My Girl Flannery
I am sorry for not having posted about this article earlier. Last month the Washington Post ran an article about my beloved Flannery O'Conner - shose Collected Short Stories return to my nightstand every other summer.
If there is, among the other major figures of American literature, one with religious faith as deep and heartfelt as O'Connor's, that person does not leap to mind; American writers (and other artists) are more likely to be skeptical about religion than committed to it. Yet religion never descended into religiosity with O'Connor, and it certainly did nothing to ameliorate a sharp sense of humor or tart literary opinions. When A. pressed a book by Nelson Algren on her, O'Connor ruefully opined that his was "a talent wasted by sentimentalism and a certain over-indulgence in the writing." She recommended William Faulkner's "Light in August" to A. but acknowledged that "I keep clear of Faulkner so my own little boat won't get swamped." (Later, in an essay, she memorably reworked the imagery: "Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.") Carson McCullers's "Clock Without Hands" was, O'Connor said, "the worst book I have ever read," but then she disliked "intensely" McCullers's work, period. As for her fellow Catholic Graham Greene:
". . . there is a difference of fictions certainly and probably a difference of theological emphasis as well. If Greene created an old lady, she would be sour through and through and if you dropped her, she would break, but if you dropped my old lady, she'd bounce back at you, screaming 'Jesus loves me!' I think the basis of the way I see is comic regardless of what I do with it; Greene's is something else." - Johnathan Yardley
Posted on 8/9/2005 10:50 PM
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Michael Brendan Dougherty
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Source: The Writer Who Was Full of Gracehe God whom Flannery O'Connor worshiped so devoutly put her faith to a severe test. In 1950, when she was 25 years old, she developed lupus, the same autoimmune disease that had killed her father when she was a teenager; with characteristic stoicism, she called the disease "no great hardship." Six years later she was on crutches, which she laughed off: "I will henceforth be a structure with flying buttresses," which, she said in the Southern vernacular she enjoyed using, "don't bother me none."
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