Raymond Chandler said that F. Scott Fitzgerald is “a subject no one has a right to mess up. Nothing but the best will do for him.” That is how I feel about Flannery O’Connor, the centennial of whose birth is this year. Chandler thought that Fitzgerald “just missed being a great writer.” I believe that O’Connor achieved what Fitzgerald missed, despite a life and a career tragically briefer even than Fitzgerald’s. In Chandler’s opinion, the author of The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned “had one of the rarest qualities in all literature. . . . The word is charm—charm as Keats would have used it.” So far as I know, no one has ever credited Flannery O’Connor’s work as possessing charm—rather the opposite. I read only recently something by a critic who began her essay by suggesting that most people, upon mention of O’Connor’s name, cannot suppress a grimace. It seems to me that such people either lack a sense of humor, or fail to recognize the various forms that humor can take, or are unable (in T. S. Eliot’s phrase) to “bear very much reality,” or perhaps all three. This failure is endemic to our humorless time.

I first learned of Flannery O’Connor from my sister, whose own sense of humor is very close to hers, though I suspect that an added—if not basic—attraction was their similarities in experience, Jane having at the time said goodbye to all that—the Spence School, Smith College, her job with The New York Review of Books, and New York City—to return to the family farm in southern Vermont to raise goats. Her decision was entirely voluntary; Flannery’s was imposed by her diagnosis of systemic lupus erythematosus at about the same age, which compelled her to move from Connecticut back to Andalusia, her mother’s dairy farm five miles from Milledgeville, Georgia (the state’s pre–Civil War capital), where she lived the rest of her life in the rural society in which her fiction, novels and stories, are set, with the exception of several of the earliest ones, written while she was living on New York’s Upper West Side. I recall having read a few of those stories when an advance copy of The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald, crossed my editorial desk at National Review in 1978, a year before I moved to Wyoming. These two events, I came gradually to recognize, were supernaturally related, with results that changed the course of my life.

National Review used books as promotional inducements to purchase magazine subscriptions. Boxes of the Catholic classics by such authors as G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Wilfrid Sheed, and others stood stacked in the old offices at 150 East Thirty-Fifth Street in New York, from which the staff were invited to take their pick. Thus I was already well familiar with some of the giants of modern Catholic literature when I first opened The Habit of Being and began to read. I was hardly prepared to discover there what amounted to an introductory, fragmentary, and casual catechism in the Roman Catholic faith, but that is what I found. Forty-seven years later, I am so thoroughly familiar with the text that I can recall nearly every next line immediately in advance of reading it.

Early in the next decade—1982 or ’83, I think—a man several years older than I walked into my office, introduced himself in a quiet Southern accent as Jim Tate (James Oliver Tate, Jr.), and seated himself on the big red leather couch, known affectionately in-house as the Willmoore Kendall Memorial Sofa, so named in commemoration of one of the great conservative scholars of the postwar era who had there consummated one of his serial romantic affairs. It was only by chance that Jim had caught me on one of my bimonthly visits from Wyoming to the home office, thus initiating a long professional association and a deep personal friendship that endures to this day.

Though now professor emeritus of English at Dowling College on Long Island, Jim is a native of Milledgeville and the son of parents who had been close friends with O’Connor and members of the reading group that met regularly at Andalusia. When I first met him, his father, a retired military man, was already dead, but his mother, Professor Mary Barbara Tate, remained very much alive and active in the Milledgeville community as a founding editor of The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, to which her son later contributed.

I had the honor of meeting Mrs. Tate, a great Southern lady with one of the softest and most beautiful accents I have ever heard, in 1986, when Jim and I took the overnight train from New York to Atlanta, to be met by Mary Barbara at the railroad station. It was my first (and last) experience of traveling by sleeping car, much to the amazement of Bill Buckley when I mentioned it to him afterward (“REEEE-ah-lay!!”). I vividly recall seeing through the wide train window the North Carolina pine barrens standing like a black wall against a full moon, an image O’Connor made recurrent use of in her stories.

Together we visited Andalusia, where we wandered about the grounds, from which I gathered the most pristine tail feathers from the descendants of Flannery’s peacocks, which I laid away carefully in sheets of folded newspaper and brought home with me on the plane to Wyoming. I have them still, set in an antique Chinese vase along with a few added feathers from my own parrots and placed on a bookcase in my study. As for The Habit of Being, it rests on a table at my bedside, where I read a few pages of it nearly every night.

