Now at Emory, the Flannery O’Connor We Never Knew

“Well I have seen the production and I thought it was slop of the third water. I aver that everybody connected in any way with it, except me, had a stinking pole cat for a mother and father.”

That’s Flannery O’Connor, being Flannery O’Connor —- and, more precisely, stating her considered critical opinion of a 1957 CBS television adaptation of her story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (starring Gene Kelly as Mr. Shiftlet) in a letter to George Haslam, a teacher of hers.

For those of us who are devoted to Flannery O’Connor, everything she wrote is significant; and the particular significance of that critical opinion is that it didn’t appear in The Habit of Being, the 1979 volume of O’Connor’s letters; it appeared a decade later, when the Library of America published an omnibus volume of her works, including a selection of letters. Long unpublished, that is, eventually it was published – and it amplified our understanding of this great American writer.

Now our understanding of O’Connor is about to be amplified beyond our greatest expectations. Through an arrangement with O’Connor’s close relatives and executors, Emory University has acquired thirty boxes of unpublished letters and other materials, including some 600 letters that she wrote to her mother, Regina, while an exile in the North, so to speak.

More than any other postwar American writer, O’Connor has gained in stature due to the adroit management of her estate and the artful editing and publishing of the work she left unpublished on her death in 1964: the essays in Mystery and Manners, the letters in The Habit of Being and the Library of America volume; and the composition book published last year as A Prayer Journal.

Speaking of novels, she once remarked that “I wish they could be written and deposited in a slot for the next century myself.” Now it is the next century, and the letters and other writing that she deposited in a slot are coming into view — and the “second life” of her art is entering a new and fascinating phase. I’m looking forward to taking a role in it.

Meanwhile, an essay of mine about the Prayer Journal is forthcoming in the New Republic, whose editors, like O’Connor, take the long view.

The photograph is of a 1944 journal kept by Flannery O’Connor and included in the materials now at Emory.

• 9 October 2014
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