Then his publisher, Little, Brown & Company, decided to get behind his second, “The Last Hurrah,” the story of an old-time political boss. The book was hyped for months before its February 1956 release. The unnamed setting of the novel was almost certainly the publishers’ own Boston; while its central character, Frank Skeffington, may or may not have been modeled on James Michael Curley, the retired mayor. By September 1956, it had sold two million copies.
It was a hit with the critics too. “Here, after a century of trying, is the first successful Irish-American novel,” wrote Harvard’s John V. Kelleher in the New York Times Book Review. The Listener, the BBC’s prestigious magazine, declared it one of the best American novels ever.
Charles F. Duffy, who has written the first full biography of O’Connor, believes it was the right book for the right time. “He began to open up a new humorous way of treating the Irish American experience,” he said.
In the early 20th century, the Irish in America had begun to bitterly resent the portrayals of themselves seen in stage acts like that of Harrigan and Hart. But for a long time after that, the Irish had been too solemn, in Duffy’s view.
“O’Connor loosened things up,” his biographer believes. “Kelleher said: ‘O’Connor has parted the lace curtains for us; we can start to laugh at ourselves again.’ ” Of the novelist’s most famous book and the only one still in print 35 years after his death, Duffy said: “I think it still reads pretty well.”
At the heart of its plot was the decline of machine politics, which the Irish had mastered. FDR’s New Deal and the emergence of the welfare state put paid to city bosses’ traditional ways of doing business. Curley, one of the best known of the bosses, first became mayor when he defeated incumbent John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald in 1914. By the mid-1950s, he was in his late 70s. Sen. John F. Kennedy — grandson of his early opponent Fitzgerald — was readying himself for a presidential bid. “He was a defanged figure of nostalgia. It was now possible to poke fun at the Curley types,” Duffy said.
Curley originally thought about suing, unhappy that the mother of the fictional mayor stole bread when she was a young domestic. But he changed his mind.
“Curley began to sense that people had fallen in love with Skeffington, so he figured, ‘Hey, maybe I’ve got something going here,’ ” Duffy said. “Instead of suing O’Connor and the publisher, he decided to embrace Skeffington as his alter ego.”
Indeed, Curley often told listeners that his favorite scene in the novel was the one where he himself died. The title of his 1957 memoirs, “I’d Do it Again,” was a toned-down version of a sentiment Skeffington uttered on his deathbed.
However, while some minor characters were drawn wholly from real-life Boston politicos, Curley was just one part of the composite that made up O’Connor’s hero.
And Skeffington was a much more likable figure than the real-life mayor. “Curley could be a very nasty man,” Duffy said. “He was bigoted and could be very cruel to some of his enemies.”
The fictional mayor, Duffy argues in “A Family of His Own,” was, at least in part, representative of O’Connor’s father’s generation — successful, assimilated to a degree, but still holding onto the resentments of the tribe.
Edwin O’Connor was born in 1918 in Woonsocket, R.I. His father was a doctor. The O’Connors were only the second Irish-Catholic family to live in their largely Protestant neighborhood. The local Irish, though, mainly fought for political control of Woonsocket with citizens of French Canadian descent, who were fellow Catholics.
On the question of ethnic identity, O’Connor was an unlikely supporter of full assimilation, given his resume. A Notre Dame graduate and devout Catholic, he became the most celebrated Irish-American writer of his day. He loved Ireland and even before he became rich and famous, made annual trips there, staying usually at Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel. However, he largely disagreed with the idea of organized Irishness in America. When the St. Patrick’s Day committee in Holyoke, Mass., asked to honor him, pointing out that JFK was a previous recipient, he declined.
“He wanted the Irish to become assimilated but not to lose their sense of fun, their wit especially,” Duffy said. “He didn’t want them to lose their Catholic roots either.”
Only one of his five novels dealt directly with a Catholic theme, his Pulitzer-winning “The Edge of Sadness,” about an alcoholic priest.
“It’s his best book. There’s general agreement on that too,” Duffy said. “It’s more profound [than ‘The Last Hurrah’], it’s better put together. The conflicts are much sharper, there’s much more drama. His eye and ear are much better.” (There are plans to reissue it soon, Duffy added.)
“Like his Irishness, his religion was a matter of a private belief,” he said. For that reason, it might reasonably be speculated that, had he lived, he would have identified with the church’s liberal wing. On the other hand, he was somewhat upset at some of the changes coming out of Vatican II, though he was an admirer of Pope John XXIII and the idea of the council. In politics and religion, Duffy concluded, the novelist was a strange mixture of conservative and liberal
One agnostic friend, the critic Edmund Wilson, wrote that O’Connor was one of the few people he knew who strove for a sincere Christian life.
“When you come right down to it, Edwin O’Connor was an old-fashioned guy,” Duffy said. The author never drank or smoked. “When he became famous, he did not become ostentatious or insufferable, I was told over and over again.”
Duffy, a professor of English at Providence College, interviewed dozens of relatives and friends of the author, including his sister, his stepson and two of JFK’s New Frontiersmen, John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., both of whom were close friends.
Edwin O’Connor died at his writing desk at his home on Boston’s exclusive Beacon Hill on March 22, 1968. He’d suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He was 49.
(“A Family of His Own: A Life of Edwin O’Connor,” by Charles F. Duffy, is published by the Catholic University of America Press. 376 pp. $49.95.)