Books: Letters off Flannery O'Connor

• Share

THE HABIT OF BEING

Edited by Sally Fitzgerald; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 617pages; $15

Author Flannery O'Connor spent most of her adult life with her mother on a dairy farm just outside Milledgeville, Ga., up the road a piece from Macon and a middling way from Atlanta. Her isolation there began involuntarily. At 25 she was already a noteworthy Southern expatriate and a prizewinning graduate of the University of Iowa's School for Writers. She had put in time at Yaddo, an artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., along with luminous fellow guests like Robert Lowell. She had settled down in the Connecticut household of Poet Robert Fitzgerald, his wife Sally and a brood of small children, working on a novel optioned by a New York publisher. Then she was hit with disseminated lupus erythematosus, a severe disease that could be kept at bay only with drugs and a straitened, cautious existence. She went home and wrote as hard as her reduced energy would permit. Two novels and a volume of short stories created a critical stir. In 1964 she was readying a second book of stories for publication when the lupus flared up and killed her. She was 39.

It seems clear that Flannery would have made her mark as a writer no matter where and how she lived her grownup years. She was born a Southerner and a Roman Catholic, and the vision that animated all her fiction came early: the infusion of divine grace into the lives of rustic, often grotesque characters who either do not recognize or cannot handle it. This plus talent and true grit guaranteed her status as an original. But the lupus made her a prodigious writer of letters as well. "Mail is very eventful to me," she wrote one friend shortly after returning to Georgia. "I never mind writing anybody," she told another. "In fact it is about my only way of visiting people as I don't get around much and people seldom come to see us in the country." What might have been frittered away in conversation was thus preserved, and this accident of fate leads to a startling discovery: the most memorable character that O'Connor ever got down on paper was her own.

She did indeed write anybody: old friends like Lowell, literary figures like Katherine Anne Porter and Walker Percy, college chums, priests, nuns, questioning students, aspiring authors, fans, cranks. She described her response to a flirtatious note from a man in Cincinnati: "I wrote [him] that I didn't think I'd like him a bit but he would be crazy about me as I had seven gold teeth and weighed 250 pounds." The diversity of her correspondents brought out her own.

Even those who knew her well may be surprised at the range and shadings of her character revealed in this collection.