A Prayer Journal

By Flannery O’Connor, edited by W.A. SessionsFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013Since she was so marvelously prolific, Flannery O’Connor’s artistic legacy--two novels and some of the finest short stories of the 20th century—will forever inspire conjecture about what she might have written if lupus had not taken her life at the age of thirty-nine. Alas, unless a lost novel suddenly appears, the best consolation available to her admirers might be the recent discovery of a private journal that she wrote between January 1947 and September 1947, when still in her early twenties. The collection provides an illuminating portal into O’Connor’s youthful but serious mind, and presages her more mature thinking on the mission of the Catholic novelist in what she considered an “unbelieving age.”W.A. Sessions, the editor of the journal and a friend of O’Connor’s, aptly titled the book A Prayer Journal, since it is essentially an epistolary collection with most entries quite literally addressed to God. Written informally and even intimately, but also deferentially, it seems as if O’Connor was grasping for the proper tone to correspond with her Lord:

I would like to write a beautiful prayer but I have nothing to do it from. There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise; but I cannot do it. Yet at some insipid moment when I may be thinking of floor wax or pigeon eggs the opening of a beautiful prayer may come up from my subconscious and lead me to write something exalted.

O’Connor concedes that these are not “traditional prayers”; true prayer is “of the moment” and not as “premeditated” as these ruminative petitions for a tonic to haunting self-doubt. She recited the more common prayers for most of her life to no avail since her attention was always “fugitive,” and the feeling that should accompany their incantation eluded her. Despite her reputation for religious orthodoxy, she turned to alternative sources of spiritual nourishment, essay-like prayer and fiction, to consecrate her relationship with God.O’Connor notes that the principal purpose of the letters is to express “adoration” for God, but much of their substance swings from distressed supplication to self-effacing confession. She sometimes prayed for guidance in prayer itself, to learn to love and draw near to a personal being who resists full comprehension. She seems to grope for a more visceral commitment and for the courage to surrender herself to God in a way that inspires rather than constrains her artistic creativity and rational powers; she pines to be “intelligently holy,” anticipating a preoccupation she would revisit ten years later in her essay “The Church and the Fiction Writer” (1957), which investigates “what effect Catholic dogma has on the fiction writer who is Catholic.” She hungers for a beatitude that nurtures her creativity, not doctrinal shackles that constrain it. She even entreats God to supply her with a surfeit of inspiration, going as far as to describe the divine as the epiphanic source of her creative output, reducing herself to a mere vessel of God’s will:

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.

But O’Connor wants more than to simply channel God’s word through some literary evangelism—she wants to be a “fine writer,” to write a “good novel,” and she wants to publish as well:

Please let Christian principle permeate my writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for Christian principles to permeate.

These pages are teeming with expressions of O’Connor’s belletristic ambition, concomitants to her fears of never surpassing “mediocrity.” And while her longing for literary success, a common refrain in her prayers, often reveals itself as a desire for ordinary emoluments, her spiritual aspirations cannot be so conventionally consummated. She makes this clear when she beseeches God for the strength to devote herself to pursuits that celebrate his greatness: “I do not mean becoming a nun.” She wants to surrender herself to God but not at the price of her artistic yearnings; her devotion to God must be as a writer. She gives herself to God as long as the constitutive core of that self, her artistic Eros, is received fully intact, as delivered.O’Connor chronically frets that her worshipful missives, just as pensive as they are personal, will devolve into mere “metaphysical exercises,” philosophically detached cogitations that stimulate the intellect at the expense of stirring the soul. She agonizes over the possibility that she will fall “prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery,” anxious that she is “always on the brink of assenting” to the popular but ostensibly dogmatic arguments against theistic belief.Herein lies, in embryonic form, a theme O’Connor wrestled with her entire writing life: the relationship between the requisites of artistic creation and spiritual devotion, especially given the secular character of the modern world. She grappled with brokering a detente between them, delicately balancing two aims: avoiding a simplistic piety that precludes a realistic view of the world, and resisting the overreaching empiricism that dismisses everything connected to the supernatural.In her searching but still unripe reflections in A Prayer Journal, O’Connor asks to be inoculated against philosophical hubris, or what she calls the “explanations of the psychologists” or, more stridently, “that cowardice the psychologists would gloat so over and explain so glibly.” In her 1963 essay “Novelist and Believer,” she labels the sophisticated but ideologically calcified rejection of the soul a “clinical bias,” or alternately, a “sociological bias.” More than once in A Prayer Journal she denies identifying herself as a philosopher (or a theologian, for that matter) but strains to construct philosophical ramparts against the materialistic incredulity of modern thought. O’Connor often feels shaken by rationalist attacks, sometimes derisively delivered, against her faith; she confesses that her “mind is a most insecure thing, not to be depended upon,” and, referring to those who oppose science to faith, says “their arguments sound so good it is hard not to fall into them.”O’Connor’s somewhat unfledged writing in A Prayer Journal dwells on the challenges the faithful encounter in a time of spiritual decline. At the age of 21, her faith was unassured, and she mined the possibilities for fortifying it while progressing as an artist. Often, her frame of reference comprised the least religious writers:

