My second completed book for the Southern Reading Challenge was the wonderful collected letters of Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being. (This would also have served as a completed book for the Chunkster Challenge, if that challenge was still operational.) O'Connor was the Southern-raised-and-bred author of what could best be described as Southern grotesque (her choice of term, over "gothic") stories and novels, including Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, and Everything That Rises Must Converge.
O'Connor lived in the South during the beginning of the integration movement. She left for a few years, heading northeast where she spent time in NYC and at the artist's colony Yaddo, but a diagnosis of lupus sent her back home to Milledgeville, GA ("A bird sanctuary," as the town's sign bragged, a descriptiong O'Connor found endlessly humorous). Her physical world was by necessity very small, but the connections she made with other writers and with fans of her work allowed her to reach out via letters and form friendships that lasted the rest of her unfortunately short life.
A devout Catholic, O'Connor did not approach her religion or its members through rose-colored glasses. Nor did she suffer the fools of literature lightly, frequently groaning in her letters about English students and professors trying to force meaning into details of her work where no meaning was intended. Many of her stories focus on Protestant characters, rather than Catholic, something she wrote about in 1963: "People make a judgment of fanaticism by what they are themselves. To a lot of Protestants I know, monks and nuns are fanatics...to a lot of the monks and nuns I know, my Protestant prophets are fanatics. ..the only difference between them is that if you are a Cathoic and have this intensity of beliefe you join the convent and are heard from no more; whereas if you are a Protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don't believe anything much at all down on your head."
But she didn't just write about Catholicism and writing, she wrote about life on a Georgia farm, in a community filled with people that served her well in her fictional pursuits. The letters are full of O'Connor's dry, understated humor, sending anecdotes about the people she meets and sees that are less gossipy and condescending, but more amused and accepting.
By the time I reached the last letter, written just days before her death, I found myself slowing down. O'Connor was a lively, thoughtful letter writer, and it's hard not to wish there were many more left to read.
The sign of a book is slowing down at the end to savor that last drops. I'm glad you enjoyed this.
Posted by: pam | July 03, 2009 at 10:27 AM