Monday, June 27, 2005

Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O'Connor

After reading Mystery and Manners I went on to read the rather large colume of the letters or correspondence of Flannery O'Connor.

The last letter was written a few days before her death at age 37 from lupus (her father died of the same disease.) When I read that last letter, I felt like I had lost a dear friend.

Flannery's letters are funny, familiar, professional, and sometimes, very spirited - especially when the matter had to do with writing fiction and art. She writes from her country home, where she lived with her mother, Regina, outside of Atlanta, GA. (I am writing while on the road and don't have specific references with me.) She refers to the peacocks or peafowl that she raised for years; the cows and other farm animals her mother raised; the farm worker families who came and went, the political situation of her times, the coming Vatican Council II, her friends, her pilgrimage to Europe, and sometimes about the disease that took her life so early.

I have some quotes from her letters saved on my laptop and I want to share some of them here. Again, if you are a writer of any kind, get a copy of this book, and read a few pages a day. Have a highlighter near by; you'll probably find many of her sayings you'll wnat to remember:

"Fiction is the concrete expression of mystery – mystery that is lived. Catholics believe that all creation is good and that evil is the wrong use of good and that without Grace we use it [good] wrong most of the time. It is almost impossible to write about supernatural grace in fiction. We almost have to approach it negatively. As to natural Grace, we have to take that the way it comes – through nature. In any case, it [Grace] operates surrounded by evil. " 

 " The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it. I didn’t make this up. I got it from St. Thomas [Aquinas] (via Maritain) who shows that art is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made; it has no utilitarian end. If you manage to use it successfully for social, religious or other purposes, it is because you made it art first.    

"It is what is invisible that God sees and that the Christian must look for. Because he knows the consequences of sin, he knows how deep you have to go to find love. " 

 "… I am to give a talk on the dizzying subject – 'What is a Wholesome Novel?'  I intend to tell them that the reason they find nothing but obscenity in modern fiction is because that is all they know how to recognize."

Mystery and Manners: Essays of Flannery O'Connor

It's been a long time since I have added to my booik journal, but I have been reading!

When a friend started quoting Flannery O'Connor at the bottom of his emails, my interest in this novelist from the South (1925-1964) was rekindled. I had read only one of her short stories years before, but my friend was quoting from Mystery and Manners, Flannery O'Connor's essays.

Actually, these essays are mostly extractions or compilations of various talks that Flannery gave at universities, though the one that opens the book is a charming and funny essay on her beloved, screaming peacocks.

If you are interested in what a Catholic novelist who considered herself a true artist and her work art, this is a little book you will want to read and then read again. There are several chapters on what it means to be a Catholic writer/artist.

I was surprised at her dismissive attitude toward the Catholic press of the 1950's which she thought insipid - probably because the book reviewers did not grasp the nature of her fiction and gave her work poor reviews.

For Flannery O'Connor, the redemption was the center of all her work and she believed that to speak of redemption, one must speak of sin.

This is an inspiring collection. If you are an aspiring writer, or a rusty one, be sure to get a copy and savor it.

Thursday, June 3, 2004

The Lovely Bones: A Novel

People have asked me what I thought of Alice Sebold's 2002 novel, and until now I have only been able to say that I hadn't read it.

I finished it over Memorial Day weekend. So many emotions... terror, loss, chaos, distance - and a whole rethinking of what heaven means to me.

When 14 year old Susie disappears, we discover what happened to her becasue she narrates it from heaven - a "place" that is different for everyone. She even has an intake counselor who was also murdered...

Susie tells the story of her rape, murder and how her body was cut up and disposed of by her murderer. From above, and then in a chapter reminiscent of the film Ghost, Susie  inhabits the body of a friend, to see what making love us like, before she goes to heaven forever.

Truth be told, I liked Thornton Wilder's 1938 play Our Town better because it was about death and loss, from the side of life and afterlife. It too offered an opportunity to examine what the next life might be like.

The Lovely Bones is very contemporary and we are spared no details as the family tries to adjust, as the case grows cold, of the father's unrelenting search for his daughter's murderer.

I just don't think that Susie's heaven does it for me, though the struggle of the family seems realistic and concludes in a mostly satisfying way. Like The Sixth Sense, souls who in life were murdered or put to death for no reason, are in a "place" until someone redeems them - a place of waiting for justice. The book ends, but there is no real sense of justice for Susie because the crime is never really solved.

What will heaven be like? "In my Father's house there are many mansions," Jesus told us. "If it were not so, I would not have told you."

Whatever these mansions might be like is no matter, as long as we can linger in the presence of transcendent, eternal love. The Lovely Bones did not quite do it for me. Is this the heaven of citizens of the West in the 21st century? I hope for more.

 

Saturday, January 31, 2004

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency is the first in a series about a detective agency in Botswana founded by Precious Ramotswe. She is a woman of about forty of "traditional" size, widowed and alone. Her beloved father has died and with her inheritance has bought a new home an office and decided to be a private detective.

She hires a secretary because you need one to be respectable.

Mma. Ramotswe is fortunate because she has hired a woman who is intelligent and ambitious to be a good secretary. Soon they have their first case. With wisdom and common sense and a book about how to be a detective, Mma. Ramotswe and her secretary begin their careers.

Tears of the Giraffe and Morality for Beautiful Girls are the second and third volumes of this absolutely charming and engaging series of books. The author is Alexander McCall Smith "a professor of medical law at Edinburgh University. He was born in what is now Zimbabwe and taught law at the Unviersity of Botswana."

I enjoyed these easy reads because they are filled with interesting characters, straight talking, humor, heart and humanity - my recipe for good books and good movies. I think adolescent girls would like them, too.

Even if a man wrote them!

Thursday, December 18, 2003

The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, is a lovely story about a motherless young white girl, Lily, in South Carolina in the 1960's. She thinks she is responsible for her mother's death, her father is emotionally blank, mean and makes her kneel on dry grits for punishment. She finds a picture of the Black Madonna on a label that belonged to her mother. When she runs away because she has helped a black woman, Rosaleen, break out of jail, they end up mid-state, near Columbia. And by chance, she sees honey with a label that matches the one she has. She gets directions and they arrive at the house of August and her sisters - a safe haven.

This is a great novel on many levels: if you are Catholic, you will appreciate the role that Our Lady plays in the lives of these women who are just achieving citizen status in the U.S. If you are a student of religion and culture, this is a study of what people do with religion and how religion changes through generations when the institutional church is missing - how the soul can remain. This is not a book with an agenda. It's a sweet novel (no pun intended) about living and believing when hope is scarse.

 

I lived in South Carolina for 2 1/2 years. Sounds real to me...