Habit of Being, an Introduction

As you might guess from the title and URL of my blog, I love Flannery O'Connor. I named my first car after one of her peacocks (Colonel Eggbert). I fantasize about meeting her in heaven. Also, God.

If you, like most people who are acquainted with Flan Flan, only know her through her most famous story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," you may wonder what's so great about this woman who wrote Southern Grotesque fiction and died of Lupus in the sixties. Let me help you.

Beginning tonight, I will intermittently make blog entries which present my favorite moments from Habit of Being, a 600 pg collection of Flannery's letters. I'll arrange them by subject so you can know up front whether or not you'll be interested. Consider this entry a sampler plate of O'Connor quotes. Maybe, like me, you'll find yourself steadily falling in love with this woman from Georgia who raised peacocks and wrote stories about men who steal wooden legs from girls. Who knows?

I am doing fairly well these days, though I am practically bald-headed on top and have a watermelon face. I think that this is going to be permanent… I stay strictly out of the sun and strictly do not take any exercise. No great hardship.

1-25-53

I have just got back from 2 days in NYC. There is one advantage in it because although you see several people you wish you didn’t know, you see thousands you’re glad you don’t know.

11-5-49

I have got my last draft off to the publisher and now am raising ducks like a respectable citizen. I have twenty-one. However, if the Lord is willing, I am shortly going to eat all twenty-one of them and start another novel.

10-18-51

I had to go have my picture taken for the purposes of Harcourt, Brace. They were all bad. (The pictures.) The one I sent looked as if I had just bitten my grandmother and that this was one of my few pleasures, but all the rest were worse. We liked your Christmas card very much and recognized yer assorted children.

Early 1952

Miss B. is still violently interested in finding herself a husband and still asks personal questions without any preparation and at the most inconvenient times. I do wish somebody would marry the child and shut her up. I am touched by her but you know what a long way a little goes.

5-23-52

I am taking painting again but none of my paintings go over very big in this house although mamma puts them up and is loth to take them down again. Sister used to teach painting classes in her youth and she says she doesn’t like this modern art because it’s not “smoothed down.” My mamma says it’s not modern art (insulted), it’s very true to nature and there’s no use spending five hours on a painting you can do in two. This refers to the fact that I have been painting with a palette knife because I don’t like to wash brushes.

Summer 1953

Mr. P. is taking a correspondence course in Catholicism. He is not going to be a Catholic or anything—he just likes to get things free in the mail.

August 1953

I would like to create the impression over the television that I’m a hillbilly Thomist, but I will probably not be able to think of anything to say to Mr. Harvey Breit but “Huh?” and “Ah dunno.” When I come back I’ll probably have to spend three months day and night in the chicken pen to counteract these evil influences… I wish somebody really intelligent would write me sometime but I seem to attract the lunatic fringe mainly. I will be real glad when this television thing is over with. I keep having a mental picture of my glacial glare being sent out over the nation onto millions of children who are waiting impatiently for The Batman to come on.

5-18-55

I don’t deserve much credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

6-10-55

The latest came from a Mr. Semple of Cincinnati who has not read anything of mine but doesn’t really see how I can say a good man is hard to find. He is an industrial engineer, likes to play bridge, is the active type, 31 years old, single etc. etc. I wrote Mr. Semple that I didn’t think I’d like him a bit but he would be crazy about me as I had seven gold teeth and weighed 250 pounds.

6-16-55