Mystery and Manners (20 page)

This action by which charity grows invisibly among us, entwining the living and the dead, is called by the Church the Communion of Saints. It is a communion created upon human imperfection, created from what we make of our grotesque state. Of hers Mary Ann made what, like all good things, would have escaped notice had not the Sisters and many others been affected by it and wished it written down. The Sisters who composed the memoir have told me that they feel they have failed to create her as she was, that she was more lively than they managed to make her, more gay, more gracious, but I think that they have done enough and done it well. I think that for the reader this story will illuminate the lines that join the most diverse lives and that hold us fast in Christ.

APPENDIX
&
NOTES

APPENDIX

[
Besides drafts of talks, the O'Connor papers included two minor classes of manuscripts: brief book reviews done mainly for the
Georgia Bulletin,
the diocesan newspaper; and copies of remarks that Miss O'Connor wrote out in reply to the questions of interviewers. Here and there in each, of course, were passages of good sense and savor that seemed to deserve republication. But on repeated review these things appeared to add less and less to what the longer pieces had to say. Ultimately we were left with a very few examples indeed, of which it will be sufficient and just to quote two. The first is from a review of J. F. Powers' book of stories,
The Presence of Grace.]

According to Mr. Evelyn Waugh on the book jacket, “Mr. Powers is almost unique in his country as a lay writer who is at ease in the Church; whose whole art, moreover, is everywhere infused and directed by his Faith.” Indeed, if it were not directed by his Faith, Mr. Powers would not have been able to survive what his eye and ear have revealed to him, but he is equipped with an inner eye which can discern the good as well as the evil which may lurk behind the surface which to ordinary eyes has long been dead of staleness, so that his work, however much directed by his Faith, seems more directed by his charity. But the explanation for any good writer is first that he knows how to write and that writing is his vocation. This is eminently true of Mr. Powers and it is for this reason that one may be allowed to wonder why, in two stories in this collection, he has seen fit to use a cat for the Central Intelligence. The cat in question is admirable, in his way. He has Mr. Powers' wit and sensibility, his Faith and enough of his charity to serve, but he is a cat notwithstanding, and in both cases he lowers the tone and restricts the scope of what should otherwise have been a major story. It is the hope of the reviewer that this animal will prove to have only one life left and that some Minneapolis motorist, wishing to serve literature, will dispatch him as soon as possible.

[
The second example is from an interview with C. Ross Mullins that appeared in
Jubilee
for June, 1963.
]

We're all grotesque and I don't think the Southerner is any more grotesque than anyone else; but his social situation demands more of him than that elsewhere in this country. It requires considerable grace for two races to live together, particularly when the population is divided about 50-50 between them and when they have our particular history. It can't be done without a code of manners based on mutual charity. I remember a sentence from an essay of Marshall McLuhan's. I forget the exact words, but the gist of it was, as I recollect it, that after the Civil War, formality became a condition of survival. This doesn't seem to me any less true today. Formality preserves that individual privacy which everyone needs and, in these times, is always in danger of losing. It's particularly necessary to have in order to protect the rights of both races. When you have a code of manners based on charity, then when the charity fails—as it is going to do constantly—you've got those manners there to preserve each race from small intrusions upon the other. The uneducated Southern Negro is not the clown he's made out to be. He's a man of very elaborate manners and great formality, which he uses superbly for his own protection and to insure his own privacy. All this may not be ideal, but the Southerner has enough sense not to ask for the ideal but only for the possible, the workable. The South has survived in the past because its manners, however lopsided or inadequate they may have been, provided enough social discipline to hold us together and give us an identity. Now those old manners are obsolete, but the new manners will have to be based on what was best in the old ones—in their real basis of charity and necessity. In practice, the Southerner seldom underestimates his own capacity for evil. For the rest of the country, the race problem is settled when the Negro has his rights, but for the Southerner, whether he's white or colored, that's only the beginning. The South has to evolve a way of life in which the two races can live together with mutual forbearance. You don't form a committee to do this or pass a resolution: both races have to work it out the hard way. In parts of the South these new manners are evolving in a very satisfactory way, but good manners seldom make the papers.

NOTES

“The King of the Birds.” This piece bears the title that Flannery O'Connor gave it. Entitled “Living with a Peacock,” it appeared in
Holiday,
September, 1961.

