Stalking Joy
Flannery O’Connor through the Eyes of a Friend and a Scholar
I meet William Sessions, former Regents’ Professor of English Emeritus at Georgia State University, on a cold November day. He has invited me over to his house in Brookhaven to talk about his old friend, Flannery O’Connor, and the biography he is currently writing about her. He has been working on Stalking Joy for the last few years, and, even though the biography is currently finished, he is still going through the process of revision, which implies dividing the book in two different volumes, the first one of which will be about her early life and works. He is currently working on a recent discovery that he is planning to include in the book, that is to say, some of O’Connor’s journals from her college years, the Xeroxes of which lay on his desk during the hour we spend talking.
“I am concerned with her in the biography as a person who comes from a background, but who is essentially an artist who is after beauty. What makes Flannery is her language. And O’Connor had a real sense of keeping language, her story, her fiction, going, no matter how painful it was.”
William Sessions has recently edited an interesting edition of Flannery O’Connor’s personal writings, A Prayer Journal (2013), “a rare portal into the interior life of the great writer. Not only does it map O’Connor’s singular relationship with the divine, but it shows how entwined her literary desire was with her yearning for God.”
“There are a lot of people who like Flannery because she was Catholic. There are a lot of people who don’t like her because she was a Catholic. And I keep saying to the non-Catholic people that they don’t have to like her, but they have to be aware of her background. It is kind of where you start with her. She starts from the specific, in her case, Irish Catholic, and then she moves through language. In this book you go through the specificity and come out with the universal. This is the same thing that goes on in the stories: they are very specific — they are set in the South, and all — but you wouldn’t say she is Catholic. I have a friend who sent her works to his Catholic mother, and she asked him why he had sent her all those violent things.”
Today, our conversation deals with an issue that somehow involves O’Connor’s religious beliefs and the way in which they have shaped her life and her poetics. I have often been told that it is not possible to read a writer’s works as entirely deriving from or being related to his life experience, as there is always a barrier between reality and fiction, and one that the fiction writer should not tear down if he wants to be considered such. However, the writer’s reality – his background, his experiences, his relations – can still get through this, and sometimes the reader can easily see bits and pieces of the writer between the lines of his works.
Since you are writing a biography of Flannery O’Connor, how important do you think it is to know the writer in order to understand his writings? Is her life experience directly mirrored in her work?
Because so many people with so many writers have taken the biographical aspect and tried to make that the way you read a writer, is not really correct to say that. She is firm herself to say, ‘No, it doesn’t have a lot to do with that.’ When I was teaching I used to say that you should take a little paradigm, an ‘X’ that stays for a text, for example, and almost everything that would come into the text — ethnicity, biography, ideology — nothing will fully explain the text. Whatever you want to put in there, it doesn’t matter. What matter is the fiction, the poem: that’s where you start. And if all of this enlightens it, then it’s fine.
You have to find the link between the text and what is outside of the text.
Right. O’Connor particularly like to emphasize four steps of writing and reading. She took them from Dante, actually. The last one is contemplation, which is what everyone who likes art does. If you go to a museum, you look at the painting, and you observe it, and you watch it and so forth. And you go back and look again, and again, and you begin to think about what it does mean. The same thing goes with music — I am a big music person. And if you hear a piece of music, you hear it and then you think about it. I could be anything, from Bob Dylan to Beethoven’s Quartets — it doesn’t matter, because you have to think about it anyway.
The thought that she was a Catholic is not the first thing that comes to mind when you read something like “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Do you think that these aspects of O’Connor’s life — the religious one, for example — are to be considered fundamental to understand her works?
I think they are in the work. I prefer to think of Flannery O’Connor as a very fine artist. I mean, I am glad she likes religion, I am glad she is a Catholic, but for me her greatness is that she is a very fine artist, and she starts off as one. Beauty is what matter. Of course, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” maybe is not a beautiful work, but it’s a powerful work and it is beautiful in its way. So I think she does what every poet or fiction writer does — creating beauty. And she emphasizes herself that she wrote the best way that she could.
I have been focusing my attention on the role of the South – as a theme, as a background, as a geographical place, as a place where literature has its own peculiar characteristics, and so on – and O’Connor’s view of the South and of Southern identity. In particular, I am interested in the way in which her origins have been as important as to made her a “regional” writer, and, at the same time, the ways in which O’Connor wrote about her origins and made them part of her works. What do you think is Flannery O’Connor’s relationship with her Georgian and Southern background? Does it only emerge because she sets her story in the South, or is there something peculiar about it?
