There are small moments within the letters of O’Connor and Gordon that open into larger worlds—moments I’ve been exploring without any goal or endposts. Here is one. On 29 January 1953, Flannery O’Connor wrote to her new friend Caroline Gordon about her reading of George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Anne Evans): I got… Continue reading That roar which lies on the other side of silence…
Credo: Love
Let me sum up my own Credo, in the hope that I can make what I am trying to say clear. A novel, any novel, in the first place, must be about love. There is no other subject. --Caroline Gordon to Walker Percy, Undated letter [January 1952]
The Primitive Ear
Your chief weakness as a writer seems to be a failure to admit the august nature of your inspiration. You speak almost always like FO'C. That is fine. You have the best ear of anybody in the trade for the rhythms of colloquial speech. [. . .] [Y]ou have this enormous advantage: what Yeats called… Continue reading The Primitive Ear
Crowded Effects, Strange Light
I think you have crowded your effects too much here. If I were writing this passage I would emphasize its importance by breaking it up into several--perhaps three--sentences instead of crowding a lot of ideas into one sentence [. . .] “Single block of one story brick and wooden shacks” sounds ugly. (Of course they… Continue reading Crowded Effects, Strange Light
The Violent Bear It Away: 70 years old in 2020
O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away was published sixty-nine years ago in January, 1960. "The back jacket is devoted to a quote from Caroline's piece in Critique [on Wise Blood]," O'Connor told Betty Hester, "which will be like waving the red flag in front of several bulls." From an outsider's perspective, it was a nice blurb… Continue reading The Violent Bear It Away: 70 years old in 2020
A Peripety
I think you need in this story [“The Enduring Chill”] what Aristotle called "a peripety," the unforeseen incident which brings about a solution and yet springs out of what has gone before. Suppose that, as very well might be, one of the students in this class is a sort of Fr. Wiegel, a young priest… Continue reading A Peripety
8 January 1964: Gordon to O’Connor
"When I reached my uncle's house," Gordon wrote to O'Connor, "my cousin, Manny, warned me not to mention Kennedy's name. My aunt doesn't like him much better than she liked Roosevelt. Those members of my family have all turned Republican. I always feel like saying, 'But you haven't got enough money to turn Republican'." from… Continue reading 8 January 1964: Gordon to O’Connor
