Dear Flannery,
Something in that article I told you about by Benjamin Alexander has been continually firming up and settling in my head. I knew it before, but it’s nice to be reminded and validated. It’s that the characters in your stories who appear to be the most normal are the real monsters. And it’s the characters who appear to be monsters who are the honest seekers of truth, struggling with the most important issues, as socially alienated and nonconforming as they are. Yes of course, Ruby Turpin, Hulga, the grandma, Rayber, Asbury, Sheppard, these are the freaks you love and are trying to reach. More and more, they are to me too. Not the prophet-freaks: the ugly girl in the doctor's office, the bizarre Bible salesman, the murderous Misfit, Dr. Block, Rufus, or Francis Marion Tarwater, and of course not Hazel Motes; these exist only to accentuate the freakishness of those whom we see as the regular people. It’s easy to forget this. It’s just such a huge, true, strange and sweeping idea, so opposite from everything around us. I have to discover it again and again with astonishment in every one of your stories. (Sometimes I think I even might have Enoch Emery figured out; he's nothing more than a gorilla in a man suit, right?)
I have to say, the more I study your writings and your life, the crazier it feels that I am writing letters to you. To say that I am wandering into waters much too deep for me would be a gross understatement. Still, I think you would encourage a person like me. You would encourage people to read beyond their intellect and think beyond their natural boundaries and to try to write whatever they could dream of writing.
My big excitement is, in that article I found another book about you I didn’t know existed. I immediately ordered it on the internet. It must be rare-ish because even a used copy was a bit expensive ($20). It arrived yesterday, a slim plain green library hardback, no dust jacket, with the white call number sticker forever cemented to its spine, from the University of California at San Diego. It’s called Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being, published by the University of Georgia Press in 1985 put together by Alfred F. Kinney. When you consider that I was going to make such a list myself from your letters so I could explore the books you treasured, this is a treasure. It’s a list of the books you owned and apparently prized and kept in your glass-doored Victorian bookcases made of Georgia walnut. It gives the exact editions, contains some passages from these books that you marked, even some of your “marginalia.” I plunged into it yesterday and was totally blown away, intellectually speaking. These bottomless books you read on philosophy, religion, history, art, and literature are to me unfathomable. And yet I can’t resist presuming to become acquainted with them, trying to get something from them, however incompletely I see and understand.
“We must remember that our state of contemplation must not be a state of inertia, but a state of preparation, a state in which we accumulate fervour, generosity, grace, so as to be ready and eager for any work to which the Lord may call us. We should be in our retirement like lions in their den; we should meditate in our house like taut bows, like wine in a bottle, like a force under pressure, so that in due time we may expand and burst forth.” You marked that in your copy of Rosmini: Priest, Philosopher and Patriot, by Claude Leetham. I have to believe this can apply to me, too, or else why was I given this interest?
A fellow booklist lover,
J.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Monday, May 2, 2011
Letter #8
Dear Flannery,
"For my money, Dante is about as great as you can get."
You wrote that in a letter to “A” in 1955. I was chatting with a visitor in my home two days ago and mentioned that I had just finished reading Dante's Divine Comedy as part of my attempt to fill in some gaping holes in my literary education. (I mentioned this ongoing project to you earlier. I have been making some progress lately through my book stacks and although I grasp very little I find myself miraculously becoming a bit less confused which I constantly remind myself is all I can hope for.) This visitor whom I believe is college-educated mumbled quite humbly that she never even heard of Dante. I strove to hide my disappointment. Never heard of Dante? How can this happen? This is the unsettling and sometimes astonishing state of modern affairs.
You saw this in your time and it has become much, much worse. Not many are interested in the accumulated wisdom of the world anymore. The great majority of teachers don’t teach it so students never hear of it. Or is it that teachers don’t instill a love of learning so people grow up with no interest in it? Or could it be that our “advanced technological age” makes both entertainment and learning equally and instantly accessible and we humans characteristically choose mindless amusements over knowledge? It could just be the pervasive new-age attitude that old is valueless, new is best (or what people perceive as old and new). If the ancient or old is referred to at all, it is often twisted to suit shallow and misguided modern sensibilities. And that’s sad, wrong, and ignorant. As if just because we are living in the present time we are smarter, better human beings than those who came before. Since when has that ever been true?
I was thrilled to find at the touch of my fingertips, glowing on my computer screen, a lengthy paper from 1989 called “Flannery O’Connor and Dante’s Divine Comedy” by Benjamin B. Alexander, a lecturer and assistant university professor of English and Religion. This I printed out at another touch for perusal at my convenience. Incidentally, all this amazing modern facilitation I enjoy makes me think of you laboriously typing and retyping your stories and novels on a mid-20th century typewriter, painstakingly making corrections--with what, an ink eraser? And then sending out precious copies to editors and publishers. (I think I remember reading that you eventually got an electric typewriter which must have been nice but not much technical help.) Beyond that, it makes me think of Dante himself, writing in the Middle Ages . . . with what? (Wait, I’ll look it up on Google.) Wax tablets, perhaps (he was probably too poor to employ a scribe), and then pen and parchment. In elegant script. No, we have no excuse nowadays, for any sort of laziness in learning or writing, do we?
