First up on my finished list, which, by the way, is decidedly shorter than my start list, is FlanneryO'Connor: Spiritual Writings, edited by Robert Ellsberg. (Check my nightstand.)
I first heard of O'Conner in college when I studied Southern American Literature. Unfortunately, the professor only mentioned her; we didn't study her. Then recently I was reading a volume of Douglas Wilson's CREDENDA AGENDA where they gushed their praises for O'Connor. Wanting to keep up with the intellectual crowd, I got my hands on a few copies of her work.
Spiritual Writings is a great intro into the work of O'Connor. In it are some of her correspondences, excerpts from her books, and a short story or two. I'm hooked.
O'Connor's writing is quick witted, intelligent, and dangerously to the point. I like that in a person. It's especially enjoyable in an author. But she isn't for the faint of heart. True to the tradition of southern writers, she being a southern Catholic, no less, O'Connor was not phased by the tragic or brutal. To her, that is the means to grace. Oh, by the way, she is uproariously funny in a frightfully honest sort of way.
I read the short story "Revelation" out loud to my husband last night. I laughed so hard I could barely get through the reading. It has been many years since I have enjoyed an author as much as I am enjoying O'Connor.
A taste:
"Conviction without experience makes for harshness."
"The only force I believe in is prayer, and it is a force that I apply with more doggedness than attention."
"The novelist with with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock; to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures..."
"...it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them."
" Anyway, the mind serves best when it is anchored in the word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity."
"What she is probably talking about is "intellectual honesty" and she is forgetting that in order to be intellectually honest, you have to have an intellect in the first place."
"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally."
My next venture into Flannery O'Connor's works will be A Collection of Stories. I'll keep you posted.
