Sir, - I reacted with glee to John Boland's predictable savaging of my introduction to Frank O'Connor's Larry Delaney: Lonesome Genius, Everyone knows that unless one is the author of a remaindered book, the only way one achieves publicity through Mr Boland's column is to raise his ire. Being mentioned in the same column as my fellow-Corkman and UCC contemporary, Dennis Staunton, made it seem like a family affair.
Boland's own sensitivities regarding Paddywhackery and Oirishness suggest to me that he is one of those very metropolitans I accuse of being embarrassed about their origins. He asks: "Who would think of comparing actual writers with fictional characters?" and lambasts me for contrasting the privileged background of Beckett with that of O'Connor's fictional alter ego, Larry Delaney. I thought the fact that Larry Delaney was described as O'Connor's alter ego would make it clear to the most obtuse that Beckett and O'Connor were being compared.
He says I continue to make swipes and unsubstantiated assertions. It's true that I did not have the space to elaborate as much as I wanted to but I did elaborate more than Boland asserted. I even named one of the soft-headed literary critics as Declan Kiberd whose literary history, Inventing Ireland, received not one dissenting review of its appearance, despite the fact that writer's such as O'Connor and O'Faolain barely received a mention.
The plight of O'Connor's reputation in this country reminds me of that suffered by a character in Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting: after the Prague Spring revolt was crushed, he found himself airbrushed out of all official histories. O'Connor is being airbrushed out now. In recent years no amount of polite, considered treatises by Americans appears to make one bit of difference to his invisibility in the established literary profile of this island. Only a calculated kick in the testicles has achieved the first mention in years of O'Connor's name in your pages. While you are forgetting, others are laughing. - Yours, etc.,
Killeen Books, Killeen, Blackrock Village, Cork city.