by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

A Missing Piece of the Puzzle: Flannery O'Connor’s `Prayer Journal'

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“P.S. Mr. Isaac Rosenfeld unburdened himself on the subject of Wise Blood in the New Republic. He found it completely bogus, at length.”

Flannery O'Connor got treated better in the magazine’s “back-of-the-book” review section after that review from 1952. In the years after I became a regular reader in 1984, there were strong essays about her by Brad Leithauser, Mary Jo Salter, and Christopher Benfey, among others – right up to a brilliant aside in a Diarist by Leon Wieseltier last year: this man so good at finding books or ideas bogus at length found the Prayer Journal satisfactory – and found in it this choice insight: 

Can we ever settle on calling ourselves mediocre—me on myself? If I am not this or that that someone else is, may I not be something else that I am that I cannot yet see fully or describe?

Leon had already written that Diarist when he arranged for me to write a review essay about O'Connor and the Prayer Journal.  I wrote it with zest.  With the turmoil over the direction of the magazine, the piece never made it into print – and it was orphaned there when Leon and a couple of dozen other editors resigned a couple of weeks ago.

Now FSG has posted the whole essay on its books-and-authors website, Works in Progress.  As I explain there:

In the years I spent writing The Life You Save May Be Your Own, the large collection of O’Connor materials recently placed with Emory University’s Special Collections was not accessible to writers and scholars. FSG’s publication of the Prayer Journal, then, offered an opportunity for me to add a crucial episode to my published account of O’Connor’s life—to insert a missing piece of the puzzle.

The essay, I am surprised to realize, is just a little bit shorter than the text of the journal.  It has been a missing piece of the puzzle that is my own work, too.  Thanks to FSG for publishing it, and to Leon for commissioning it – and for commissioning so many extraordinary review essays over the years.  Who isn’t eager to know what his next move will be?

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