I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say
The Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“My epistolary powers enthrall me. It is a pity I can’t receive my own letters,” wrote Flannery O’Connor in her diary on 22nd January 1944. She was 18 years old and entirely correct. O’Connor would go on to become one of the most admired writers of the 20th century—sharp, strange, deeply devout, and utterly original. Her fiction is celebrated for its dark humour and piercing insight, but it’s in her letters that we get closest to the person herself: funny, fierce, unfiltered, and often profound without even trying. Her correspondence—much of it written from a small farmhouse in Georgia, where she lived with peacocks and lupus—feels just as alive today, a hundred years after her birth.
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Betty Hester
6th September 1955
I have just got back from 2 days in NYC. There is one advantage in it because although you see several people you wish you didn’t know, you see thousands you’re glad you don’t know.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Betty Boyd
5th November 1949
I’ve read your book with great delight and I wish I had some reasons to tell you why I think it’s so fine. However, I merely enjoys, I does not analyze.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Robie Macauley
28th October 1952
Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” I said. He looked crushed. “Well, Miss O’Connor,” he said, “what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey
25th May 1959
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.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Elizabeth McKee
21st July 1948
I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Maryat Lee
31st May 1955
Never lend a book to a man as you will have to set a stick of dynamite under him before you get it back.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Betty Hester
12th November 1956
I’m 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 your 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 interfere with those two hours, at the same time and 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 was time wasted. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the fact is if you don’t sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won’t be sitting there.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Cecil Dawkins
22nd September 1957
I’ve got no advice on these up and down times of elation & depression you seem to have, but I can tell you that time is very dangerous without a rigid routine. If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Betty Hester
10th February 62
I am about convinced now that my novel is finished. It has reached the stage where it is a pleasure for me to type it so I presume it is done. I sit all day typing and grinning like the Cheshire cat. There is nothing like being pleased with your own efforts—and this is the best stage—before it is published and begins to be misunderstood.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Maryat Lee
5th July 1959
The review in Time was terrible, nearly gave me apoplexy… It was written I understand by the lady who writes about gardening. They shouldn’t have taken her away from the petunias.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Ben Griffith
9th July 1955
I don’t deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Alice Morris
10th June 1955
If you enjoyed these snippets, I highly recommend tracking down these books:
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, edited by Sally Alexander
Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O'Connor and Friends, edited by Ben Alexander
The Letters of Flannery O'Connor and Caroline Gordon, edited by Christine Flanagan
The Correspondence of Flannery O'Connor and the Brainard Cheneys, edited by C. Ralph Stephens
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Apart from the wit and incisive observations, the blistering critique of Ayn Rand's absurd novels deserves plaudits.
I love that quote "There is nothing like being pleased with your own efforts", describing the feeling when you've finished creating but nobody else has see it yet. Perfect!