Jim Tate’s critical opinion is that Habit is Flannery O’Connor’s best book. I tend to agree, while thinking that it is also one of the two best collections of letters by an American writer, the other being Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, edited by Frank MacShane, Chandler’s biographer. While two more dissimilar novelists can hardly be imagined, both epistolary volumes have in common that their contents represent to a very substantial extent their authors’ principal point of contact with the world, amounting indeed to their social lives. Chandler once remarked that most of his best friends he had never met in person, while O’Connor was largely reliant for direct personal meetings with her correspondents on the off chance that they might pass through east-central Georgia. This accounts for the intensely intimate quality of her letters, and for their thoughtfulness and their length.

The lupus, to the effects of which were added the symptoms resulting from the contradictory interactions of the various medications prescribed to treat it, meant that for most of her career Flannery O’Connor was compelled to limit her professional writing to two or three hours a day. This restriction, however, never prevented her (though perhaps, from the point of view of her physical health, it should have) from maintaining a rigorous correspondence that must have taxed her mental strength as much as the composition of the stories and novels did; letter writing, after all, is writing, as every professional writer knows, even when it is informal, humorous, and lighthearted, as O’Connor’s letters so frequently are.

The Habit of Being is a comprehensive introduction to Flannery O’Connor: her life, her faith, her work, her domestic and social setting, and her reading. As such, it is also the record of the sources of her art and its development over the eighteen years of her literary career. The range of O’Connor’s correspondents was as wide and various as her interests, from Katherine Anne Porter to Russell Kirk to an English teacher who wrote to inquire about the significance of the Misfit’s wearing a black hat in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and another who submitted to her his theory, and that of “ninety students,” that the Misfit is the product of Bailey’s hallucination. (To this she replied, “My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.”) In her introduction to Habit, Sally Fitzgerald quotes “one commentator” who remarked that “any crank could write to her and get an answer,” adding that “I expect it is true that she answered any letter someone had taken the trouble to write to her.”

Her most frequent and best-known correspondents were Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, the classicist; Robert Giroux, her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Elizabeth and Robert Lowell; Catherine Carver, her literary agent; the aspiring writer identified as “A.,” whose name (Betty Hester) was only recently revealed and whose work she generously read and criticized; Maryat Lee, a young New York playwright and close friend-at-a-distance; the novelist John Hawkes, whose work she admired; Elizabeth Fenwick Way, a writer of mystery fiction; Caroline Gordon, also a novelist and the wife of Allen Tate, who read the drafts of much of O’Connor’s work and advised her on them; Andrew Lytle, the novelist and Southern Agrarian whom she studied under in the writing program at the University of Iowa; and a number of Catholic priests and professors of English.

Because O’Connor’s life, and therefore her work, was necessarily restricted to her own equivalent of what William Faulkner called the postage-stamp piece of ground that he made his own through the powers of his poetic imagination, the greatest literary interest in her letters will likely be found by her readers in her evocation of domestic life as she and her mother lived it at Andalusia. It was within the context of the farm, and of rural Georgia in the more or less immediate region, that she developed the alert sense of humor that offsets and relieves what so many readers, critics especially, have described as the Southern Gothic qualities of her stories and the characters who inhabit them. No doubt these people have in mind such characters as Hazel Motes and Enoch in Wise Blood, Tarwater and his grandfather in The Violent Bear It Away, Bevel in “The River,” Parker in “Parker’s Back,” Mr. Shiftlet in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” and—of course—the murderous Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

The tight-fisted, sour, self-righteous, self-pitying, cynical, paranoid, and usually widowed female landowner on whom crushing responsibilities have devolved, an oft-recurring figure in O’Connor’s stories, has an aspect markedly reminiscent of Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic; of this kind of woman Mrs. McIntyre in “The Displaced Person” and Mrs. May in “Greenleaf” are extreme examples. Basing their suspicions on Flannery’s portrayal of her mother in Habit, numerous readers have taken it for granted that they are more or less accurate portraits of Regina O’Connor, who possessed to some degree certain of their unpleasant traits, however exaggerated and dramatized.

