The Complete Stories
Read The Complete Stories Online
Authors: Flannery O'Connor
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Contents
A Late Encounter with the Enemy
The Life You Save May Be Your Own
You Can't Be Any Poorer Than Dead
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Introduction
Flannery O'Connor's first book has never, up to now, been published. It was entitled
The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories
and consists of the first six stories in this volume. The title page of the original manuscript, in the library of the University of Iowa, bears the legend, “A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, in the Department of English, in the Graduate College of the State University of Iowa.” It is dated June 1947 and a separate page carries a dedication to her teacher, Paul Engle.
At their first meeting in his office, in 1946, Mr. Engle recalls,
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he was unable to understand a word of Flannery's native Georgian tongue: “Embarrassed, I asked her to write down what she had just said on a pad. She wrote: âMy name is Flannery O'Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writer's Workshop?' ⦠I told her to bring examples of her writing and we would consider her, late as it was. Like Keats, who spoke Cockney but wrote the purest sounds in English, Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive: just like Flannery herself. For a few weeks we had this strange and yet trusting relationship. Soon I understood those Georgia pronunciations. The stories were quietly filled with insight, shrewd about human weakness, hard and compassionate ⦠She was shy about having them read, and when it was her turn to have a story presented in the Workshop, I would read it aloud anonymously. Robert Penn Warren was teaching a semester while Flannery was at the University of Iowa; there was a scene about a black and a white man, and Warren criticized it ⦠It was changed. Flannery always had a flexible and objective view of her own writing, constantly revising, and in every case improving. The will to be a writer was adamant; nothing could resist it, not even her own sensibility about her own work. Cut, alter, try it again ⦠Sitting at the back of the room, silent, Flannery was more of a presence than the exuberant talkers who serenade every writing-class with their loudness. The only communicating gesture she would make was an occasional amused and shy smile at something absurd. The dreary chair she sat in glowed.”
The publishing career of this unknown writer of twenty-one had already started. Flannery mailed “The Geranium” to the editors of
Accent
as early as February 1946.
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They accepted it at once and printed it in their summer issue. On the basis of the stories she later incorporated into her novel-in-progress,
Wise Blood,
Mr. Engle recommended her for a prize offered by a publisher for a first novel. In the spring of 1947 she was awarded this prizeâthe sum of $750, which was to serve as part of the advance against royalties if the publisher ultimately accepted the novel.
Flannery received her master's degree that summer;
Sewanee Review
published “The Train” the next spring; in June 1948 she took the important and crucial step of finding a literary agent and a lifelong friend, Elizabeth McKee. Miss McKee placed her story “The Capture” (entitled “The Turkey” in the thesis) with
Mademoiselle
in November. It was shortly after thisâI was not the publisher involved with the prizeâthat I met Flannery O'Connor.
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Robert Lowell brought her into my office late in February 1949. They had come to New York from Yaddo, the writer's colony at Saratoga Springs, where Flannery worked on
Wise Blood
and Lowell on his poems. Behind her soft-spoken speech, clear-eyed gaze and shy manner, I sensed a tremendous strength. This was the rarest kind of young writer, one who was prepared to work her utmost and knew exactly what she must do with her talent. I rather regretted, as a publisher, meeting such an interesting writer at the start of a career in which I could play no part. She told me she was committed elsewhere, and if I knew anything it was that she would honor her commitment. She asked about a new writer I had recently publishedâThomas Merton; I gave her a copy of
The Seven Storey Mountain
to take with her to her mother's house in Milledgeville, Georgia. Later I heard that she would be coming north again to live in Connecticut with my friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald and I hoped I'd have the opportunity to know her better.
It was not until after her death in 1964 that I learned exactly how her publishing fate took an unexpected turn. (Our later publishing relationship also developed surprisingly, and I'll come to that.) The details are fully and rather comically recorded in her correspondence with Elizabeth McKee, who gave me copies of the letters before she added the originals to the papers that Flannery's mother, Regina O'Connor, is collecting. The excerpts from Flannery's letters are quoted here with the permission of her literary executor, Robert Fitzgerald.
