Flannery O’Connor, Letters.
Mary Flannery O’Connor (1925 – 1964) was not only one of America’s greatest fiction writers, but also a hero. Both for her courageous act of living in the face of tragedy as well as her nobility of character which shined through her suffering. Although she was merely 39 at the time of her passing, having battled lupus for twelve long years, her wide letter correspondence reveals beyond doubt a human being radiantly alive.
Arranged chronologically, beginning in 1948, to her diagnosis in 1952, and through to her final days in 1964, The Habit of Being; Letters of Flannery O’Connor discloses a generous and hospitable woman of unusual spiritual depth. A devout Catholic, unapologetic in her faith, she loved Christianity and the Church as much as she loved the peacocks, pheasants, and many birds of fowl which surrounded her and her mother on their quiet Georgia farm, Andalusia.
Of course many remarks of great substance can be found in such a rich collection of personal writings. Running throughout however is a firm trust in the value of self-knowledge due to the humility it brings. She believed that coming to understand oneself, facing squarely one’s own imperfections, diminishes egotism and allows a person to see above all what one lacks.
Pointing to Catherine of Siena as an example, Flannery highlights that it was precisely St. Catherine’s interior decent into self-knowledge by which she was able to change the dysfunctional state of Italian politics and the Church in her day.
Frequently, we experience our shortcomings as either immobilizing or as putting us in a state of exaggerated defensiveness. These overreactions are a failure to accept our stature as finite creatures prone to making mistakes and in need of divine support. Flannery O’Connor possessed the grace to avoid such extremes, which helped her to blossom as both a writer and a person.
Learning from the philosophical work of Jacques Maritain, “the habit of art” as the essential attitude or quality of mind of the real artist, intimate friend and editor of her letters, Sally Fitzgerald says Flannery went one step further. Fitzgerald believes Flannery acquired “a second distinguished habit” of both practical and spiritual importance, “the habit of being.”
Fitzgerald writes, “living in accordance with her formative beliefs, as she consciously and profoundly wished to do, she acquired…an excellence not only of action but of interior disposition…reflected in what she did and said.”
Although flawed like the rest of us, Flannery O’Connor committed herself to what her Catholic faith told her was of real value, especially in the small, day in and day out activities of life. This devotion to self-knowledge as the road to humility and virtue not only raised her fiction writing to a higher state of perfection, but her soul as well.
“You can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and polite. I prefer the good manners of an idiot to his honesty and while I am not an idiot in these matters, I have found myself mighty far wrong mighty often.”