Dear God, I don’t want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don’t want to have created God to my own image as they’re so fond of saying. Please give me the necessary faith, oh Lord, and please don’t let it be as hard to get as Kafka made it.

For all her brilliance, O’Connor was capable of succumbing to childish melodrama: “My thoughts are so far away from God. He might as well not have made me.” Or even worse:

What I’m asking for is really very ridiculous. Oh Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. But then God can do that—make mystics out of cheeses. But why he should he do it for an ingrate slothful & dirty creature like me.

Beside O’Connor’s expressions of immature hyperbole, though, are penetrating considerations on the nature of art and religion:

To maintain any thread in the novel there must be a view of the world behind it & the most important single item under this view of [the] world is conception of love—divine, natural, & perverted. It is probably possible to say that when a view of love is present—a broad enough view—no more need be added to make the worldview.

Ten years later, her confidence in her Catholicism had blossomed, and she was less concerned with the tug of war between art and religion than between art and religion as a collaborative pair on the one hand and modern philosophical thought on the other. Even in “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” where she considers the very real problem of Catholic writers who are “victims of the parochial aesthetic and the cultural insularity” that religion can generate, her primary aim is to demonstrate the kinship between a Christian worldview which includes the miraculous and an unflinching literary realism. A far cry from diffidently enjoining God to protect her fragile faith, she now discusses her belief in God as a precondition of good fiction.For O’Connor, faith and fiction are necessarily wed, a matrimony demanded by the peculiar character of modernity. In “The Church and the Fiction Writer” she writes,

When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.

Modernity, according to O’Connor, is defined by a paradox, both epistemological and moral in character: the age is possessed by the pretense that the world now reveals itself exactly as it is, shorn of obsolete religious categories. The modern man is “increasingly convinced that the reaches of reality end very close to the surface, that there is no ultimate divine source, that the things of the world do not pour forth from God...”However, it is precisely this philosophical prejudice clothed in the gauzy garb of enlightenment that closes the modern mind, shuttering it to the mystery that pervades all human affairs. The self-congratulatory conceit that reality has been fully demystified actually pinches the modern horizon, squeezing out fundamental human experiences that can no longer be adequately understood or described. The atheistic novelist must presume that there is no God and, as a consequence, can never passably convey the fundamental human experience of divinity. Speaking of writers like Kafka, Camus, and Hemingway, O’Connor explains:

As great as much of this fiction is, as much as it reveals a wholehearted effort to find the only true ultimate concern, as much as in many cases it represents religious values of a high order, I do not believe that it can adequately represent in fiction the Central religious experience.

Art, as O’Connor, understood it, has a much greater kinship to religion than philosophy, since both art and religion are forms of realism. “There is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism,” she once wrote. And both the novelist and the believer share a “distrust of the abstract, a respect for boundaries, and a desire to penetrate the surface of reality.” In “The Novelist and Believer,” O’Connor argues the overarching goal of the fiction writer is to capture the visible world in its concreteness:

As a novelist, the major part of my task is to make everything, even an ultimate concern, as solid, as concrete, as specific as possible. The novelist begins his work where human knowledge begins—with the senses; he works through the limitations of matter, and unless he is writing fantasy, he has to stay within the concrete possibilities of his culture.

