Flannery O'Connor: A Memorial. - Review - book reviews

FLANNERY O'CONNOR: A MEMORIAL, edited by John J. Quinn, SJ. Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 1995. xiii + 136 pages. $25 cloth; $17 paper.

Flannery O'Connor: A Memorial is an uneven book, at once more and less than its advertising promises. The book is being marketed by Fordham University Press as a reprint of a special 1964 issue of the University of Scranton literary journal Esprit, in which numerous significant remembrances of O'Connor were collected after her death.

The new volume retains a short preface by editor Quinn, an introductory piece by John Clarke, and the large section containing the primary appeal of the now-sold-out special edition of Esprit: a gathering of fifty short pieces--some very short--by writers, critics, and editors. Some famous figures in this group are Elizabeth Bishop, Kay Boyle, Caroline Gordon, Elizabeth Hardwick, John Hawkes, Frank Kermode, Andrew Lytle, Thomas Merton, Orville Prescott, Nathan A. Scott, Jr., Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty. Part of what is interesting about these remembrances is their variety. Some are analytical, some impressionistic. While some take on the tone of praise for O'Connor that one expects in advertising blurbs, others are surprisingly condescending toward her. Katherine Anne Porter's is fairly long, even though she had to telephone it in from a sickbed. The pieces by Saul Bellow, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Lowell are basically short statements of apology for not having time to write anything substantial. For those who may have examined the Esprit issue in the past, it may be time to take another look at some of the comments. It is occasionally refreshing to read commentary from a time when the respectable attitudes toward O'Connor had not thoroughly solidified, and to look for opinions that relate to current matters of debate in O'Connor studies. This reader was struck by Allen Tate's opinion that "all" O'Connor's characters "are possibly damned," by Louis D. Rubin's comment that O'Connor wrote like a man, and by Robie Macauley's report of an anecdote O'Connor once told him about the use of the word "nigger" in one of her stories.

Over a third of this volume consists of material not in the 1964 Esprit issue, but most of this material is reprinted from earlier issues of Esprit or from other magazines. Quinn includes a humorous letter in which O'Connor explains her judging of an undergraduate writing contest. This letter is important because it is available in neither The Habit of Being nor the Library of America's volume of O'Connor's Collected Works. Less in need of inclusion are a short interview (available in Conversations with Flannery O'Connor) and some short quotations plus one full essay from O'Connor's Mystery and Manners. Quinn also reprints several of his own essays from other journals, in which he reviews The Violent Bear It Away; argues for the significance to O'Connor of Joseph Conrad and William F. Lynch, SJ; and reads "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" on literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical levels.

Most of what is missing from the 1964 Esprit issue will not be missed by most readers. The essays, stories, and poems by undergraduates are not the reason the issue sold out. But one does miss some of the art, and one misses all of the photographs--several of them of O'Connor's farm--that were used to expand Porter's remembrance into a very impressive looking section of the magazine.

While Flannery O'Connor: A Memorial could use more careful editing and some shortening of the text, and while the loss of the photographs of O'Connor's world is regrettable, this less-than-essential collection should still be appreciated by serious fans of O'Connor.

MARSHALL BRUCE GENTRY University of Indianapolis

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