I knew Flannery O’Connor was one of America’s great Southern Gothic writers. From her stories, I knew she was a devout Christian, one who stripped the romanticism and sentimentality from Redemption and portrayed it as she saw it: violent, sudden, even grotesque. But until I read her Prayer Journal, I was unaware how seriously and vigorously she struggled with her Self in relation to God, particularly when it came to her artistic ambition.
O’Connor kept her Prayer Journal from 1946 to 1947, while a young woman studying writing at the University of Iowa. Throughout the Journal, she reveals a wisdom far beyond her years. For instance, consider the following:
It does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming. I see my ridiculous self by degrees.
She was around twenty-one when she wrote those lines. Twenty-one. At that age, the only things I was ruminating upon were my boyfriend and getting a spiral perm that would make my hair look like Meg Ryan’s in When Harry Met Sally.
Several struggles emerge from the Prayer Journal, including O’Connor’s frustration with her more remote, intellectualized experience of God, when she wishes to love and yearn for Him with an all-consuming passion, full of lifeblood and breath. This passage expresses that conflict perfectly (and hints at the deadly “Fulfillment” O’Connor would depict in stories like Greenleaf).
Dear Lord please make me want You. It would be the greatest bliss. Not just to want You when I think about You but to want You all the time, to think about You all the time, to have the want driving in me, to have it like a cancer in me. It would kill me like a cancer and that would be the Fulfillment. It is easy for this writing to show a want. There is a want but it is abstract and cold, a dead want that goes well into writing because writing is dead.
However, the most recurrent (and to me, the most compelling) struggle O’Connor describes is the one between her artistic ego and God, between her burning desire to be a great writer and her equally burning conviction that her talent and ability flow solely from God. On the one hand, O’Connor sees God as the one true source of her creativity, positing herself as but a humble scribe:
Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story — just like the typewriter was mine . . . Dear God, I wish you would take care of making it a sound story because I don’t know how, just like I didn’t know how to write it but it came.
On the other hand, and simultaneously, O’Connor isn’t satisfied with being an average writer. She longs to be an excellent writer, one of distinction — then chastises herself for the longing:
Oh dear God I want to write a novel, a good novel. I want to do this for a good feeling & for a bad one. The bad one is uppermost. The psychologists say it is the natural one. Let me get away dear God from all things thus “natural”. Help me to get what is more than natural into my work — help me to love & bear with my work on that account. If I have to sweat for it, dear God, let it be as in Your service. I would like to be intelligently holy.
What is this “bad feeling” fueling O’Connor’s ambition — the feeling psychologists justify as “natural”? My guess is that it’s the self-satisfaction we all feel when we receive worldly acclaim and recognition. While “psychologists” might rationalize such satisfaction as the ego justly reaping its rewards, O’Connor sees it as minefield of spiritual dangers. Self-satisfaction distracts and diverts from the God-driven purpose of work, turning it into an indulgence of the ego. Worse, left unchecked, self-satisfaction transforms God-given gifts into instruments of casual cruelty. The following anecdote O’Connor relates about a fellow writing student is telling:
Dear God, In a way I got a good punishment for my lack of charity to Mr. Rothburg last year. He came back at me today like a tornado which while it didn’t hurt me too much yet ruined my show. All this is about charity. Dear Lord please make my mind vigilant about that. I say many many too many uncharitable things about people everyday. I say them because they make me look clever. Please help me to realize practically how cheap this is.
After reading this, I kind-of, sort-of wanted to reach across time and space and give Flannery a hug. Haven’t we all been there? You have that joke or that quip about a fellow human being who has never done you any harm, but who said something ridiculous, or made a cringeworthy error, or reacted with too much emotion. Maybe this fellow human being is a novice at an endeavor in which you shine and have already achieved honors. Maybe you don’t like this fellow human being’s politics. Or maybe this fellow human being is simply a bit of an Odd Bird. So you make that joke or that quip — despite the still, small voice within you telling you to shush — and it’s met with laughter (or if it’s online, with lots of “likes” and “loves”). Which feels freakin’ great, because that is the sugar-rush of ego validation. Yet it also feels like (unless you are a sociopath) diminishment, like you’ve become a smaller person by small degrees.
O’Connor understood she possessed a singular talent that presented a host of temptations for self-involvement and pride; she fought those temptations with constant self-reminders that God was the source of her art. But what happened when she suffered writer’s block? What to do when the source seemed to dry up? She responded with both faith and fear, in an entry that reads less as a prayer than as a personal sorting-out of these conflicting forces:
I want so to love God all the way. At the same time I want all the things that seem opposed to it — I want to be a fine writer. Any success will tend to swell my head — unconsciously even. If I ever do get to be a fine writer, it will not be because I am a fine writer but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He Kindly wrote for me. Right at present this does not seem to be His policy. I can’t write a thing. But I’ll continue to try — that is the point. And at every dry point, I will be reminded Who is doing the work when it is done & Who is not doing it at that moment. Right now I wonder if God will ever do any more writing for me. He has promised His grace; I am not so sure about the other. Perhaps I have not been thankful enough for what has gone before.
I’ll continue to try — that is the point. This seems to mark a turning point in how O’Connor views herself as a writer: not as someone who merely channels God’s inspiration into words, but as a craftswoman who relentlessly hones and perfects her words to convey God’s truth. The struggle inherent in this work is all that matters, not the final story or novel or associated worldly praise:
I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship . . . The word craftsmanship takes care of the work angle & the word aesthetic the truth angle. Angle. It will be a life struggle with no consummation. When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle. All our lives are consumed in possessing struggle but only when the struggle is cherished & directed to a final consummation outside of this life is it of any value. I want to be the best artist it is possible for me to be, under God.