You may be surprised and pleased that Alexander finds striking similarities between your writings and our esteemed 14th Century Italian’s. Both of you wrote to illuminate the divine life, or the Holy Spirit, in everyday people’s lives. He says you parallel Dante in the crafting of your stories. Yes, I believe I can see that. He goes on to acknowledge that while Dante lived in a time when he could take for granted that the people around him shared his view of heaven and hell as “unquestionable truth,” you lived in a world of “pluralistic options and existential dilemmas” when all things God had become “a conditional alternative.” There was no longer a universally shared faith. In other words, you had extenuating circumstances Dante did not have to contend with.
A world losing both its faith and its certainties was the world you wrote for, an “age with doubts both fact and value, and which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions.” Even so, you would not recognize the world we live in today. You would see those momentary convictions flowing mainstream from our new god, Secularism, the new fountain of “truth,” decorated with demonic distortions, violence, and filth right out of the Inferno. Dante’s readers recognized the hellish as “deformed and perverse, whereas contemporary culture increasingly equates hellish iconography with the normative and chic.” Alexander wrote these words over 20 years ago, and in the last outrageous and unprecedented 20 years, things have gotten worse.
It’s really become quite unfriendly here for those who believe this world is not our real home, who care about the welfare of immortal souls, who exercise faith that there is a spiritual universe we can begin to explore and know here and now. Even churches of every denomination have been caught up in the popular secular current. Their once firm doctrines are now diluted and watery and swirl among shallow, liquid, ever-changing sophistries. As a result, for some, sitting in a crowded chapel on a Sunday feels like the loneliest place on earth.
Glimpsing light from Dante’s “dark wood,”
J.
"For my money, Dante is about as great as you can get."
You wrote that in a letter to “A” in 1955. I was chatting with a visitor in my home two days ago and mentioned that I had just finished reading Dante's Divine Comedy as part of my attempt to fill in some gaping holes in my literary education. (I mentioned this ongoing project to you earlier. I have been making some progress lately through my book stacks and although I grasp very little I find myself miraculously becoming a bit less confused which I constantly remind myself is all I can hope for.) This visitor whom I believe is college-educated mumbled quite humbly that she never even heard of Dante. I strove to hide my disappointment. Never heard of Dante? How can this happen? This is the unsettling and sometimes astonishing state of modern affairs.
You saw this in your time and it has become much, much worse. Not many are interested in the accumulated wisdom of the world anymore. The great majority of teachers don’t teach it so students never hear of it. Or is it that teachers don’t instill a love of learning so people grow up with no interest in it? Or could it be that our “advanced technological age” makes both entertainment and learning equally and instantly accessible and we humans characteristically choose mindless amusements over knowledge? It could just be the pervasive new-age attitude that old is valueless, new is best (or what people perceive as old and new). If the ancient or old is referred to at all, it is often twisted to suit shallow and misguided modern sensibilities. And that’s sad, wrong, and ignorant. As if just because we are living in the present time we are smarter, better human beings than those who came before. Since when has that ever been true?
I was thrilled to find at the touch of my fingertips, glowing on my computer screen, a lengthy paper from 1989 called “Flannery O’Connor and Dante’s Divine Comedy” by Benjamin B. Alexander, a lecturer and assistant university professor of English and Religion. This I printed out at another touch for perusal at my convenience. Incidentally, all this amazing modern facilitation I enjoy makes me think of you laboriously typing and retyping your stories and novels on a mid-20th century typewriter, painstakingly making corrections--with what, an ink eraser? And then sending out precious copies to editors and publishers. (I think I remember reading that you eventually got an electric typewriter which must have been nice but not much technical help.) Beyond that, it makes me think of Dante himself, writing in the Middle Ages . . . with what? (Wait, I’ll look it up on Google.) Wax tablets, perhaps (he was probably too poor to employ a scribe), and then pen and parchment. In elegant script. No, we have no excuse nowadays, for any sort of laziness in learning or writing, do we?
You may be surprised and pleased that Alexander finds striking similarities between your writings and our esteemed 14th Century Italian’s. Both of you wrote to illuminate the divine life, or the Holy Spirit, in everyday people’s lives. He says you parallel Dante in the crafting of your stories. Yes, I believe I can see that. He goes on to acknowledge that while Dante lived in a time when he could take for granted that the people around him shared his view of heaven and hell as “unquestionable truth,” you lived in a world of “pluralistic options and existential dilemmas” when all things God had become “a conditional alternative.” There was no longer a universally shared faith. In other words, you had extenuating circumstances Dante did not have to contend with.
A world losing both its faith and its certainties was the world you wrote for, an “age with doubts both fact and value, and which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions.” Even so, you would not recognize the world we live in today. You would see those momentary convictions flowing mainstream from our new god, Secularism, the new fountain of “truth,” decorated with demonic distortions, violence, and filth right out of the Inferno. Dante’s readers recognized the hellish as “deformed and perverse, whereas contemporary culture increasingly equates hellish iconography with the normative and chic.” Alexander wrote these words over 20 years ago, and in the last outrageous and unprecedented 20 years, things have gotten worse.
It’s really become quite unfriendly here for those who believe this world is not our real home, who care about the welfare of immortal souls, who exercise faith that there is a spiritual universe we can begin to explore and know here and now. Even churches of every denomination have been caught up in the popular secular current. Their once firm doctrines are now diluted and watery and swirl among shallow, liquid, ever-changing sophistries. As a result, for some, sitting in a crowded chapel on a Sunday feels like the loneliest place on earth.
Glimpsing light from Dante’s “dark wood,”
J.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)