Quote of the Day (Flannery O'Connor, on Fame)

“If the fact that I am a ‘celebrity’ makes you feel silly, what dear girl do you think it makes me feel? It's a comic distinction shared with Roy Rogers’ horse and Miss Watermelon of 1955.”—Southern short-story writer and novelist Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), letter to pen pal “A,” Dec. 16, 1955, in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Flannery O'Connor, With Bravery in the Face of Her Medical Condition)

“I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing. ”— Southern novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), in a letter to poet Robert Lowell on being stricken with lupus, in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979)

Quote of the Day (Flannery O'Connor, on ‘Nice Young Men’)

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.” — Southern novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), “Good Country People,” in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955) 

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, on Flannery O'Connor and ‘The Intangible Mysteries of Life’)

“[T]he short stories of Flannery O'Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day. They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us.”—American rock ‘n’ roll legend Bruce Springsteen, “By the Book: Bruce Springsteen,” The New York Times Book Review, Nov. 2, 2014

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Flannery O'Connor, on Change and Grace)

"All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful."— Southern novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979)

Quote of the Day (Flannery O'Connor, on Storytellers and the ‘Redemptive Act’)

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”—Southern novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1969)

Photo of the Day: Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home, Savannah, GA

Today would have been the 90^th birthday of the Southern novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor. I owe it to her fiercely perfected talent and her fierce faith to post this photo I took this past November, on an afternoon trip to Savannah, of the outside of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home.

O’Connor did not live here long—only 13 years, before her family relocated to a farm in Milledgeville—but it was enough to forge her. The house was deeded to her, and she still, in fact, owned it when she died, only 39 years old, of complications from lupus—the same disease that struck down her father in middle age.

Much to my chagrin, the home was closed that day when I visited. But I had seen it on my prior visit to Savannah, in fall 1999. I knew from the short tour of the house I took then that the interior reflected the comfortable middle-class lifestyle of her family, and that it included her baby carriage, her cradle and bedroom furniture.

For the devoutly Catholic O’Connors, their Savannah location was—to borrow a phrase—a godsend. The family worshipped at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist (a landmark that I discussed in this prior post), just across Lafayette Square. Young Mary Flannery was baptized three weeks after her birth, in the cathedral; later, the building would be the site of her early education, at St. Vincent’s Grammar School, as well as her first communion and confirmation.

But back to the small Georgian row house at 207 Charlton Street that you’re looking at now. It was actually owned by maternal second cousin Mrs. Raphael Semmes (“Cousin Katie”), who had the garden and mansion next door. In Flannery’s mid-30s, as lupus forced her to use a cane, Mrs. Semmes accompanied her to Lourdes for a cure.

It was also, in the back of this house, that an amusing episode—one that “marked me for life,” she chuckled later—occurred. One of the five-year-old girl’s feats was training a “frizzled” chicken to walk backward. A New York newsreel company, Pathe, got wind of this and sent a cameraman down to record the action. Years later, as an adult, when she was not writing, she was indulging to the hilt her fascination with farm animals. (At one point, she raised 40 peacocks.)

O’Connor’s fiction—dark, violent, absurd at points—could be called Southern Gothic. Her private voice—highly intelligent, surprising, warm but sharply funny, unafraid to take on the central questions regarding her faith—can be heard unmistakably in Habit of Being (1979). Her collected works now form part of the Library of America, the handsome hardbound series of books dedicated to preserving the nation’s best literary tradition.

Quote of the Day (Flannery O’Connor, on the Writer as Instrument for God’s Story)

“Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story—just like the typewriter was mine.” —Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal, edited by W.A. Sessions (2013)

This Day in Literary History (O’Connor Puts Editor in His Place)

February 18, 1949—Flannery O’Connor might have been only a few weeks short of 24, but she would not be condescended to be an editor twice her age as “a slightly dim-witted Camp Fire Girl.” One day after writing her agent that she wouldn’t respond to John Selby until hearing back from her first, she fired off a letter to the Rinehart editor in chief anyway, telling him that, while perfectly amenable to criticism, it would only be “within the sphere of what I am trying to do.” In fact, contrary to the “conventional novel” that he was trying to steer her toward, the finished book, though “less angular,” would still be “just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now.”

Anyone who has read any of the work of the Georgia writer can guess that O’Connor and Selby did not work together—certainly to the relief of both parties, but not to the ultimate benefit of Selby and his reputation. A short-story writer and author of 10 novels himself, he might have been expected to have been sympathetic to the likes of O’Connor, and his firm had, only the year before, made a splash with a first novel by another twentysomething author, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.

But O’Connor, while finishing up her stay at the Yaddo artists’ colony near Saratoga Springs, NY, was annoyed that it took Selby so long to get back to her about his opinion of her manuscript—and that the criticism he did send was “very vague and totally missed the point of what kind of novel I am writing.” This only increased the misgivings created by her friend, poet Robert Lowell, who believed that the very inadequacies seen by Selby were, in fact, part of the manuscript’s strength.

Three years and who knows how many revisions later, Wise Blood would go on to establish O’Connor as perhaps the leading voice of Southern gothic fiction.  Its humor was so dark, its descriptions so stark (“He had a nose like a shrike’s bill and a long vertical crease on either side of his mouth”) that initial reviews were mixed. 

