FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Images of Grace
Harold Fickett and Douglas R. Gilbert
Eerdmans, Grand Rapids
151 pp., $ 18.95
In our era of debased literary criticism and the fiction of nihilism, Flannery O'Connor's triumph is a phenomenon almost astounding. (For the most part, it has been a posthumous success with the critics and the reading public.) O'Connor was an earnest Catholic, conservative politically, living in a decayed Georgia town, writing about odd rural people and their experiences with the mysterious ways of Christ. Having written two collections of short stories and two unconventional novels, she died young.
Her books appeared at a time when America's intellectual milieu - or at least the desiccated intellectuality of New York's reviewers and publishers, with few exceptions - clearly was hostile to Christian orthodoxy, the politics of prescription, the South, oldfangled rural life, and the mysteries of being. Yet today, no American novelist is more discussed than O'Connor; her letters and her book reviews are collected, praised by critics, and widely read. In Harold Fickett's phrase, she gives our decadent time an "incarnational art" that may wean us away from our present diet of literary Dead Sea fruit.
This new book, a large paperback handsomely printed with many photographs, is at once a critical study and a succinct biography, gracefully and movingly written by Fickett. His collaborator, Douglas R. Gilbert, is a well-known photographer who appends naturalistic photographs of Milledgeville and its environs, the country of O'Connor's stories. Both the text and the pictures call to mind a strong passage from one of T.S. Eliot's earlier essays:
We mean all sorts of things, I know, by Beauty. But the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
For although O'Connor was a talented comic writer, commonly she wrote of ugly actions here below. Innocent herself, so far as any of us can be, she perceived with high power of vision the boredom of most lives, the horror of fallen human nature, and the glory of grace and redemption. Fickett notes repeatedly her affinity to Eliot - whom she never met and who declined to read her stories.
A whole school of criticism is growing up in appreciation of O'Connor, almost on the scale of Eliot's critical influence; doctoral dissertations about this shy, kindly young woman, totally free of pretence, are proliferating. Of earlier studies, I commend Robert Drake's pamphlet Flannery O'Connor: A Critical Essary (Eerdmans, 1966) and David Eggenschweiler's The Christian Humanism of Flannery O'Connor (Wayne State University Press, 1972). As yet, we are spared any presumptuous exercise in psychobiography. To understand what sort of person O'Connor was, we need only read her letters, The Habit of Being, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1979) and her collected reviews, The Presence of Grace, compiled by Leo J. Zuber (University of Georgia Press, 1983). She suffered much and bore that suffering with high courage. She was made for
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