“Stories Don’t Lie if Left to Themselves”

“My advice is free, excellent, unsought after but given without stint,” Flannery O’Connor wrote to a novelist friend, tongue firmly in her cheek. To another friend she wrote, “I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.”

I first read The Habit of Being, O’Connor’s selected letters, to learn more about her life and character; it was an additional delight to discover that the letters were full of free and excellent advice for the fiction writer. I got frantic trying to remember it all, so I started writing it down and my copy soon sprouted post-it notes, slips of paper with observations longer than the margins could contain and bookmarks identifying passages I wanted to re-read.

I sought the advice but it wasn’t always palatable; throughout the letters O’Connor notes that writers have limitations. The writer is limited by the nature of their individual talent, which O’Connor defined as what the writer can make come alive, and by the nature of the individual story, which dictates its own terms.

Sharing something of O’Connor’s brief life is appropriate because all her adult life she faced severe limitations. Born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, Mary Flannery O’Connor was educated at local schools, attended Georgia State College for Women, then went to the School for Writers at the University of Iowa. Her father died of lupus when she was fifteen. Flannery was diagnosed with disseminated lupus erythematosus—an incurable disease with hereditary links—in 1951, aged twenty-six. She coped with this condition and others—rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia—which robbed her of energy and limited her mobility until her death in 1964. She lived the last thirteen years of her life with her mother on the family’s 550-acre farm near the small town of Milledgeville, Georgia. Her attitude to her illnesses is summarised in this 1953 letter to her friend Robert Lowell: 

I am making out fine in spite of any conflicting stories … I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe more closely, or so I tell myself. 

Early in her adult life, O’Connor measured out and observed closely the nature of her talent: she knew what she could and couldn’t do. When asked why she wrote stories of murderers, religious crazies, white trash, ineffective intellectuals and the rural poor, she responded: 

There is really only one answer to the people who complain about one’s writing about “unpleasant” people—and that is that one writes what one can. Vocation implies limitation but few people realize it who don’t actually practice a vocation. 

In another letter she expressed her frustration to a friend about interpretations of her stories that ignored authorial limitations: 

I have now to sit down and write a graduate student in Cleveland who wants to know why my stories are grotesque; are they grotesque because I am showing the frustration of grace? It’s very hard to tell these innocents that they are grotesque because that is the nature of my talent. 

In other words, she wrote what her talent allowed her to make vibrant and real, what expressed “felt life” and “heart knowledge”. “I write what I can and accept what I write after I have given it all I can,” she explained. “Like [Graham] Greene or any other writer, when I write I do what I have to do with what I can. You are always bounded by what you can make live.” To a young man eager to explore fiction writing she wrote, “Ultimately, you write what you can, what God gives you.” 

O’Connor knew that the nature of her talent prescribed limits; she also knew that the stories themselves prescribe limits: the dynamics of a story have to be discovered and respected and the author who ignores these dynamics does so at their and the story’s peril; a story has to be written in a certain way to be effective, and what will make a story effective differs with every story. For O’Connor, discovering how to write a story was often a matter of trial and error, of exploring, of backtracking from a false trail, of writing “by smell as it were”, and of being led by the characters and their setting. She wrote to a friend, “I have 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.”

O’Connor recognised the element of mystery in the creative process; she was never sure that a story would emerge from what she was writing. Even as a successful and lauded author she could still admit to having to search for the story she wanted to write: “I’m writing something that requires my feeling around in it for a while before I will know what, OR IF, it is supposed to be.” She wasn’t dismayed to find that what she’d been writing wasn’t what the story needed. She wrote to Cecil Dawkins, another short story writer: 

I’ve just been going about my fictional bidnis [sic] this summer, staying doggedly on the wrong track I think, but I suppose you have to pursue the wrong road long enough to be able to identify it and then you can get and keep off it. 

Also to Cecil Dawkins: 

I am writing a story now and have proceeded at a regular rate of two pages a day, following my nose more or less … I think you discover a good deal more in the process when you don’t have too definite ideas about what you want to do. 

