Letter #3

Dear Flannery,

It’s about time I let you in on how you and I came to be introduced. I had lately decided that with what schooling I did have and the type it was and the age in which it occurred, I had in large part missed out on a classical education and was setting out to fashion one for myself. To begin, I was exploring the best books about reading the best books. Along with Clifton Fadiman's The New Lifetime Reading Plan, I got my hands on The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature by Elizabeth Kantor (2006), and was finding it wonderfully illuminating. She tells us what’s gone wrong with higher education today and provides a plan to amend the literary wrongs done us. It was as if Elizabeth said (like my dad used to say as he switched on a lamp when he found me reading in a darkening room),“Would you like some light on the subject?”

On page 169 in a big gray text box is “A Mini-Course in American Literature,” what the author calls “a high-speed tour through our whole literature by reading bite-sized pieces of fine American writing from Edgar Allan Poe to Flannery O’Connor.” (Aren't you pleased?) I was to read four tiny poems, five short stories, and two novels. I decided to make my way through this list in a highly conscientious manner. Your “Everything that Rises Must Converge” was one of the short stories, and that’s how we met. (You will surmise correctly that your stories. or parts of them, are now thought of as politically incorrect, but it seems you knew that when you wrote them.)

That one brilliant story intrigued me enough to keep reading until I had read all your fiction. And then, because I wanted to know if I was really "getting" any of it or not, I read your papers and speeches and letters, all that they’ve put into books. My copies of these collections are scribbled on with underlinings and notes and exclamation points and question marks and stuffed with a wild variety of colorful bookmarks and sticky Post-it notes, so many that they don’t do me any good. But I can’t help myself. Every time I open one of these books I find something more to mark or exclaim at or make notes on. I must take it slow or go blind from the brightness.

Yours out of the gloom,

A Reader