I’m reading “Letters of Flannery O’Conner The Habit of Being” …It’s so strange looking at the life of someone who was so similar to myself. When I had first read a short story by Flannery O’Connor in college I picked her story to write my paper on not because I thought the story was fun to read-not at all. I remember forcing myself through it. But I also remember afterwards thinking about it a lot-it was just…strange. Unique. Layers to think about. Then when I went to write my paper on this story I looked up author information. She was an Irish American woman who was chronically ill. I’ve meant to read this book ever since.
I’m not far into it, but I’m already enjoying it and writing things down as I go.
The introduction is written by Sally Fitzgerald, a friend of hers. She talks about how Flannery O’Conner percieved things differently, probably from being ill. I know what she’s talking about-it’s hard to explain, but I know what she’s talking about. Things are more acute, I’m more aware, more observant, everything means more-and these are all attributes I thought I had prior to becoming ill. Being sick has changed so many things in my life-sometimes I find myself almost being grateful for being sick.
In a letter to Robert Lowell and his wife she wrote this: “I am making out fine in spite of any conflicting stories…I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe more closely, or so I tell myself.”
The title of the book, The Habit of Being, comes from the concept of “habit of art” which she had read about in her early years. Habit in this case means “an attitude or quality of mind, as essential to the real artist as talent”. In the introduction to the book Sally Fitzgerald talks about Flannery O’Connor, the habit of art in her life, and then says this “Less deliberately perhaps, and only in the course of living in accordance with her formative beliefs, as she consciously and profoundly wished to do, she acquired as well, I think, a second distinguished habit, which I have called “the havit of being”:an excellence not only of action but of interior disposition and activity that increasingly reflected the object, the being, which specified it, and was itself reflected in what she did and said.”
I love reading about this woman who loved walking to her mailbox everyday. Who exchanged letters with people she had never met and kept friendships that way. Who loved the absurd. Loved quietly pointing out the contradictions that amused her. She would cut out newspaper clippings of things like birth announcements of babies with strange names and send them along to her friends.
She took her writing very seriously, and was very honest about the way she wrote. In a world full of articles about how you’r'e “supposed” to write, I find this wonderfully refreshing.
In one of the early letters in her book she is writing to this man in publishing who had criticized her work. She wrote this: “In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. The finish book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now.”
Oooooooh, how wonderful! How splendid. How strange it is to read about someone so much like myself in all of these ways where I feel like no one can relate.
