‘Prizes appeal to the eternal child within’ — John Banville writes on
Ulick O’Connor was a writer, historian, sportsman and lifelong quarreller, writes Liam Collins
IT is perhaps wiser to judge a man in how he handles life’s disappointments than how he behaves at the height of his success.
And this weekend Booker Prize winning author John Banville was as dignified and eloquent as ever in the face of a disappointment that made headlines around the world.
On Friday he had received a call, which appeared to come from the Swedish Academy’s offices, telling him he was one of two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature about halfan-hour before Thursday’s ceremony in Stockholm.
Later he was to learn that it was not to be, when he received a voicemail explaining that there had been a last-minute disagreement among the decision-makers. Both communications seem to have been hoaxes.
Speaking to the Sunday Independent, he described his feelings the morning after the news: “It was a peculiar, out-of-body experience. But I’m a novelist, and all experience is potential material.”
He added: “One should never take prizes too seriously. They appeal to the eternal child within, and have nothing to do with one’s work. I’ve said it before, and I say it again, I’d be a poor writer indeed if the getting or not getting of a prize influenced what I write and how I write it.
“Every morning is a struggle to start up afresh, as every writer knows. I had intended to work today [Saturday], to make up for the previous two days of running about and shouting — not literally, but you know what I mean — but I’ve had too many distractions, a lot of them pleasant ones, for I’ve had many calls and emails from sympathisers.”
“Still”, he said, “it would have been nice to have all that lolly...”
Mr Banville, whose novels include the acclaimed Frames and Revolutions trilogies — The Book of Evidence, Ghosts and Athena; and Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and The Newton Letter — and The Sea, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2005, is in good company as a writer without a Nobel Prize.
A host of the world’s greatest writers have famously not won the coveted prize, including. Robert Frost, John Updike, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, whose novel Ulysses is often called the greatest ever written.
ULICK O’Connor, who died last Monday aged 90, was a biographer, writer, dramatist, sportsman, barrister and an irascible commentator on public affairs at home and abroad for more than half a century.
He was also instrumental in establishing the popularity of The Late Late Show under Gay Byrne when rancour between himself and fellow-panellist, the actor Dennis Franks, became a popular weekly feature. The enmity between the two eventually led to the item being dropped because it was beginning to overshadow other aspects of the talk show.
“People often say to me that I’m not like the louser they see on television,” O’Connor later told Gay Byrne. “They say, ‘you’re actually quite nice’. I can’t figure this out. What sort of image do I project? Is it because I say what I think that people take offence? In Ireland this can happen... the sheer fact that I speak my mind actually terrifies them.”
O’Connor, often mocked by his contemporary, the playwright and commentator Hugh Leonard, was an observer rather then a participant in the literary Dublin of the late 1940s and 1950s and wrote best-selling biographies of Oliver St John Gogarty (James Joyce’s model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses) and Brendan Behan.
An accomplished pugilist, on one occasion he knocked Behan unconscious after the latter “called him out” of Davy Byrne’s public house off Grafton Street to fight.
“I didn’t like the fellah,” O’Connor admitted, “He thought I was a fragile 18-yearold from Rathmines.”
His book on the author of Borstal Boy caused a storm of controversy when it revealed Behan’s bisexuality, a well-kept secret among the literary set at a time when such tendencies were regarded as repugnant and were also illegal.
Ulick O’Connor was born in Fairfield Park, Rathgar, Dublin, on October 10, 1929, the eldest of a family of five children, four boys and one girl. His father was the eminent Dublin doctor Matthew O’Connor, who was a Professor of Pathology and Dean of the Royal College of Surgeons; his mother, Eileen Murphy, was a Celtic scholar.
Ulick was a cousin of the famous American actor Carroll O’Connor, who played the character Archie Bunker in the highly popular 1970s sitcom All In the Family.
Educated at St Mary’s College, Rathmines, University College Dublin and Loyola College, New Orleans, where he took a diploma in dramatic literature, O’Connor devoted himself equally to his studies and sport.
He was Irish pole vault champion and record holder from 1947-1951 and narrowly missed being selected for the 1948 Olympics in London. He was also British universities welterweight boxing champion in 1950. He was a keen rugby player and also played cricket but he had an abiding interest in all sports and could talk endlessly and entertainingly about sporting characters, especially boxers, he had met or seen during his lifetime.
During his term in UCD, where he studied English and philosophy, his “practical joking” was frowned upon and the president of the college, Michael Tierney, eventually put a proposal to the influential Literary & Historical Society that he be banned from its meetings. O’Connor, who was barred from attending, managed to gain entrance to the meeting by dressing up as a woman and seconded Tierney’s motion, before whipping off his wig and chaining himself to a lecture bench. Pandemonium ensued and the gardai were called.
Following his return to Dublin from America he studied at the King’s Inns and was called to the Bar in 1951. He practised as a barrister for the next 15 years, mainly on the western circuit in criminal cases and in defamation actions before the High Court.
