Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man Is Hard To Find with Jon Parrish Peede

Nadya Williams and Jon Parrish Peede discuss the literary legacy of Flannery O'Connor, exploring her impact on American literature and the theological themes present in her work. They highlight the Southern Gothic genre, O'Connor's unique storytelling style, and the reader's engagement with her stories. It also touches on her reception over the years and personal reflections on her most significant works.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

In 1955, Flannery O'Connor published her first collection of short stories. A good man is hard to find. Just 30 years old at the time, she was, some said, a rising star in the American literary landscape. But she also had less than a decade left to live. Lupus, an autoimmune disease, would claim her life at the age of just 39. She left behind an impressive literary legacy, nevertheless. 31 short stories, over 100 book reviews for Catholic newspapers, two novels she completed in her lifetime, and one more, Why Do the Heathen Rage, that was left unfinished. Literary scholar Jessica Hooten-Wilson devoted a decade to studying O'Connor's archives for everything connected to this novel. And the final published product appeared with Brazos Press a year ago. Still, at the end of the day, O'Connor was best known for her short stories. And her collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find, is 70 years old this year. This makes it an apt time to visit or revisit the self-described Helbili Thomas. She opened her short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, for which the collection was named as follows. The grandmother did not want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in East Tennessee, and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the journal. Now look here, Bailey, she said. See here, read this. And she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. Here, this fellow that calls himself the Misfit is eloosed from the federal pen and headed toward Florida. And you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that eloose in it. I couldn't answer my conscience if I did. Bailey didn't look up from his readings. So she wheeled around then and faced the children's mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage, and was tied around with a green head kerchief that had two points on the top, like a rabbit's ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar. Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy. I am Nadia Williams, books editor at Mere Orthodoxy, and interim director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Ashland University. Today I have the privilege of speaking about Flannery O'Connor with John Parrish Phoebe, president of Ashland University. But he has worn many other hats over the years, all of them in roles involving a love of literature, the cultivation of good writing, and the support of the humanities in America. Among other prominent positions he has held, he was the publisher of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia from 2011 to 2016. And he was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2018 to 2021. So welcome.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

My pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

There's a reason that President PD is here to speak specifically about Flannery O'Connor. He is the editor of multiple books, but one of them in particular is a collection of essays inside the church of Flannery O'Connor. Sacrament, Sacramental, and The Sacred in her fiction. So, in other words, you are the obvious person to ask all the questions about Flannery.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Oh my goodness. Well, I can think of a dozen people that are more qualified, but you know what? They're not on the uh in the studio on the phone with you. So uh so I'll have to do.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. What a treat. Now, the first question I'm gonna ask you actually is not about Flannery, but hear me out. So this first season of the podcast focuses on literary classics with a significant anniversary this year. But before we get to Flannery, I want to ask, what is a classic? Like, is it enough, for instance, in Flannery's case, that we're still reading her work 70 years after publication? Or what other criteria would you ask? Like, what is a classic?

SPEAKER_01 4:40

Um, I think we go wrong when we say a classic is measured by popularity. Um, I believe a classic is la is measured by longevity. Um you, you know, and and others have traced this quite well. The the Great Gatsby, if you don't have the armed services uh editions of the Great Gatsby, we don't uh know uh Fitzgerald in the way that we know him now. And um so O'Connor always had a strong circle around her, right? Uh particularly the Vanderbilt Agrarians and fugitives and Catholic leaders that grew out of that. Uh Alan Tate, Caroline Gordon, uh but uh uh Robert Pen Warren. There were other great Southern writers that were less inclined to her. I grew up outside of Jackson, Mississippi, where you're wealthy, Miss Wealthy, as we called her, was just this lovely person. Um she was not taken with O'Connor, um, or by the way, with Carson McCullough's either. And so um I think there is in a classic some essence, and it doesn't always reduce. And one thing I look at it is I'm now in my later 50s. I've been reading these books for 30 years, and I find in them not just a different book every time, but a different me every time. And uh that's why many of us return to books as readers that often the scholars tell us are not so deep at all. They tell us about Steinbeck, for example, though he produced any number of classics.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