“The Fiction Writer and His Country.” This was contributed in the spring of 1957 to a book of statements by novelists on their art, edited by Granville Hicks and published in the same year under the title
The Living Novel: A Symposium.

“Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” This paper was read by the author in the fall of 1960 at Wesleyan College for Women in Macon, Georgia. At that time she asked that it be given only local distribution as she might “sooner or later revise it for publication.” This she never did. After her death her literary executor permitted its publication in 1965 in
Cluster Review
of Macon University in Macon and in
The Added Dimension,
a book mainly devoted to critical studies of Miss O'Connor's work, edited by Melville J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson, published in 1966. In the latter case, at least, the text as published appeared to contain a number of misreadings. We print her own manuscript version.

“The Regional Writer” was contributed by the author to
Esprit,
the literary magazine of the University of Scranton, Scranton, Pennsylvania, where it appeared in Winter, 1963.

“The Nature and Aim of Fiction” and “Writing Short Stories” are composites for which the editors bear the kind of responsibility explained in the Foreword. We do not know the dates of the talks from which these texts were derived; the nucleus of “Writing Short Stories” was delivered at a Southern Writers' Conference neither located nor dated on the manuscript. “On Her Own Work” consists of fairly late observations, as noted in the footnotes.

“The Teaching of Literature” is a composite. The main part or nucleus was a single talk to an unidentified group of English teachers. “Total Effect and the Eighth Grade” was published in the
Georgia Bulletin,
March 21, 1963, under the title “Fiction Is a Subject with a History; It Should Be Taught That Way.” We use the manuscript title.

“The Church and the Fiction Writer” was published in
America,
March 30, 1957.

“Catholic Novelists and Their Readers” and “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” are composites of relatively late material. The former includes passages from a paper read at the College of St. Teresa, Winona, Minnesota, and published under the title “The Role of the Catholic Novelist” in
Greyfriar, Siena Studies in Literature,
Vol. VII, 1964, at Siena College, Loudonville, N.Y. The latter essay embodies much of a lecture delivered at Georgetown University during 175th-anniversary ceremonies in 1963 and published in the Georgetown magazine,
Viewpoint,
in Spring, 1966.

The manuscript of her “Introduction to
A Memoir of Mary Ann”
bears Miss O'Connor's inscription, “December 8, 1960, Milledgeville, Georgia.” It was first published in 1961.

Books by
F
LANNERY
O'C
ONNOR

Wise Blood

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

The Violent Bear It Away

Everything That Rises Must Converge

Mystery and Manners

The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor

The Habit of Being

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 1957, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1966, 1967, 1969

by the Estate of Mary Flannery O'Connor

Copyright © 1962 by Flannery O'Connor

Copyright © 1961 by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy

(now Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

All rights reserved

Published in 1969 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First paperback edition, 1970

Library of Congress catalog card number: 69-15409

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-50804-3

Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-50804-6

www.fsgbooks.com

eISBN 9781466829046

First eBook edition: September 2012

*
In talks here and there Flannery O'Connor often alluded to this challenge on the part of the
Life
editorial. Once she said: “What these editorial writers fail to realize is that the writer who emphasizes spiritual values is very likely to take the darkest view of all of what he sees in this country today. For him, the fact that we are the most powerful and the wealthiest nation in the world doesn't mean a thing in any positive sense. The sharper the light of faith, the more glaring are apt to be the distortions the writer sees in the life around him.”

*
In another mood on another occasion Flannery O'Connor began as follows: “I have very little to say about short-story writing. It's one thing to write short stories and another thing to talk about writing them, and I hope you realize that your asking me to talk about story-writing is just like asking a fish to lecture on swimming. The more stories I write, the more mysterious I find the process and the less I find myself capable of analyzing it. Before I started writing stories, I suppose I could have given you a pretty good lecture on the subject, but nothing produces silence like experience, and at this point I have very little to say about how stories are written.”

*
I.e., in 1962. These remarks were made by Flannery O'Connor at Hollins College, Virginia, to introduce a reading of her story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” on October 14, 1963.

*
This note was written to introduce the second edition of the novel in 1962.

*
From letters written to Winifred McCarthy, published in
Fresco,
Vol. I, No. 2, University of Detroit, February, 1961.

*
The hero of
The Violent Bear It Away.

†
A disciple of Hazel Motes in
Wise Blood.

*
At Sweetbriar College, Virginia, in March, 1963.