The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [3]
In the five years between 1947, when a draft of the first chapter of Wise Blood was written, and 1952, Flannery’s development was amazing. In the three years following, she wrote better and better.
Starting late in 1952 with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a masterpiece of a story, she turned out one beauty after another, including “The River,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Displaced Person,” “The Artificial Nigger” and “Good Country People.” Catherine Carver, whom we were fortunate enough to have as an editor, and who worked with Flannery at this period, brought each new story into my office with more or less the same remark, “Wait till you read this one!” Early in 1955 Flannery completed work on her second book, a collection of these stories which she entitled A Good Man Is Hard to Find. In January we sent it to press, having set publication for June. I remember our amusement at Evelyn Waugh’s reaction to the advance proofs we sent him: “If these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed remarkable.” At the beginning of April, before the book appeared, I resigned from the firm and joined the house with which I have since been associated. When Flannery sent me an inscribed copy, soon after my departure, I felt a twinge of sadness that my editorial association with her books had ended.
Once again fate rearranged what seemed to be an unalterable course. After the very successful publication of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery was offered a new contract about which she asked my advice, saying she wanted to stay as long as Catherine Carver remained as her editor. In that case, I suggested, why not ask that such a stipulation be incorporated in the contract? This was not readily granted, but Flannery had made up her mind and in the end she got what she wanted. Within three years, after Catherine Carver and Denver Lindley had left, it came to pass that Flannery was free to join the house she remained with until her death. We contracted for her third book, “a novel in progress,” on April 15, 1958, and published The Violent Bear It Away in 1960. Then I learned that Wise Blood was out of print, and we soon acquired this classic work.
She wrote a short and eloquent preface for the second edition, describing the book as “a comic novel about a Christian malgre lui” and stating that it had been written by “an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.”
She ended by defining her theme, free will or freedom, as “a mystery, and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.” We reissued Wise Blood in 1962, on the tenth anniversary of the original publication, and it lives on both in cloth and paperback editions. Didn’t some wise man define a classic as a book that does not stay out of print?
One of Flannery’s admirers was Thomas Merton, who became more of a fan with each new book of hers. Over the years I came to see how much the two had in common—a highly developed sense of comedy, deep faith, great intelligence. The aura of aloneness surrounding each of them was not an accident. It was their metier, in which they refined and deepened their very different talents in a short span of time. They both died at the height of their powers.
Finally, they were both as American as one can be. When publication of Merton’s The Sign of Jonas was forbidden by the Abbot General in France, I was able to obtain its release only with the help of Jacques Maritain, who wrote him in beautiful French (the Abbot General did not read English and consequently had not read The Sign of Jonas), explaining what the “American Trappist” was up to.
As for Flannery, whose