The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [0]
THE COMPLETE STORIES
Contents:
Introduction by Robert Giroux
The Geranium
The Barber
Wildcat
The Crop
The Turkey
The Train
The Peeler
The Heart of the Park
A Stroke of Good Fortune
Enoch and the Gorilla
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
A Late Encounter with the Enemy
The Life You Save May Be Your Own
The River
A Circle in the Fire
The Displaced Person
A Temple of the Holy Ghost
The Artificial Nigger
Good Country People
You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead
Greenleaf
A View of the Woods
The Enduring Chill
The Comforts of Home
Everything That Rises Must Converge
The Partridge Festival
The Lame Shall Enter First
Why Do the Heathen Rage?
Revelation
Parker’s Back
Judgement Day
Introduction
Flannery O’Connor’s first book has never, up to now, been published. It was entitled The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories and consists of the first six stories in this volume. The title page of the original manuscript, in the library of the University of Iowa, bears the legend, “A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, in the Department of English, in the Graduate College of the State University of Iowa.” It is dated June 1947 and a separate page carries a dedication to her teacher, Paul Engle.
At their first meeting in his office, in 1946, Mr. Engle recalls, he was unable to understand a word of Flannery’s native Georgian tongue: “Embarrassed, I asked her to write down what she had just said on a pad. She wrote: ‘My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writer’s Workshop?’… I told her to bring examples of her writing and we would consider her, late as it was. Like Keats, who spoke Cockney but wrote the purest sounds in English, Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive: just like Flannery herself. For a few weeks we had this strange and yet trusting relationship. Soon I understood those Georgia pronunciations.
The stories were quietly filled with insight, shrewd about human weakness, hard and compassionate… She was shy about having them read, and when it was her turn to have a story presented in the Workshop, I would read it aloud anonymously.
Robert Penn Warren was teaching a semester while Flannery was at the University of Iowa; there was a scene about a black and a white man, and Warren criticized it… It was changed. Flannery, in a letter to Robert Giroux dated July 13, 1971, always had a flexible and objective view of her own writing, constantly revising, and in every case improving. The will to be a writer was adamant; nothing could resist it, not even her own sensibility about her own work. Cut, alter, try it again… Sitting at the back of the room, silent, Flannery was more of a presence than the exuberant talkers who serenade every writing-class with their loudness.
The only communicating gesture she would make was an occasional amused and shy smile at something absurd. The dreary chair she sat in glowed.
The publishing career of this unknown writer of twenty-one had already started. Flannery mailed “The Geranium” to the editors of Accent as early as February 1946. We are indebted to Daniel Curley, former editor of Accent for verifying this date. They accepted it at once and printed it in their summer issue. On the basis of the stories she later incorporated into her novel-in-progress, Wise Blood, Mr. Engle recommended her for a prize offered by a publisher for a first novel.
In the spring of 1947 she was awarded this prizes—the sum of $750, which was to serve as part of the advance against royalties if the publisher ultimately accepted the novel.
Flannery received her master’s degree that summer; Sewanee Review published “The Train” the next spring; in June 1948 she took the important and crucial step of finding a literary agent and a lifelong friend, Elizabeth McKee. Miss McKee placed her story “The Capture” (entitled “The Turkey” in the thesis) with Mademoiselle in November. It was shortly after this—I was not