‘I almost said “Thank God” when Joyce died’: thus wrote Irish writer and critic, Frank O'Connor (born on this day in 1903), in his “appreciation” of Joyce published in “The Bell”. O’Connor wrote on and off about James Joyce for 50 years and clearly had very mixed feelings. Thread

O’Connor met Joyce once in his Paris flat and noticed a print of the River Lee: "I put my hand on it and said ‘that’s rather nice, what’s that?’ And Joyce said, ‘that’s Cork’, and I said , ‘yes, yes! I know it’s Cork but what’s the frame made of?’ and Joyce said, ‘that’s cork’.

Then he said, ‘I had great trouble getting the French frame makers to make it, they said they never made a frame of cork before’. I felt a little bit dizzy after that and it struck me that the man was suffering slightly from associative mania.'

Like many, O’Connor preferred Joyce's early writings and often struck a note of regret for what he saw as a once committed writer, an Irish angry young man, who has lost his way:
There had been another James Joyce, much closer to Stanislaus, and whom only Stanislaus remembered

– poor, angry and idealistic – and to him the material had mattered intensely. One can find this earlier Joyce in Stephen Hero. It is not the style of Stephen Hero that matters, for it has none; it is the rage, the anguish, the pity, the awkwardness in it.’

In an 1958 LP recording about Joyce, O’Connor prefers the ‘good honest hatred’ of ‘The Holy office’ to the subsequent ‘adolescent preoccupation with literary form and manners’. In A Backward Look, he expresses further frustration with Joyce who, ‘like other exhibitionists

… not only reveals but conceals’ and had little time for most Joyce criticism: ‘Despite having ‘Boswells galore […] the commentaries are not always accurate because Joyce had a mania for mystification, and he even amused himself by mystifying those he enlightened.’