Oh, I love that. So a classic as a book that you can return to and find a different yourself in it every time, too. Yeah, I can think I can think of a number of books that this is the case for me. Well, let's start with some background on about Lenaria Connor. And since this is a podcast of a Christian's a Christian ideas magazine, we might as well start with her interest in weaving in theology throughout her writing. So I'm gonna read something from your introduction. These are words you wrote. And I'll ask you to explain a little bit. This is not as threatening as it sounds. So, in your introduction to Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor, you wrote, though she was a cradle to the grave of Catholic Orthodox in her faith, in her afterlife, Vlaterie O'Connor has come to resemble the rural evangelists she so often contemplated in her fiction. With wise blood, she climbed into the pulpit as a pious young handmaiden and left it 12 years later, as an immutable voice through which a creator God powerfully spoke. When examining O'Connor's journey to literary sainthood, one should not be surprised that a certain infallibility has been projected not only onto the word with a capital W, but onto her word. Okay, so tell us more, like about Flannery as kind of a theological thinker, writer. What do we absolutely have to know?

SPEAKER_01 7:53

Uh yes, well, let me say that since as a university president, I deal with budgets and bureaucracy all day long. So it's nice to remember that I once had an intellectual life, um, however uh modest it was. Um it is, I think some of the things I said there captures this peculiar dichotomy. Um she is uh orthodox and Christian in a world, in a post-World War II world that's moving away from that, right? Uh she is a Catholic in a Protestant South, an evangelical South. She is a rural voice in a nation that has industrialized itself into the economic power of the world. Uh she is, as she says, uh talking about uh she is living in a Christ-haunted world to use her phrasing, uh, not a Christ-centered world that she was born into. And she does not uh come at this in the way her fellow Southern Catholic Walker Percy does, uh, which is mixing in, you know, uh the nonfiction essay, the philosophical track. Uh she is giving us um these short stories, these remarkable jewels. Um and what stands out, and here and there, I only jotted down a few quotes, but uh but one I did jot down, one of our longtime correspondents, uh, and we should know for the readers how important her letters are, uh, but in in describing what she wants to do with the story of the river, she says uh to her longtime correspondent, uh, quote, how to document the sacrament of baptism. Think about baptism in an English department if you're pursuing a PhD across America, is a construct that might be alien to you. The idea of the sacrament of baptism, that again, that Catholic phrasing, that is extraordinarily alien in the world we live in. And so uh in some ways she's trying to move beyond us as literary scholars um to get uh to, let's say, the everyday person, and yet uh she certainly did not write a book for the masses, right? Um uh she is this classic um that will live generations past the two of us. Um and she demands a lot of the reader, and I don't know that that's the case for most classics, uh, but it certainly is for all of her classics.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

That's intriguing, the thought of a classic that demands something from the reader. So can you talk a little bit more about this? Like what is she asking us, especially for first first-time readers? What do we need to know?

SPEAKER_01 10:55

Uh first thing is uh what's uncommon for her is that it's rare to talk about classics and in fiction, we're not talking about a novel as much as we're talking about short stories. I'll certainly put the novel, short novel Wise Blood, on my classics list. It's uncommon to talk about stories. And uh the other part is even with a story, it it demands less of us in terms of these are shortish, short stories. Uh still with a tweet going off and the headlines in the news and and all the gadgets we have around ourselves, it's hard to re-enter the world that she has created. Where everything has deep meaning. So in a story, uh Good Country People, which I think I would strongly recommend to our readers, every even the names. There's Miss Hopewell, uh, there's Mrs. Freeman, there is what does it mean when you change your name from Joy to Holga? And uh for all the wonderful people named Holga in the world, I'm sorry about um about O'Connor's approach to that name. She let's just say Joy was considered more favorable. And uh so the level of uh of compressed meaning in her work uh is is rather extraordinary. And I could think of other classics that do not demand uh so much of us. I will be candid. Uh even when I was uh a teenager, I never found anything notable in catch in the rye. I thought it was a self-satisfied narrator, uh and I consider I consider it the same decades later. It did not make me do anything as a reader. O'Connor, uh I won't say she makes me want to be a better man. I'll say that she wants she makes me want to live more fully into what it means to be human and in my case what it means to be a Christian.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

Oh, that's really beautiful. And it's striking also considering some of the themes in the story. So we'll keep coming back to that, but let's talk about the short stories proper. Like, what is going on here? What are some main themes? I mean, the first, uh, the story um with which I opened this podcast today is really about serial killers. Like, how do these kind of stories make you want to be a better man?