Yet this assumption has been pretty much refuted, given the closeness of Flannery’s relationship to Regina. Sally Fitzgerald claims that Flannery once confided to her that she had only one great fear, which was that Regina would die before she did: “‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘what I would do without her.’” Regina and Flannery were very different women, owing in part to the gap between them in education and sophistication, and there are passages in the letters in which Flannery comes close to treating “my parent” with gentle condescension. Early in Flannery’s career, she reports to Elizabeth McKee, at the time her agent, “Regina is getting very literary. ‘Who is this Kafka?’ she says. ‘People ask me.’ A German Jew, I says, I think. He wrote a book about a man that turns into a roach. ‘Well, I can’t tell people that,’ she says. ‘Who is this Evalin Wow?’” Some of the funniest as well as the warmest anecdotes, amounting at times almost to playlets, have to do with Flannery’s fond encounters with her mother.

Life on one dairy farm is essentially like that on any other, yet the farms in her stories are recognizable from her epistolary depictions of Andalusia, as are the hired workers, though in the fiction they are mostly poor whites while Regina seems to have employed mostly blacks, who are frequently referred to in the Letters—most memorably the teenaged boy Shot, whose amusing struggles to pass the state driver’s test are an exaggerated version of Flannery’s own travails in quest of the same. Almost without exception, Andalusia as represented in her correspondence is a far more genial, generous, and good-natured establishment than the farms portrayed in the stories. O’Connor was always comfortable in her native society and circumstances, about which she was never defensive in writing to her sophisticated and mainly non-Southern friends. In the letters addressed to her closest ones, she regularly employs the local idiom, grammar, construction, and fausse naïveté only partly for comic effect and never with irony or sarcasm. (Similarly, she made no attempt to modify her rural Georgia accent, which was so heavy that at Iowa the instructor had a fellow student read her compositions aloud to the class in place of O’Connor herself. Indeed, one wonders why she was in such demand at the literary conferences to which she was invited to read from her own work: Her recorded rendition of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is, for the non-Southern listener a half century later, nearly incomprehensible.)

To “A.,” Flannery writes, “I persuaded my mother this week that she didn’t want to go to see The Ten Commandments. Told her she ought to read the book first anyway and presented her with Exodus. Then to salve my guilty conscience I went to see The Three Faces of Eve with her as she don’t like to go by herself. First time I had been to the picter show in two or three years. It was not such a bad picter, but I ain’t going again for another three years if I can possibly help it.”

O’Connor excelled at the keen, humanly perceptive, warm, and often hilarious vignettes that occur throughout her letters and give them such appeal. Her account of Shot’s trials courtesy of the Georgia Motor Vehicle Department is only one of many such. “The big problem is to get Shot that driver’s license and my mother has decided he has to have PROFESSIONAL assistance,” she wrote to “A.,” “so the teacher of driving at the local high school is coaching him, and we are all holding our breath. He drives very well but I still don’t think it’s clear to him what a vehicle is, etc.” In the same letter she reports, “Well, Mr. F., with his wife, children, mother, and stepdaddy together with their lares and penates moved out of here forever on a pick-up truck last Tuesday. The full story of Mr. F. will have to be written by me sometime in the future. Suffice it to say that he proved himself to be of the tribe of Mr. Tom T. Shiftlet [of ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’].” Their departure is also strongly reminiscent of the Shortley family’s in “The Displaced Person,” one of O’Connor’s darkest stories, in which the landowner is complicit with the distrustful and resentful native farm hands in the “accidental” death of a Polish refugee whose spine is crushed by a runaway tractor.

Not all of the anecdotes have to do with Andalusia. Following her return from an appearance at a literary conference in 1955, she writes, again to “A.,”

I didn’t hear Russell Kirk lecture as that turned out to be on Mon. instead of Sat. as I had thought: however, he and I were visiting the same people for the weekend so I saw plenty of him. He is about 37, looks like Humpty Dumpty (intact) with constant cigar and (outside) porkpie hat. He is non-conversational and so am I, and the times we were left alone together our attempts to talk were like the efforts of two midgets to cut down a California redwood. However, at one point we burst forth into the following spurt of successful uncharitable conversation:

Me: I read old William Heard Kilpatrick died recently. John Dewey’s dead too, isn’t he?

