Frank O'Connor: Everybody Speaks an Entirely Different Language

INTERVIEWER:I have noticed in your stories a spareness of physical description of people and places. Why this apparent rejection of sense impressions?

O’CONNOR: I thoroughly agree, it’s one of the things I know I do, and sometimes when I’m reading Coppard I feel that it’s entirely wrong. I’d love to be able to describe people as he describes them, and landscapes as he describes them, but I begin the story in the man’s head and it never gets out of the man’s head. And in fact, in real life, when you meet somebody in the street you don’t start recording that she had this sort of nose—at least a man doesn’t. I mean, if you’re the sort of person that meets a girl in the street and instantly notices the color of her eyes and of her hair and the sort of dress she’s wearing, then you’re not in the least like me. I just notice a feeling from people. I notice particularly the cadence of their voices, the sort of phrases they’ll use, and that’s what I’m all the time trying to hear in my head, how people word things—because everybody speaks an entirely different language, that’s really what it amounts to. I have terribly sensitive hearing and I’m terribly aware of voices. If I remember somebody, for instance, that I was very fond of, I don’t remember what he or she looked like, but I can absolutely take off the voice. I’m a good mimic; I’ve a bit of the actor in me, I suppose, that’s really what it amounts to. I cannot pass a story as finished unless I connect it myself, unless I know how everybody in it spoke, which, as I say, can go quite well with the fact that I couldn’t tell you in the least what they looked like. If I use the right phrase and the reader hears the phrase in his head, he sees the individual. It’s like writing for the theater, you see. A bad playwright will “pull” an actor because he’ll tell him what to do, but a really good playwright will give you a part that you can do what you like with. It’s transferring to the reader the responsibility for acting those scenes. I’ve given him all the information I have and put it into his own life.

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