Frank O’Connor and the Literary Development of Radio Éireann

Soon after the war in continental Europe started in the summer of 1939, Irish writers who had relied on income from foreign, especially American, magazine and book publishers had little choice but to seek alternative, native sources of revenue if they wanted to remain in Ireland. This retreat to the domestic market was both daunting and humbling. Not only were there few publishing opportunities in fiscally challenged Éire, but also there was a pride factor; numerous post-Independence authors had quarreled with and often sternly indicted Irish society—the hand they now more than ever needed to feed them. Several writers—including Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Michael Farrell, and Mervyn Wall—turned during this difficult time to Radio Éireann (RÉ), the state-run broadcasting service, which, since its establishment in 1926, had been relegated to the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, operated as a public service like its model and rival the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and financed by a combination of import duties on radios, license fees and advertising.¹

Among this cohort, Frank O’Connor (the pseudonym of Michael O’Donovan), was the most intransigent critic of the repressive features of Irish society and, thus, the least likely to find the radio service, with its conservative Catholic nationalist character and commitment to preserving traditional Gaelic culture, a hospitable outlet for his ideas and writing. O’Connor also had a low threshold for frustration and a volatile temper, for which his friend O’Faolain reproached him as being a “complete wash-out” when it came to “practical work.”² Yet, of the post-Independence writers employed by RÉ during the Emergency years, it was O’Connor who worked most arduously for the service, derived the most from the work, and made the most significant contribution to Irish culture through his broadcasting.

The productive relationship that O’Connor forged with RÉ administrators from 1939 to 1941—what could be called his first career at the national broadcasting service—supports Brian Fallon’s alternative characterization of him as an “ultraprofessional” man of letters who, along with O’Faolain, was “resourceful and resilient, with an ability to thrive or at least keep afloat in almost any situation” despite “persistent attempts” to depict these writers as “outsiders or even intellectual martyrs,” including apparently their own representations of each other as uncompromising geniuses.³ O’Connor’s successful two-year tenure on RÉ’s features staff, during which he and the service propelled each other’s development, also attests that important aesthetic and cultural strides were made during the post-Independence era. Those achievements have been slow to register, both in Irish cultural studies and in popular culture, eclipsed as they have been by exaggerated accounts of the period’s repression and stasis, and in this case by an oversimplified view of the early Irish radio service. Writing and broadcasting for radio inspired O’Connor to heighten the oral qualities of his fiction and convinced him of the short story’s centrality in Irish culture, a belief that he subsequently developed in his influential studies of Irish literature. In his own words, through his radio work O’Connor made “a significant discovery” about modern fiction.⁴ It was while working at RÉ that he came to realize that modern fiction’s formal sophistication and detached perspective had greatly diminished the story’s traditional impact; in his critical and creative writing, he sought to address and redress this loss.

Although O’Connor’s ideas about modern fiction also inevitably evolved in relation to his concurrent efforts for the BBC, his contributions to the British service were driven by England’s wartime ideological needs, which Clair Wills has elucidated in That Neutral Island.⁵ O’Connor’s epiphany and deepening sense of radio’s literary possibilities—as well as the subsequent modifications to his own fiction—resulted primarily from the greater autonomy he enjoyed at RÉ. Paradoxically, the ignorance about broadcasting stories and other literary materials that he encountered within the Irish service benefited O’Connor, because it compelled him to experiment and derive his own conclusions about...