Flannery Oconnor - Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends

Flannery OConnor is a master of the American short story, joining, since her untimely death in 1964, Hawthorne, Poe, Hemingway, and Faulkner in the literary canon. Now a fixture in textbooks and collections, she always maintained a powerful ethical vision rooted in a quiet, devout faith. It informed all that she wrote and did.

She was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, but she lived most of her life on a dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, raising peacocks. OConnor practiced her craft in a modest room near an ample front porch, where she received many visitors. She composed on an old typewriter with bookshelves nearby of modern fiction, philosophy, and theology unique among American writers. The novels of William Faulkner, the American Virgil, beside the rich theological writings of the angelic doctor, Thomas Aquinas, testified to wide study. Novels by the Russians, along with volumes of the serene German theologian, Romano Guardini, occupied a shelf. The massive work of arguably the most penetrating political theorist of the twentieth century, Eric Voegelin, had another space. Such works and many others in OConnors library gave me a rich reading list that I have tried to pursue. When I first saw the actual setup of OConnors room, I was moved by the austerity. In the corner was a narrow iron bed where OConnor spent sleepless hours courageously enduring lupus, which would take her life at the young age of thirty-nine.

OConnor left a body of fiction featuring a combination of violence and sacramental truths that continues to stun readers. Sensational action at the point of a gun or the end of a rope reminds them of what they see on television. OConnor was a careful observer of the medium in its early days. Slow-motion, rarefied stories might have entertained readers of earlier times, but not in the age of moviegoers, as OConnors compatriot writer, Walker Percy, revealed. OConnor recognized that her readers were becoming increasingly conditioned by television and cinema, causing her to pack dramatic action into her stories. She once noted, To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling pictures.

OConnors strategy still wakes up somnambulant English classes. OConnor can still break through a dull lecture with a story in which a Bible salesman steals the wooden leg of an atheist philosopher (Good Country People) or an impudent teenager hurls a book at a racist old lady in a segregated waiting room, calling her an old wart hog from hell (Revelation).

I will always remember I first heard that OConnor phrase in an undergraduate class in the late 1960s. Those days of campus radicalism and opposition to the Vietnam War imbued many students with a loathing of their country that still endures on college campuses today. The Kent State shootings were shocking and paralleled the murders of the innocent in an OConnor story. In 1969, I enrolled in a course taught by Andrew Lytle who had taught OConnor at the Iowa Writers Workshop. There he had witnessed OConnor herself reading Wise Blood to a class. An accomplished novelist and critic in his own right, Lytle performed OConnors stories dramatically in the classroom. The nasal drawl of the Misfit was unforgettable. Lytle revealed OConnors dialect and power to distracted students, like me. We became woke. I soon wanted to understand OConnor better and teach her stories from the other side of the desk.

The academic vocation has proved daunting at times, but my students, many outside the South, have responded more readily to her writing than to other masters, such as Faulkner or Hemingway. Teaching OConnor became easier in 1979 with the publication of her letters, The Habit of Being. New readers, my own mother among them, read and re-read her letters, delighting in the infectious humor and pithy wisdom. A less startling voice than the one in the stories often spoke. OConnors letters made her fiction more understandable. They also revealed OConnor as an apologist for the faith and spiritual director for a few searching friends. OConnor nourished my own spiritual hunger in the 1970s left unfed by the imploding Episcopal Church that had irrationally jettisoned its historic Elizabethan prayer book. Often amused at OConnors unparalleled sense of humor, I also was instructed by her unflinching catechesis.

Having marked up three copies of The Habit of Being, I heard at academic conferences that there were more unpublished OConnor letters. She often wrote to a Jesuit priest, the Rev. James H. McCown, who appears sparingly in TheHabit of Being. He visited her many times at the Georgia farm. This vital, unexplored friendship contributed to OConnors creation of Ignatius Vogle, S. J., in her story The Enduring Chill. Father McCown introduced OConnor to Thomas and Louise Gossett, both credentialed academics. From 1956 through OConnors death in 1964 and afterward, Thomas Gossett collected her letters to Fr. McCown. (He died in 1991.) In 1972, Gossett, a pioneer in African American studies (a role OConnor admired), shared the OConnor letters with her editor-friend Robert Giroux, who encouraged their publication. In 1974, Gossett wrote the first article about the riches of OConnors letters and hoped to be the first to publish them.