SPEAKER_01 13:33

Well, it's uh that one is a story that I think everybody reads or needs to wrestle with. And you can object to some of her premises. Um the uh the grandmother in that story is clearly, I think she's somebody who's in church, right? She bakes a pie, she might send a note to a friend who's not well, uh, she is dressed appropriately. If, you know, I have no doubt that she wears her white gloves when you're supposed to, and all of these things. And her obituary would say, what a fine pillar of the community she was. Uh and most of us may maybe only hope for to be such a person. Okay, it's not a low bar, I'm not mocking it. Uh she runs into this serial killer, the misfit, the the is capitalized here. And uh and what he says, and I don't have the phrasing in front of me, so I'll misquote it, you can correct me, but but he says something to the fact to one of the other killers that she would have been fine if she had someone to shoot her every day of her life. I think we should all see a bit of ourselves in that. Um, two things. We don't know the hour of our ending, and then second, if somebody really challenged us about our core self and our core beliefs as a Christian, um, we might find our best self. And in in the closing of her life, um maybe she broke through polite Christianity to authentic relationship with her savior. Um and uh and the misfit, the other thing is the afterlife of her stories. Um, and some writers have notably tried to continue to engage in O'Connor's world. I don't mean online fan fiction or whatever that's properly called. I mean serious literary writers have have either picked up themes or you know, or characters. Um the shock is you finish that story and the years go by and you read it again, and in your mind you think, I would not be fully surprised if the Misfits incarcerated running a prison ministry, or in some city under another name, running a street ministry. The idea that um something happens in that moment. Um and what happens to him is not fully on the page.

SPEAKER_00 16:19

That's striking. I just reread uh C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, and there's this like there's a killer in heaven, and somebody else who arrives there is like, what are you doing here? This is just not right.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

But yeah, I believe there's a thief up there too, at least.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Yes. Yeah. Like heaven is a sketchy place, it seems like. Which is like really exciting because I guess that gives me a chance. But um so that that story is especially, I I found it especially like just shocking. But let's talk about some that perhaps are less, well, say violent. What are some other themes that she brings up? Like you mentioned uh the river, which engages with baptism.

SPEAKER_01 17:01

Yes, in the river, and boy, uh on one level, I hope we don't spoil all these stories for the readers, but you know, um, it's been out there. Uh we're celebrating books that have been around 70 years, so if we spoil our alert, I guess. Uh the river is a hard one for me. Uh, you know, I'm a I'm a parent and I know you're a parent. And um, I had a friend that's a literary agent, and he put on his website, I don't read manuscripts about kids in peril. Um, actually, I know he published the book quite successfully that did have it, so I have to ask him about his rule. But um The River's tough for me because we we don't want a kid in peril. We don't want in our literary fictions the failures of the parents to uh be uh to cause harm to the child. Uh this book I edited inside Flannery O'Connor, um, I'll tell a quick story, and you can cut it out if you need to. Um, we we I co-edited this book. Um I I used to be a book editor at the University Press, and I edited, I was the in-house acquiring editor of three or four books on O'Connor, including books by her personal friends, such as the poet Ted Spivey. Uh so I published this LSU professor, uh Joanne uh McMullen, and um, I'm at the National Endowment for the Arts, working Madera's closest friend, Dana Joya, uh, as his counselor when he was chairman of the agency. And Joanne would say, Could you reach out to this person? I think they'll respond to you, not me, or this or that. And finally, I said, Joanne, I love O'Connor, but uh honestly, at this point, I'm your co-editor. I'm spending too much time on a project, you know, it's not mine. And she said, Great, I appreciate you accepting the co-editorship. So that's how I came to co-edit this book, right? And I'm so glad I did. And uh so at some point we're talking about the intro, maybe we shared it for proofing. And one of the scholars, and I won't mention names to protect the guilty, because I think everybody's still living, um, really objected to the challenge that Joanne put in there. She said that the river baptism does not follow the Catholics, uh, the very traditional interpretation of Catholic texts about uh kind of a baptism of, you know, a martyr, if you will. And and the others were saying, I think you missed the point here, you know. And uh and it was a good dialogue, and the book has ends with these three essays going back and forth. And I like that uh very much. So uh this brings us to one complication in O'Connor. As a work of literature, we can say, yes, yes, thank you for letting me see the operation of grace in ways I did not understand. She talked about drawing large and startling pictures, right, for the hard to see and shouting for those that are that are hard of hearing, right? She was very conscious that she was exaggerating uh in some ways. Though I can say as a southerner, you'd be surprised uh what we're up to sometimes. Uh what might seem like the Southern grotesque or the Gothic is just for me how how life once was in the in the America South that I knew in, say, the 1970s. But um, and as I talk to you, my bell is ringing in the background in my office.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

