared). O’Connor was a daily communicant who knew many priests, and his fiction evinced extensive appreciation for their complicated humanity.

O’Connor wrote at a hinge point in the life of the American Irish, when this ethnic group had reached a zenith of influence in this country’s political, religious and commercial life. At this exact moment, the tribal loyalties that fueled their rise, forged over nearly a century of exclusion and misery, began to attenuate. 

"Sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers," says John Rooney, the Irish-American crime boss played by Paul Newman, in the 2002 film The Road to Perdition. O'Connor would have disagreed: the grievances ran deep on both sides of the generational divide. Nobody was in a better position than O’Connor to depict the resulting ambivalence of this sunny and sorrowing ethnic group he knew so bone-deep.

Quote of the Day (Chicago’s Daley, Continuing a Time-Honored Political Tradition)

“[Mayor Richard M.] Daley is an unreconstructed old-school pol: rarely glimpsed without a suit jacket, fluent in the ancient political rituals. He is especially good at going to wakes. ‘He has a style—he goes in a little early,’ John Schmidt, his former chief of staff, said. ‘It lets you get in and out, because no one else is there.’ ”—Evan Osnos, “Letter From Chicago: The Daley Show—Dynastic Rule in Obama’s Political Birthplace,” The New Yorker, March 8, 2010 (subscription required)

I was half tempted to use this quote yesterday, but I thought better of it when I asked myself: Which picture accompanying it would appeal more to readers: an aging, fleshy Midwestern pol or a screen goddess whose flaming hair was the best argument ever made for Technicolor?

Maureen O’Hara is beloved in a way that Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago (known dismissively in his younger days as “Richie,” though “Richard II” might be more appropriate now) can never hope to be. But the Windy City’s current hizzoner-for-life is, in his own way, as steeped in Irish tradition as the leading lady of that St. Patrick’s Day perennial, The Quiet Man.

Forget all the last-of-the-bosses, last-hurray hooey you read 33 Christmas seasons ago when Daley’s father—the big-city boss sputtering and gesticulating at the 1968 Democratic Convention held in his city—went to his eternal reward. It took a little while, and the son had to add to his coalition some groups (e.g., African-Americans, gays) that the old man would never dream of courting.

But now, the young (or, shall we say, not-quite-so-young anymore) Daley bestrides his city almost as powerfully as his father ever did.

Some practices from long ago remain enduring. “I figure, what’s wrong with a little nepotism?” a suburban bed-and-breakfast owner asked me when I was in the area five years ago. “As long as the city works, who cares?”

Those two sentences explain the enduring power of the Machine, despite decades of reformers’ efforts to change matters. Somewhere, the first Mayor Daley is smiling.

Adding skin and bones to this skeletal explanation for the Daley family’s continued success is Evan Osnos’ fine profile in The New Yorker from a few weeks ago. As with Ryan Lizza’s deeply perceptive 2008 background piece on the political roots of candidate Obama, it shows how politics works in Chicago. If you’re an idealist, you’ll approach it the same way a meat-eater 100 years ago would have regarded Upton Sinclair’s description of the legendary stockyards in The Jungle.

In certain ways, Osnos’ vivid piece goes rather easy on the mayor and his family (including airily dismissing the longtime claim that Richard I helped steal votes for JFK in the 1960 Presidential election). But there’s much of political and personal interest here, from the younger Daley’s early awkward entrance into the political arena to his wary relationship with the English language.

(Daley fils, a communications professor hired for his first mayoral campaign concluded, tended “to misstate the obvious, invent words never imagined by linguistic researchers, introduce irrelevant material, and demonstrate anger at seemingly uneventful moments.” The late essayist Michael Kelly was only slightly less devastating in an August 1990 GQ profile: “The more he feels attacked, the more disjointed his speech becomes, a collection of fits and starts punctuated by an idiosyncratic use of the word ‘fine.’” Hmmm—a bigtime pol with a father who also managed to mangle the English language…who does that sound like? At least on the linguistic front, it appears that Richard II and Bush II might have a common evolutionary forebear.)

Still, I wish Osnos might have explored a bit more Daley’s penchant for early arrivals at services for the departed, which will remind many of the hilarious section in Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah when Mayor Frank Skeffington appears at the wake of “Knocko” Minihan--and upstages the corpse.

(By the way, before we go any further: Can we all please tip our tweed caps to how the Irish have enriched popular lore with wonderful nicknames in the political realm?