After he was commissioned to write a biography of the doctor, sportsman and journalist Oliver St John Gogarty, which took him eight years, writing and journalism became his pre-eminent concern.
When his parents died in the early 1960s, O’Connor, who even in old age referred to them quaintly as Mammy and Daddy, took over the family home in Rathgar, an impressive Victorian red-brick, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Visitors were struck by the fact that the interior was changed little since the early part of the 20th Century. It was never re-painted and central heating and other modern comforts ignored by O’Connor, a lifelong bachelor. The only additions from his parents’ time were the voluminous papers and books that seemed to flow from his desk and occupy all the spare space.
He kept a series of small, silver-coloured profiles of famous Irish writers on the mantelpiece in the sitting room — done for him by the bohemian sculptor Desmond McNamara a denizen of McDaid’s pub.
The bookcases contained different editions of his books and the walls were decorated with posters for his theatrical productions.
His best known works were his biographies of Gogarty (1964) and Behan (1970). His collection of poems, Life Styles, was published in 1973.
He also published Celtic Dawn: A Biography Of The Irish Literary Renaissance and Sport Is My Lifeline in 1984.
His play Executions, about events in the Civil War, was premiered the same year and his Biographers and the Art of Biography was well received in 1991.
He performed and toured extensively in Ireland and America with one-man shows on both Gogarty and Behan.
He was a director of the Abbey Theatre, where a number of his works were performed, and he virulently opposed the closure, for economic reasons, of its permanent cast, the Abbey Players.
As a writer and journalist he was a well-known figure in the media, although he fulminated at being “banned” from RTE in later life.
The breadth of his interests and friendships is best captured in his 2001 book The Ulick O’Connor Diaries 1970 to 1981: A Cavalier Irishman, which teems with meetings, lunches, dinners and social occasions with famous literary, political and social figures.
It chronicles his diverse lifestyle, his friendship with the 8th Earl of Wicklow, Christmas dinner with the Guinness family at Leixlip Castle, lunch at the Chelsea Hotel in New York with Viva, star of Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie, drinking in McDaid’s with Joey Betts, a bookies runner, inviting Seamus and Marie Heaney home for drinks after a night in the Arts Club, playing cricket for the Leprechauns against Sir William Blunden when he owned Mount Juliet and seeing the sights of Tangier with Paul Bowles.
The commentator Vincent Browne wrote in a piece about the diaries: “How could it be that you were invited to lunch and dinner so often by civilised people, given that you are an uncouth and relentless braggart?”
These encounters led to entries like: “Spent the night at Leixlip Castle. Came down this morning to breakfast to find Mick Jagger there resplendent in dressing gown, a book propped in front of him as he eats. It is Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales. Seeks to enrol me as an enthusiast and seems a little disappointed to find that I already am. Nothing is quite so overwhelming for a fan in the first flush of discovery, so inventing an excuse that I had forgotten to shave I grab a plate of bacon and eggs from the side table and flee.”
Meetings with other famous figures include an overnight at Castlemartin, the stately home of Tony O’Reilly, where he describes fellow guest, the businessman Sir Basil Goulding, “crossing the room in a velvet suit, with a stuffed frog on his shoulder and drinking gin through the teat of a baby’s bottle”.
He also kept in with the sporting and bohemian set as this entry of May 10, 1975 indicates: “Back to Luke Kelly’s flat for party in Dartmouth Square. A lot of singing including A Nation Once Again. Interesting Faces. Ray Treacy sings On The One Road. Fellow says to me, ‘I see you got the sh*t beaten out of you in the New York papers for your last book’. Liam Brady comes over. John Giles in command of the evening.”
O’Connor took an intense personal interest in events in Northern Ireland, intervening with various taoisigh and Northern politicians, particularly John Hume and badgering friends in the British political and legal establishment and the media over various issues. He worked with Jack Lynch following Bloody Sunday to try to counter British propaganda that the Republic had no business intervening in ‘British’ affairs.
He never drove a car and engaged in a series of feuds with taxi drivers and bus conductors over issues like time-keeping and other trivial matters.
The former deputy editor of the Sunday Independent Willie Kealy and I had long and enjoyable lunches and dinners with O’Connor in his favourite Indian restaurant, during which the two of them talked knowledgeably about sport, particularly boxing — a subject about which I knew nothing but found enthralling.
O’Connor loved conversation and admired talent, verbal or written, even in people he didn’t like, such as “that toad” Conor Cruise O’Brien, another bete noire.
He continued to write into his late 80s and was proud of his Newstalk radio broadcasts, which were eventually collected in a well-received box set, Words Alone, in which he recited poetry and prose and talked about the work of Irish writers. He said he could recite hundreds of poems by heart.
Ulick O’Connor was buried in Deans Grange with his parents and his beloved nanny, Annie Bell.
He is survived by his niece Mary Buckley, nephews, and his personal assistant and friend Anna Harrison.
‘He engaged in feuds with taxi drivers and bus conductors’