It's just very gothic.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Yes, yes. I don't know if it comes through the microphone. Um, so the river is difficult because we certainly have uh a child welfare issue. You would, if you were a member of the state, separate those parents from that child. You would also separate that child from you know the ministerial presence, if you will, in that story. Um so I think it's a tough one. Uh what I come back from it is um that um the there is a path toward God for the innocent, and all those paths are not as we would wish them to be.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Yeah. I guess one thing that I find surprising about her writing, because a lot of times, you know, they say, like, write what you know. Here's a fiction writer who is homebound. Like she did not experience that sort of life. Where do you think she got these ideas?

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Well, you know, some of the more biographical scholars, you know, they'll point to this or that, that this was in a newspaper account or this, you know. Um uh and certainly that was a time where print media was everywhere, and she read deeply. She was so orthodox in her Catholicism that if she wanted to read a book that wasn't allowed, she would, you know, whether she wrote, you know. You know, or bishop or, you know, whome, you know, whomever it may be. Uh, but she would write to get permission. They say, yes, yes, you're allowed to read, you know, Graham Green or whoever she was asking about. Um, and some of the people she was reading about were, you know, themselves quite unorthodox, uh, even if they were deeply committed European Catholics, uh, for um in particular. So I think the work of the imagination. So the actual plot of sentences that people say, uh, I remember reading her and I say, oh, I remember that was said by my grandmother. So I should say my wife is from Georgia. Uh I spend every summer going over from Mississippi to Georgia in one town. Uh, we have probably 60 or 70 relations. So parts of phrasing that strike us as almost quaint or exaggerated, I would just call that Tuesday with my relatives, right? Um so uh, but clearly there's something else operating. And what I would say about a cat a classic, and particularly a Christian classic, uh, it's important to know what she was against. So she's so orthodox, right? And yet, what did she say she was against? Pious writing. And when, you know, you're leading our MFA program, and I love how you've talked about, you know, the good, the beautiful, and the true. Um and so it's nice to have MFA programs where somebody can express their faith. You know, it could be Christian, it could be Jewish, it could be Muslim, it could be any faith, or it can be no faith, but they can be authentically themselves. Sometimes I'm harder on somebody on the person of faith because I say, you're creating a religious tract, and I'm trying to teach you to write a point. These are different acts, right? And O'Connor never confused the two. Um and, you know, uh, we can talk. Uh, I know I want to go where you're directing this, but the other thing is we can say we love a writer or a work. Um, each one of the works as a unit itself works for me. I also look at uh a writer comprehensively. And the one thing you will not find in O'Connor is you won't find a healthy marriage, you won't have find a uh a loving relationship of, you know, even you know, uh a healthy sexual relationship with a marriage, right? Um I think because she she didn't have those romantic uh involvements, um uh you don't find it uh really in your door, you find happy couples in your Dora Welty's uh novels and short stories, but you also don't find like the the deep passion that you find in, say, Graham Green, right? Um these are deeply flawed people, but they are he writes about the full experiences of of relationships, if you will. Uh so I think instead of a broad range, she is uh I won't say narrow, it's an inadequate word, but I will say that she has a uh a scope that she goes deep into.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

In that regard, at least she did write what she knew.

SPEAKER_01 25:25

Yes, or what she said. Yes, yes, indeed.

SPEAKER_00 25:29

So the uh the term has come up a couple of times. So let's explain this a little bit more for listeners. Like scholars repeatedly describe her work as a Southern Gothic. Like, what does this mean?

