Happy Birthday, Flannery O’Connor

“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” – Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor was born today, in Savannah, Georgia in 1925.

She is one of the greatest American writers. No other country in the world could have produced a Flannery O’Connor. With all her darkness, madness, and terror, she is so OF this nation, her voice is quintessential American, in the same way that Fitzgerald’s is.

Her titles are also beyond fantastic. She’s not afraid to GO THERE in her titles. Her titles are not “safe”. They are Biblical.

Her first published efforts were cartoons, in her high school newspaper. She tried to get her cartoons published in The New Yorker. That went nowhere, so she started to focus on writing. She applied to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and got in. Once there, though, she was kind of an outsider: she hadn’t read “the big authors” in vogue at the time. Her writing idols were Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe – masters of small-town pain and paranoia and religious persecution- but seen as “old-fashioned”. She wasn’t really born “in the right time”, if you think about it, but she turned that to her advantage. She didn’t try to change her influences, or write like other people. Her short stories blew everyone away at Iowa. She was a shy girl, the only one in the workshop with a Southern accent, but her writing was so good she got a contract to write her first novel (Wise Blood: A Novel – and WHAT a first novel.

Here’s the post I wrote about Wise Blood.

Right around this time, she got very ill with lupus. Her father had died from lupus. She was always tired but she had good discipline, and kept up a writing schedule, despite her exhaustion.

She wrote:

“I feel that if I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified or even to enjoy anything.”

Here she describes a literary evening: I find this anecdote really moving, coming as I do from a family featuring a couple of nuns, where such things are discussed at the dinner table, basically:

“Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

For Christmas one year, my sister gave me the recently-published edition of Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal, a notebook she kept where she wrote down daily prayers. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

A famous story about Flannery O’Connor stands alone in the annals of publishing anecdotes, and remains a touchstone for writers who perhaps are not understood by the powers-that-be, writers who can sense that what they are is NOT what the publisher wants.

In 1949, Flannery O’Connor was in correspondence with Rinehart Publishers, who were interested in publishing Wise Blood, her first novel. O’Connor was not a name yet. She was completely unknown. Now, granted, Wise Blood was a tough sell, but so was Ulysses. It would take someone with courage to say, “Yes. I will publish this as it stands right now. It may sell only two copies, but to alter its form would be WRONG.” In the meantime though, an editor at Rinehart had written to her, saying they’d like to publish it but only if she would re-write it, as per his specifications.

This was the unknown – I remind you – she was UNKNOWN – Flannery O’Connors response to that request:

Thank you for your letter of the 16th. I plan to come down next week and I have asked Elizabeth McKee to make an appointment with you for me on Thursday. I think, however, that before I talk to you my position on the novel and on your criticism in the letter should be made plain.

I can only hope that in the finished novel the direction will be clearer, but I can tell you that I would not like at all to work with you as do other writers on your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. I do not think there is any lack of objectivity in the writing, however, if this is what your criticism implies; and also I do not feel that rewriting has obscured the direction. I feel it has given whatever direction is now present.

In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now. The question is: is Rinehart interested in publishing this kind of novel?

I remind myself of that letter from time to time, when it seems I am not being understood, or that someone’s response to my work is, basically, “I wish you would focus on something ELSE.” O’Connor’s confidence is still breath-taking, as is her belief in what she had done. To write a letter like that, to say NO to a publication offer, takes brass balls.

As a coda to that story, not surprisingly: Rinehart DIDN’T publish Wise Blood, but Harcourt Brace did. The book was not a success, but time has vindicated everyone involved. Wise Blood is one of the great American novels.

Here’s the opener:

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods. Nearer, the plowed fields curved and faded and the few hogs nosing in the furrows looked like large spotted stones. Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock, who was facing Motes in this section, said that she thought the early evening like this was the prettiest time of day and she asked him if he didn’t think so, too. She was a fat woman with pink collars and cuffs and pear-shaped legs that slanted off the train seat and didn’t reach the floor.

He looked at her a second and, without answering, leaned forward and stared down the length of the car again. She turned to see what was back there but all she saw was a child peering around one of the sections and, farther up at the end of the car, the porter opening the closet where the sheets were kept.

“I guess you’re going home,” she said, turning back to him again. He didn’t look, to her, much over twenty, but he had a stiff black broad-brimmed hat on his lap, a hat that an elderly country preacher would wear. His suit was a glaring blue and the price tag was still stapled on the sleeve of it.

Flannery O’Connor died at the age of 39.