If a story has its own integrity that the writer must find and honour, then how much of the writer’s self gets into the story? O’Connor answered this question, put to her by one correspondent, in this way: 

Now I understand that something of oneself gets through and something that one is not conscious of. Also to have sympathy for any character, you have to put a good deal of yourself in him. But to say that any complete delineation of the writer occurs in the successful work is, according to me, a romantic exaggeration. A great part of the art of it is precisely in seeing that this does not happen. Maritain says that to produce a work of art requires the “constant attention of the purified mind,” and the business of the purified mind in this case is to see that those elements of the personality that don’t bear on the subject at hand are excluded. Stories don’t lie if left to themselves. Everything has to be subordinated to a whole which is not you. Any story I reveal myself completely in will be a bad story. 

To another friend O’Connor wrote, “when I thought about the story I would forget about myself and when I thought about myself I would forget about the story”. The story imposes limits on the author, and to write the story the author must impose limits on herself—to keep the rampant self out of the story except where its input augments the portrayal of the story’s characters.

Another thing the writer had to keep out of the story was undifferentiated language: if a story was being told by an omniscient narrator, then the narrator should not use the colloquialisms of the story’s characters; to do so reduces the effectiveness of the storytelling. O’Connor repeats this advice several times to various writers in different letters: 

In any fiction where the omniscient narrator uses the same language as the characters, there is a loss of tension and a lowering of tone. This is something that has taken me a long time to learn myself; Mrs [Caroline Gordon] Tate is my mentor in matters of this kind and she has drummed it into me on every occasion so I am very conscious of it. 

Elsewhere she wrote, “This may seem a small matter but the omniscient narrator NEVER speaks colloquially. Every time you do it you lower the tone.”

Secular critics may think that any mention of prayer also lowers the tone but O’Connor wasn’t above asking her friends to pray for her writing; she recognised that the creative process depended on gifts: “I am writing every day but I don’t know what, as the brew has not begun to thicken yet. Sometimes it don’t. Pray that it will.” She prayed for her own writing while at Lourdes, which she visited on her one trip outside the United States. Afterwards, she wrote to Janet McKane: 

I’ve been to Lourdes … as a patient not as a helper. I felt that being only on crutches I was probably the healthiest person there. I prayed there for the novel I was working on, not for my bones, which I care about less, but I guess my prayers were answered about the novel, inasmuch as I finished it. 

Her work nearly always proceeded slowly. In one letter she wrote, “The greatest gift of the writer is patience.” Patience was perhaps a virtue that her publishers also had to develop. She informed her editor, Robert Giroux: 

I have 50 or 60 pages on the novel [The Violent Bear It Away] but I still expect to be a long time at it. It’s a theme that requires prayer and fasting to make it get anywhere. I manage to pray but am a sloppy faster. 

Sloppy faster maybe, but O’Connor was not a sloppy worker. Her lupus restricted her to a few hours of work each morning; sometimes being able to do one hour’s work made her happy. But whenever her health allowed, she maintained a regime of regular writing and re-writing. She knew that talent has to be assisted with disciplined habits: 

I am a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away. I see it happen all the time. Of course, you have to make the habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfer [sic] with those two hours, at the same time and at the same place. This doesn’t mean I produce much out of the two hours. Sometimes I work for months and have to throw everything away, but I don’t think any of that time was wasted. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. 

And she scolded an author-friend for his sloppy writing habits: 

It is my considered opinion that one reason you are not writing is that you are allowing yourself to read in the time set aside to write. You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing; but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don’t all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It’s the only way, I’m telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading. And don’t write letters during this time. If you don’t write don’t do anything else. And get in a room by yourself. If there are two rooms in that house, get in the one where nobody else is … 

O’Connor worked as hard at rewriting as she did at completing the first draft. And the first draft was often far from satisfying. She advised a fellow author: 

I wouldn’t be discouraged by the experience you had reading your story. Learning to write proceeds by such shocks and jolts and it’s the people who don’t have them who will never do anything. Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for the most part. 

The pattern she recommended, she followed herself: “Once you have done a first draft then read it and see what it says and then see how you can bring out better what it says.” Early in her career she wrote to an influential teacher from her Writers’ School days, “Believe me, I work ALL the time, but I cannot work fast. No one can convince me that I shouldn’t rewrite as much as I do. I can only hope that in a few years I won’t have to so much.” The hope didn’t come to pass. Until the last weeks of her life, she continued to write and then carefully rewrite even after a story or novel had been accepted for publication. Sometimes she’d ask for a story to be returned from a journal or from her agent so she could make further amendments before it was printed. She confessed: “I am a great hand at rewriting myself. It takes a long time to make a thing like this [short story] work. Looks simple but is not.” To another friend she joked, “When the grim reaper comes to get me, he’ll have to give me a few extra hours to revise my last words.” 

