Farrar, Straus & Giroux has just published a short, delicate and extraordinary book, a facsimile copy of Flannery O'Connor's Prayer Journal, written when she was a 20 year old student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1946 and 1947.
It was intended, of course, as a private journal, not for publication, and was found among her papers after her death. At that precocious age her passionate religiosigy and her remarkable gift for writing prefigure her later published work, most usefully gathered in the Library of America one-volume edition of her collected published works. As Marilynne Robinson notes in the review of the journal reprinted below, O'Connor's journal is addressed to God. "The brillance that would make her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in [it]... This little journal puts its reader a step closer to one touching and remarkable young mind." And soul. She is already aware that there is no way we can know God, that we are always getting in the way of our relationship with God, although we can in a host of ways ask God's help in getting less in the way, even getting out of the way. But, in O'Connor's inspired use of the word, our attention is always fugitive.
Reading O'Connor's words, I sometimes wonder why it does not occur to all of us to create at one or another time in our lives something kin to her prayer journal. That leads me to want to understand how that journal, in more than aesthetic terms, evolved into her published writing. What does it have in common with those stories that are at once so wonderful, compelling and hard — Wise Blood, A Good Man is Hard to Find, The Violent Bear It Away, Everything That Rises Must Converge.
After all, her journal is a youthful expression of what we commonly call our practice or our vocation, if by those terms we mean our most wholehearted devotion to life.
Perhaps for most of us it is less a matter of conscious choice than what we have called, in various times and places, what has come to us unbidden, as accretion, conversion, discovery, a conversation that began in an ordinary way and then somehow became extraordinary, in Martin Buber's language, a transition from I-It to I-You or I-Thou. Our true vocation or calling may appear slowly or in a radical encounter or discovery. We may have been saying it, practicing for it, a long time, and one day come upon the familiar in a way that is wholly new, find it extraordinary, then with practice ordinary again, a gift of our capacity for life. We grew up saying, say, the Lord's Prayer — "on earth as it is in heaven." Then we may be granted a realization of what is truly meant by "Not my will, Lord, but Thine." Eliot wrote in "Ash Wednesday," "Teach us to sit still, even among these rocks, our peace in His will." And -— at least if we are given anything like her gifts, even in much lesser measure, we are always learning, practicing, forgetting, learning again, finding practice where we least expected it.
______________________
I want to include here for interested Reckonings readers, three things. The order is important if unconventional: first, a review of the slim book in the current (November 17, 2013) New York Times Book Review by one of our finest contemporary novelists (Housekeeping, Gilead and Home) and essayists (especially When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012); second, a brief introduction to the book by the publisher, and third, an excerpt from O'Connor's journal itself.
Marilynne Robinson's review is most valuable as an introduction, as Robinson, a woman and a gifted writer of great intelligence and sensitivity, familiar with O'Connor's later published stories and novels, and a person of faith, comes closer to meeting the young Flannery O'Connor on her own ground (something that can only be approximated, except by God). The publisher's introduction is a more conventional introduction, perhaps, and still valuable, even eloquent.
I hope my wish to offer the last, a brief excerpt from the journal itself, is self-explanatory.
1. Here is Marilynne Robinson's review.
November 15, 2013
The New York Times Book Review
The Believer
By Marilynne Robinson
A PRAYER JOURNAL
By Flannery O’Connor
96 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $18.
This slender, charming book must be approached with a special tact. To read it feels a little like an intrusion on inwardness itself. The volume contains, alongside a lightly corrected transcription, a facsimile of the Sterling notebook in which Flannery O’Connor, just 20 years old, began a journal addressed to God. Written in her neat hand, it is reproduced complete with the empty final pages (her concluding words are “there is nothing left to say of me”) and not omitting a bit of musical notation floating on the inside of the back cover. The prayers, attempts at prayer and meditations on faith and art contained in it were written in 1946 and 1947, while O’Connor was a student in Iowa. The brilliance that would make her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in them.
The complexity of O’Connor’s thinking, together with the largely flawless pages in her hand, suggest that these entries may be fair copies of earlier drafts. Clearly O’Connor’s virtuosity makes her self-conscious. Young as she was, new to writing, she could only have been pleased, even awed, at having produced these beautiful sentences. Perhaps nothing written is finally meant to go unread, even if the reader is only a creature of the writer’s mind, an attentive and exacting self that compels refinements of honesty. After a little joke about the pedestrian uses we would make of a knowledge of heaven if we had been given one, she says, remembering her intended Hearer, “But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered so.” Her mind is examined, faith questioned, weakness confessed, powers tried as they might not have been under the eye of any human observer. Youth and loneliness and the unspent energies of a singular mind are testing the possible and must be allowed free play.
It is the religious sensibility reflected in this journal that makes it as eloquent on the subject of creativity as it is on the subject of prayer. O’Connor’s awareness of her gifts gives her a special kind of interest in them. Having concluded one early entry by asking the Lord to help her “with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing,” she begins the next entry: “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.”
