The Habit of Being by Flannery O'Connor

First published: 1979

Type of work: Letters

Time of work: 1948-1964

Locale: Near Milledgeville, Georgia

Principal Personages:

• Flannery O’Connor, the American author
• Regina Cline O’Connor, her mother
• Sally Fitzgerald, a close friend of O’Connor
• Robert Fitzgerald, her husband and a close friend of O’Connor
• Maryat Lee, a playwright and O’Connor’s devoted friend
• Cecil Dawkins, a professor and admirer of O’Connor’s work
• John Selly, the Editor in Chief of Rinehart Publishing Company
• A., a close friend of O’Connor

Form and Content

“I always answer any letter I get, at once and at length. This may be because I don’t get many.” The Habit of Being, a collection of more than eight hundred of Flannery O’Connor’s letters, reveals the truth of her first sentence and the understatement of her second. Assembled by O’Connor’s friend and correspondent Sally Fitzgerald, the wife of O’Connor’s literary executor, the collection begins with a letter to O’Connor’s agent in 1948 and concludes with a barely legible, scrawled note to Maryat Lee written six days before the author’s death in August, 1964. In between are letters addressed to a wide circle of correspondents—famous writers such as John Hawkes, Robert Lowell, and Robert Fitzgerald; lesser-known authors such as Cecil Dawkins; her editor, Robert Giroux; and, perhaps most interesting of all, a woman known only as “A.,” an Atlanta writer of O’Connor’s age and build who chose to remain anonymous.

Not all of her correspondents are represented or represented fully. O’Connor’s mother refused to allow the publication of the letters her daughter sent to her, claiming that these were of private interest only. One finds virtually nothing about her early work on her first novel, Wise Blood (1952). Except for a brief note, Fitzgerald has omitted all the letters written to Walker Percy and there are few to Caroline Gordon, O’Connor’s favorite source of advice about her work. Absent, too, are many of the amusing letters to Richard Stern. The absence of any mail to O’Connor often creates the sense of listening to only one side of a telephone conversation; one must guess to what O’Connor is responding.

Nevertheless, The Habit of Being illustrates the scope and nature of O’Connor’s correspondence. Fitzgerald includes a useful introduction to the collection and brief biographical headnotes to each of the four chronological divisions. The first of these, covering the period from 1948 through 1952, takes O’Connor from her work at the literary colony of Yaddo to the publication of Wise Blood and the discovery that she was suffering from lupus erythematosus, the disease that killed her father and was to claim her life as well. Parts 2 and 3, 1953-1958 and 1959-1963, deal with the completion of her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), as she struggles with her writing and her illness. The final and shortest section treats the last eight months of her life, when she miraculously completed Everything That Rises Must Converge, a collection of short stories published posthumously in 1965, and produced some of her finest pieces.

Occasional editorial comments identify an allusion or an individual, though these have been kept to a minimum to avoid interfering with the letters themselves. Striking a balance between too much and too little commentary always poses a challenge for an editor; Fitzgerald has sided with O’Connor in her assessment that too much interpretation is worse than too little. While this attitude spares the reader the burden and distraction of excessive annotation, which might overwhelm the text, it also leaves certain references and abbreviations obscure. One might also wish for a more detailed index that would quickly lead a reader to comments on such matters as writing habits or favorite authors, in other words, one that included subjects as well as people and titles. In general, though, Fitzgerald is correct in assuming that the letters speak for themselves and can, more effectively than any scholarly apparatus, draw the reader into the world and mind of Flannery O’Connor.

Critical Context

To John Hawkes she writes, “More than in the Devil I am interested in the indication of Grace.” Grace—theological, stylistic, and personal—fills this collection. “Vocation implies limitation,” she told Dawkins, but she allowed neither illness nor art to interfere with her humor or her relationships. The modesty revealed in the correspondence would have made her skeptical of anyone’s comparing these letters to those of John Keats or Hemingway, but similarities exist. Like theirs, hers offer numerous rewards; The Habit of Being provides a course in writing, an introduction to contemporary Catholic theology, an understanding of modern literature and criticism, a delightful encounter with an intelligent and alert mind.

Reviewers have universally recognized the contribution the book made to understanding O’Connor’s life and writing and have praised the humor and polish of the letters. The longest of her published works, it contains her most lovable and memorable character—herself.

Bibliography

Asals, Frederick. Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. This useful scholarly critique analyzes the texture and conflicts of O’Connor’s fictional universe. A limited bibliography includes works from O’Connor’s personal library.

Cash, Jean W. Flannery O'Connor: A Life. University of Tennessee, 2002.

Coles, Robert. “Flannery O’Connor: Letters Larger than Life,” in The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin. VIII (Autumn, 1979), pp. 3-13.

Coles, Robert. Flannery O’Connor’s South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. A psychiatrist offers a unique slant on O’Connor’s depiction of characters’ conflict and anxieties.

Feeley, Kathleen. Flannery O’Connor: Voice of the Peacock. 2d ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982. Feeley, a Catholic nun, approaches O’Connor’s work through the writer’s nonliterary reading, drawing extensively on her essays.

Ficken, Carl. “Theology in Flannery O’Connor’s The Habit of Being,” in Christianity and Literature. XXX (Winter, 1981), pp. 51-63.

Friedman, Melvin J., and Beverly Lyon Clark, eds. Critical Essays on Flannery O’Connor. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. Various critical approaches, an annotated bibliography of twenty-two books and articles, and “Reminiscences and Tributes” by Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Thomas Merton, and Alice Walker provide a broad view of O’Connor scholarship.

Hawkins, Peter S. “Faith and Doubt First Class: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor,” in Southern Humanities Review. XVI (Spring, 1982), pp. 91-103.

Montgomery, Marion. Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home. Vol. 1 in The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age. LaSalle, Ill.: Sherwood Sugden, 1981. Montgomery shows how Western culture’s great philosophers shaped O’Connor’s thought, making her a prophetic voice of the modern spiritual crisis. Rather than offering a detailed critical reading, this work synthesizes O’Connor’s ideas.

Napier, James J. “Another Look at Flannery O’Connor’s Opinions of Other Writers,” in Antigonish Review. XLVI (Summer, 1981), pp. 95-101.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971. Editor Robert Giroux provides a good overview of O’Connor’s publishing career. The thirty-one stories range from those written for her thesis in 1947 to her last story, completed a month before she died.

O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners:Occasional Prose. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. O’Connor’s essays provide an excellent companion to her letters, with topics ranging from religious belief to Southern writers.

Pastva, Agnes Ann. “Too Good to Miss,” in English Journal. LXIX (November, 1980), pp. 70-72.

Walters, Dorothy. Flannery O’Connor. New York: Twayne, 1973. One of the best critical overviews. Walters intelligently examines the theology and literary sources influencing O’Connor.

Westling, Louise. “Flannery O’Connor’s Revelations to ‘A,”’ in Southern Humanities Review. XX (Winter, 1986), pp. 15-22.