Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works.

Flannery O'Connor. Collected Works, selected and annotated by Sally Fitzgerald (Library of America, 1,281 pp., $30)

THE INCLUSION of Flannery O'Connor in the Library of America seriesshe and William Faulkner are the only two contemporary writers represented there to date-inevitably prompts an official appraisal, as it were, of the literary stature of the woman Marion Montgomery has called "this remarkable creature who lived and flourished on a middleGeorgia farm," dead these 24 years. In most of the reviews I have looked at, the reviewer handles the word "great" as gingerly as if it were a diamond pin he was thinking of presenting to a favorite mistress and replaces it finally, after further consideration, on the velvet. Greatness in a writer is as elusive and indefinable a quality as beauty in a woman, though Mr. Montgomery, in his book The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit

of the Age: Why Flannery O'Connor

Stayed Home, goes so far as-or no further than-to say this: "If Flannery O'Connor's poetry lacks the grandeur we find in Shakespeare, it does not lack a profundity, a vision worthy of comparison." Was Miss O'Connor a "great" writer-a writer, that is, to be placed squarely in the company of Hawthorne and James, Hemingway and Faulkner? I believe that she was. Of one thing, though, I have no doubt at all: great writer or not, she was consistently one of the finest literary artists to appear in this (or any) country in this century.

Flannery O'Connor died in 1964 at the age of 39, having written two short novels, two collections of short stories, and a number of occasional prose essays, most of them on the art of fiction-writing (read these pithy, witty, and clairvoyant pieces and you won't need to bother with the James Prefaces) and posthumously edited and published as Mystery and Manners by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. These, in addition to several unanthologized stories and the better part of Miss O'Connor's wonderful letters (including 21 published here for the first time), make up the present volume, which represents virtually the entire published oeuvre and which totals, with Mrs. Fitzgerald's annotations, 1,281 pages.

Even from a writer who didn't make forty, that is no large body of work: Miss O'Connor worked slowly and painstakingly and within a closely circumscribed thematic, social, and emotional range. On the other hand, when we consider the debilitating effects of her fatal disease (lupus erythematosus), which resulted necessarily in her "staying home," and the retardant ones imposed by her formulated aesthetics, it is hard to see how it could-or should-have been otherwise. She worked consciously as a prose poet, in a medium she liked to insist upon as an "incarnational" art. Faulkner, who was capable of writing thousands of words a day of highflying Dixie-Shakespearean prose, was ordinarily about 45 per cent efficient as an artist; Miss O'Connor, laboring painfully four hours a day, about 95 per cent. Almost nothing in her work is unintentional; nearly everything has a place and a meaning, pointing to another significance, which is another way of saying that it operates on two levels of existence at once. An O'Connor production, whether a short story or a novel, is as compressed as a diamond, a reduction of life-however narrow a slice of it-to essences. In a letter to the anonymous "An.," with whom she corresponded regularly during the last nine years of her life, she praises the bulldog in Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools as "essence of bulldog." She might have been speaking of her own work, in which we find essence of grandmother, essence of farm widow, essence of hired man, essence of malevolent child, essence of progressive schoolteacher, essence of Wellesley graduate. As a poet, she naturally lacks the novelistic expansion of Thackeray, James, or Dos Passos (who, had they tied themselves to her principles of fictional construction, would be fitting together the bits of their poetic-and unpublished-mosaics in Purgatory); correlatively, she makes up for it with the modern poet's own kind of inclusiveness. "The longer you look at one object," she wrote, "the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction-writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene." By continuing to develop the poetic sensibility of modernist literature while discarding the formal experimentalism of the Joyce-Woolf-Faulkner-Garcia Mirquez school, she made herself the most successful American practitioner of post-modernism in fiction; not the official Post-Modernism as represented variously by minimalists like Raymond Carver or freaks like Thomas Pynchon, but a lay version running parallel to it, while infinitely transcending it.

According to Miss O'Connor, "the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means that it is greater." Miss O'Connor herself was a Catholic, as orthodox as you can get; her theological position is one, as Montgomery has remarked, "which nineteenth- and twentieth-century aestheticism assumed itself rid of." Christian dogma, she insisted, "frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery"which, combined with an interest in "manners," was in her opinion what the writing of fiction is about. A selfdescribed "realist of distances," she uses metaphor as a means of juxtaposing two countries and of providing windows through which one-the unknown-may be glimpsed from the familiar other. You do not need to travel in the vicinity of Milledgeville, Georgia, to appreciate the aptness and power of her primary metaphors-the sun, a white hole in the sky; a line of red sunset cloud, a clay road; a dark line of trees, a threatening wall on the far side of a pasture-but to do so is, as she herself put it in a quite different context"an added blow."