Every writer wonders where fictional ideas come from. The best of them often appear very abruptly after a period of imaginative drought. And, mysteriously, they really are good ideas, much superior to the contrivances of conscious invention. Such experiences are by no means exclusive to writers with religious worldviews. But believing them to be literal gifts grants them an objective existence they seem actually to deserve. This entails problems, of course. Fiction rarely shows a divine imprimatur, as its mortal creators are well aware. I would be curious to know what story or part of a story by O’Connor should be attributed to the Lord. It can seem self-aggrandizing or simply bizarre to ascribe any thought or work to a seemingly external source, named or unnamed. Nevertheless, Hesiod, Pindar and any number of poets and prophets before and after them have declared indebtedness of this kind. If they, and O’Connor, were naïve, sophistication has made language poorer. There is no way now to describe an experience many a writer can attest to, having been surprised by it, and having enjoyed it as a particular pleasure and reward of the art. Religion is by its nature more accommodating to the unaccountable than rationalism ever can be.
While O’Connor was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop she was also a daily communicant at St. Mary’s Catholic Church at the edge of campus. Her journal reflects a conflict, in her mind at least, between a skeptical intellectual environment and the faith she sometimes anxiously sustains. She says: “I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery. I do not want it to be fear which keeps me in the church.” She knows all the arguments against religion. They seem to have changed little over the last 70 years, so there is no need to rehearse them here. Considering the threat she feels them to be, it is striking that atheism, in an apparently Southern, vernacular incarnation with nothing intellectual about it, is at the center of “Wise Blood,” the novel she had already begun to write and submit to be read in workshop. This is a tale in which pathos tips into pathology and violence, answered by a penance of self-mutilation and suffering. Yet the prose is absolutely brilliant, sentence by sentence, simile by simile, and so relentlessly inventive it feels comic.
The young writer prays, “Please let Christian principles permeate my writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for Christian principles to permeate.” At prayer she is scrupulous in her candor, and a little wry therefore. She seems already to be making important decisions about the means by which she will carry forward her intention to write as a Christian, influenced by her reaction to the assertive skepticism and the fashionable theism she senses around her. She says, “Give me the grace, dear God, to see the bareness and the misery of the places where You are not adored but desecrated.” This might serve as a gloss on the fiction she was writing at the time, which conjures such a world. She asks: “Am I trying to shock with God? Am I trying to push Him in there violently, feet foremost? Maybe that’s all right. Maybe if I’m doing it it’s all right?” Certainly by the standards of the most tentative or perfunctory reverence her language can seem transgressive. Her religious sincerity is beyond question, but the forms of its expression raise many questions. This is no criticism. It is the honorable work of any writer who touches on great matters to provoke. And it is a discipline of writing well to allow the fiction to discover itself, however it may startle its writer’s intentions as it does so. She says of the story for which she has thanked God: “I am not trying to disparage anybody’s religion although when it was coming out, I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it was going to mean. . . . Please don’t let me have to scrap the story because it turns out to mean more wrong than right — or any wrong.”
The particular pleasure of life in Iowa City rests not so much in the fact that the girl beside you on the bus or behind you in line might well be pondering a great and turbulent tradition of thought and belief, and finding new language to explore it. This could be true anywhere. It is that here the privilege of hearing or seeing her thoughts as fiction or poetry, even seeing them emerge and develop, is widely shared. This little journal puts its reader a step closer to one touching and remarkable young mind.
Marilynne Robinson is the author of three novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gilead,” and four books of nonfiction. Her essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books was published last year [2012].
2. This is the introduction to A Prayer Journal offered by its publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux:
" I would like to write a beautiful prayer,' writes the young Flannery O’Connor in this deeply spiritual journal, recently discovered among her papers in Georgia. “There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise.” Written between 1946 and 1947 while O’Connor was a student far from home at the University of Iowa, A Prayer Journal is a rare portal into the interior life of the great writer. Not only does it map O’Connor’s singular relationship with the divine, but it shows how entwined her literary desire was with her yearning for God. “I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually . . . I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God. Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You.”
O’Connor could not be more plain about her literary ambition: “Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted,” she writes. Yet she struggles with any trace of self-regard: “Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story.”
As W. A. Sessions, who knew O’Connor, writes in his introduction [in the book itself], it was no coincidence that she began writing the stories that would become her first novel,Wise Blood, during the years when she wrote these singularly imaginative meditations. Including a facsimile of the entire journal in O’Connor’s own hand, A Prayer Journal is the record of a brilliant young woman’s coming-of-age, a cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.
A quick interpolation, an excerpt from James Parker's review in The Atlantic:
“Miraculous . . . Both a blueprint for her fiction and a prophetic dreaming-out of her life’s purpose and pattern . . . Beneath the surface, as recorded on the 47 and a half handwritten pages to which we now have access, [O’Connor] was refining her vocation with the muscularity and spiritual ferocity of a young saint-in-waiting.”
___________________
3. And here, finally, is the brief excerpt from Flannery O'Connor's journal itself, made available by the publisher:
“Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon . . .
“I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside . . .
“I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You.”