Balancing act
Jonathan Keates
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor Ed. Sally Fitzgerald (Faber £8.25) Flannery O'Connor was hardly the most fortunate of American writers. In 1964, at the age of 39, she died of the wasting ,metabolic disease known as lupus, having spent her final years in a world of steroids, splints and consultants. It is savagely ironic, in the light of this, to say that she was born a little too late to correct the vision of the South created by writers like Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, though such was indeed the case. Plantation Gothic and the camp douceurs of New Orleans successfully overcame the opposition put up by more acerbic and jaundiced spirits. The enduring image is now irremovably fixed as a vision of white colonnades, wrought iron balconies and mossed cedar trees, populated with senile Confederates and loony spinsters. The childhoods are always hyperbolically Freudian, no estate is unmortgaged and every family has Something to Hide.
Well, yes, maybe, but in the teeth of such flamboyant platitudes it is good to be reminded of another kind of South, less crudely romantic but altogether richer in the bizarre, the touching and the absurd. O'Connor's background, to which she remained persistently loyal and which provided the setting for her novels and stories, was the rural Georgia of small farmers and po' white trash. Among the pleasures of reading these selected letters is her own infectious delight in the anecdotal detail of daily life on her mother's farm at Milledgeville. Surrounded by peacocks and Chinese geese she views everything with the mildly patronising amusement of one who realises that 'around here it is not a matter of finding the truth but of deciding which lie you live with better.' 'I am very Country Bumpkinish in such society', she remarks of Auden and Randall Jarrell, rounding off the same letter briskly with 'My Chicken feed bill this month was $9.95.1 must get back to the imminent duties, of which you are not one.'
Elsewhere she describes a visit from a party of schoolchildren: 'The children go all over the yard and see the ponies and the peacocks and the swan and the geese and the ducks and then they come by my window and I stick my head out and the teacher says, "And this is Miss Flannery. Miss Flannery is an author". So they go home having seen a peacock and a donkey and a duck and a goose and an author.' Her life, as these letters suggest, was dedicated to establishing an adequate balance among a diversity of worlds, in which emotional and artistic survival counterweighed the ruthless encroachments of sickness. Immobility does not necessarily imply isolation, however, and the correspondence ndurished some incongruous friendships. The present editor quotes the ill-natured comment that 'any crank could write to her and get an answer'. Perhaps it was only that Flannery O'Connor was one of those people whose pleasure in writing letters enhances even their mbst trivial postscripts and asides.
This selection, indeed, includes an instructive display of her painstaking attention to even the most tiresome or absurd requests. In 1955 she had published a macabre story called 'A Good Man is Hard to Find', in which a Georgia family on a country outing is slaughtered wholesale by a homicidal maniac. The following year a university professor wrote to her with the suggestion, formulated during a seminar, that the murder was in fact imaginary, the prolonged fantasy of the central characters. 'My tone is not meant to be obnoxious,' says Flannery, after reminding the professor sharply that too much interpretation is worse than too little, but 'I am in a state of shock'.
In the same letter she points to the crisis of religious faith underlying the story. Catholicism coloured her life and writings alike. She never cut herself adrift (nor, surely, did she wish to) from that all-too familiar professional role of Being a Catholic which various contemporary artists have been content to adopt. Sev eral features of the archetype are at once recognisable: the correspondence with nuns and priests, the unwearying attempts at proselytising; the gung-ho exchanges with committed atheists, the invocations of Maritain and Teilhard and the definitions of literary aims within a decisively Catholic context. She was born into the faith and utterly convinced of its efficacy. Freed thus of the anguish, snobbery and parochialism of the convert, her perspective has a characteristic clarity and hardheadedness. Yet the voice in which she exhorts her fellow Catholic, Cecil Dawkins, or discusses theology with the hesitant 'A', carries the unmistakable ring of the country preacher. Her remark to Sister Mariella Gable that she writes about Protestants because 'they express their belief in diverse kinds of dramatic action which is obvious enough for me to catch' has an intriguing ambiguity about it. These letters celebrate the variety and durability of friendship. As editor and friend Sally Fitzgerald has skilfully collected enough of the scattered and voluminous correspondence to create what is, in effect, an extended autobiography. The personality thus reflected, shrewd, practical, persuasive, at times waspish and severe, and charged with a limitless sense of the ridiculous, is wholly irresistible. 'We are judged,' she once wrote to 'A', `by how hard we use what we have been given ... It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.' How wary she was of her success is continually apparent. A reissue of her novels and stories would be more than timely.
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