Kirk: Yes, thank God. Gone to his reward. Ha ha.

Me: I hope there’re children crawling all over him.

Kirk: Yes, I hope he’s with the unbaptized enfants.

Me: No, they would be too innocent.

Kirk: Yes. Ha ha. With the unbaptized enfants.

Me: Yes.

Curtain

Flannery O’Connor was the sort of writer who makes literature out of life rather than from other writers’ books. Nevertheless, she was an avid reader, mainly of fiction and of theological works. Regarding the former she was a first-rate literary critic. Writing to Maryat Lee about Graham Greene, she has this to say: “The best thing I ever read on Greene was by an English girl named Elizabeth Sewell. . . . She allowed that his sensibility was different from his convictions, the former being Manichean and the latter Catholic, and of course, you write with the sensibility. Her word for him was Neo-Romantic Decadent. What he does, I think, is try to make religion respectable to the modern unbeliever by making it seedy. He succeeds so well in making it seedy that he then has to save it by a miracle.” About Henry James she writes to “A.,” “James has no preoccupation about avoiding vulgarity, James is a master of vulgarity. A good part of all his books and the whole of many of his stories are studies in vulgarity. Certainly he recognized it in himself, but he recognized it, he was able to define it in the concrete, and being able to define it and see where it was only adds to his greatness.” She adds, “James said he had the ‘imagination of disaster.’ Read his books and look for it and you will carp about him less, or to more effect.”

As with virtually everything she wrote, the subjects of O’Connor’s letters, save for those to her agents, are, directly or indirectly, God, the Church of Rome, and religion generally. Theology was always her greatest interest; inevitably, then, many of her correspondents—including her most interesting and intelligent ones—were either priests or some other type of religious, secular friends curious about her faith (often on account of having read her fiction), and Catholics who were fallen away, doubting, or gravely weakened by a misunderstanding of basic Catholic teachings and principles. O’Connor’s deep Christian concern, charity, and generosity, combined with her profound religious insight, make the letters in which she attempts to correct and enlighten such people the most interesting in the collection. One has the impression that in explaining her faith to others she deepened her own understanding of it and the ways in which it inspired, directed, and shaped her imagination and thus her stories.

To the novelist Cecil Dawkins, she writes,

Glibness is the great danger in answering questions about religion. I won’t answer yours, because you can answer them as well yourself but I will give you, for what it’s worth, my own perspective on them. All your dissatisfaction with the Church seems to me to come from an incomplete understanding of sin. . . .

You are asking that man return at once to the state God created him in, you are leaving out the terrible radical human pride that causes death. Christ was crucified on earth and the Church is crucified in time, and the Church is crucified by all of us, by her members most particularly because she is a Church of sinners. Christ never said that the Church would be operated in a sinless or intelligent way, but that it would not teach error. . . . The Church is founded on Peter who denied Christ three times and couldn’t walk on water by himself. . . . All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others. To have the Church be what you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God in human affairs, whereas it is our dignity that we are allowed more or less to get on with those graces that come through faith and the sacraments and which work through our human nature. God has chosen to operate in this manner. We can’t understand this but we can’t reject it without rejecting life.

Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does. The Church does well to hold her own; you are asking that she show a profit. When she shows a profit you have a saint, not necessarily a canonized one. . . .

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

And to Louise Abbott: “I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith. . . . What people don’t understand is how much religion costs [like creating a body of literary work, she suggests elsewhere]. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.”

Finally, to Cecil Dawkins again: “St. Thomas . . . says that the prophetic vision is a quality of the imagination, that it does not have anything to do with the moral life of the prophet. It is the imaginative vision itself that endorses the morality.” This explains the intense frustration that O’Connor experienced, from early on in her career, in reading reviews of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”—and much else that she wrote—that judged the story “brutal and sarcastic.” “The stories are hard,” she acknowledged, “but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer has hold of the wrong horror.”

