Flannery O'Conner: The Realist

I have recently re-discovered Flannery O'Conner, the Southern novelist who died in 1964, just as Vatican II was making its way into the modern world.  As a long time fan of her novels, I have just begun reading her letters, edited by Sally Fitzgerald, in A Habit of Being.

O'Conner makes me laugh out loud, think deeply, and groan at the truth of her insight into our culture, particularly the culture of the South, in which she was so deeply immersed and which she portrays so well in her short stories and novels.

In O'Conner, the deepest truth is enfleshed in the coarsest realities of life; the heroes are often the villians and the crazies.  The "normal" people are those most in need of salvation.  She turns the world upside down, with a purpose.  I think she is a modern saint, although she would (and did) bristle at the very idea.

Here is a sample of her letters, as delicious as any novel I've read:

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband....She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual.  We went at eight and at one, I hadn't opened my mouth once there being nothing for me in such company to say.  The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife....Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.  Well, toward morning the conversaton turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend.  Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the "most portable" person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one.  I then said, in a very shaky voice, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it."  That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.

You see what I mean.