Δελτίο Βιβλικών Μελετών, τχ. 33Α, Ιούνιος 2018
Translation: John Raffan
In the autumn of 2013 there appeared a short, hitherto unpublished, book by Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) under the title A Prayer Journal (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 96 pages). It contains diary entries from January 1946 to September 1947, namely, when the author was between twenty-one and twenty-two years old. At the time, she was at the University of Iowa studying journalism and above all writing at a Writer’s Workshop organized by the same university. O’Connor’s text itself takes up a mere forty pages. The rest of the book consists of a short introduction by the editor, W. A. Sessions, and a photographic reproduction of the entire notebook.
Flannery O’Connor, a fervent Catholic, was born in Savannah, Georgia, in the heart of the American Protestant South. She was to live almost all of her short life in the same state on Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville. In December 1949, when she was just twenty-four years old, there would appear the first symptoms of the illness that was to plague her sorely over the following years and lead to her death at the age of thirty-nine. The illness, systemic lupus erythematosus, would be diagnosed definitively in 1951. From 1955 she was able to walk only with the aid of crutches. During the years of her illness she wrote feverishly and looked after her peacocks. Before she died, she saw published a collection of short stories (A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, 1955) and two novels (Wise Blood, 1952, and The Violent Bear It Away, 1960). The rest of her writings were published posthumously. To these are now added the precious stone, A Prayer Journal.
Almost all the entries in the Prayer Journal –the title was given by the editor– begin with (or contain) a prayerful address to God, usually, My dear God, and essentially constitute prayers. These prayers, however, are not only prayers, but are at the same time reflections about prayer and more generally about Christian thinking and life. O’Connor is aware that writing as premeditated, planned and crafted speech cannot easily become prayer, because it is a slow process and lacks that upwelling of the moment which is characteristic of prayer (20).
The young Catholic woman had been saying the traditional prayers of the Catholic Church all her life; she had been saying them, but had not been feeling them (4). Now, without rejecting them, she wants to say her own, to pray while feeling what she was saying. She wants to adore God with feeling, with a warmth of love. She works at this intensely, but at the same time she knows that prayer and adoration of this kind is a gift of God’s Grace (8-9). The twenty-year-old O’Connor already knows what others, who have also devoted themselves to the art of prayer, learn, if they learn it at all, only after many years, namely, that prayer is not a human achievement but a gift from above, that true prayer is ultimately God’s prayer within us: Even in praying it is You who have to pray in us (7).
Flannery O’Connor had been writing from her early childhood. When she went to Iowa to study she had already made up her mind: she wanted to be a writer, that alone is what she wanted and nothing else. At the time when she was writing her prayer notes, she was also writing short stories and was beginning to write her first novel, Wise Blood.
To pray it is not sufficient to believe simply that there is Someone who is listening, but you must also believe that he hears you, namely that he wants and is able to fulfil your requests. Flannery O’Connor had decided, as we said, to pray with honesty, with all her truth. What else could she then ask for in her prayer other than that for which she longed with every fibre of her being, namely, to become a writer? And this is what she does:
Please help me dear God to be a good writer (10); Oh dear God I want to write a novel, a good novel (18); I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship. […] I want to be the best artist it is possible for me to be, under God. (29)
I do not know of any other contemporary writer who has written prayers of entreaty to become a good author and asking to write well. O’Connor with her forthright honesty desires only one thing (The desires of the flesh –excluding the stomach– have been taken away from me. For how long I don’t know but I hope forever. It is a great peace to be rid of them: 23) and she asks for this persistently. She is studying writing in a school where everyone regards faith as laughable (15), and yet she is praying to become a good writer! Writing certainly is not an act of humility, on the contrary it requires some small or great – and more likely a great – dose of egocentrism. The young Catholic woman is aware of the contradiction: I want so to love God all the way. At the same time I want all the things that seem opposed to it – I want to be a fine writer (23: the word fine is underlined by the author).
