Corkers

CRAB APPLE JELLY -- Frank O'Connor --Knopf ($2.50).

Michael O'Donovan, Cork-born in 1903, got off the mark so fast that he tried to publish his "collected works" at the age of twelve. Later, having adopted the pseudonym of Frank O'Connor, he published several novels and plays, some verse, a biography of Irish Revolutionary Michael Collins, and a host of short stories that critics have called the best in Ireland since James Joyce's Dubliners. "O'Connor," said the late great William Butler Yeats, "is doing for Ireland what Chekov did for Russia."

Crab Apple Jelly contains a dozen simple, tart tales of the men, women & children of Cork and Kerry. The townsmen -- clerks, shopkeepers, shabby priests, students, girls who dream of America -- live in a retired world of mahogany cabinets with glass fronts, gilt mirrors with cupids, sets of the History of the Popes, cheap alarm clocks on bedside tables. Snatches of whiskey, poteen or brandy turn them from sighs to smiles in the wink of an eye. Back of them are the old stone farms and grey walls of their childhood--homes huddled away on islands in the middle of lakes and reached by cold journeys in red-sailed boats. They talk an easy, distinctive language that is neither the voice of England nor the voice of Dublin:

" Tis probably indigestion," said the [woman] doctor. "Are you sleeping alright?"

"Poorly," said Johnny.

"Is it palpitations you have?"

"Thumps," said Johnny. . . .

"Ah, go to God!" said she, drawing down the blind. . . . "Open that old shirt of yours."

"Ah, I'd be too shy. . . . And besides, what's wrong with my heart wouldn't show through the speaking tube."

Natural, straightforward, usually tragicomical, Author O'Connor's stories present a world that is self-contained--often sadly so. An old Ford is the most up-to-date object in the book; the reader's eyes are directed into the past rather than the future. In one of the stories an old woman attains her lifelong ambition, which is to be buried in the place where she was born. In another, a kindly, drunken father spins his young daughters what seems to be simply a gay, Oriental tale, but which turns suddenly into the old man's pathetic way of reproaching his daughters for being ashamed of his drunkenness.

Lightest gay-sad story is about two Irish Trappist monks who have put everything in the world behind them--except making secret bets with each other on the horses. The loser pays the winner in Hail Marys for both their souls.

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