'Some Impending Social Disaster'

I must have learned of the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland from a book, certainly not in school. It might have been from Yeats: “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.” More likely it was from Frank O’Connor in his first memoir, An Only Child (1961): 

“In April 1916 a handful of Irishmen took over the city of Dublin and were finally surrounded and overwhelmed by British troops with artillery. The daily paper showed Dublin as they showed Belgian cities destroyed by the Germans, as smoking ruins inhabited by men with rifles and machine guns. At first my only reaction was horror that Irishmen could commit such a crime against England.”

 

Seditious talk in some quarters. O’Connor (1903-1966) was born Michael O’Donovan. He came from Cork, the home of my mother’s forebears, the Hayeses and McBrides. His was a Dickensian childhood of poverty and his father’s alcoholism. I had an early interest in Irish writers, and O’Connor was among the first I read. His prose was clean and pre-Modernist. He was a storyteller. More than fifty of his short stories were published in The New Yorker between 1945 and 1965. His editor at the magazine was William Maxwell.

 

While rereading O’Connor’s memoir I was reminded of Dr. Johnson, Louis Armstrong and others who start life with crippling disadvantages – poverty, disease, prejudice, limited formal education -- conditions that crush many. Through some combination of pluck, luck, perseverance and a congenital gift, they survive, prosper and return a disproportionately generous gift to the world. Here is O’Connor, addressing anyone with an autodidactic streak who has had the good fortune to encounter an encouraging teacher or mentor:       

 

“The first book I took from [his teacher, Daniel] Corkery’s bookcase was a Browning. It was characteristic of my topsy-turvy self-education that I knew by heart thousands of lines in German and Irish, without really knowing either language, but had never heard of Browning, or indeed of any other  English poet but Shakespeare, whom I didn’t think much of. But my trouble with poetry  was that of most auto-didacts. I could not afford books, so I copied  and memorized like mad. It is a theory among scholars that all the great periods of manuscript activity coincide with some impending social disaster and that scribes are like poor Jews in the midst of a hostile community, gathering up their few little treasures in the most portable form before the next pogrom.”