In her first letter (June 19, 1948) to Miss McKee, Flannery revealed she had been working on the novel “a year and a half and will probably be two more years finishing it.” She described her writing habits in a letter dated July 13: “I must tell you how I work. I don't have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again. I am working on the twelfth chapter now. I long ago quit numbering the pages but I suppose I am past the 50,000 word mark. Of the twelve chapters only a few won't have to be rewritten, and I can't exhibit such formless stuff. It would discourage me to look at it right now and anyway I yearn to go about my business to the end.”
At the end of the year, when she was worried about money, her agent advised her to submit the new chapters in order to get a definite commitment and perhaps a further advance. From Yaddo, December 15, 1948: “Perhaps I shall get down [to New York] in January and perhaps before that send you the chapters I am working on ⦠I have decided, however, that no good comes of sending anything off in a hurry.” On January 20, 1949, Flannery wrote: “Here are the first nine chapters which please show [the publisher] and let us be on with financial thoughts. They are, of course, not finished but they are finished enough for the present⦔ When there was no response by February 5: “I'll be anxious to hear the outcome⦔
She heard it on February 16 and it was not to her liking. One can sympathize with the publisher's problem at this early stage of composition.
Wise Blood
was a strange book, as Flannery would have been the first to acknowledge. What she could not accept was the tone of the publisher's letter. He said he thought she was a pretty straight shooter, that she had an astonishing gift, but that some aspects of the book were obscured by her habit of rewriting over and over again. To be honest, he added, he sensed a kind of aloneness in the book, as if she were writing out of her own experience, and consciously limiting this experience. He wished she would sit down and tell him what was what. He hoped she didn't mind his forthright letter.
Flannery wrote at once to Miss McKee: “Please tell me what is behind this Sears-Roebuck Straight Shooter approach. I presume ⦠either that [the publisher] will not take the novel as it will be if left to my fiendish care (it will be essentially as it is), or that [the publisher] would like to rescue it at this point and train it into a conventional novel ⦠The letter is addressed to a slightly dimwitted Campfire Girl, and I cannot look forward with composure to a lifetime of others like them.”
At the same time, in an effort to honor her commitment, she answered the publisher's letter next day: “I can only hope that in the finished novel the direction will be clearer ⦠I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from ⦠In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not pretend to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you now have.”
Matters had not improved much by the following April, when she wrote Paul Engle to tell him that “other publishers who have read the two printed chapters”âshe was referring to “The Train” and to the publication that winter of “The Heart of the Park” in
Partisan Review
â“are interested.” She also told him about her meeting with the dissatisfied publisher, at which he “and I came to the conclusion that I was âprematurely arrogant.' I supplied him with the phrase.” She thought that “no one will understand my need to work this novel out in my own way better than you, although you may feel that I should work faster. I work
ALL
the time, but I cannot work fast. No one can convince me I shouldn't rewrite as much as I do.” She concluded with the news that she had been turned down for the Guggenheim fellowship for which Mr. Engle had recommended her. (Her other sponsors were Robert Lowell, Philip Rahv and Robert Penn Warren.)
I met her again in May 1950, at the christening of Maria Juliana Fitzgerald in Ridgefield, Connecticut. I noted what good spirits Flannery was in, as we gravely performed our roles as godparents, renouncing the devil and all his works and pomps. (It is to be regretted that she did not live to see our godchild become Sister Mary Julian in 1970.) She told me she was still working hard on the novel and was still committed to her publisher, though her literary agent soon informed me that the submission of additional chapters had not allayed his doubts. Finally, in October, after she had obtained a release from him, I offered and she signed a contract for
Wise Blood.
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The strength I sensed in Flannery at our first meeting now had an incredible strain put on it. She was stricken with lupus on her journey home for Christmas, and spent nine months, desperately ill, in and out of Emory Hospital in Atlanta. On her release she was unable to climb stairs, and Regina O'Connor then decided to move to “Andalusia,” their country place five miles from town, which was to be their home and Flannery's refuge from then on. By the following September Flannery was writing Miss McKee, “The last time I saw Bob Giroux, he said we would push the date [of delivery of the manuscript] up to the first of the year [1951] but that there was nothing magic in that date. There is nothing magic in my speed or progress at this time, but I don't know anything for it. I plan to last until the first of the year and then see what I've got.” A full year later (September 1, 1951) she wrote Miss McKee from Milledgeville: “Bob Giroux and Caroline Gordon made some suggestions for improving my book and I have been working on these and have by now about come up with another draft of it.”