Dust for the Sake of Art

MYSTERY AND MANNERS by Flannery O'Connor. Occasional prose, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. 237 pages. Farrar, Straus & G/Voux. $6.95.

The fiction of the late Flannery O'Connor is distinguished by an uncommon and otherworldly density. The inhabitants of her Southern creative country are grotesques who are viewed as through a Catholic prism darkly. Larger than life, her creations are yet pervaded by an air of death; their clear and dramatic actions nevertheless seem metaphysically resonant, touched by overtones of primitive brooding. Flannery O'Connor's achievement is all the more remarkable--not to say miraculous --because of her meager literary output. She was just 39 years old when she died five years ago. Incurably ill from the age of 26, she had only been able to publish two short novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away) and a single collection of short stories (A Good Man Is Hard to Find). Now her steadfast friends have made a collection of her nonfiction prose.

Courageous Approach. Not surprisingly, the occasional essays in Mystery and Manners can do little to enhance her already considerable reputation. Nonetheless, they do further illuminate its foundations and the problem of being a true Southerner, a devout Catholic and a practicing creative artist at the same time. They emphasize just how tough-minded, courageous and dedicated Flannery O'Connor was in her approach to the art of fiction.

Living in the Protestant Bible Belt both delighted and challenged her. "To be great storytellers," she said, "we need something to measure ourselves against. It takes a story to make a story. It takes a story of mythic dimensions. In the Protestant South, the Scriptures fill this role." She asserts her Catholicism with a most graceful catholicity. "The writer should never be ashamed of staring," she wrote. "When the Catholic novelist closes his own eyes and tries to see with the eyes of the Church, the result is another addition to that large body of pious trash for which we have so long been famous." Instead, she consciously sought to use her belief as the light by which she saw, making her religion implicit in her vision rather than explicitly intrusive in her work. If the theme of redemption by Jesus Christ lay at the center of her work, this was simply because "what I see in the world I see in its relation to that."

Gothic Eccentricity. Unlike many Catholic writers, Miss O'Connor never felt caught in the traditional bind between religion and art. "When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist," she said, "I have had to reply ruefully that because I am a Catholic, I cannot afford to be less than an artist." What she did was make literature her highest office by accepting the Thomist dictum: "The good of an art is to be found, not in the craftsman, but in the product of the art" "The fiction writer," she observed, "writes for the good of what he is writing. Yet what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God."

Her technical preceptors in literature were Henry James and Joseph Conrad, two authors who shared an ability to interweave seamlessly dramatic theme and moral vision. Pooh-poohing grandiose abstractions, she persistently reasserted that the prime requisites for fiction are specific details, concrete images and exact sensations. "The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you."

She defended her own obsession with Gothic eccentricity in plain terms. "To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. It is most certainly Christ-haunted." She pursued her own art with a strict attention to the order, proportion and radiance of what she was creating. Perhaps that is why Mystery and Manners inadvertently provides a fitting epitaph for the books that she so artfully created before her death. "The fiction writer presents mystery through man ners, grace through nature," she wrote in 1957, 'But when he finishes there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula."

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