In time, it would come to be recognized as a distinctly powerful vision of a spiritually blind male pilgrim (the first and last name of its protagonist, Hazel Motes, doubly reinforces the notion of diminished sight) in a barren, lost contemporary landscape seemingly aching for his “Church Without Christ.” It would be regarded as stark as a Hieronymus Bosch painting in the way it used the outlandish to underscore religious concerns, an allegory that would be adapted for film in 1979 by John Huston.

It is easy to regard Selby as benighted in his dealings with someone now regarded as a midcentury master of American fiction, and he didn’t help his case for posterity when, upon giving her release to take her manuscript elsewhere, he noted that O’Connor was “stiff-necked, uncooperative and unethical.” But his kind has not disappeared from the modern publishing landscape. An author I know was told by at least one editor that a major problem with his long novel was the multiple-character perspective he used on the plot. He disregarded the advice, took the novel to another house and was rewarded with an American Book Award.

Moreover, Selby was almost certainly in something of a state of shock, because the 108 pages he read were far, far different from what he had originally seen. O’Connor began her work while a graduate student at the University of Iowa. That material had helped her win the school’s Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award, which gave the publisher the first shot at publishing the novel.

But midway through, O’Connor developed a far different narrative voice—one less sympathetic and more “strident and detached,” according to The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor, by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. If you want to see another example of how a mid-revision change can alter a book’s dynamic, the closest counterpart would be Moby-Dick, transformed, after Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne and delved deeply into William Shakespeare, from a conventional sea account of a voyage into a symbol-laden examination of an obsessive quest to destroy evil.

The editor who became the lucky beneficiary of Selby’s befuddlement was Robert Giroux, then at Harcourt, Brace and Company. The two had a common faith—Roman Catholicism—which helped him understand her unique worldview. Moreover, he felt her “tremendous strength, creative and moral,” and came to admire not only the very self-confidence that had put Selby off but also another quality: that “She not only knew exactly what she wanted to write but was prepared to sacrifice everything to achieve it,” according to an interview he gave George Plimpton a half-century later for The Paris Review.

Quote of the Day (Flannery O’Connor, on Sermons)

“It is easy for any child to pick out the faults in the sermon on his way home from Church every Sunday. It is impossible for him to find out the hidden love that makes a man, in spite of his intellectual limitations, his neuroticism, his own lack of strength, give up his life in the service of God’s people, however bumblingly he may go about it.”—American novelist-short-story writer Flannery O’Connor (19251964), letter to Cecil Dawkins, December 9, 1958, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979)

Quote of the Day (Flannery O’Connor, on the Impact of One Trait on Her Vocation)

“I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both."—American short-story writer and novelist Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), in a letter to Betty Hester, June 28, 1956, in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979)

Over the years, thousands have felt good reason to read the short stories, novels, essays or letters of Flannery O’Connor —for bizarre characters, for her precise use of words, for theological concerns that yet never trump the fiction writer’s need to convey humanity in all its crazy complexity. But the best reason of all can be glimpsed in this quote: the lady was a pistol.

At, that voice—so deliciously tart. “She was a lovely girl, but scared the boys to death with her irony,” an instructor at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop observed. Their loss. 

She was born too early for ace pop tunesmith Marshall Crenshaw, who might have found the kindred “Cynical Girl” he longed for in the sickly young woman from Milledgeville, Ga., who never let either her increasingly grave physical condition or a fallen world get in the way of her humor.

In addition to pressing on me Moss Hart’s Act One (recounted in a prior post), my college friend Greg Burke also urged me to delve into O’Connor. While aware of her artistry, I never fell under her sway as completely as Greg did—maybe because, though of Irish-Catholic descent like myself, her milieu was overwhelmingly rural Protestant, while mine was northeastern (northern New Jersey by way of the South Bronx), with my faith neither submerging nor submerged by others in my region.

I think I need to revisit my attitude about her work. The more I have read of her letters (collected in Habit of Being) and of her life, the more that merging of style and sensibility has captivated me.

Ten years ago this coming fall, while touring Savannah, I visited O’Connor’s childhood home. She is more often associated with Andalusia, the farm in Milledgeville where she raised peacocks (an avocation she wrote about, in typically hilarious detail, in “The King of the Birds,” an essay in the Literary Savannah anthology) and lived most of her life.

Knowing her Roman Catholic background, however, I wasn’t surprised to learn that her family’s home at 207 East Charlton Street on Lafayette Square was located so close to the city’s Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. (I mean, she could see it, as well as Sacred Heart School, where she was educated as a young girl.)

The brick, stucco structure, dating back to the 1850s, is long and narrow, only half as wide as the neighboring house, where a wealthy cousin lived. But somehow I doubt that O’Connor cared about wealth so much as enough health to do her work. This past fall, the home was reopened after a lengthy renovation.

The writer would probably be chagrined to know that her lifespan would be closer to her father’s, who died when she was only a teenager, than to her mother’s, which extended to 1995, when Mrs. O’Connor was 99 and had outlived her daughter by more than three decades.

One last thing: We don’t have more work from this “Southern Gothic” writer because, at age 39, O’Connor was struck down by lupus—the same disease that claimed her father. 

The high school English teacher who encouraged me the most to write, Sister Marie Harold, was afflicted with the same condition. I think that these two women would have gotten along very well if they had ever had the opportunity to meet because of their shared love for words and for Christ.