O’Connor would get her work as near as she could to completion, and then she’d send her story or novel to a number of trusted friends for criticism and suggestions. She was judicious in who saw her stories-in-progress. In one letter, she confessed, “I listen to a few people but not many.” She listened to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald because she respected their critical skills. “I have finished the novel [The Violent Bear It Away] and when I do some doctoring on it, I am going to send it to you, and please kindly tell me what you think and mince no words …” O’Connor also routinely sent her work to the author and writing teacher Caroline Gordon Tate for comment. Tate “didn’t mince no words”, as a humbled O’Connor reported to a mutual friend: 

We have just had a weekend of Caroline. She read a story that I have been working on and pointed out to me how it was completely undramatic and a million other things that I could have seen myself if I had the energy. It all goes to show that you can know something in your head and still not carry it out. I was writing the story in a hurry to see if I had a story to write. Now it’ll probably take me three months to really dramatize the thing. So much of my trouble is laziness, not physical laziness so much as mental, not taking the trouble to think how a thing ought to be dramatized. I have written so many stories without thinking that when I have to think, it is painful. 

It might have felt painful when it was pointed out to her where a story or novel was deficient, but O’Connor was nevertheless grateful and listened to the criticism and suggestions and amended the story as appropriate, with this caveat, “In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be pursuaded [sic] otherwise.” It was all too common for readers and book reviewers to misunderstand completely the sphere of what she was trying to do. This exasperated her but didn’t worry her. “I only worry in these things about serving my own artistic conscience, not a mythical set of admirers who expect a certain thing. God and posterity are only served with well-made articles.” O’Connor’s attitude to adverse criticism is revealed in the advice she gave a novice playwright: “Don’t let People and their Opinions affect you so much. I always count on a big percentage of Those Who Will Have None Of It and do not let myself be concerned about remarks within that circle.” 

Given the varieties of misinterpretations of her fiction, one might expect that her stories are overly subtle and difficult to understand, but this is entirely contrary to O’Connor’s intention and inclinations. She did not write subtle stories chock-full of allusion, “symbolisms”, or (and how she hated to be accused of this!) with Freudian overtones. She declared, “I am a pretty insensitive soul for subtleties and so forth but then one never writes for a subtle reader. Or if you do, you shouldn’t.” O’Connor was appalled by over-intellectualising literary theories that blinded people to the characters and the events portrayed in the stories. She advised a writer friend: “Don’t mix up thought-knowledge with felt-knowledge.” Stories primarily deal with felt-knowledge, with the sensual, the concrete and the particular and not with the abstract: “abstractions lead to thinness and allegory whereas in good fiction and drama you need to go through the concrete situation to some experience of mystery”.

In the last year of her life, anaemia, caused by a fibroid tumour, compounded the debilitating effects of her lupus and arthritis and left her with little strength or energy for writing. She worked when she was able but some days no work was possible; crossing her bedroom exhausted her. Nevertheless, she tried to finish the stories that went into her superb collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. She was proud of these stories but she was also aware that they signalled the close of a stage of her creative life. In a letter to a priest, she wrote, “I have the sense of having exhausted my original potentiality and being now in need of the kind of grace that deepens perception, a new shot of life or something.” She wrote to Sister Mariella Gable: 

I appreciate and need your prayers. I’ve been writing for eighteen years and I’ve reached the point where I can’t do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things that I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing. 

O’Connor didn’t get the chance to do the “larger things”. She died a few weeks after the operation to remove the tumour; the rigours of the surgery reactivated her lupus, as her doctor warned that it would. Everything That Rises Must Converge was published posthumously in 1965. Two years before her death, O’Connor wrote, “It is a great temptation to write essays when you are writing fiction. I find it is a greater temptation the longer you write too. I have to watch it all the time.” That piece of advice reminds me that I need to stop writing this essay and get back to my fictional business. For all of us, time is limited. 

Two of Gary Furnell’s stories have appeared in Quadrant recently.