The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor Book

Don't know when I'll send those stories. I've felt too bad to type them.

Flannery O'Connor wrote the last sentence of her last letter on August 3, 1964, six days before the systemic lupus she'd been fighting since her diagnosis in 1951 attacked her immune system and took her life. This makes me wonder what the last sentence I'll ever write is going to be. The prevalence of social media does not bode well for cosmic insight.

O'Connor had returned to Midgeville, Georgia to be cared for by her mother and lived fourteen years after her diagnosis, publishing two novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away) and a multitude of short stories, some published posthumously in 1965 in All That Rises Must Converge. A definitive collection, The Complete Stories, was published in 1971.

While O'Connor never wrote a memoir or a book on writing, we do have her letters, selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald and published in 1979 as The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor. The author reserves much space to discuss her Catholic faith, its role in her work and in critical misreadings of it, as well as describing events such as writing panels, college lectures or fan mail with deadpan wit. O'Connor was much more comfortable around her peafowl or chickens.

On her college education:

I didn't really start to read until I went to Graduate School and then I began to read and write at the same time. When I went to Iowa I had never heard of Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, much less read them. Then I began to read everything at once, so much so that I didn't have time I suppose to be influenced by any one writer. I read all the Catholic novelists, Mauriac, Bernanos, Bloy, Greene, Waugh; I read all the nuts like Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Richardson and Va. Woolf (unfair to the dear lady of course); I read the best Southern writers like Faulkner and the Tates, K.A. Porter, Eudora Welty and Peter Taylor; read the Russians, not Tolstoy so much but Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol.

On her literary influences (or not):

I became a great admirer of Conrad and have read almost all his fiction. I have totally skipped such people as Deiser, Anderson (except for a few stories) and Thomas Wolfe. I have learned something from Hawthorne, Flaubert, Balzac and something from Kafka, though I have never been able to finish one of his novels. I've read almost all of Henry James--from a sense of High Duty and because when I read James I feel something is happening to me, in slow motion but happening nonetheless. But always the largest thing that looms up is The Humerous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. I am sure he wrote them all while drunk too.

On the college lecture circuit:

I see that telephone call those Vanderbilt students made has got around. What they wanted was for me to write their paper for them. They asked me such things as "Miss O'Connor, why did they stop at The Tower?"--trying to make something of the word tower. Then they try to make everything a symbol. It kills me. At one place where I talked one of them said,"Miss O'Connor, why was the Misfit's hat black? "Well," I said, "he stold it from a countryman and in Georgia they usually wear black hats." This sounded like a pretty stupid answer to him, but he wasn't through with it. In a few minutes he says, "Miss O'Connor, what is the significance of the Misfit's hat?" "To cover his head," I say. When the session was over they obviously thought I didn't have sense enough to have written the story I wrote.

On movies:

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 picture, but I ain't going again for another three years if I can possibly help it.

On writing habits:

I write only about two hours every day because that's all the energy I have, but I don't let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place. This doesn't mean I produce much out of the two hours. Sometimes I work for months and have to throw everything away, but I don't think any of that was time wasted. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the fact is if you don't sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won't be sitting there.

On writing:

You have to let things in the story do the talking. I mean that, as author, you can't force it and I think you tend to force it in your story, every now and then. The first thing is to see the people at every minute. You get into the old man's mind before you let us know exactly what he looks like. You have got to learn to paint with words. Have the old man there first so the reader can't escape him. This is something that it has taken me a long time to learn. Ford Madox Ford said you couldn't have somebody sell a newspaper in a story unless you said what he looked like. You have to learn to do this unobtrusively of course.

Writing in the 1950s and early '60s, O'Connor's time and place were another world compared with today's. The uneducated black manual laborers who worked for her mother are viewed with a sort of bemused detachment and while O'Connor expresses no racial bigotry, she comfortably quotes the word "nigger" in reference to statements made by others about blacks. The word simply had no derogatory connotations among white people in O'Connor's day. Her devout Catholicism might also raise eyebrows if retweeted today, but is a subject the author is much more comfortable discussing.

Labelled as Southern Gothic, O'Connor's letters make it clear she views her work as trafficking in "Christian realism". She's helped me view the Jesus freaks of my native Texas with less derision and a bit more respect. These are not corrupted souls using faith as a sword, at least in O'Connor's fiction, but are being speared in the side with it. Without seeking to document her culture, her writing does reflect the Dixie South as it was dragged kicking and screaming into the Civil Rights era, with results ranging from the comic to the tragic. Characters are led to an abyss and made to look on the ruin that is their own existence. Her stories, and her short life, haunt me.