Oh, there is a connection, in a funny way. She said that the South is Christ-haunted, as in Europe people are kind of haunted by the idea that religion it is out there, whether they are involved or not. The same was true for people in the South, and probably is even now, more than most people think anyway. So here is the point. What she did was to take from the traditional Southern culture — the culture of the preachers, the culture of beliefs. “The River” is a good example of it: she takes a theme, identifies it with the Southern culture, and then she made it suit her religious and theological point of view. And that’s important.
Besides her explaining her relationship between the writer and his country in Mystery and Manners, do you think there is a work of fiction that really expresses her ideas of the South and of the meaning of Southern identity for a writer?
Oh, sure. I mean, I think that all of those stories — “Revelation,” which is about a religious country woman, and Flannery uses her to make a certain point. What she did was using the culture for her own needs: she could use the Confederate soldier in “Encounter with the Enemy,” or the criminal in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” What O’Connor did was to use the South to express her ideas — that is to say, from the preacher in “The River,” to the landscape, to the events. She used it in a way that any writer would do. Basically she used the South to make a good story, that’s the point.
I was reading that she gives a lot of importance to sight.
Yes, she does.
And she said that a writer, before he can write a story, has to see the reality around him, and only then he can write the story.
My wife remembers that, when she first came from Greece, Flannery used to look at you like this (he leans forward on the chair, his eyes wide open). We were friends of hers. There are letters in The Habit of Being that she wrote to us. That’s why they asked me to wrote the biography. When I knew her, I didn’t know that I was going to write a book about her and I didn’t take notes. Therefore, so much of what I write comes out from my memory.
When I first read about her life in Milledgeville, I thought of Emily Dickinson.
Yeah, it’s not a bad analogy.
Was her life really that secluded because of her disease?
Lupus was a really terrible disease, and she suffered. I mean, she was in pain, her kidneys didn’t function, she had bad arthritis, she had itches all over her body — all kinds of terrible sufferings. You don’t see that in her works, though. Many people say that it influenced her dark work. Not at all. Wise Blood was finished before she got sick. It wasn’t published, but it was finished. But she knew how to concentrate on being an artist, a writer. She was like Emily Dickinson in some degree, but her work came out, and was successful in her time even. Her publisher said about Flannery O’Connor that she grew, and everyone was surprised by the reputation she got. I don’t think they quite saw what was the depth in her, what went on. She knew how to use the literary material, she had to build a depth, and the point is that the writer’s story is a time, and a place, and a point in eternity.
I read a lot about dark humor and Southern grotesque. The first time I encountered these terms I was reading William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” and one of my professor said that it was a good example of both dark humor and Southern grotesque. Can we find these characteristics in O’Connor’s works?
Yes. She actually had a very funny say about Faulkner. She said that her image was someone who was on a horse and wagon and getting stuck on a railroad track, and she said, you want to get your horse and wagon off the railroad track when the Dixie Limited comes down the path. The Dixie Limited for her was Faulkner. Faulkner was very important for her. She got the whole idea of becoming a writer from Faulkner. She had other sources, of course, as James Joyce. She actually modelled “Revelation” on Joyce’s “The Dead,” on its structure. Flannery was tremendously read anyway.
Henry James once said that in order to understand your country you have to go away and look at it from a distance. About Iowa…
That’s exactly what happened in Iowa. And after that in New York.
How do you think her being away to Iowa influenced her work? In Mistery and Manners, for example, she states she is against this kind of workshops and the idea of teaching how to write.
She was a product of it, but she was an early product of it. What you have with her is that, first of all, she came from a segregated South, where you had poor black, but also rich white and poor white. Then she went to Iowa, to the Midwest, where everybody was kind of wealthy and where, for the first time, she was in class with African Americans. So it wasn’t just that it opened her up, but she also met the right people who taught her, as Allan Tate. Unlike Faulkner, she was trained to take care of her theories. Faulkner had read deeply, especially the experiments of Joyce. It was Joyce’s Ulysses who influenced him the most. I am a big Faulkner fan, and I think that he is the greatest Southern writer. Faulkner was the master. And I actually met Faulkner, and spent an evening with him.
(When I asked him what William Faulkner was like, he told me that he was shrinking with age.)
What is the importance of the archives that gathered her works? What could the readers find out about her in Milledgeville or at Emory University?
She was supposed to have died four, five years after she found out she had lupus. A doctor in Atlanta found a way to keep her alive for fourteen years, and that’s why we have all this great works. There is also an unfinished novel, and someone just got permission to deal with it. That is a fascinating work. Her first novels are really novellas — Wise Blood is really a novella, and the same thing is true for The Violent Bear It Away. Her third work is longer, as far as I can remember, and the structure is straight out of Joyce and Beckett. It has a kind of Waiting for Godot flavour, the waiting. It’s a remarkable work. She never finished and it’s sketched. She left other things behind, but the real loss I think is the novel. A young scholar had just got permission to work on it, and in a couple of years he may be publishing it.
