Attempting to explain the Irish affinity for the short story, critics have been overly fond of the shanachie. Thus the potato-headed condescension from Charles Poore decorating the jacket of Frank O'Connor's Collected Stories: "One of the great Irish storytellers…." Not so. Though O'Connor often read his stories over Irish national radio, he was one of the great Irish story writers, a compulsive and even finicky craftsman who put a ten-page tale through thirty or forty drafts before letting it escape him, and that for only a moment or so. Rather like Auden endlessly tinkering among his poems, O'Connor took each major republication of his work as a chance to sneak in yet another revision. There is an illusion of spontaneity, a sense of overheard pub talk miraculously being as wonderful as the Irish Tourist Board would have us believe it is, but only an illusion….

[C'Connor's hallmark is] precise and homely description pushed to that far border where the slightest false step will tumble reader and writer together into either bathos or blarney. The trick—and it is more a wire-walker's than a magician's—appears at first to be merely linguistic, the outrageous comparisons apt enought but flashy. And sometimes, even in this collection of revisions of revisions, they are so….

To a great extent, "The Shepherds" is about the transplanted rural innocence of Father Whalen, and Abby Driscoll's rootlike attachment to the old ways lies at the core of "The Long Road to Ummera."

Perhaps O'Connor captured those qualities so tellingly because he always lived with them. Though both stories appeared in his first collection, Guests of the Nation (1931), he was still worrying at their themes when he died in 1966. Throughout the sixty-seven stories in the current volume, O'Connor seems haunted both by the perils of innocent good intentions and by the loss—indeed, the systematic destruction—of Ireland's past. The reasons surrounded him, to be sure, but lay within him as well. (p. 417)

Once he had accepted the hard fact of Cromwell and opted for Ireland's present—even her future—O'Connor almost immediately fell under the censor's ban as a writer of dirty stories. They are hardly that (O'Connor was a cruel disappointment to me when I first challenged the Irish Christian Brothers' warnings and covertly read him in the public library), but they are often awash in sex. Even in his liberation, however, the twin pincers of Romantic and Jansenist Ireland nipped at O'Connor, for the sex in such stories as "The Mad Lomanseys," "News for the Church" and "Judas," from Crab Apple Jelly (1944), is implicitly Pauline. Women are warm, strong and sensual temptations to overeducated and repressed "good Catholic" men….

O'Connor was never able to escape the Pauline notion entirely (though after his American sojourn—an economically induced exile that began in 1951—he was able to present it as but one among a variety of views), but he stood it on its head. The sensual women, those "natural beings," were good; the pinched and parched men who denied their own sensuality along with the women's represented the worst sort of evil. This crude Freudianism is hardly the most rigorous intellectual construct, but when banged repeatedly against the mass of near-naturalistic detail O'Connor brought to his portraits of quotidian Irish life, it struck fire.

Still, as the half-ironies of "My Oedipus Complex" and "The Study of History" testify, O'Connor never quite trusted Freud, regarding him as something of a toy to be played with….

O'Connor created his art from the the present because that was all there was, but he never stopped longing for the Celtic past. Even Bishop Gallogly, in "The Old Faith," has a good word to say for "the ghosts and the fairies and the spells," and in such well-known stories as "Peasants" and "The Majesty of the Law," O'Connor gives full life to the generous, pagan, communalist Ireland of his dreams—an Eire without priests or Freud. In that sense, at least, he stayed true to Yeats, and this brilliant collection shines not only with the light of his language but with the fire of a romanticism more timeless than reactionary. (p. 419)