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.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.