The twenty-year-old O’Connor already has experience of the bitterness of the writer’s cup, and first of all the depressing sense that she is unable to write what she wants: I can’t write a thing. But I’ll continue to try (23). Every day that passes sine linea is another disappointment. Above all, she fears what every true writer fears: mediocrity, as she manifests often and forcefully throughout the notebook. She prays for God to grant her stories and for her to turn them into short stories or novels. And how great is her joy when it happens! Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story – just like the typewriter was mine (11). She asks for God who gave her the story now to become actively involved in her writing, to show further interest in her story, so that through its repeated revisions it may finally acquire cohesion and clarity and convey its meaning to the reader, namely, that something good can appear in life even through something cheap.
O’Connor does not wish for writing with its own dynamics to lead to shores far from her faith, on the contrary, she wishes to be an author whose writing is permeated by Christian teachings: Please let Christian principles permeate my writing (5). Does she then wish to be a writer ad majorem gloriam Dei? No, her Christianity does not have the self-confidence or pugnacity of the Jesuits of old.
Strong as is O’Connor’s desire to become a writer, equally strong is her desire to remain faithful. She would go to Church every day, as we know both from her biography and from this Journal (35). We know, however, that these desires (or needs) cannot easily be reconciled. Faith in its fullness may make literature seem vain and redundant. In September 1947 O’Connor was to undergo a major crisis of doubt not simply about the importance of what she had begun to write, but about writing in general. On the 23rd September 1947 she states: Writing is dead. Art is dead, dead by nature, not killed by unkindness (36), and adds that all she wants is God. She asks Him to lead her to want Him all the time, at every moment, and for this want to become so strong in her that it would be like a cancer in me. It would kill me like a cancer and that would be the Fulfillment. She does not desire the life of writing, but the life of life. This September of 1947 seems to have been decisive. She asks with intensity for God to grant her the experience and life of the mystics, here and now, she cannot bear to remain far from Him any longer: make me a mystic, immediately (25th September: 38). She pleads for God to become her Bridegroom. Now, immediately. In this entry she pounds out the word “immediately” three times, and concludes: If I could only hold God in my mind. If I could only always just think of Him. It seems that she could not. Hence the entry on the following day (26th September): My thoughts are so far away from God […] Today I have proved myself a glutton – for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me (40).
These are the last words in the Journal. This distancing of her thoughts –albeit slight– from an exclusive focus on God and on the vision of God is a precondition for writing the kind of literature that O’Connor wished to write, namely the novel. If her desire were to write poetry, this distancing would not be necessary. When living the life of a mystic, which O’Connor was asking for, you cannot write a novel with an overall view of the world and the most important single item under this view of [the] world is a conception of love – divine, natural, and perverted (30). If you uproot erotic thought and the desire for Scotch oatmeal cookies from within yourself, you can write many and important things, but not a novel, namely, you cannot speak about our world, this world of sin, as O’Connor believed it to be. Our age, she states, is simply that of the Fall, the age of Original Sin, and nothing essential has changed since then (33).
She would later write repeatedly that the first virtue of the novelist is to see, to see what exists around him.1 The eye is the prime organ of the writer and his only concern is the rules and constraints of his art. The Catholic novelist doesn’t have to be a saint; he doesn’t even have to be a Catholic; he does, unfortunately, have to be a novelist.2 Addressing her Catholic readers who were disturbed by her work, she tells them unequivocally:
If you shy away from sense experience, you will not be able to read fiction; but you will not be able to apprehend anything else in this world either, because every mystery that reaches the human mind, except in the final stages of contemplative prayer, does so by way of the senses. Christ didn’t redeem us by a direct intellectual act, but became incarnate in human form, and he speaks to us now through the mediation of a visible Church. All this may seem a long way from the subject of fiction, but it is not, for the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.3
The heroes of the novel are not God and his saints, but torn and vulnerable human beings.
