As so often occurs, someone rummaging through old papers found a treasure: Hitherto unknown writings by Flannery O'Conner, the American author. Not a journal or workbook, it can only described as a prayerbook, a personal Book of Hours.
One could only imagine what the personal prayers of an American Southern Gothic writer might be. Her creative style is dramatic and brutal. The southern farms and small towns where her dramas play out are more like rugged seascapes with terror--and purification--swimming below, waiting. As a young woman in school she aspired to be a cartoonist (a collection was published a few years ago) and she carried the exaggerated stylized cartoonist vision into her writing. How, you might wonder, did such a mind pray?
Surprisingly simply. Her prayers are remarkably tender, yearning and plaintive. There is some irony--not everyone is strong enough to joke with God--but the writing is always personal. And hopeful. Some might be attributed to youth but that is a difficult qualification for a genius who died at 39. This hard intense talent, with her hard intense vision of active evil and corruption, is surprisingly soft and yielding.
This disparity makes her writing all the more impressive. But perhaps that is the point. The wonderful British critic, V. S. Pritchett, said of her, "for her, the role of the diabolic is to destroy pride as a misconceived virtue." Perhaps simplicity is the starting point and the endpoint.
One could only imagine what the personal prayers of an American Southern Gothic writer might be. Her creative style is dramatic and brutal. The southern farms and small towns where her dramas play out are more like rugged seascapes with terror--and purification--swimming below, waiting. As a young woman in school she aspired to be a cartoonist (a collection was published a few years ago) and she carried the exaggerated stylized cartoonist vision into her writing. How, you might wonder, did such a mind pray?
Surprisingly simply. Her prayers are remarkably tender, yearning and plaintive. There is some irony--not everyone is strong enough to joke with God--but the writing is always personal. And hopeful. Some might be attributed to youth but that is a difficult qualification for a genius who died at 39. This hard intense talent, with her hard intense vision of active evil and corruption, is surprisingly soft and yielding.
This disparity makes her writing all the more impressive. But perhaps that is the point. The wonderful British critic, V. S. Pritchett, said of her, "for her, the role of the diabolic is to destroy pride as a misconceived virtue." Perhaps simplicity is the starting point and the endpoint.
No comments:
Post a Comment