SPEAKER_01 25:40

I think what it means, again, mostly outside the South, it means that the gestures, actions, uh, and in some cases even the mannerisms of the characters are outside the norms of polite society. Uh that uh they say things that you don't normally say, they act in ways that are peculiar, that she drops in things that uh uh in the uh in the story um I'll take good country people. Okay, so the daughter Joy uh has what's described in the story as an artificial leg. Um there's a man who who uh uh she's gone by the name Hulga, she's very ac described as academic. Uh uh she is uh romance seduced, whatever you want to say, by a Bible salesman who does not in the least believe in the Bible. And she thinks she'll scandalize him with her lack of belief. And he's just a common grifter, really. And he, you know, he says, I've been believing in nothing since I was born, you know, as a paraphrase. So where's her Southern Gothic in this? First thing is, my goodness, if a Bible salesman steals your leg, I mean, that is not an everyday occurrence, uh, I think where we are in Ohio. Um the other thing is the passing sentence, how'd she lose her leg? She got it shot off in a hunting accident. You know, again, that's probably not happening in Manhattan a whole lot, right? Um, and if it was happening in Manhattan, and we read it in the New Yorker, it would be about the trauma, the recovery of, I don't know, you had a pedestrian got hit by a car or what have you. In O'Connor, it's a sentence or two, right? And then we're moving on. And so the Southern Gothic is, or it's sometimes called the Southern Grotesque, it's um it's not the same as surrealism. This is not Master and the Margarita, another classic, right? Yeah. Um it is where things that shock the conscience uh that float somewhere between above fairy tale um um and short of surrealism are taken as the normal conduct of the region and people.

SPEAKER_00 28:03

That's striking. So I have a follow-up question because on occasion she moves outside the south, like geranium, a story of somebody who is a southerner and it's a transplant. So, how do we read those stories and why do you think she wanted to engage with that?

SPEAKER_01 28:20

Well, I think um I I'm gonna remind myself. So, geranium, she did go outside of the South to Iowa, the you know, the finest MFA program, uh if not the oldest, one of the oldest. And uh I think geranium was among those that she wrote or worked with for that. Um, I do not have a chronology in front of me, so I hate to say something in the air that's that's mistaken. But um, if if these were written, if these are published in the collected in the order which they're written, the geranium uh it's the first one and it's out, they're out of alphabetical order. I do I think it's as a successful uh story for me. Not necessarily. Um I think uh there's something I'll give you this comparison. Uh I read uh All the King's Men with great frequency and I collect it. Uh I mean I'm obsessive. I I think I have 200 editions, movie posters about uh from about a dozen countries. Uh what's interesting in that, and in Robert Pen Warren's own life as a Southern writer who very much supported O'Connor and published her short fiction. In that book, and in Warren's life, uh Jack Burden and him, they both go to California. And then as a novelist, he doesn't know what to do with him there. Now, Warren himself marries, has a short marriage there, and ultimately returns to the South and ultimately to his career at Yale. Uh there's a certain type of Southern writer whose work does not operate well outside of their soil. Um and I think um we'll find that the works that last that become classics and rather sustain as classics are gonna be those those ones where where she's immersed in the South in a particular way in the Southern grotesque, like Parker's Back or the or you know Good Man is Hard to Find, um, you know, uh it's and some others. I I I don't think wise blood works for me if it's located in Seattle. Um, but I think it works if it's located in El Paso. Um and uh uh there was a sociologist before we had the internet, John Shelton Reed, and he wanted to decide where the South was. Okay, so this is before the internet, it was looking at phone books, and he decided that you could track whether somebody used the word Dixie in a business. So you find the surprising things in Utah, of course, you even have a university with Dixie in their title. Um, he found Bakerfield, California ahead of a great deal. I believe that Bakersfield, as it existed in O'Connor's life, is a Southern community, if you will. It's people looking from it's Steinbeck's people, right? Looking for jobs after the Dust Bowl era. And so uh what I do wonder is how does that regionalism work now? The voices of the South, my my Southern voice is nothing like my brothers. Two brothers, we worked in Washington, D.C., two state of Mississippi. Uh we have the same mannerisms, but our voices become different. Um our children are raised in an international world, you know, so regional differences flattened out. Um the quirks of the home are flattened out. And this is the re you know, the reality for the Midwest, too, of course. And so O'Connor looks, may look 50 years from now like a museum piece from a world that didn't exist. But it is the operation of faith in her nonfiction and fiction that'll last. I think uh what she did in Mystery and Manners is so extraordinary. Um, something she says, I did jot down a sentence that I wanted uh to say. Um she said uh when she was talking about teaching literature, you know, I like these essays because they're very accessible essays. There's no jargon. And she says, mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind, unquote.

SPEAKER_00 32:54

That's such a theological statement.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

Indeed. Isn't that isn't that lovely?

SPEAKER_00 32:58

Uh well so that leads me to the question of what did readers make of her work then? And how do you think her reputation kind of has continued now? What do you see? How accessible was she to begin with, and how accessible is she is today?

