Portraying creator of landmark ‘Last Hurrah’

A FAMILY OF HIS OWN: A LIFE OF EDWIN O’CONNOR.

By Charles F. Duffy

Catholic University of America Press, $49.95, 368 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY BRUCE ALLEN

Edwin O’Connor (1918-68) will be remembered less for a small, though engaging body of work than as the author of a novel whose title added a phrase into our language. “The Last Hurrah” (1956) is, if not the definitive fictional treatment of Irish-American politics, at the very least a jauntily exuberant portrayal of a uniquely resourceful and charismatic rogue.

O’Connor’s Frank Skeffington, inspired (as the novelist never quite admitted) by Boston’s infamous serial mayor, James Michael Curley, is a vivid amalgam of Machiavellian cunning and sentimental blarney that ought to have provided Spencer Tracy with one of his juiciest film roles. Alas, that didn’t happen: Tracy’s sluggish performance and director John Ford’s lethargic 1958 film version are uncharacteristic duds.

This first biography of Skeffington’s creator, the work of a professor of English at Providence College, is a warmly affectionate, though not uncritical look at a commercially successful novelist whose unfortunately brief career and life ended long before he might have achieved his declared ambition: to become “the Faulkner of the Irish in America.”

Born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island in 1918, “Sonny” (a nickname that lingered into his middle age) grew up as the eldest son of a second-generation Irish-American family made “comfortable” by his father’s successful medical practice. Edwin was an excellent student, with a vagrant mischievous streak, who would mature impressively at Notre Dame (1935-39), where he came under the literary influence of energetic English professor (and self-destructive alcoholic) Frank O’Malley, and performed as an announcer for the college’s radio station.

Relying on Hugh Rank’s 1974 critical study in Twayne’s U.S. Authors Series, and also an unfinished autobiographical novel (“The Boy”), Mr. Duffy efficiently traces O’Connor’s postgraduate radio career (at WPRO in Providence, then Boston’s WNAC, and elsewhere), service in the Coast Guard, and fortuitously forged connections with The Atlantic Monthly magazine and with tireless literary agent Helen Strauss.

His first novel “The Oracle” (1951), a satire on commercial radio, was a mixed success that created a lively self-absorbed antihero — and also offered the first of several portrayals of a vital, accomplished, judgmental father, about whom his son (the novel’s protagonist) became and remained deeply conflicted. The tensions of living without a fixed income (though he did freelance extensively as a newspaper television critic) doubtless contributed to the bleeding ulcer that nearly killed him in 1953.

But a therapeutic first trip to Ireland recharged his batteries, and was followed in 1956 by “The Last Hurrah.” This runaway success won a prestigious Atlantic Prize, earned (mostly) rapturous reviews, and made O’Connor a wealthy man — who quickly indulged in such luxuries as a Porsche and a summer home on Cape Cod.

Now a committed Bostonian, O’Connor spent his remaining twelve years trying to repeat “The Last Hurrah“‘s success. His most curious third novel “Benjy” (1957) was a “ferocious fairy tale” filled with unmistakable — and disturbing — autobiographical resonance.

Readers and critics alike have never known quite what to make of it. But O’Connor rebounded brilliantly with the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Edge of Sadness” (1961). This, his best novel, created the unforgettable characters of Father Hugh Kennedy (its witty narrator) and Hibernian-American patriarch Charlie Carmody, and led to a flurry of further awards and honors.

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