Only Child

Author(s): Frank O'Connor

Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 36, No. 3, Frank O'Connor Issue (Autumn,
1990), pp. 365-368
Published by: Hofstra University
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 Only Child

FRANK O'CONNOR

I believe statistics have proved that genius occurs most frequently

in younger sons of large families. That may be, but I'm sure the
conviction of genius occurs mainly among only children. They have no
brothers and sisters to shake it. In fact, so rooted is their conviction that
it rarely occurs to them that they are geniuses at all. They merely know,
as geniuses do, that they are unique and irreplaceable, and take up the
occupation for want of anything better to do.
That's one of the troubles of being an only child; it's not pleasant,
particularly on wet days. We lived near the barrack in Cork, next door
to my grandmother who washed for the officers. She was an old
countrywoman who never wore boots indoors and lived mainly on
potatoes and porter. Socially she was a sore trial to me. My father, who
had been a soldier, was worse, because he diverted so much of my
mother's attention. I was the victim of what Freud calls an Oedipus
complex-a shocking misnomer because Oedipus must have been the
only only child who never suffered from that complaint. There is no
evidence whatever that Oedipus wanted to kill his father and marry his
mother. I did. I shouldn't have much minded getting rid of my
grandmother at the same time.
I can't remember a time when as an escape from these domestic
trials I hadn't books, paints and a private theatre. The theatre was
usually a bootbox with a proscenium arch cut in one end, and my
company of actors were cut from illustrations in books, mounted on
pasteboard and stuck in sticks. Apart from the Passion Play at
Oberammergau I had no playbooks, and my plays tended to be the
composite type with Prince Charlie and Buffalo Bill as contemporaries.
In those days I devoted less attention than I should now on dramatic
construction or even acting; my main interests were in decor and

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

lighting. Like many entrepreneurs my real difficulty was to find plays

worthy of my art. Coloured paper well greased made wonderful filters.
Never again have I seen in any theatre moonlit woodlands with solitary
cottage windows aglow that equalled mine. I particularly liked
producing grand opera because it gave scope to my skill as a singer as
well. The experiments led to trouble in the home; the greased paper
blazed and my theatres went up with the regularity of mediaeval towns,
but with mediaeval pertinacity I went on.
Books were a trial too. With my pocket money I could buy only a
"Gem" or at most a "Gem" and a "Scout," and even eked out by
judicious swapping these were not enough. The Carnegie Library was
right at the other side of the town, on the quay beyond the second
branch of the river, and I tramped there almost every second day. In
the reading room you could get the "Boy's Own Paper," a most superior
magazine with illustrations in half tone-as an artist myself, I had a
poor opinion of line drawings. It was in the days before open access,
and unless you could nab a good book on the counter, just as it was
brought back, you had to choose from the catalogue. Library
catalogues-I've never made them myself-are an invention of the devil.
A title that suggested Rockies or Himalayas proved to be a pious tract,
and back I tramped over the two bridges in the dusk with death in my
heart. I couldn't change it until next day at the earliest, and for some
reason I was afraid of changing a book that day after for fear one of the
assistants would think I wasn't able to read and cancel my ticket. I don't
know if there was any basis for this fear other than the fact that I was
kept rigorously law-abiding by endlessly trying and sentencing myself
for imaginary crimes. I don't think I ever pinched an illustration from a
library book, though I was often sorely tempted for the sake of the
theatre. Usually, I confined myself to tracing.
You see, if only children escape one sort of crisis by retreating into
fantasy, it's only to find another one waiting them inside. For instance,
I was convinced that the authors of the books I read were all realists like
myself. Their characters protected the weak, endured endless suffering
rather than betray a companion, and always told the truth. Could the
authors do less? Could their books contain falsehoods? As the fellows in
the school where I went told lies, beat up smaller boys and put the
blame on someone else, they were obviously no class. Once, a teacher
gave the leather to a chap I'd been fighting with and told him to slap
me. Would Tom Merry stand for punishment from a bounder? Would
even a bounder take the leather to Tom Merry? I made it plain that I'd
die rather than be licked in that ignoble manner, and of course, I only