Flannery O’Connor believed that a fictional character, to be a successful literary creation, must be a different person at the end of a story than he was at the beginning of it. In the case of her own work, this meant that “an action of grace” on the part of the Divine must occur between the two, and that the meaning of the story depends upon whether the character accepts or rejects it for what it is. What she herself, like her perceptive readers, recognized as the comical aspect of her work is typically related to the fierce attempts—usually by her uneducated and naïve southern Protestant dramatis personae—to identify the divine elements and achieve salvation within the terrible confines of what she called “a do-it-yourself religion,” one lacking the sacraments of the Catholic Church. In the determinedly secularist modern West, the believer—from an Episcopal bishop to an itinerant preacher and snake handler—is inevitably perceived as being to some degree or another a disruptive, uncouth, ignorant, unsettling, and unwelcome freak by the larger part of society: a situation that suited O’Connor’s prophetic imagination and sense of humor admirably.

The writer is necessarily restricted in his choice of subject matter, she frequently insisted, by what he can make live; while from the beginning of her career she recognized two fundamental human types for him to work with. The first was “folks,” the second “freaks”—no need to state which one she made her own. For the blind, she explained, you draw large and startling pictures; for the deaf you need to shout. In a world equally blind and deaf to the existence of the holy, the choice was a foregone one. It is testimony to her genius that her freaks, while freaks indeed, are always recognizable human beings, never cartoon figures.

Actually, the grotesque and freakish qualities, whether in the characters or in the stories, are more pronounced in the two novels than in the shorter works. The composition of Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), short as those books are, was a severe ordeal for O’Connor each time, the second especially; it took her seven years to finish a novel of 243 printed pages. The trouble, she came to recognize, was the progressive high school teacher Rayber, uncle to the principal character, the fourteen-year-old Tarwater (Francis Marion Tarwater), whom the boy seeks out in town after his grand-uncle and namesake dies. Rayber, an atheist as well as a secularist whom old Tarwater had kidnapped when the boy was seven years old, intending raise him up as a prophet of the Lord to follow in his own footsteps, was eventually “rescued” from his uncle by his father and raised to live a “normal” life. Rayber is determined to bring up young Tarwater in his own modernist and atheistic image, despite the boy’s conviction that he is himself a prophet entrusted by the Almighty with the mission of baptizing Bishop, Rayber’s idiot child by his estranged wife. The novel ends with Tarwater drowning the boy in a lake in the act of baptizing him.

If the schoolteacher is himself a freak, he is so only in the sense that, for Flannery O’Connor, the modern secular world is a mass society created, inhabited, and controlled largely by freaks. Her problem in writing The Violent Bear It Away was that, while she had plenty of experience with what that world considers benighted backwater fanatics and ignoramuses, she had relatively little exposure to the “educated” and more or less sophisticated people who despised them. She had a hard time imagining how they think and feel. Both Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away struggle to some extent to realize themselves as fully formed novels, but the former succeeds better than the latter to the extent that the author allows the freaks and grotesques full rein to express themselves in thought and action.

This explains why Wise Blood is more coherent, more of a piece, and much funnier than its successor. Its protagonists are Hazel Motes and his would-be sidekick, Enoch Emery, who tags along beside him but with whom Haze wants nothing to do. Both youths believe that they have inherited what Enoch’s “daddy” called “wise blood”—an instinct for the Holy—that Haze is determined to deny and that Enoch indulges while mistaking it for something else. Arrived in a small city in Georgia after his release from the Army, Haze meets up with a drunken street preacher and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily, who tries to seduce him. A primitive full, as O’Connor describes him, of the poison of the modern world, Haze sets up as the founder of what he calls “The Church of Christ Without Christ,” established on the atheological premise that Truth reveals itself through blasphemy and the promise of a coming “new jesus.” The church is successful to the point of inspiring a heretical imitator named Onnie Jay Holy, who sees it as a scam to make money. At the novel’s end, after killing his impersonator hired by Holy, Haze blinds himself with lime and dies as the inmate of a boarding house whose landlady is after his Army pension. Concurrently, Enoch steals his own “new jesus” from a “MVSEVM” in the city park. He gives the shriveled mummy, wrapped in a package, to Sabbath Lily to pass on to Haze, with whom she is now living. She cradles the thing in her arms as Mary had cradled Jesus and calls herself “Momma.” When Haze discovers the mummy, he throws it against the wall and leaves her. Enoch, having performed his act of duty, steals a gorilla suit from an actor hired to promote a movie about an ape named Gonga and is last seen offering his paw to a terrified young couple on a park bench; O’Connor’s apparent point being that Enoch, who wants merely to show off and draw attention to himself, has betrayed his “wise blood,” if indeed he ever had it, by accepting and confirming his animal nature.

