Making friends over a full stop

Picture the boiling streets of New York, deep in a melting summer, some time in the 1950s. In the restorative cool of a shaded apartment on Brooklyn Heights, two men are pacing around a study, poring over galleys, rowing about commas.

One of them is a Corkman, Michael O'Donovan, better known as the short story writer Frank O'Connor. He is something of a dandy. The other is William Maxwell, from Lincoln, Illinois, who edits O'Connor's stories for The New Yorker and who will himself one day be acclaimed as a master of American fiction.

Harriet O'Donovan Sheehy, O'Connor's widow, can summon up "an absolutely clear memory of the voices of the two men at the table working on the proofs. Bill's voice quiet, soft, almost hesitant, Michael's deep, strong, more insistent, but an ease and admiration between them creating a harmonious atmosphere."

Now and again, the work would be done at the office and in later years, Maxwell would recall the event that was an O'Connor visit "The shape in the doorway, the smile of delighted greeting, the big wool tam o'shanter - the only tam o'shanter in the whole city of New York - the voice speaking my name, and the envelope in his hand, containing a manuscript."

It wasn't always sweetness and light. Even after a story had been published, O'Connor would continue to rewrite it, pulling the words apart and sprucing up the syntax, tugging at the prose like a pup at a trouser cuff. He could send Bill Maxwell spinning close to distraction.

Their work is done now, of course, and their reputations made. This week, the first International Frank O'Connor Festival of the Short Story is held in Cork, a fitting memorial to his achievement. Maxwell died in July at the age of 91, the many talents displayed during his slow-burning career having ultimately been recognised. John Updike has said his voice "is one of the wisest in American fiction." Richard Ford says he "makes greatness seem simple."

Thankfully, the record of Maxwell and O'Connor's work together has been preserved in The Happiness Of Getting It Down Right, a collection of their letters published by Alfred Knopf in 1996. The letters illuminate a collaboration that stretched over a period of almost 20 years and they allow an invaluable close up focus on the processes of fiction. And there's endless literary gossip, too . . .

Early 1953 - they've been corresponding for six years already but O'Connor is frequently in America by now, fleeing "the emptiness and horror of Irish life", and the friendship deepens. Though occasionally immodest, and not averse to mentioning his own work in the same breath as Joyce's, he is increasingly open to collaboration.

"I live in the hope that somebody can improve a line I write," he says. Maxwell politely suggests that some of the Irishman's recent characters are "skimped" or "blurred". There are many long lunches. There is a story that when Sylvia Plath gets turned down for a place on O'Connor's writing course at Harvard she attempts suicide - and it's true.

June 1956 - when O'Connor gets it right, Maxwell is fulsome in his praise. He writes to him about The Man Of The World: "Now he's got himself in a pickle, I said, and waited, and open-mouthed watched you walk right over that pickle because it wasn't, for your purposes, even there."

Frank, of course, insists that the story wants changing, prompting a peevish response from Bill "protecting what I feel is one of the most moving and beautiful stories of modern times from your itch to improve it."

November 1956 - Maxwell writes to Harriet, complaining that the senior editor at the New Yorker is "pale from lack of (O'Connor) manuscripts, and keeps asking about him. I tell her he is a frivolous, talk-loving man who only writes when he is locked in a room, and for money to buy drink, while his poor children go barefoot. I forgot to add in the snow, but I will next time."

April 1959 - O'Connor writes from Dublin about a meeting on the street with Patrick Kavanagh. He characterises the conversation . . .

P K: I see you do be writing for a paper called The New Yorker?

F O'C: I do. P K: I dare say for a piece in a paper like that you might get big money? F O'C: Begod you might.

P K: I dare say you might get $500? F O'C: You might indeed. P K: You might even get $1,000?

March 1962 - Maxwell has stalled again. "I have a character, a central figure, a man shaving, but the son of a bitch won't do anything." O'Connor soothes.

May 1962 - O'Connor sends Maxwell some chapters from the second volume of his autobiography but the American is not impressed. "And what was Cork itself like? I know there was no intellectual life there but when were fiction writers ever dependent on intellectual life? There were people, weren't there?" He can't bring himself to mail the letter.

December 1963 - O'Connor's health is beginning to fail and his travelling is greatly reduced. He complains to Maxwell of "the effects of high altitudes on elderly alcoholics."

September 1967 - A New Yorker reader, Elizabeth Corcoran, unaware of O'Connor's death a year earlier, writes to the magazine about a posthumously published story : "Please forward my love and appreciation to Frank O'Connor for Bring In The Whiskey Now, Mary and also for several other wonderful, wonderful things he has written. I'm middle-aged and find the brave new world pretty confusing, but Frank O'Connor I understand." Maxwell forwards the note to Harriet : "This, I believe, is immortality," he writes. "Or the only kind of immortality that is worth having."

The First International Frank O'Connor Festival Of the Short Story runs in Cork from today until Saturday. The opening address, at the Crawford Gallery at 6.30 p.m., will be delivered by Professor James Alexander of Wisconsin University on "Frank O'Connor and The New Yorker."

Highlights of the festival include a reading from the Russian writer Ludmila Ulitskaya at the Tigh Fili Gallery, MacCurtain St, at 1 p.m. on September 21st and "State Of the Art", a panel discussion on the contemporary story at UCC at 4.30 p.m. on September 23rd.

For information phone 021-312955