Trying to see straight: Flannery O'Connor & the business of writing.

October 6, 1959: People are always asking me if I am a Catholic writer and I am afraid that I sometimes say no and sometimes say yes, depending entirely on who the visitor is.

It was a frequent complaint in the letters of Flannery O'Connor (1925-64) that "The silence of the Catholic critic is so often preferable to his attention" (November 6, 1955). And, "I always look in the Catholic magazines my mother reads, to see if my book has been reviewed and when I find it hasn't, I say an act of thanksgiving."

Though O'Connor might have cringed at what follows, she has given us too much for us to refrain from speaking of her and her work. Her generosity would not long begrudge us even our misreadings.

Besides her novels, short stories, and essays, which are jewels, we have her letters (The Habit of Being, Vintage). These are, for me, the most satisfying of O'Connor's works, perhaps because they give us the most direct access to her life. In these we most closely approach her views on the business of writing--a business that was for her indistinguishable from the spiritual life itself. In 1955 (August 2), she writes:

One of the awful things about writing when you are

Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the

Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, the

whole reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes

in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience.

My audience are the people who think God is dead.

At least these are the people I am conscious of writing

for.

Though she was aware of writing for those for whom God is dead, it is certainly true that many of her readers turn to her precisely because of her belief in the Incarnation. They too, believe, however half-heartedly, and find--at least I do--that O'Connor offers sane and good-humored guidance for professed Christians.

This isn't the sort of responsibility she bargained for when she started writing. In her letter of January 17, 1956, she speaks of her task (somewhat reluctantly) as being concerned with "the accurate naming of the things of God." She continues, "I don't mean it's an accomplishment. It's only trying to see straight and it's the least you can ask for. You ask God to let you see straight and write straight."

Later (on August 6, 1957) she comes to a more explicit understanding of the responsibility she has to her readers--prompted by an exchange with one of America's editors (her essay "The Church and the Fiction Writer" was published there, March 30, 1957):

I had said that the responsibility ... of the artist was to

his art. Now it seems to me that he [the editor] is correct

but that some explanation should be given of how

the artist's responsibility for souls operates. Is it, for

instance, the same in kind as the responsibility of the

church, is it to children, to idiots, to old ladies, to fifteen-year-old

girls, to unbalanced people? .... I think he

just sees this as an abstract theoretical problem and from

a great distance. Whereas the writer himself is traveling

the rocky road, and feels every individual bump.

Perhaps it is this closing of distance that is most essential in O'Connor's art. To "write straight," in full cognizance of the reality of the Incarnation, is to respect the specificity and dailiness of life. O'Connor speaks of "Christian realism," and says that "there is nothing harder or less sentimental" than this.

Her letters show us her refusal to seek a truth that stands apart from the concrete and local. "The artist dreams no dreams. That is precisely what he does not do..." (April 20, 1957). Rather, in her writing and in her farm work (raising "peachickens" in Milledgeville, Georgia), she busies herself with what is immediate, and necessary. Some of the most entertaining passages in her letters concern her "peafowl." Dogs and peachickens do not mix, she tells us. Her yard sounds like a jungle at night; and the birds do mostly what they want. "They have no proper sense of place; we have a very nice lawn that they could decorate to advantage but they prefer to sit on the tractors or the top of the chicken house or the garbage-can lid" (July 16, 1957).

Such observations are in keeping with O'Connor's belief that the artist's work is conditioned by a reality that is given: "Ultimately, you write what you can, what God gives you" (November 6, 1955). The creative act of the artist does not replace the creative act of God: rather, the artist participates in a creative power that is of God. The art produced, then, is as much "discovered" as it is constructed. She writes on October 27, 1957:

I always have an idea of what I want to do when I write

a story, but whether I'll be able to remains always to

be seen. I am writing a story now and have proceeded

at a regular rate of two pages a day, following my

nose more or less. They have to work out some way

or other, and I think you discover a good deal more in

the process when you don't have too definite ideas about

what you want to do.

She hated "pious language" for its disrespect of the mystery that is already present in things. She distrusted "academic" approaches to literature for the same reason. When asked why the Misfit's hat was black in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, she replied that "most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats." When pressed for the significance of the hat, she said that it was "to cover his head."

That same realism (and hatred of sentimentality) applied also in the matter of her own bad health. If one reads the letters chronologically, there are increasing indications of the decline in her condition (she suffered from lupus), but they are incidental signs: matter-of-fact mentions of blood transfusions, hospital visits, apologies for not having had the energy to write. On September 30, 1955, she writes:

My being on the crutches is not an accident or the energy-depriving

ailment either but something that has

been coming on in the top of the leg bone, a softening

of it on acct. of a failure of the circulation to the hip.

They say if I keep the weight off it entirely for a year

or two, it may harden up again; otherwise in my old

age I will be charging people from my wheel chair or

have to have a steel plate put on it. Anyway, it is not

as great an inconvenience for me as it would be for somebody

else, as I am not the sporty type. I don't run around

or play games. My greatest exertion and pleasure these

last years has been throwing the garbage to the chickens

and I can still do this, though I am in danger of

going with it.

Still, it is moving to come to the end of these letters and see how they get shorter. She goes on signing her letters comically: Tarbutter, Tarpot, Tarbug--all variations on her "Tarwater" in The Violent Bear It Away. But in her letter of July 21, 1964, just two weeks before her death, she signs herself "Tarweary."

Flannery O'Connor's concerns were theological, in the best sense of that word. She wrote, "I'm no theologian, but all this is vital to me, and I feel it's vital to you" (December 23, 1959). It is vital. We profit by her example of faith.

Timothy P. Schilling is the youth and young-adult minister, and director of communications at Saint Joseph Parish in Vancouver, Washington.