But the modern mind, O’Connor contends, is mired in abstraction, insensitive to the opportunities for transcendence and grace embedded within ordinary experience. In fact, the central vice of modern thinking is sentimentality, an “excess, a distortion of sentiment,” or a disfigurement of the often austere truths of the human condition. For O’Connor, sentimentality can result in a contrived innocence or quixotic piety, or it can descend into the pornographic. She generally uses the term to denote a depiction of human life that neglects an essential feature like our fallen natures or our openness to possibilities for grace. O’Connor counts pornography as a species of sentimentality since it delinks our erotic longings from its “hard purposes,” demoting sex to “simply an experience for its own sake.”O’Connor was a believing Catholic and felt compelled to write as one: “If the Catholic writer hopes to reveal mysteries, he will have to do it by describing truthfully what he sees from where he is.” She never considered her “fixed dogma” an impediment to creativity but, rather, an “added dimension” that opened up spiritual vistas denied to others, horizons of supernatural experience “many cannot, in conscience, acknowledge.”Modernity, as O’Connor appraised it, is allergic to an unalloyed realism that takes seriously the full, kaleidoscopic breadth of human life that connects nature to grace. The volatile truth about our condition—in all its beauty and horror—permanently lies outside the perimeter of any academic school. “The virtues of art, like the virtues of faith, are such that they reach beyond the limitations of the intellect, beyond any mere theory that a writer may entertain.” But modern philosophy is infatuated with recondite revisions of lived experience, rendered blind by its own indulgent sense of wisdom. In “Good Country People,” a short story published in 1955, the character Hulga has a Ph.D. in philosophy, ostentatiously quotes Malebranche, and approvingly reads Heidegger. She is contemptuous of religious belief and considers herself relieved of its benighted tyranny. She is also remarkably gullible, made vulnerable to the malice of others by her own philosophical self-satisfaction, and is eventually taken advantage of by a young southern boy unschooled in letters but learned in cunning deceit. His parting words to Hulga capture the spirit of the age: “I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!”Gothic hyperbole was the arrow of choice in O’Connor’s literary quiver, the kind of grim exaggeration that jostles the reader out of a slumbering complacency. “In these times, the most reliable path to reality is by way of the grotesque,” she wrote. Not content to preach to the choir, she aimed her message at the unconverted, writing with all the purpose of a missionary who insists on demonstrating the truth, not proselytizing it:

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use the more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock; for the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.

O’Connor’s ecumenical vocation was buoyed by hopefulness but not romantically so—she believed the odds were stacked against her fiction loosening the white-knuckled grip of secularity:

The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with this God is how he shall make the experience—which is both natural and supernatural—understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well-nigh insurmountable one.

O’Connor seemed to believe that her emphasis on the grotesque was a kind of second sailing, the best literary strategy available given that the bulk of her audience was ideologically hostile. She thought there could be no “great religious fiction until we have again that happy combination of believing artist and believing society.” Sometimes, she concedes that the serious writer needn’t be Christian as long as he recognizes something akin to original sin, “whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not.” However, the Christian writer has a distinct advantage over his “pagan colleagues” by dint of the fact that he “recognizes sin as sin.”In what she considered a recalcitrantly, even gaudily godless age, O’Connor enlisted the help of fiction and religion to uncover a reality moldering under the weight of false enlightenment. In place of the venerable tension between faith and reason, the tensile dyad the German philosopher Leo Strauss said animated the entire history of the West, O’Connor substituted an outright conflict between a Christ-haunted art and an excessively abstruse, modern philosophy.A Prayer Journal reveals her first attempts—sometimes green but never callow—at comprehending her charge as a writer inspired by revelation in a world deaf to its calling. This is a rare invitation to inspect the private thoughts of an artist whose life was despairingly short but whose legacy is long and deep. It is a legacy she longed for:

The intellectual & artistic delights God gives us are visions & like visions we pay for them; & and the thirst for the vision doesn’t necessarily carry with it a thirst for the attendant suffering.... 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.

____Ivan Kenneally is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York.