While she never wrote except as a Catholic, Miss O'Connor was not a "Catholic novelist" in the sense that Graham Greene, who frequently includes Catholic characters and explicitly Catholic themes in his work, is one. She defined a Catholic novel as "a Catholic mind looking at anything" in a novelistic way; her own characters are drawn from the Southern Protestant majority and most of them violently deny or defy supernatural reality, or are oblivious to it. Her theme is that spiritual wasteland, the modern world, and the stunted, warped, and frustrated spirituality it has produced in modern man, who has become incapable of seeing himself as, in Donne's phrase, "a little world made cunningly of elements, and an angelic sprite." The Word has become nearly invisible, or inaudible, and when it does manage to get through it is usually garbled. A good deal of the humor in O'Connor is in the deadpantranscription of mispronunciations and verbal inaccuracies; my own favorite instance being in Wise Blood, when Haze, who has inquired of the truck driver for directions to the city zoo, is in turn asked, "Did you exscape from there?" The sprite who does not know himself to be a sprite, denying his spriteliness, is not a whole man but a freak whom the artist has not only to depict but even to address as such: "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."

Figuratively speaking, most of Flannery O'Connor's characters are blind and deaf; like most deaf people, they are also subject to irritableness raised to the power of hostility. O'Connor (as my friend J. 0. Tate has noted) is a poet of negative emotions whose perversity provides another rich vein of grim comedy, particularly in female children of about the age of 12 who may be suspected of representing dramatized portraits of the author at that age. In many of her people this negativity has a positive dimension: it is anger-even anger unto violence-in service to the Good which is everywhere ignored or denied. The protagonist in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost"-she is identified only as "the child"-is an excellent example of the positivism of negativism, as is of course young Tarwater, the prophet malgre lui, in the perfectly titled second novel, The Violent Bear It Away. Miss O'Connor remarked once that, as a Catholic, she was unable to leave a character or situation hanging: there must be resolution; a soul is either saved or lost. "There is a moment in every great story," she says, "in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment." And again: "I have found . . . from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil."

Flannery O'Connor was an exceptionally well-read woman not only in literature but, particularly, in theology and philosophy. Marion Montgomery and other critics have emphasized the influence of Eric Voegelin on her understanding of the contemporary world and, through it, on her art. Montgomery writes:

A principal cause of the divisive ideological wars which Voegelin has so perceptively demonstrated to us in book after book is that our hungry eyes have proved bigger than our stomachs, to use a country figure such as Miss O'Connor was fond of appropriating to large questions. We are wracked by unrestrained visions of a conquest of the world by reason on the one hand and by the heart on the other, having long since convinced ourselves that heart and head are at the absolute disposal of the individual conscience, whose first cause is consciousness itself. Our spiritual state of arrested development is accompanied by a confusing spectacle.

Readers familiar with Miss O'Connor's alienated intellectual types like Hulga in "Good Country People" and Asbury Fox in "The Enduring Chill," and with the humorless progressive ones (Sheppard in "The Lame Shall Enter First" and Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away), will have no difficulty making a connection between O'Connor the artist and Voegelin the political philosopher. Flannery O'Connor was nobody's "conservative" making a case for the status quo, for the modern democratic-capitalist world. To the contrary, money-getting, "business values," and Progress as it is understood by Rotary and thc sponsors of Miss Gum Spirits of Turpentine-as well as by activist priests and atheist social workers-are frequent objects of her with and sarcasm. She was a reactionary, as defined once by Kenneth Minogue"someone with a clear and comprehensive vision of the ideal world we bave lost"-although the realist in her would probably have balked at the word "ideal." ("People's suffering," this much-suffering woman wrote to a friend, "tears us up now in a way that in a healthier age it did not"; and, "Everybody, as far as I am concerned, is The Poor.") Nevertheless, rereading (for the nth time) this past summer both novels and most of the stories, I was struck less by tbe prophetic aspect of her work and more by the moralistic one. Miss O'Connor considered herself a direct literary descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and indeed there are marked similarities in their art. In a famous passage from "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," Mr. Shiftlet tells the old woman, "'There's one of these doctors in Atlanta that's taken a knife and cut the human heart-the human heart . . . out of a man's chest and held it in his hand . . . and studied it like it was a day-old chicken, and lady, . . . he don't know no more about it than you or me. . . . What you want to bet?' " Flannery O'Connor knew how to study the human heart like it was a day-old chicken, and you can bet she knew a lot more about it than the old woman or Mr. Shiftlet or the heart surgeon from Atlanta-perhaps even more than Professor Voegelin. Not only did she know how to study it, she knew how to draw its portrait to a T.

For a conscientious artist, surely one of the most terrible lines in literature is this one from The Violent Bear It Away: "He knew that he was called to be a prophet and that the ways of his prophecy would not be remarkable." Flannery O'Connor, when she died at 39, must have known, despite her genuine humility and an awareness of what she described as her "poverty of means," that, many being called and few chosen, she was among those selected for a truly remarkable prophecy. She lived after all in a larger universe than do most modern writers, and nearly all modern novelists. How could her own small books not loom ultimately larger than theirs?

SALLY FITZGERALD, here as in The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, 1979), a selection of Miss O'Connor's letters, has done a superior job of annotation and general editing. The "Note on the Texts" is exemplary scholarship, while tbe "Chronology" is a capsulated preview of the longawaited biography which, I am told, is now a promissory speck on the horizon.