The Writer Who Was Full of Grace

If there is, among the other major figures of American literature, one with religious faith as deep and heartfelt as O'Connor's, that person does not leap to mind; American writers (and other artists) are more likely to be skeptical about religion than committed to it. Yet religion never descended into religiosity with O'Connor, and it certainly did nothing to ameliorate a sharp sense of humor or tart literary opinions. When A. pressed a book by Nelson Algren on her, O'Connor ruefully opined that his was "a talent wasted by sentimentalism and a certain over-indulgence in the writing." She recommended William Faulkner's "Light in August" to A. but acknowledged that "I keep clear of Faulkner so my own little boat won't get swamped." (Later, in an essay, she memorably reworked the imagery: "Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.") Carson McCullers's "Clock Without Hands" was, O'Connor said, "the worst book I have ever read," but then she disliked "intensely" McCullers's work, period. As for her fellow Catholic Graham Greene:

". . . there is a difference of fictions certainly and probably a difference of theological emphasis as well. If Greene created an old lady, she would be sour through and through and if you dropped her, she would break, but if you dropped my old lady, she'd bounce back at you, screaming 'Jesus loves me!' I think the basis of the way I see is comic regardless of what I do with it; Greene's is something else."

Her letters, like her fiction, are suffused with comedy. She preferred typewriter to pen: "On the basis of the fact that you use ten fingers to work a typewriter and only three to push a pen, I hold the typewriter to be the more personal instrument. Also on the basis of that you can read what comes off it." She loved birds, and kept swans and peacocks at the place in Milledgeville (a photo of one of her peacocks adorns the jacket of "Mystery and Manners"), but she was no more sentimental about them than she was about any of her human characters:

"I came back from my trip with enough money to order me another pair of swans. They are on their way from Miami and Mr. Hood, the incumbent swan, little suspects that he is going to have to share his feed dish. He eats out of a vase, as a matter of fact, and has a private dining room. Since his wife died, he has been in love with the bird bath. Typical Southern sense of reality."

On the central Southern reality of her day, O'Connor was ambivalent. Unlike her approximate contemporary Eudora Welty, she embraced the civil rights cause slowly and skeptically, though eventually she grasped its essential justice. O'Connor cared about people, not categories and races, and she treated her black characters with as much love and compassion as her white ones. Rereading her letters reminds me, with a force I had not anticipated, that she is one of the essential writers of my life, and that it is time to return to the rest of her work.

"The Habit of Being" is available in a Farrar, Straus & Giroux paperback ($22).

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address isyardleyj@washpost.com.