SPEAKER_01 33:14

Well, first thing is she might have been in this, you know, small Georgia, mostly corresponding by letters. Um, but she had great champions and they were highly connected. And you have to understand, as a listener, the importance of what we called the little magazine in, you know, the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, you know, uh obviously she wasn't activated, you know, and alive in some of those early decades. So to be published in the Southern Review or have a review in the Partisan Review, uh, this meant so much. Um uh she had a great publisher in FSG that really believed in her, uh, operated by great uh uh literary Catholics themselves. And so being with one publisher who kept her in print, that they were not driven by uh sales. So when we talk about literary fiction, quite often we're talking about books that sold 10,000 copies or less. Uh but um she uh she had great champions, she had modest financial needs. Um, and uh there was never a time where she was fighting against uh a significant opposition among her critics. Um there were toward the end of her life prominent critics who said, I believe she gives the devil the upper hand too much. This was one of the charges against Milton. Lucifer and Paradise Lots. I mean, Lucifer gets the great lines, right? Um, you know, uh Satan, Lucifer Light Bear, right? You know, you know, uh you know, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven, right? And so um it's the flawed people that O'Connor draws us to. I think of wise blood. Um and so that reputation, uh when I was NEH chairman, uh I funded the uh wonderful documentary film on O'Connor. And uh uh the team that did that just did a fabulous job. Um uh what you if you know the one thing that's that's not not there is if they wanted over credits to put all the covers of all the translations of books, it would be staggering. Um there's only uh uh you know, she's she's large in Japan, for example. Uh usually um Southern writers that were, and I include Faulkner in this and others, um, it was the French that often kept our writers alive. They did this for Poe. Um, I know Poe, you know, I think the Richmond and Baltimore influence were both uh Southern operations uh for Poe in many ways. But uh so we had this habit of the French understanding a great Southern writer before the rest of America. Uh but in this case, O'Connor was widely adopted. Um, and again, she had no apparatus around her. She passed away. There was no publicist pushing her. You know, she wasn't operating from an endowed chair at you know at Harvard. She was operating um from an operational small farm in in Georgia.

SPEAKER_00 36:33

It's striking to think about um like the accidents of or that helped or did not help certain writers. And it's um obviously the ones who did not get the help, we wouldn't be reading them. But it's um a couple of years ago I read an essay about uh Cormac McCarthy and like kind of the accidental way in which he became the sensation that he did, because his early few books didn't sell at all. And like we now think like, really? But uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:02

Absolutely. And there's a lot of discussion and and and overlapping editors uh that that worked with him, that worked with Robert Penn Warren, um, you know, and others, William Styrin. Um, but O'Connor was never like Styrin, for example. Um, I remember very much, and I, you know, and I met uh you know uh Styrin uh once when I was in graduate school, and I remember something to the effect, I think it was the New York Times obituary, that was making the point that by the time uh William Styrin passed away, you know, Sophie's choice wasn't being assigned anywhere. His other books had been um uh overlooked as you know, as Nat Turner and others. And um they looked up and they said, you know, some of these books are selling five or six thousand copies a year, whereas uh other books like Catch 22, other classics, uh had, or Slaughterhouse 5, I think might have even been mentioned in the exact review, were selling extraordinary. I mean, some of these books are selling 30,000 copies a month, particularly Slaughterhouse 5 and Vonnegut. So that's the other thing is culture distils things. Scholars can prop it up, book reviewers can in that old culture of the mid-20th century. Uh, but ultimately readers will find their path. It could be this podcast, right? That you bring uh something into a consciousness. And and I do hope uh here and there uh that you might have a one where you say, this isn't yet a classic, but it should be. Oh my goodness, don't we all have pockets full of such things? Um and one of the great joys of an O'Connor is you can go through our letters and say, Well, who is she reading? And um, you have that level of awakening. Um I loved that before the internet, where you know you would go to a card catalog, get a book, you had to return the five before you could get another one. And uh it was incredible. Uh the late writer, southern writer, my professor friend, uh, once republished one of his novels, Barry Hanna. Very hard man uh in a lot of ways. Um, and he had this religious conversion late in his life in a hospital. Um, but he said when he got to the MFA program at Arkansas, uh everybody was talking about reading Flint O'Connor and he didn't want to look dumb. And he said, Oh yes, he's great, you know. Um, and uh uh and Barry talks about being blown away by by her work. Um and he's certainly continued the Southern Gothic in his short stories, Airships, and uh his his great novel Geronimo Rex, which was the novel I I republished.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

That's striking. You know, your point about um how much these writers are reading, it's really um I've I've thought before, maybe sometime like in the future to do uh a season of this podcast focusing on like writers' bookshelves. Um because there's that book recently published, Jane Austen's bookshelf. And I think there's a lot, like Flanneria Connor's bookshelf would be a fun conversation with somebody who uh is familiar with her letters and so on.

