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About Books: Flannery O'Connor's "Bulletin" Reviews HUGH R. BROWN nr ' l,r ' ™ /-xn™.™ - HUGH R. BROWN When Flannery O’Connor was first gaining a national reputation as a Catholic writer, in the 1950s, she was still a puzzle to many of her co-religionists in Georgia. Everybody knew she was a writer. She had already published a novel, WISE BLOOD in 1952, and numerous short stories, including those collected in A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND in 1955. But many Georgia Catholics found it difficult to understand her stories. In particular, it seemed almost impossible to discover the connection between her Catholicism and such characters as Nazie Motes, the country preacher who gouges out his eyes in WISE BLOOD, or The Misfit, who orders the execution of an entire family in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” And even when she mentioned something specifically Catholic, it was more than likely to be a character like the priest in “The Displaced Persdn,” who seems to confuse Christianity, peacocks and a Polish refugee. I myself remember talking about Flannery O’Connor to a Savannahian, one of her many local cousins, who described her as “a perfect old maid” who lived on a farm near Milledgeville and wrote “strange stories about ugly country people.” The cousin, whose name I forget, was typical in her views (if not her expression) of this extraordinary lady from Georgia. Now, almost 30 years later, the name O’Connor is very well known in American literature. It is a rare anthology of short stories that does not contain at least one of her’s, usually complete with editorial questions designed to bring the young reader to full knowledge of technique and meaning. Her novels and short stories remain in print, her collected letters and her lectures are acclaimed, and both she and her fiction are the subjects of large numbers of books, articles and university dissertations. For some, the puzzle has been explained, and they discuss her characters and their actions confidently in terms of “symbolic representation” and “occasions of grace.” For others, the puzzle remains or, if they have plunged deeply into the arcane world of literary criticism, may even have become more complex. Thus it is a happy occurrence that in the midst of this celebration of Flannery O’Connor there has been published another volume of her collected writings, but this time one that shows her as an author who puzzles nobody: Flannery O’Connor the faithful reviewer of books for diocesan newspapers. c^fo[anta HA/raji fling & '^Packing Robert Williams 1189 Howell Mill Road, N. E Atlanta, Georgia 30318 (404) 355-669- BULK RATE US. POSTAGE PAID PERMIT NO. 17*3 THE PRESENCE OF GRACE AND OTHER BOOK REVIEWS, published this year by the University of Georgia Press, is a collection of 120 reviews, all written either for the Bulletin or the Southern Cross from 1956 to 1964, the year she died at the age of 39. The reviews were compiled by Leo J. Zuber, her book editor on the Bulletin from 1960. Mr. Zuber died in 1980 and the task of editing the reviews, adding appropriate letters and writing an introduction was carried out by Carver Martin, an English professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. For readers who remember the Bulletin when it served the entire state of Georgia, the letters interspersed throughout the book will call up memories of Mr. Zuber, Mrs. Eileen Hall, his predecessor in the job, and Gerard Sherry, who edited the Bulletin in the early 1960s. She also mentions John Markwalter, then an assistant on the Bulletin, and now editor of the Southern Cross. All the names come up incidentally as Ms. O’Connor expresses her preference for books, worries about diocesan affairs (“When are they going to get us a bishop,” she writes in 1962. “High time they got us something.”), and wonders about the future of the book review section, “the best thing in the paper.” The reviews themselves are remarkable in two ways. First, they give us Flannery O’Connor at her critical best, penetrating in her lucid prose to the heart of volumes on subjects ranging from the history of spirituality to popular Catholic fiction. Second, the fact that they are collected in one volume gives us perspective on her reading, her concerns and her views about the American Catholic Church of the pre-Vatican II era. The reviews show us a young, gifted Catholic writer who was scandalized by the low state of Catholic literature and art, sharply critical of Catholic taste, dubious about the Catholic press, but keenly aware of the need for intellectual and spiritual development among all who seek the Kingdom of God. The reviews show Ms. O’Connor as a Catholic of her times, accepting the need for censorship in the arts, but siding with New York drama critic Walter Kerr in his view that Catholic tendencies toward censorship had much to do with the “low state of Catholic taste” in America. She is aware of and bows to authority, sending back to her f editor a volume by the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin because he had been placed on the warning list by the Holy Office, and suggesting the volume might better be reviewed by “a clerical gentleman.” The range of her reviewing (and thus of her reading) is remarkably wide. Among others, she reviews Msgr. Romano Guardini on Christ, on Mary and on meditations; Father Bruce Vawter on the Old Testament, the Jesuit Philip Hughes on the history of the Reformation, Jesuit Walter Ong on the church in America, the Protestant theologian Karl Barth on evangelical theology, the French philosophers Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, the American economist Russell Kirk, and, of course Teilhard PAGE 15—The Georgia Bulletin, September 1,1983 de Chardin and his theory of spiritual evolution, which appealed strongly to her. She has surprisingly few reviews of novels and fiction. She reviews nothing by Graham Green and only THE ORDEAL OF GILBERT PINFOLD by Evelyn Waugh. But she does review lesser writers and regularly displays a trenchant pen when she points out their shortcomings. Of a novel by Charles B. Flood entitled TELL ME STRANGER, she comments that “in fiction there is nothing worse than a combination of slickness and Catholicism.” Of Morris L. West’s THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE, which she liked, she notes that “the book is worth reading for its virtues and we have its faults to thank for its being so widely read.” She was, of course, a craftsman herself and considered writing a vocation. She regards the best seller list as “a standard of mediocrity through which occasionally a work of merit will slip for reasons unconnected with its quality.” But when she reviews a “real writer,” she is quite generous, praising, for example, Francois Mauriac’s LINES OF LIFE, and Julian Green’s THE TRANSGRESSOR. A few of her favorites are not much read today. For example, she has praise for J.F. Powers’ portraits of “the immovable pastor, the ambitious curate, the Gothic housekeeper and the Regulars of Altar and Rosary” in his short story collection THE PRESENCE OF GRACE. Most of these types, natural targets for satire in the 1950s are no longer with us. However, when she writes of basic matters - the life of prayer, the figures of the Old Testament, the often tortuous paths of grace and salvation - her reviews are as fresh today as they were when she wrote them, and, like her fiction, likely to endure. (Hugh Brown is Professor of English at Armstrong State College, Savannah.) eciafiiti for: •Gift Wrapping •Custom Packing « • » pick-up, delivery, mailing, & shipping services 3400 Peachtree Road, N.E. 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