A synopsis of these stories inevitably fails to convey the perverse humor that gives them so much of their charm while relieving the grotesquerie. In literature, a sense of the grotesque can be only insufficiently conveyed by description; it has to be dramatized by action, and action at some length and level of complexity, making the novel a better medium for accomplishing the purpose than the short story. Haze and Enoch were invitations to prolong the action by sustaining and developing the characters as well as the storyline. This prolongation seems, for O’Connor, to have been difficult; it took time and thought. Although the novels themselves are essentially novellas, the ability to sustain the plausibility of the grotesque is strained to the degree that the narrative is extended, even as the temptation to exaggerate grows.

The limitations inherent in Flannery O’Connor’s work are obvious and readily explicable. Her physical and geographic confinement necessarily restricted her experience of the world. Perhaps as a means of coping with these deprivations, she had little or no interest in travel, whether within the United States or abroad, except to give readings and make paid appearances at writers’ conferences, duties she undertook as a means of contributing to her own upkeep and Andalusia’s. Although she consented to go at the urging of the cousin who paid for the trip, she was unenthusiastic about visiting Lourdes to take the waters. France seems to have made no impression on her whatever, and on her return to Georgia she declared her firm intention never to leave home again.

Another limitation has to do with the fact that O’Connor is, so far as I know, the only first-rate author to have taken formal writing courses in an academic setting. For most writers of her innate gifts, “creative writing” is at best a waste of time, at worst a curse upon one’s native talent. In O’Connor’s case, what might have been an artistically fatal experience was avoided by the fact that among her teachers at Iowa was Andrew Lytle, best known for his novel The Velvet Horn, his short stories, and his contribution to I’ll Take My Stand, the manifesto of the Southern Agrarians. Still, her training at Iowa was probably responsible for her overreliance on poetic symbols, a good many of which seem artificial and inscrutable. It is true that she often makes the point in letters and essays that the best literary symbol is also the obvious one—she uses the sun, the white sky, the dark line of trees over and over again—and she warns against subtlety in writing. Appalled by what had already become the absurdly over-intellectualized, trivialized, and anti-literary study of literature in schools and universities, she deplores the modern critical tendency to see a story or a novel as a complex puzzle created for the puzzle’s sake, whose elements mean the opposite of what they appear to mean and where everything stands for something else, thus encouraging the reader to suppose his business is to figure out a literary work rather than to experience and enjoy it. (“The Misfit represents Jesus Christ, does he not, Miss O’Connor?” . . . “Why does the Misfit wear a black hat?”) But Flannery O’Connor’s work does, to a certain extent, invite this response from the “educated” reader.

O’Connor’s posthumously published Mystery and Manners, a collection of her occasional prose in the form of essays and lectures edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, demonstrates that she understood her craft in a more conscious and formal way than many, if not most, writers do. If even half of the critical and creative insight behind these pieces comes from what she was taught at Iowa, it may be that the university’s writing program was better than I am giving it credit for being. Portions of the letters are brilliant literary criticism in epistolary form, much of it developed and extended in Mystery and Manners, which considers such topics as “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” “The Regional Writer,” “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” “Writing Short Stories,” “On Her Own Work,” and “The Teaching of Literature.”

Regarding what is so often described as Southern Gothic, she explains, “When I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.”

Regarding the short story, she says, “I myself prefer to say that a story is a dramatic event that involves a person because he is a person, and a particular person—that is, because he shares in the general human condition and in some specific human situation. A story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of a personality.”

So far as regionalism goes, O’Connor observes that an American writer who writes from someplace other than the Northeastern seaboard knows from the start that he will inevitably be called a “regional writer” and that the moniker is not meant as a complimentary one. “To call yourself a Georgia writer is certainly to declare a limitation,” O’Connor concedes, “but one which, like all limitations, is a gateway to reality. It is a great blessing, perhaps the greatest blessing a writer can have, to find at home what others have to go elsewhere seeking.”

