clearclassicsblog 7
Irish people love to talk, and can work nearly everything into a story. ‘Not wanting to give you a short answer’ was a standard preamble that my parents’ generation used when they were about to deliver too conclusive or terse a response to a question. Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness (1961) is about the seductions and dangers of storytelling in a mid-twentieth-century Irish-American community, about how it can mask bullying, grief and despair, and lull both teller and listener into a sense that all is well, when it most emphatically is not.
This extraordinary book (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1962) is usually described as being about a priest coming to terms with his vocation. To me, the book is as much, or as little, ‘about’ the priesthood as Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices is ‘about’ the female religious life. In both novels the life consecrated to God is the setting for universal truths. And while The Edge of Sadness could never be called a feelgood read – if anything, its climatic scene makes it a kind of anti-Christmas Carol – it concludes on a note of hope.
Edwin O’Connor’s earlier political novel, The Last Hurrah (1956)is a perceptive and hilarious account of the decline of the Irish-American boss-style politician, made into a film by John Ford in 1958 with Spencer Tracy. The Edge of Sadness, also set in Irish Catholic America before Vietnam and Vatican II, has little even of the ambivalent nostalgia of The Last Hurrah.
When the story opens, 55-year-old Hugh Kennedy, the narrator, is parish priest of St. Paul’s, in a north-eastern American city. The badly-maintained church is half-empty on Sundays, the neighbourhood is so depressed and dispersed that it doesn’t even have a red-light district, and parishioners range in ethnicity from Portuguese to Finnish to Chinese (there are no Irish). Hugh, recently returned from four years drying out in a sanatorium, is invited, out of the blue, to the birthday party of Charlie Carmody, from the old neighbourhood. Charlie, who knew Hugh’s late father, Dave, is the father of Hugh’s closest childhood friends, John (now a priest) and Helen, who is married to a doctor. Charlie, who made his considerable wealth as an unscrupulous slum landlord, is great fun, and he talks affectionately about Dave to Hugh.( It was Dave’s premature and painful death which turned Hugh to depression and alcoholism.) Dave had often talked to Hugh about Charlie, a man he disliked; ‘as fine a man as ever robbed the helpless’ was his verdict. Charlie starts to call on Hugh regularly, and through him Hugh meets other old people from the old neighbourhood, like Bucky Heffernan and P.J.Mulcahy, who provide a combative commentary on Charlie’s master-narrative of the past; ‘All right Charlie! Hold on there! There’s other people besides yourself that knew Dave Kennedy! For the love of God, the man wasn’t a stranger you met all by yourself on top of a mountain in Zanzibar!’. When Hugh goes with Charlie and P.J. to visit Bucky in hospital, it is only by accident that he (Hugh) encounters one of his parishioners, Albert, in the next bed. Hugh leaves most of the parish work to his boundlessly enthusiastic curate Stanley Danowski, listening with patronizing amusement to Danowski’s frequent bulletins about the parish and individual parishioners.
Hugh’s passivity makes him the perfect audience for Charlie’s stories, with P.J and Bucky providing a comical chorus. It’s all great fun, though a lot of this chatter is what a later generation would call white noise, intended to distract the listener from what is really going on. Charlie is ever-watchful through his endless stories, waiting to pounce on Hugh for some favour – but what? The reader is left to wonder. At one stage, Bucky tells story after story in an attempt to probe Hugh about the alcoholic rehabilitation centre. The power of story also leads Hugh, at the climax of the book, into a serious lie that betrays not only his core beliefs (and his vocation), but also his dear father’s memory.
If the book is critical, then, of something we Irish have always considered to be our Unique Selling Point, it is even more unsettling reading for anyone who cherishes the fond belief that the old are somehow ‘better’ than the young. If Charlie is not as monstrous at 81 as he was in his prime, it is only because he has already done all the damage he can do – to his misfortunate tenants, his business associates and most of all, his family. A faithful husband, an excellent provider, and never violent, his controlling and criticism drove his wife to miserable silence and an early grave, and affected all his children. John is a priest who fears and loathes all humanity, and Mary, ‘the daughter-at-home’ is her father’s slave. For a male author of his time, O’Connor is refreshingly regretful about the waste of Helen’s intellect in marriage rather than a career – but there was no way Charlie was going to pay for third-level education for her. Cheerful ne’er-do-well Dan, whose invented memories provide some of the comic highlights of the book, is permanently on the move, regularly baled out by Charlie. The only offspring from the four Carmodys is Helen’s son Ted, an aspiring politician with a charming wife and abnormally well-behaved twins. Ted regards his grandfather as a harmless old teller of tall tales; at one point Hugh finds himself ‘defending’ Charlie by insisting that the old man was every bit as bad as he claims to have been.
It is no spoiler to say that Hugh eventually finds his own way out of the beguiling, treacherous shadows of the past. To do this, he has to acknowledge that he will never be as comfortable again as he was in the big familiar Irish-American parish when he was a young priest and his beloved father was still alive. But a new, more steadily-burning joy (as opposed to comfort) is in store for him, stemming from his reliance – for the first time in his life – on the love of God to help him. A non-believer could appreciate this as the mid-life epiphany of accepting limitations and hurling oneself willingly, in the spirit of adventure, into unexpected and unasked-for places, situations, and relationships.
When I first read this book, in my 20s, I thoroughly enjoyed it as a great story with memorable characters. I re-read it a few times over the years, but never did it pack such a punch as it did when I read it in my early 60s.
Edwin O’Connor, The Edge of Sadness (New York: Little, Brown 1961; London: Max Reinhardt 1961). Cluny Media have republished this more recently.
Edwin O’Connor, The Last Hurrah (New York: Little, Brown 1956).
ABOUT CLEAR CLASSICS BLOG:
A few years ago I had the idea of republishing Irish books (mainly novels and biographies) from the 1930s and 40s that I loved and would like to introduce to a wider audience. I still haven’t given up this dream, but until I put this plan into effect – and I might not, because there are already plenty of publishers out there – I’m using this blog as a way of exploring some of my opinions and feelings about these books, and how my perspective on them has changed over the years. Not all the books I’ll be writing about were published in Ireland, or in the mid-twentieth century, but the rationale for any outliers will be explained.
Clear Classic Books 
Leave a comment