O’Connor used so many in his novel—not just “Knocko,” but “Ditto” and “Footsie”—that he could have had a second career as a headline writer for the sports pages. Caught up in a minor-league scandal involving Chicago’s Richard II was John “Quarters” Boyle, a campaign operative convicted of pilfering $4 million in change (yes, including quarters) from toll booths. And nobody should forget Al Smith lieutenant John “Fishhooks” McCarthy, who has earned a large place in any short book on political prayer with this--perhaps apocryphal--supplication: “O Lord, give me health and strength. We’ll steal the rest.”)

Many readers, like Adam in O’Connor’s marvelous novel about the urban political machine (inspired by Boston’s mayor, James Michael Curley), might be a bit stunned by the seemingly irreverent attitude of the mayor and his cronies at what is supposed to be a solemn religious service. But Thomas J. O’Gorman’s “Sorry for Your Troubles,” a consideration of the wake in the Winter 1998 issue of The World of Hibernia, notes that for the Irish, it is “an intimate expression of national character, a curious blend of religious devotion, social support, and cultural cohesion--the linchpin in the pantheon of Irish loyalties.” (In certain Hibernian quarters, the obituaries are known variously as “the Irish funnies,” “the Irish racing form,” or “the Irish sports pages.” You know—the first thing you read when you get up in the morning.)

Those impulses—devotion, support, cohesion, loyalty—are at the heart of machine politics, too. They’ll excuse a lot—and in the context of the O’Connor novel, that very much includes the deceased as well as his gabby, sometimes oblivious mourners.

Knocko, you see, was not a man of sterling character in life: “A little runt of a man….Thin as a snake…and mean as a panther.” These ways did not win people to his side: indeed, “If friendship with Knocko were to be the basis for attendance at his wake, it could have been held in a phone booth."

But Knocko’s wife—a “grand woman” who had been good friends with Skeffington’s own wife—belonged to the mayor’s social circle. And so, the mayor came to the service of a man he had no use for—and, along the way, he and his men cemented allegiances and exchanged information essential to any cohesive unit such as theirs.

How did Richard I of Chicago employ the wake as a political intelligence activity--in much the same way as his son (something Osnos’ article clearly implies)? How does it differ from Skeffington’s method? I wish Osnos had delved into this at least a bit. The anecdote lingers, endlessly suggestive on the ways, far less obvious than money exchanges, by which a well-oiled political operation works…

Quote of the Day (O’Connor)

“It was early in August when Frank Skeffington decided--or rather, announced his decision, which actually had been arrived at some months before--to run for re-election as mayor of the city.”—Edwin O’Connor, The Last Hurrah (1956)

(The author of one of the greatest—no, make that two of the greatest—American political novels was born in Providence, R.I., on this date in 1918. He died in 1968, only 49 years old, and I can’t help lamenting how much the literary world lost with his untimely passing. His friends lost something more: the infinite pleasure of his company. As you might guess from the dialogue of his novels, he had a great ear for dialogue who made listeners chuckle with his accomplished mimicry. Reminiscenses from friends such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Alfred Kazin were invariably warm and fond.

I wrote that O’Connor wrote two great political novels. The second is now forgotten when it isn’t being confused with a later product of another medium: All in the Family (1966). Like The Last Hurrah, it was viewed as a roman a clef—in this case, since it dealt with a rich Irish-American patriarch, a charismatic politician son, and a second son who served as campaign manager, as a commentary on the Kennedys. The controversy might have initially spurred sales, but it probably lessened its critical reputation—unfairly, I think, since the events of the book, by their conclusion, diverge considerably from that of the famous Massachusetts clan.

If you want another side of O’Connor, I urge you to hunt down The Edge of Sadness (1961). If it was All in the Family’s lot to be confused with a sitcom, it was this other novel’s misfortune to be overshadowed by a catchphrase spawned by another novel from the same year—Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. O’Connor beat Heller for the Pulitzer Prize—a move widely interpreted as O'Connor's consolation prize for being snubbed for The Last Hurrah.

The Edge of Sadness features an often-hilarious protagonist in Charlie Carmody, but the character who by the end of the book stands out the most is the narrator, Fr. Hugh Kennedy, a burnt-out case and recovering alcoholic. His assignment to a decaying inner-city parish looks like a dead end, since he has little or no rapport with his immigrant flock. Bit by bit, however—like most of us—Fr. Kennedy receives grace in unexpected ways. As with The Last Hurrah, O’Connor has caught perfectly an institution in transition. You won’t find a heroic priest out of the Bing Crosby-Spencer Tracy-Gregory Peck mode of the 1930s and 1940s, but you’ll certainly find one believable and human--one who, like St Paul, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation," might serve as an appropriate humble stand-in for Christ in a post-scandal clerical world.)