Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Letter #9

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment