pyramids frank ocean tick sound in background

When his back was turned, Mother let me get a chair and rummage through his treasures. There was a bit of the magpie about Father he expected everything to come in handy. Each time he left a trail of souvenirs – model tanks and Gurkha knives with handles made of bullet cases, and German helmets and cap badges and button sticks, and all sorts of military equipment – carefully stowed away in a long box on top of the wardrobe, in case they ever came in handy. He smoked, which gave him a pleasant musty smell, and shaved, an operation of astounding interest. In fact, I rather liked his visits, though it was an uncomfortable squeeze between Mother and him when I got into the big bed in the early morning. Like Santa Claus he came and went mysteriously. Sometimes in the early morning I heard the slamming of the front door and the clatter of nailed boots down the cobbles of the lane. Sometimes I woke and there was a big figure in khaki peering down at me in the candlelight. My Oedipus Complex Father was in the army all through the war – the first war, I mean – so, up to the age of five, I never saw much of him, and what I saw did not worry me.

His titles include Guests of the Nation (1931), Grab Apple Jelly (1944), The Stories of Frank O’Connor (1956), and A Set of Variations (1971).

He was in any event a prolific historian of Irish manners and the Irish character.

The subsequent publication of these revisions makes it hard to pin down the exact scale of his life’s work since some of his books contain pieces that appeared in different form in previous volumes. He rewrote many of his stories –-often after first publication –-ten, twenty, or thirty times. His declared objective was to find the natural rhythms and stresses of the storyteller’s voice in shaping his material. From 1931 on he published regularly in American magazines taught for some years at Harvard and Northwestern Universities.

Then he worked as a librarian in Cork and Dublin and for a time was director of the Abbey Theartre before he was established as a writer of short stories. Independence he was briefly a member of the Irish Republican Army. Frank O’Connor is the pen name of Michael O’Donovan (1903-1966), who was born in Cork, Ireland, of a family too poor to give him a university education.

Pyramids frank ocean tick sound in background