Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 28, 1988 by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Flannery O'Connor. Collected Works, selected and annotated by Sally Fitzgerald (Library of America, 1,281 pp., $30)

THE INCLUSION of Flannery O'Connor in the Library of America seriesshe and William Faulkner are the only two contemporary writers represented there to date-inevitably prompts an official appraisal, as it were, of the literary stature of the woman Marion Montgomery has called "this remarkable creature who lived and flourished on a middleGeorgia farm," dead these 24 years. In most of the reviews I have looked at, the reviewer handles the word "great" as gingerly as if it were a diamond pin he was thinking of presenting to a favorite mistress and replaces it finally, after further consideration, on the velvet. Greatness in a writer is as elusive and indefinable a quality as beauty in a woman, though Mr. Montgomery, in his book The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit

of the Age: Why Flannery O'Connor

Stayed Home, goes so far as-or no further than-to say this: "If Flannery O'Connor's poetry lacks the grandeur we find in Shakespeare, it does not lack a profundity, a vision worthy of comparison." Was Miss O'Connor a "great" writer-a writer, that is, to be placed squarely in the company of Hawthorne and James, Hemingway and Faulkner? I believe that she was. Of one thing, though, I have no doubt at all: great writer or not, she was consistently one of the finest literary artists to appear in this (or any) country in this century.

Flannery O'Connor died in 1964 at the age of 39, having written two short novels, two collections of short stories, and a number of occasional prose essays, most of them on the art of fiction-writing (read these pithy, witty, and clairvoyant pieces and you won't need to bother with the James Prefaces) and posthumously edited and published as Mystery and Manners by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. These, in addition to several unanthologized stories and the better part of Miss O'Connor's wonderful letters (including 21 published here for the first time), make up the present volume, which represents virtually the entire published oeuvre and which totals, with Mrs. Fitzgerald's annotations, 1,281 pages.

Even from a writer who didn't make forty, that is no large body of work: Miss O'Connor worked slowly and painstakingly and within a closely circumscribed thematic, social, and emotional range. On the other hand, when we consider the debilitating effects of her fatal disease (lupus erythematosus), which resulted necessarily in her "staying home," and the retardant ones imposed by her formulated aesthetics, it is hard to see how it could-or should-have been otherwise. She worked consciously as a prose poet, in a medium she liked to insist upon as an "incarnational" art. Faulkner, who was capable of writing thousands of words a day of highflying Dixie-Shakespearean prose, was ordinarily about 45 per cent efficient as an artist; Miss O'Connor, laboring painfully four hours a day, about 95 per cent. Almost nothing in her work is unintentional; nearly everything has a place and a meaning, pointing to another significance, which is another way of saying that it operates on two levels of existence at once. An O'Connor production, whether a short story or a novel, is as compressed as a diamond, a reduction of life-however narrow a slice of it-to essences. In a letter to the anonymous "An.," with whom she corresponded regularly during the last nine years of her life, she praises the bulldog in Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools as "essence of bulldog." She might have been speaking of her own work, in which we find essence of grandmother, essence of farm widow, essence of hired man, essence of malevolent child, essence of progressive schoolteacher, essence of Wellesley graduate. As a poet, she naturally lacks the novelistic expansion of Thackeray, James, or Dos Passos (who, had they tied themselves to her principles of fictional construction, would be fitting together the bits of their poetic-and unpublished-mosaics in Purgatory); correlatively, she makes up for it with the modern poet's own kind of inclusiveness. "The longer you look at one object," she wrote, "the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction-writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene." By continuing to develop the poetic sensibility of modernist literature while discarding the formal experimentalism of the Joyce-Woolf-Faulkner-Garcia Mirquez school, she made herself the most successful American practitioner of post-modernism in fiction; not the official Post-Modernism as represented variously by minimalists like Raymond Carver or freaks like Thomas Pynchon, but a lay version running parallel to it, while infinitely transcending it.

According to Miss O'Connor, "the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means that it is greater." Miss O'Connor herself was a Catholic, as orthodox as you can get; her theological position is one, as Montgomery has remarked, "which nineteenth- and twentieth-century aestheticism assumed itself rid of." Christian dogma, she insisted, "frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery"which, combined with an interest in "manners," was in her opinion what the writing of fiction is about. A selfdescribed "realist of distances," she uses metaphor as a means of juxtaposing two countries and of providing windows through which one-the unknown-may be glimpsed from the familiar other. You do not need to travel in the vicinity of Milledgeville, Georgia, to appreciate the aptness and power of her primary metaphors-the sun, a white hole in the sky; a line of red sunset cloud, a clay road; a dark line of trees, a threatening wall on the far side of a pasture-but to do so is, as she herself put it in a quite different context"an added blow."