Fiction is the most impure and the most modest and the most human of the arts. It is closest to man in his sin and his suffering and his hope, and it is often rejected by Catholics for the very reasons that make it what it is.4
God appears in the novel, in O’Connor’s novels at least, when His Grace intrudes in a sudden, unexpected and often violent manner in people’s lives. In other words, the imprint of the world of sin does not diminish trust in the Grace of God. She writes about this in the Prayer Journal as follows:
Sin is a great thing as long as it’s recognized. It leads a good many people to God who wouldn’t get there otherwise. But cease to recognize it, or take it away from devil as devil & give it to devil as psychologist, and you also take away God. If there is no sin in this world there is no God in heaven. No heaven. (26–27)
And a few sentences earlier she writes:
Hell, a literal hell, is our only hope. Take it away & we will become wholly a wasteland not a half a one. (26)
Flannery O’Connor’s fate was to mature early. The Prayer Journal is an important witness to her intense journey towards maturity as a writer and September 1947 is the decisive moment on this path.
In her Prayer Journal Flannery O’Connor may pray for the art of writing to be given to her, but there is something which she places higher than this art and which she almost regards as its precondition: pain and suffering. She regards pain as so much higher, that she does not regard herself as worthy to ask for it and to receive it. And even if she were to receive it now, she believes that her spiritual state is so low that she would not be in a position to recognize it if she received it. The Prayer Journal is a constant search for God’s Grace, and pain, as its author believes, is a precondition for this (10). Not even the critical and unconventional Flannery O’Connor could avoid the error that so many Christians make, namely, of believing that she could and should ask for pain from the Prince of Life (Acts 3:15). Even her beloved Pascal in his famous, and unquestionably important, Prière pour demander à Dieu le bon usage des maladies regards pain as the reward of the saints and even speaks of joy in suffering, since thanks to this the believer participates in the sufferings of Christ. This is a fatal spiritual error which has its source in the idea that pain is participation in the Passion of Christ. There is no greater misunderstanding of Christian teaching than this: Christ suffered unto death, even death on a Cross (Phil 2:8), precisely so that people would not suffer and not die. Let anyone show me a single prayer of the Church in which we ask for illnesses, pains and tortures. In all the prayers of the Church we pray for the very opposite. The search for pain and much more the desire to find joy in it is a sin, precisely because it denies God as the Giver of life. The only good use of illness that exists is the creative and loving use of the gift of life to the end.
In her life Flannery O’Connor received what she asked for: she became both an important writer and she suffered greatly. By saying this, I do not want to say that her prayers were heard. I am not God’s private secretary to know his judgements. Me judice, the first occurred because she possessed that rare gift called talent and she worked hard with pen on paper, the second came about because she had the misfortune to inherit a serious hereditary illness, and science has still not found drugs to treat systemic lupus. All I can say is that she made good use of her illness: she wrote important works up until her last breath, she gave us literature which thousands of people throughout the world, very far from the American South, still read today, and which enriches our understanding of the human situation.
The essay was originally published in Greek as ‘‘Θεός, σκωτσέζικα μπισκότα και μυθιστόρημα. Φλάννερυ Ο’ Κόννορ, Ημερολόγιο προσευχής’’, in my book Υπό το φως του μυθιστορήματος, Athens: Polis 2015, pp. 135-145.
1 I am referring to her essays and lectures as they were published after her death by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald under the title, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), and above all to four of these: “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” “Novelist and Believer,” “Catholic Novelists and their Readers” and “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South.” It is worth noting that the edition of the Collected Works of O’Connor edited by Sally Fitzgerald (The Library of America, 1988) is not identical as far as the essays and lectures are concerned with the Mystery and Manners edition mentioned above, and accordingly does not replace it. The same holds for her correspondence and for the book The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979).
2 Mystery and Manners, p. 172.
3 Mystery and Manners, p. 176.
4 Mystery and Manners, p. 192.