The lone voice

The debate surrounding creative writing schools is one that, at least in Italy, never seems to let up. It may therefore be worth reading Frank O’Connor’s "La voce solitaria" (The Lonely Voice), recently published by Racconti in a translation by Stefano Friani. The Irish writer O’Connor, an author admired by W. B. Yeats and a long-standing contributor to The New Yorker, taught creative writing for many years in the United States from the 1950s onwards, and his The Solitary Voice (1962), with its eloquent subtitle ‘A Study of the Short Story’, became a classic. Paradoxically, in the final pages of the essay, O’Connor explains how her teaching method consisted (in part) of having her students write, for a month, nothing but four-line prompts: before delving into the details, it was important that her students understood what they really wanted to tell. Yet it would be reductive to view O’Connor’s book merely as a creative writing manual. It is a genuine essay on the short story, a model of reflection on the genre regarded by many writers as an invaluable guide. O’Connor deconstructs and analyses the mechanisms of the classics of this form (Maupassant, Chekhov, Hemingway and Mansfield, to name but a few). The guiding principle is the image of the ‘tribe of the submerged’: humble office workers (such as the protagonist of Gogol’s famous The Overcoat), domestic workers, and ‘invisible’ people of all kinds. The short story finds its most powerful voice in the narration of their loneliness (and how can one not think of Carver, absent from these pages for chronological reasons?). At the end of the chapter on Maupassant, an anecdote is recounted about an Irish intellectual and a French prostitute discussing the writer in a hotel room. ‘He knew us,’ she insists. ‘He understood us.’ In Chekhov, this understanding extends to the unjust: even those who ignore the pain of others can be just as lonely. The assessment of Hemingway is more controversial. O’Connor admires his skill, but suspects “a technique that carefully avoids the subject”. In Hills Like White Elephants, the icy ruthlessness of the dialogue seems designed to conceal information about the characters’ lives. What do we lose when we choose not to say something? And what do we really add when, on the other hand, we enrich our story with details? (O’Connor, speaking of Maupassant, cites his ‘novelist’s details’, which, according to the scholar, risk stifling the agility of the stories). Returning to writing schools, then, one of the many lessons we glean from reading this essay is learning to recognise the consequences of narrative choices. A silence or a long soliloquy can both be valid solutions. First, however, as O’Connor used to tell his students, we must understand what we really want to tell. 

The lone voice

Frank O’Connor

Short stories, 295 pp., 16 euros