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 ONLY CHILD

got licked worse and was regarded as a fool for my pains. That was what
always happened when I stood on principle.
The second crisis was more serious. These were the good old days
of the Liberal Alliance, and the atmosphere we grew up in might have
been that of any small Scotch town of the time. But when I was eight or
nine a new teacher came. He took down the grimly educational prints
from the schoolroom wall and hung up two watercolours of his own. As
a bit of an artist myself, I felt I was going to like him. He stopped us
singing "When through life unblest we rove" and made us sing instead
"Breathes there a man with soul so dead," a change I disliked, because
I loved sentimental songs, the dolefuller the better. Then one day he
kept us in after school, wrote something on the blackboard in an
unfamiliar script, and gave us our first lesson in an unfamiliar
language. I noticed that he refrained from translating the words on the
blackboard, so being a studious sort of chap I went afterwards and
asked him what they meant. After a moment's hesitation he said
"Waken your courage, Ireland." I thought this most peculiar. I thought
it more peculiar still when I went home and discovered that the strange
language was spoken by my grandmother, the washer-woman. In fact,
what was taught in secrecy, almost, after school hours, was Gaelic.
"Breathes there a man with soul so dead" was a disguised appeal to our
patriotic sentiments (very disguised so far as I was concerned), and the
words which the teacher hadn't translated were probably an exhortation
to himself. That was my introduction to the Irish Renaissance, so called.
Still, I was glad I hadn't murdered my grandmother, because she
now enabled me to take the head of the class. The new teacher gave me
books. He hadn't it seemed heard of E. S. Ellis or Gunby Hadath, but he
gave me books about Irish heroes like Cu Chulainn and Finn McCool. I
saw that Cu Chulainn and I had a great deal in common. At the age of
six he set out from home to the royal palace with a dart, a hurley stick
and a ball. He threw the dart, pucked the ball, tossed the stick after
them and caught all three before they reached the ground. I practised
that single simple trick endlessly but never succeeded in catching even
the dart. Naturally, it never struck me that any more than Frank
Richards or Gunby Hadath, wasn't the author telling the truth. I put it
down to a general decline in vigour and felt I had to do something
about it.

Then came the 1914 war, and my father and uncle were back in the
army, and I followed our army on a map. I was at a new school with a
lot of Belgian refugees. I forgot Cu Chulainn, I forgot my Gaelic; all my
time was taken up learning Flemish from the Belgian lads. And after

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

that came the Easter Rebellion, and Cu Chulainn and Gaelic came back,
and I didn't even understand how I could have been so heartless as to
desert them. At the same time I saw in a shop window a book with my
old teacher's name on it. It cost a shilling-a small fortune!-but I was
in a fever until I got it. It turned out to be a book of short stories, not,
of course up to the standard of E. S. Ellis or Gunby Hadath-in fact,
most of them I couldn't make head or tail of-but a trifle of
incomprehension has never worried me when I felt really enthusiastic.
That book sunk me. Between Tom Merry, Cu Chulainn, the theatre
and short stories, the course of my life had already been mapped out,
and never since have I been for long out of hot water.
That's the major drawback of being an only child. "Just when we're
safest" as Browning says, but it isn't a "sunset touch or a chorus ending
from Euripides," it's Tom Merry, Buffalo Bill, Bonnie Prince Charlie or
Cu Chulainn, and all at once you begin to behave in a way that drives
the children of large families wild. Their invisible playmates, their
extemporised playthings, if they ever had any, have long been banished
by the mockery of brothers and sisters. They assume you are behaving
like that to please some audience other than themselves-a galling
thought. They assume that you're not doing it for nothing-"three
thousand a year or more" is the last figure I heard quoted for myself,-
and they hate it. They make it hot for you. Ah, yes, the way of the only
child is hard, especially in Ireland. Ireland is full of large families.

-Broadcast on the Scottish Home Service (BBC), October 11, 1950

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