Flanneriana

FLANNERIANA Frederick Asals Rosemary M. Magee. Conversations with Flannery O'Connor. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1987. xxvii + 118 pp. Edward Kessler. Flannery O'Connor and the Language of Apocalypse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. 163 pp. At a time when the latest orthodoxy in academic literary circles is the vexed topic of "the canon," no recent American writer appears more surely canonical than Flannery O'Connor. Inclusion in the Library of America is probably as close to the rite of canonization as one gets these days, and she is the only writer of her generation so elevated, the youngest to have a volume next to such fixed stars as Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, James and Faulkner. Skeptics might insinuate that she has simply been dead long enough to be "safe,"but surcease has not helped such others as her fellow Georgian Carson Mccullers, whose luster seems to have faded considerably since her death. It seems a very long time now since I, as a graduate student, sat in the dimmed office of the chairman of my department not long after O'Connor's death and broached the subject of a thesis on her fiction. Did I really think she was worthy of such an honor, he solemnly asked me, and I quite as solemnly affirmed my belief that she was. Now one picks up the newspaper to find Alfred Kazin calling her "one of the few American novelists of my time I am sure will be read well into the next century." He is far from alone. O'Connor herself would have been contemptuously dismissive of the current fashion of lavishing theological language on literature; for her, religion was no metaphor, as she said repeatedly and as the pieces in Conversations with Flannery O,Connor remind us. Although part of a series, this slim volume too is a sign of the canonical, the posthumous gathering of the fugitives even when they are not, strictly speaking, "works"--as, for instance, her book reviews for the diocesan papers were, however minor. Nevertheless, most of the articles Rosemary M. Magee has gathered here, some of them in question-and-answer format, others "profiles" or impressionistic pieces based on time spent with O'Connor, first appeared in newspapers and journals now hard to find: it is good to have them made more readily available. 96 Frederick Asals The O'Connor devotee coming to these for the first time, however, will find little that does not have its echo or elaboration elsewhere, although some of us cannot have too much of the dry O'Conn.or wit and sardonic intelligence (on why she prefers publishing stories: "When you publish a novel, the racket is like a fox in the hen house." In response to "What is a short story?": "This is a hellish question inspired by the devil who tempts textbook publishers"). Those qualities are not alwaysto the fore, however: a few of these articles are hardly more than Sunday supplement pieces in which the distinctive laconic O'Connor voice virtually disappears beneath bland journalistic prose. The best of the non-interviews are two articles by Richard Gilman based on a single 1960visit, one written soon after, the second (which masquerades as a review of MysteryandManners) years later, after her death. The latter, penetrating on her strengths and limitations and luminous in its evocation of her presence, is the most movingpiece here. Elsewhere we find runs through the now familiar territory of O'Connor topics, one or another receiving greater emphasis depending on the venue of the work in question, ranging from the more to the less personal: her illness, her peafowl, her reputation as a recluse (invariably debunked), Catholicism, the South, the practice of fiction. Flanneriana, in short, recognizable from letters, reviews, lectures, essays. Rosemary Magee has ordered these pieces according to the date of the writer's or compilees encounter with O'Connor and provided date and place of original publication. Usually this is sufficient, although now and again (will every reader recognize "Wylie"or "the Section Eight School of Southern Writers"?) annotation seems called for. It is very useful to know that the "Robert Donner" who signs one piece is actually Richard...