Flannery O’Connor

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"She was touched by evil and no doubt knew it." (Image by Cmacauley.)

This classic photograph profiles arguably the greatest American short-story writer, Flannery O’Connor, in a happy moment with friends Robie Macauley and Arthur Koestler. O’Connor, who suffered from lupus, managed in her brief life to find all of the darkness of humanity in narrow strips of the South. How could someone whose illness made it necessary to live a sheltered life have such a deep understanding of terror? Did she herself possess the capacity for great evil, which remained dormant for reasons we can’t quite understand? FromTouched by Evil,” Joseph O’Neill’s excellent 2009 Atlantic consideration of O’Connor and her work:

“One problem with O’Connor the exegesist is that she narrows the scope of her work, even for Catholic readers. To decode her fiction for its doctrinal or supernatural content is to render it dreary, even false, because whatever her private purposes, O’Connor was above all faithful to a baleful comic vision derived, surely, from an ancient, artistically wholesome tradition of misanthropy. Nonetheless, a spiritual drama is playing out. Only it is not the one put forward by the self-explaining author, in which she figures as an onlooker occupying the high ground of piety. On the contrary, Flannery O’Connor’s criticism reveals her as scarily belonging to the low world she evokes. She was touched by evil and no doubt knew it. That is what makes her so wickedly good.”

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Harper Lee reunites with Boo Radley in 2007. (Image by Eric Draper.)

With the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird upon us, some brainiac from the Daily Mail thought it was a good idea to show up unannounced and bother novelist Harper Lee for an interview, even though Lee hasn’t been interested in doing that kind of thing for more than 45 years. The reporter was politely rebuffed. Good for Lee. Back when she was open to discussing her work, Lee  sat down with Roy Newquist in 1964 and covered many topics, including the then-state of contemporary writing. An excerpt:

“Roy Newquist: When you look at American writing today, perhaps American theatre too, what do you find that you most admire? And, conversely, what do you most deplore?

Harper Lee: Let me see if I can take that backward and work into it. I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing, and especially in the American theatre, is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this—the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea. It takes time and patience and effort to turn out a work of art, and few people seem willing to go all the way.

I see a great deal of sloppiness and I deplore it. I suppose the reason I’m so down on it is because I see tendencies in myself to be sloppy, to be satisfied with something that’s not quite good enough. I think writers today are too easily pleased with their work. This is sad. I think the sloppiness and haste carry over into painting. The search, such as it is, is on canvas, not in the mind.

But back to writing. There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

Mockingbird: I don't care for the title. (Image by Eurico Zimbres.)

Now, as to what I think is good about writing. I think that right now, especially in the United States, we’re having a renaissance of the novel. I think that the novel has come into its own, that it has been pushed into its own by American writers. They have widened the scope of the art form. They have more or less opened it up.

Our writers, Faulkner, for instance, turned the novel into something Wolfe was trying to do. (They were contemporaries in a way, but Faulkner really carried out the mission.) It was a vision of enlargement, of using the novel form to encompass something much broader than our friends across the sea have done. I think this is something that’s been handed to us by Faulkner, Wolfe, and possibly (strangely enough) Theodore Dreiser.

Dreiser is a forgotten man, almost, but if you go back you can see what he was trying to do with the novel. He didn’t succeed because I think he imposed his own limitations.

All this is something that has been handed to us as writers today. We don’t have to fight for it, work for it; we have this wonderful literary heritage, and when I say “we” I speak in terms of my contemporaries.

There’s probably no better writer in this country today than Truman Capote. He is growing all the time. The next thing coming from Capote is not a novel—it’s a long piece of reportage, and I think it is going to make him bust loose as a novelist. He’s going to have even deeper dimension to his work. Capote, I think, is the greatest craftsman we have going.

Of course, there’s Mary McCarthy. You may not like her work, but she knows how to write. She knows how to put a novel together. Then there’s John Cheever—his Wapshot novels are absolutely first-rate. And in the southern family there’s Flannery O’Connor.

You can’t leave out John Updike—he’s so happily gifted in that he can create living human beings. At the same time he has a great respect for his language, for the tongue that gives him voice. And Peter De Vries, as far as I’m concerned, is the Evelyn Waugh of our time. I can’t pay anybody a greater compliment because Waugh is the living master, the baron of style.

These writers, these great ones, are doing something fresh and wonderful and powerful: they are exploring character in ways in which character has never been explored. They are not structured in the old patterns of hanging characters on a plot. Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.”

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Milton Glaser was a Fulbright scholar in Bologna.

Milton Glaser was a Fulbright scholar in Bologna.

If he had created only theI ♥ New Yorklogo or the multicolored Bob Dylan poster, Milton  Glaser would have secured a place in design history. but he’s done so much more in his 80 years, co-founding New York magazine and doing an unbelievable quantity and quality of work in print, environmental and interior design, posters, etc. My single favorite work of his is a rather obscure book cover he created for the Flannery O’Connor novel, Wise Blood.

O’Connor was a master of the short story and this novel never quite reached the level of the three stories she’d written earlier about Hazel Motes and Enoch Emery. But Glaser’s image of a vague thumbprint-ish face under dark glasses is hypnotic and speaks to the book in literal and figurative ways. It’s just about perfect.

Visit Glaser’s official site to see his numerous other designs.

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