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When he came to literary awareness, modernism was enjoying its fullest and most successful expression. In its general and necessary attack on a dying tradition of panoramic social realism, it also inflicted major — and to O’Connor’s belief, catastrophic — damage on the notion of the writer’s voice. Modernism fragmented and ironised it, made it unreliable and shifty, sometimes hidden away altogether. O’Connor wanted to keep alive in prose, and especially in the short story, what he believed to be at its heart: the sound of ‘an actual man, talking’.
Talking, but also listening. O’Connor once said that when he remembered people — even those he was very fond of — he sometimes couldn’t remember their faces, but could always take off their voices. So, in his art, how a character sounds is more important than where they live or what they are wearing, or even what they look like. William Maxwell, O’Connor’s editor for many years at the New Yorker, amicably complained that though he was capable of ‘marvellous descriptions’, he didn’t go in for them much because they didn’t interest him. They did when he was writing topographically or architecturally — then he looked as closely as anyone — but in the rendering of human beings into fictional form it all began with voice — their voice, his voice.
The writer Benedict Kiely once noted that ‘O’Connor can be as outrageously at ease with his own people as a country priest skelping the courting couples out of the ditches.’ His fellow New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan also teased him with the clerical comparison, imagining St Patrick’s Cathedral with O’Connor ‘where he usually is in the afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a priest and giving penance to some old woman’. But the real priest listens, judges, issues penances, and keeps the sinner’s secrets. O’Connor listened, took notes, did not judge, and turned the confession into a story. His masters were not the moralists or the modernists, but those like Turgenev (‘my hero among writers’) who went with seeming simplicity to the complexity at the heart of human matters. And the short-story writer he turned to most often was Chekhov. When Maxwell inherited O’Connor’s volumes of Chekhov, he described them as ‘so lived with — turned down corners, coffee stains, whiskey stains, and perhaps tears’.
In his essay on the Russian in ‘The Lonely Art’, O’Connor identifies one central, and to him profoundly sympathetic, belief in Chekhov’s work: the notion that
We are not damned for our mortal sins, which so often require courage and dignity, but by our venial sins, which we often commit a hundred times a day until we become as enslaved to them as we could be to alcohol and drugs. Because of them and our toleration of them, we create a false personality for ourselves.
(Again, O’Connor’s confessional was an unorthodox one.) In ‘Checkhov’s ‘The Bishop’, written the year before he died, a bishop, originally from a poor background, is dying a lonely death. He is visited by his old mother who, because of his eminence, at first cannot stop calling him ‘Your Grace’. Only towards the end does she break through the ‘false personality’ society has imposed on her, to the intimate contact mother and son once had: she starts calling him again by the private names she once used when he was a small boy unable to button his trousers. ‘It is a final affirmation,’ O’Connor writes, ‘of Chekhov’s faith in life — lonely and sad, immeasurably sad, but beautiful beyond the power of the greatest artist to tell.’
And yet not beyond the power of the artist to try. If Chekhov was O’Connor’s prose master, Mozart was his musical master, and there is a conscious iteration in O’Connor’s analysis, on the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death, of what it is that we have come to call ‘Mozartean’:
It is a way of seeing things which revokes the tragic attitude without turning into comedy, which says, not ‘Life is beautiful but so sad’ but ‘Life is so sad but beautiful’, and this way of seeing things, half way between tragedy and comedy, represents a human norm.
That human norm tells us where O’Connor’s art came from, and where it is heading.
The Best of Frank O’Connor, published by Everyman’s Library on 26 June, contains this introduction by Julian Barnes.
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