SPEAKER_01 40:25

There's a little cottage industry of just publishing bibliographic records of uh, you know, somebody did a book of uh Faulkner's bookshelf at Roanoke. Um, you know, now you can do it with something uh digital Yatnap Patofa, uh F uh that's Faulkner's fictional, you know, county. And some of this is better to put online instead of publish as a print book because you know you can have a three-dimensional aspect to it. But I would love uh I would listen to that podcast.

SPEAKER_00 40:56

Well uh so to get back to O'Connor proper, I did want to ask you um what's your favorite O'Connor short story?

SPEAKER_01 41:05

Gosh.

SPEAKER_00 41:06

Um I guess if you have to narrow it down to just like two or three, that's okay. If you can't name just one.

SPEAKER_01 41:12

I'm gonna go back uh to good country people, but um because of the way it tries to get at uh love or marriage, um Parker's Back is very compelling to me. And there's a I will admit, there's a quite good essay in the book I edited about uh uh Parker's Back, where they try to look at the bibliographic uh elements of it. Um and uh he's trying to prove uh his deep connection with God. He's he's he's got this Byzantine uh, you know, I guess, uh tattoo, and and what he believes is I am fully, I have given my flesh over to his flesh. And uh and for his wife, maybe more pious, um, sees it as a sacrilege, right? Um you know, um I haven't reread it, I'm ashamed to say it more than a decade, but I think I described that properly. I uh but um it's um what I appreciate uh about that and the other stories that really last um is she is saying it has to stand as a work of literature. That's so important. But also literature, she crafted it as a function of the spirit.

SPEAKER_00 42:51

Literature is a function of the spirit. I like that. That just sounds like I mean it's it's a reminder. Um this is like so David Bentley heart or something, but like the whole idea that like this material world is not all that there is. And again, a reminder that like, yes, we are minds, but we're also like souls.

SPEAKER_01 43:11

And uh yeah, there's a detail I won't get quite right, is it's uh, but you know, she was also she got a lot of fellowships. People wanted to help her out, you know. She uh, you know, I think O'Connor didn't always have social graces, right? She had the awkwardness of maybe being shy as a person. She had, you know, arm braces later, she had good days and bad days of her physical health. But she ends up at Yadto with, you know, people supporting her. But there's some, this is a broad statement, um, it might not have been the Yatto years, whatever, but you know, she was, you know, of all all souls, she was she liked Robert Lowell a lot, a lot. And uh but there's she's at some kind of uh social gathering. And they're talking about the Eucharist as a device, as a literary device, okay, how it could be useful in the way um we might interpret a James Joyce story. And and she basically says, as a symbol, you know, to heck with it. I don't remember if she said the word heck, but I'm gonna say it on your podcast. Um and uh uh and the idea that that brings that's her and the misfit, the character, the misfit being one and the same. Um if the misfit of, and I can get this phrase right, um, but the misfit is he's an all or nothing. If Jesus did what Jesus said he did, then you have you have to lay down everything and follow him. And if he didn't do it, then it's the biggest lie there ever was. And so I see O'Connor in that uh dinner gathering party, social whatever, and as she is the misfit. And the rest of them are saying, Oh, what a wonderful device it is. You see what Joyce did, you know, with the dead, and you see the function of the snow and and uh all this, all those things, and and she would not have it. So remember, I take us back to where we were talking earlier when she's writing to her friend who in the letters is initially known as A, the letter A. Um, she doesn't just say, I think I'm gonna write about baptism and this kind of theological complexity of baptism and who's allowed to baptize. No, she says how to document the sacrament of baptism.

SPEAKER_00 45:41

That's striking.