On the subject of how literature is taught in modern America: “I was well on the way to getting a Master’s degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it’s perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction. . . . The fact is, people don’t know what they are expected to do with a novel, believing, as so many do, that art must be utilitarian, that it must do something, rather than be something.”

One of the things modern readers believe it must do, as she explains further, is to “comfort,” “uplift,” and “inspire”—all of which obligations, numerous readers wrote to complain, her work failed badly to meet.

How widely read Flannery O’Connor is one hundred years after her birth, and how strong her reputation remains sixty-one years after her death, is hard to estimate. So far as her name is mentioned at all these days, it is generally with respect. In 1979, John Huston made a critically acclaimed movie from Wise Blood. On the other hand, The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin founded by Mary Barbara Tate, after having been hijacked by feminists and lesbian activists claiming O’Connor as one of their own and renaming it the Flannery O’Connor Review, published its last issue in 2021. Already in her own day, her work stood at odds with a determinedly secular culture, as she was all too aware. Indeed, the fifth section of Mystery and Manners addresses the subject with “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” “Novelist and Believer,” “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” and “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South.”

In the first of those essays, she confronts the problem as it is presented by the Church itself: “Catholic readers are constantly being offended and scandalized by novels that they don’t have the fundamental equipment to read in the first place, and often these are works that are permeated with a Christian spirit. It is when the individual’s faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost.”

In “Novelist and Believer,” O’Connor observes, “We live in an unbelieving age but one which is markedly and lopsidedly spiritual. There is one type of modern man who recognizes spirit in himself but who fails to recognize a being outside himself whom he can adore as Creator and Lord; consequently he becomes his own ultimate concern. . . . At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily. . . . I don’t believe,” she concluded, “that we shall have great religious fiction until we have again that happy combination of believing artist and believing society.”

Other factors working against a fiction writer with her literary and moral preoccupations are the sociological tendency of modern fiction that began in the late nineteenth century, the worse notion that fiction should concern itself with the typical, and—worst of all—what she calls “the clinical bias, the prejudice that sees everything strange as a case study in the abnormal.”

Further, the rural settings and characters of O’Connor’s stories and novels are not conducive to a continued interest in her work: Most readers of literary fiction today are urbanites and suburbanites with no experience of, or sympathy for, small towns and the country and imagine the lives of the people who inhabit them—in the Deep South particularly—to be boring, unenlightened, and irrelevant.

Nevertheless, the chief strike against O’Connor’s books today is the twenty-first century’s neurotic obsession with race and what in her day was known as “the race question.” When she began to write in the late 1940s, Brown v. Board of Education was still a decade in the future. Regina O’Connor hired blacks and poor whites at Andalusia, both of which groups Flannery knew growing up and as an adult, and both of which she depicted realistically in her books. Apart from her regular and wholly unselfconscious use of what today is so primly called “the n-word,” she was simply doing what authors do, which is to rely on the language of their time, place, and society—Oxford University in the early twentieth century; Oxford, Mississippi, in the first half of it; or Milledgeville, Georgia, in the postwar decades. O’Connor put on paper the speech she had heard since infancy, and she did so honestly and innocently. She adhered with similar fidelity to the manners and mores of her native region—unapologetically. “No,” she wrote to Maryat Lee, “I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia. It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on—it’s only fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia. I have read one of his stories and it was a good one.”

O’Connor had little to no interest in politics and social reform, never wrote about them in her letters, and never touched on them in her stories. Poverty was not for her a social problem, nor was economic poverty deprivation of the worst kind: “Everybody, as far as I am concerned, is The Poor.” She wrote in one of her letters that when it came to the civil rights issue, “I say a plague on both their houses.” Yet O’Connor quite rightly regarded “The Artificial Nigger” as being perhaps the best thing that she ever wrote. “What I had in mind to suggest,” she explained in a letter to Ben Griffith, “with the artificial nigger [a piece of lawn statuary on the wall of a suburban garden] was the redemptive quality of the Negro’s suffering for us all.”

Flannery O’Connor was a clear-headed realist who was highly allergic to sentimentalism. As she wrote in her introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann—a twelve-year-old girl with a cancerous face who was cared for until her premature death by the Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home in Atlanta—“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”

This famous passage is the distillation of the essence of Mary Flannery O’Connor and every word she ever wrote.