TRYING TO SEE STRAIGHT "The silence of the Catholic critic is so often preferable to his attention" Or so Flannery O'Connor thought Our essayist gamely defies her
Schilling, Timothy P
TRYING TO SEE STRAIGHT Flannery O'Connor & the business of writing Timothy P. Schilling October 6,1959: People are always asking me if I am a Catholic writer and I am afraid that I sometimes say...
...Besides her novels, short stories, and essays, which are jewels, we have her letters (The Habit of Being, Vintage...
...It was a frequent complaint in the letters of Flannery O'Connor (1925-64) that "The silence of the Catholic critic is so often preferable to his attention" (November 6,1955...
...They have no proper sense of place...
...They too, believe, however half-heartedly, and find-at least I do- that O'Connor offers sane and good-humored guidance for professed Christians...
...Still, it is moving to come to the end of these letters and see how they get shorter...
...The artist dreams no dreams...
...Flannery O'Connor's concerns were theological, in the best sense of that word...
...If one reads the letters chronologically, there are increasing indications of the decline in her condition (she suffered from lupus), but they are incidental signs: matter-of-fact mentions of blood iraifls-fusions, hospital visits, apologies for not having had the eri-ergy to write...
...She distrusted "academic" approaches to literature for the same reason...
...When pressed for the significance of the hat, she said that it was "to cover his head...
...This isn't the sort of responsibility she bargained for when she started writing...
...Rather, in her writing and in her farm work (raising "peachickens" in Milledgeville, Georgia), she busies herself with what is immediate, and necessary...
...It is vital...
...1 think he just sees this as an abstract theoretical problem and from a great distance...
...Her generosity would not long begrudge us even our misreadings...
...of the artist was to his art...
...Dogs and peachickens do not mix, she tells us...
...In 1955 (August 2), she writes: One of the awful things about writing when you are Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, the whole reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation...
...My greatest exertion and pleasure these last years has been throwing the garbage to the chickens and I can still do this, though I am in danger of going with it...
...They say if I keep the weight off it entirely for a year or two, it may harden up again...
...Some of the most entertaining passages in her letters concern her "peafowl...
...that is, nobody in your audience...
...Later (on August 6,1957) she comes to a more explicit understanding of the responsibility she has to her readers- prompted by an exchange with one of America's editors (her essay "The Church and the Fiction Writer" was published there, March 30,1957): I had said that the responsibility...
...I am writing a story now and have proceeded at a regular rate of two pages a day, following my nose more or less...
...She wrote, "I'm no theologian, but all this is vital to me, and I feel it's vital to you" (December 23, 1959...
...otherwise in my old age I will be charging people from my wheel chair or have to have a steel plate put on it...
...If s only trying to see straight and it's the least you can ask for...
...Such observations are in keeping with O'Connor's belief that the artisf s work is conditioned by a reality that is given: "Ultimately, you write what you can, what God gives you" (November 6,1955...
...And, "I always look in the Catholic magazines my mother reads, to see if my book has been reviewed and when I find it hasn't, I say an act of thanksgiving...
...You ask God to let you see straight and write straight...
...We profit by her example of faith...
...we have a very nice lawn that they could decorate to advantage but they prefer to sit on the tractors or the top of the chicken house or the garbage-can lid" (July 16,1957...
...But in her letter of July 21,1964, just two weeks before her death, she signs herself "Tarweary...
...They have to work out some way or other, and I think you discover a good deal more in the process when you don't have too definite ideas about what you want to do...
...She goes on signing her letters comically: Tarbutter, Tarpot, Tarbug-all variations on her "Tarwater" in The Violent Bear It Away...
...Is it, for instance, the same in kind as the responsibility of the church, is it to children, to idiots, to old ladies, to fifteen-year-old girls, to unbalanced people...
...On September 30,1955, she writes: My being on the crutches is not an accident or the energy-depriving ailment either but something that has been coming on in the top of the leg bone, a softening of it on acct...
...I don't run around or play games...
...In her letter of January 17,1956, she speaks of her task (somewhat reluctantly) as being concerned with "the accurate naming of the things of God...
...Though she was aware of writing for those for whom God is dead, it is certainly true that many of her readers turn to her precisely because of her belief in the Incarnation...
...Her letters show us her refusal to seek a truth that stands apart from the concrete and local...
...and the birds do mostly what they want...
...To "write straight," in full cognizance of the reality of the Incarnation, is to respect the specificity and dailiness of life...
...When asked why the Misfif s hat was black in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, she replied that "most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats...
...of a failure of the circulation to the hip...
...The creative act of the artist does not replace the creative act of God: rather, the artist participates in a creative power that is of God...
...The art produced, then, is as much "discovered" as it is constructed...
...Perhaps it is this closing of distance that is most essential in O'Connor's art...
...April 20, 1957...
...She writes on October 27,1957: I always have an idea of what I want to do when I write a story, but whether I'll be able to remains always to be seen...
...At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for...
...That same realism (and hatred of sentimentality) applied also in the matter of her own bad health...
...She hated "pious language" for its disrespect of the mystery that is already present in things...
...TRYING TO SEE STRAIGHT Flannery O'Connor & the business of writing Timothy P. Schilling October 6,1959: People are always asking me if I am a Catholic writer and I am afraid that I sometimes say no and sometimes say yes, depending entirely on who the visitor is...
...Her yard sounds like a jungle at night...
...O'Connor speaks of "Christian realism," and says that "there is nothing harder or less sentimental" than this...
...Now it seems to me that he [the editor] is correct but that some explanation should be given of how the artist's responsibility for souls operates...
...Whereas the writer himself is traveling the rocky road, and feels every individual bump...
...That is precisely what he does not do...
...She continues, "I don't mean if s an accomplishment...
...In these we most closely approach her views on the business of writing-a business that was for her indistinguishable from the spiritual life itself...
...My audience are the people who think God is dead...
...These are, for me, the most satisfying of O'Connor's works, perhaps because they give us the most direct access to her life...
...Though O'Connor might have cringed at what follows, she has given us too much for us to refrain from speaking of her and her work...
...Anyway, it is not as great an inconvenience for me as it would be for somebody else, as I am not the sporty type...
Vol. 122 • November 1995 • No. 19