SPEAKER_01 45:42

Yeah. And to say document, because that seems to be because we said earlier, wait, we're not supposed to be writing pious stuff. You're not writing church tracks. There's a there's a lane for that. Um but uh but um what I would tell you is uh how did she document it? Well, she transformed it into something else. Um somebody who struggled with his faith, another southerner. Um James A. G. didn't know what to do with it either. And between him and Evans photography with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, another classic, uh uh sold less than 5,000 copies in its time. Uh, largely unreadable and publishable, it seemed a failed masterpiece. Um, and it took the 1960s with a kind of back to the land point of view that all of a sudden that becomes a masterpiece. AG went down there to document poverty and sharecropping in the American South for commercial magazine. And um, it was transformed in him. If I could tell your listeners a book that should be a classic is The Morning Watch by A. G. I corresponded with the years from the person that held the rights trying to get it back in print, and I couldn't. But the paperback I have of the morning watch was the 22nd printing. And no one even knows it exists, hardly.

SPEAKER_00 47:16

You know, the word document to me brings uh to mind like journalism, nonfiction. And it sounds like from this conversation, one big takeaway I have from our conversation today is uh for O'Connor, fiction and nonfiction are kind of blurry.

SPEAKER_01 47:31

I want to say I'm not sure I agree. Okay, go for it. But um because I can think of some novelists that that do that differently. Um I'm trying to uh and I don't want to eat a ton of air time. I'm trying to find my footing on this. I can think of writers where that line was closer. So I don't want to deny the operation of her imagination, but certainly there's been uh just good old meat and potatoes scholarly research saying this happened and you know there's a bank robby X and then she did this. There's the misfit traces back to someone you know along that time. And I was never, for her, that type of scholar. Um, but um it's it's what somebody does with these uh things. The great surprise in these literary investigations, which I love, is that the part that we find most likely to seem made up is the part that's true. I will tell you, within the Southern Gothic, um, you will be shocked how much of it uh is is is reality, what is now called lived experience, but once we just called experience. Um I I'll tell you too, I mentioned Walker Percy, and this is gonna seem like a secular, but I wanted to get it in. It's both about, you know, Walker Percy uh uh was uh you know a Southern Catholic as she was. And uh my mother was Southern Baptist, and my father was Catholic, Roman Catholic from Birmingham. You know, and that did not happen in the 1950s.

SPEAKER_00 49:20

I was gonna say, this is beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 49:23

And he he passed about a year older than I am, but I don't really, I think, in retrospect, remember a time. I thought he was always sick, but I guess now I know he's dying, and it took a long, you know, from his 30s on. And so I think underneath O'Connor spoke to me in a particular way. We were raised in a Protestant house, um, you know, but the rosary beads are in that top drawer, right? And uh, but um I gotta read this passage because I think it's so great, and and it also you'll say great, but a non sequitur. But Walker Percy's being interviewed about Catholic literature, and this is what he says, and I think it's just wonderful. He says, I think a lot of novels, so-called Catholic novels, American Catholic novels, are usually Irish Catholic. Some of them are very well done indeed, like Edwin O'Connor. And then there's Flannery, although she's a Georgia fundamentalist, unquote. Georgia fundamentalists. Yes. Um, and you know, that's the other part is uh we can't flatten how much of her being uh raised in Irish Catholic, you know, because there is in Savannah, you know, we can't wash out uh her father never really recovering from World War I. Um the function of that would be close to PTSD, you know, of some kind of crack up. And uh so I haven't read the scholarship. I just haven't kept up. I you know, I've been on to other jobs. Um, but I I'd be interested in what scholars have done with the presence of the father in her stories. I think what they would tell us is the absence of a father is manifest on her pages.

SPEAKER_00 51:15

That's striking. Well, as we conclude, I have one final question for you, which I think is a fun one. And I want to hear what you think. So, what classic book do you wish you had written and why?

SPEAKER_01 51:28

Oh my goodness. Um, I'm so frustrated with myself that I have uh inadequate novels in drawers right now. Um what I wish um and why. I wish I could get on the page what uh James Age got on the page in the morning watch. Uh a fictionalization of what he experienced when he was being raised near Swanee in the boys' school there in Tennessee. His father died, and his mother um sent him off to school in the same town. I mean, she really separated. And he has that little group of boys, and they're just trying to hold a vigil, right? And they're fighting off sleep and they're being crude in some of their snide little marks. And uh um I wish that, or his little Knoxville introduction, uh, you know, to his Pilcer Prize winning novel that was a posthumously published. I wish I could get at the essence of the quiet southern boy trying to locate that quiet, still voice within himself.

SPEAKER_00 52:47

Oh, that's wonderful. Well, thank you so much.