Twelve Tart Tales

THE COMMON CHORD, STORIES AND TALES OF IRELAND (278 pp.) -- Frank O'Connor--Knopf ($2.75).

Frank O'Connor of County Cork is blessed with a rare, enviable talent: he can express serious ideas in blandly humorous, seemingly inconsequential stories. The twelve tart tales in this book create an imaginary world as real, and certainly as relevant, as daily experience itself.

O'Connor's stories are set in small Irish towns where good-natured, bumbling provincials doze through their days in even rhythms, scarcely touched by the frenetic spleen of cosmopolitan existence, and only occasionally shaken into surprised awareness of life's complexities. While these neat tales unfold, Author O'Connor remains in the background, rarely moralizing.

Pinings. But beneath the smooth, light surfaces of these stories there is a highly moral awareness of the inadequacies of contemporary life and the yearnings in every man for something better. When mocking the plight of a shopkeeper sentimentalist whose notions of marriage have been shaped by Romeo and Juliet but whose experience of it has been soured by a frigid, all too high-minded wife, O'Connor redeems the character from mere ridiculousness by noting that "he knew he could never be like any other sensible man, but would keep on to the day he died, pining for something a bit larger than life." This rarely stated but always sustaining compassion guides all the stories.

Sex is the common chord struck in all the stories--sex not as sensual experience but as a disturbing drive that leads people to behavior they can hardly control and but dimly understand. In one beautiful tale, The Babes in the Wood, O'Connor enters the shadow-world of painfully solemn, almost preternatural children who suffer from their elders' illicit affairs. O'Connor's bitterest stories are implicit denunciations of the sexual attitudes--or lack of them--of the prim, provincial and pious sort of Irishwoman. When a husband, desperately annoyed with his wife's unwifely reliance on the parish priest, is tempted to tell her "it was Father Ring she should have married," he refrains because he knows that "in time she'd be bound to confess it. There is nothing a good-living woman likes better than to confess her husband's sins." And when this same unfortunate husband is asked by a continental European why respectable Irishmen don't kiss their brides in public, he doubtfully replies that "We don't go in much for that sort of thing . . . we're more in the sporting line--horses and dogs and so on."

Priests. In many of the stories, O'Connor takes a mild jab at the clergy: Father Ring, a well-meaning but not too wise busybody; Father Cassidy, a worldly sort nonplussed by a girl's blithe confession of sin ("A philosopher of 60 letting Eve, aged 19, tell him about the apple!"); and Father Foley, a tragic figure who finds himself in love with a woman ("He sat by the fire wondering what his own life might have been with a girl like that, all furs and scents and laughter . . .").

O'Connor's effects are the result of a highly skillful use of language. He finds his images in daily experience ("She had a sallow face that looked very innocent down the middle and full of guile round the edges like a badly ironed pillow case") and composes dialogue that is corrosively revealing.

No doubt The Common Chord will be belittled by those who mistake lugubriousness for seriousness and who dismiss O'Connor as a minor writer unworthy of his master, Joyce. But to write a work of minor stature as well as O'Connor does is in itself a kind of triumph all too rare.

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