New World
 Flannery O’Connor

Stalking joy
Fully Armed
An intimate friend of American author Flannery O’Connor, BILL SESSIONS, presents her soon-to-be published prayer journal, in which “she expressed a consecration of herself to an Absolute that she believed surrounded her,” her greatest love and buttress against “the dragon at the side of the road.”

by John Martino

W.A. (Bill) Sessions is Regents Professor Emeritus of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta. A scholar of European literature (Renaissance and early modern) with considerable publication and a decorated teacher as well as a poet and playwright, he was also a friend of Flannery O’Connor, the renowned Georgia writer, who died in August 1964 at age 39. He is presently completing O’Connor’s authorized biography, Stalking Joy: The Life and Times of Flannery O’Connor, and he is the editor of her previously unpublished prayer journal from her years in graduate school at the University of Iowa, to be published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux in fall of 2013. The prayer journal has the potential to “change O’Connor scholarship,” showing how her works stem from an offering of herself to God. Bill talks about his friendship with Flannery and the novelty of her journal, which he himself brought into the open, a work being published in our turbulent times perhaps as a “call for a final act, which is contemplation.”

In The Habit of Being [a collection of O’Connor’s letters], we read about your friendship with O’Connor. When did it begin?
Flannery and I read each other’s reviews in the Georgia Bulletin, the newspaper for the Archdiocese of Atlanta. It was a small publication, but Flannery liked to write for it because if you reviewed a book, you got to keep it! But we also had mutual friends–Caroline Gordon [Flannery’s mentor] and Betty Hester [the anonymous A. from A Habit of Being].

At the time, did you grasp that there was something unique about her, such that we would still be talking about her almost 50 years after her death?
I do recall once, sitting on her porch, the subject came up of living life so as to be a saint, and it was clear to me she’d given it some thought; her face lightened dramatically. But as far as her literary stature, when she died, I was shocked that Elizabeth Bishop, a very great poet, could write, “Her stories will be with us forever.”

You didn’t see yourself one day writing a biography of O’Connor?
Not at all. I didn’t go around like Boswell [who wrote The Life of Samuel Johnson], writing down everything she said. I tried to say no, in fact, when asked to write the biography by the estate. I’m not an American literature specialist, and I don’t like to write about friends. The prayer journal was part of what convinced me.

What is this prayer journal?
Flannery was 21 years old when she went to Iowa and, suddenly, she was alone. She had been in this very reserved Southern environment–she once said that the highest emotion ever expressed in her family was irritation. That’s not say she had never faced different ideas before–in Milledgeville, Georgia, she attended a progressive high school using the curriculum of John Dewey. Nevertheless, Iowa was a big contrast. The GIs returning from the war were also a prominent feature of the landscape. This lonely period led her to write a prayer journal from January 1946 to February 1947.

What does the journal contain?
The journal is essentially a series of prayers, but very personal, composed in a style unique to her. She tore out the first five pages, and so one begins them in media res, in the middle of things. In its pages, she expressed a consecration of herself to a force that she believed surrounded her. She wrote with great intensity in a prayer form she was inventing. The lover whom she addressed through the journal was typically referred to as God–she only used the name “Father” in conjunction with certain prayers, and only mentioned Christ or Jesus a couple times. “I want to feel,” she wrote, “I want to love.” She addressed these prayers to the Absolute. She had, at least for her time, the somewhat outlandish hope of total consecration to this Absolute, to this love.

Why has the journal remained in obscurity and how is it that it is coming to light now?
On the one hand, it seems remarkable, given O’Connor’s prominence, that this document has remained unknown until now; on the other hand, it seems remarkable that a secular publishing house would publish a litany of prayers. I can understand why the family thought it was too personal–“I want to give myself to you”–nice girls didn’t talk like that. I encountered the journal among her many manuscripts, and it was clear to me this had to be in print, but I wasn’t sure how. Eventually, I read it aloud at an O’Connor conference in Chicago. I was focused on reading, but I’m told you could have heard a pin drop. From there, it took on a life of its own. You can see the quality of writing. She dramatized her desire; she was already following Henry James–don’t report, but render. So she rendered her desires, which were sometimes childlike, but were also often astonishing both in their intensity and in their depth of understanding. While these were wholly private reflections, they were hardly stream-of-consciousness; already she was a master craftsman, even in the journal.

What do you think the impact of the journal will be?
Well, I think it will sell, because it’s short! John Desmond, a renowned O’Connor scholar, says that it will change O’Connor scholarship. I’m not sure about that, because there are a lot of factions in O’Connor scholarship. Many of them work out of theory only, to the detriment of the text itself. Theories are fine, but works of art–and Flannery’s works in particular–call for a final act, which is contemplation. Theory is for getting started.

Fr. Giussani would say, “The object determines the method.”
Yes, the object does determine the method, but the other side of that is: the object has to be free to surprise you.

What surprised you about the prayer journal?
It is very terse, more like Pascal than Therese of Lisieux, or even more like the desert fathers than Pascal. Take this statement, for example: “No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist. The devil is the greatest believer & he has his reason.” God doesn’t need to believe in Himself, but the devil can’t exist without this belief. Things like this will surprise a lot of people, and it could help a lot of people.

Did the journal help O’Connor?
She wondered whether it was really helping her; that’s actually why she stopped. In her final entry, she says to God, essentially, I’ve done all these prayers, and I don’t see much change. “Today, I have proved myself a glutton for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thoughts.” And she never wrote in it again. Just before the final entry, she had written, “I would like to be a mystic and immediately.” But it didn’t happen immediately. When her father had died, she had written [in a previous journal], “The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side.” But that was a dramatic moment, like the end of many of her stories. Here in this journal and in her own life, she had to work out her desires in the realm of the trivial. She prayed for two things, above all: to become closer to God, and to become a writer, and I think she was granted both those things. She also wrote that she did not want suffering, but would accept it. She came later to understand her desires would only be fulfilled through the waiting. Paradoxically, the most fertile years of her writing came after she was attacked by the same disease–lupus–that had taken her father. It was not just the first, terrible onslaught of the disease, which had changed her appearance overnight on a train trip south from a young woman to “an old man,” as her uncle told me. It was the daily pain that afflicted her thereafter.

Is the method of prayer open to surprises, as well?
You could say that. The other thing to realize is that when she stopped the journal, she had started Wise Blood. She later wrote to her mother that, although her mother wouldn’t understand the novel, it meant something to Flannery’s spiritual development. There’s a direct line from the journal to Wise Blood. So, in a sense, you can see her spirituality develop after the journal through the stories themselves, up to her final triptych of stories: “Revelation,” “Judgement Day,” and “Parker’s Back.”

Do you see the same connection in her letters?
Yes, although in her letters, she was a bit like St. Paul–all things to all people, in order to save some. Her stories also have an audience in mind, and are more indirect, like the Gospel parables. The parables are harsh, and so are her stories. She meditated over her stories, and they can become objects of meditation for readers. The difference in the prayer journal is that she was writing for herself and God. It should illuminate the stories, and vice versa.

The title for your O’Connor biography is Stalking Joy. Why?
The quote is from a letter to Betty Hester, who, at the time of the letter [January 1, 1956; c.f., The Habit of Being, p. 126], thought Flannery was in a shell and not enough in the real world. Flannery wanted to give her a very different image: “Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy–fully armed too because it is a dangerous quest.” She also quoted from Cyril of Jerusalem, instructing catechumens: “The dragon is at the side of the road watching for those who pass. Take care lest he devour you! You are going to the Father of souls, but you must pass by the dragon.”