Books

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (1979) – Wit, faith and chickens

The great writer’s letters from 1948-1964 show her at home on a wide variety of topics

American writer Flannery O’Connor. Photograph: APIC/Getty

Brian Maye
Sat Sep 18 2021 - 00:00

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), a significant voice in American fiction, is also highly regarded as a theologian and her strong Catholic faith informs her work. Her fiction is set in the American south (she was from Georgia) and she referred to her own style as “Southern Grotesque”. At 26, she was diagnosed with lupus, the autoimmune disease that killed her father; expected to live a further five years, she survived for 14.

Although confined to a sheltered existence, O’Connor had an extraordinary knowledge of human behaviour. She lectured far and wide on faith and literature, despite her health problems, and also corresponded widely.

The Habits of Being is a collection of her letters between 1948 and 1964. They show her equally at home discussing the behaviour of chickens or the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and reveal her vast knowledge of books, writing, religion and peacocks (which she raised on the family farm).

Indeed, O’Connor had a lifelong fascination with birds, exotic and domestic, and had the following anecdote in one of the letters: “When I was six, I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax.”

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Her long battle with sickness meant she knew about suffering and sorrow, and an awareness of a possible early death gave urgency to her tone. She employed a kind of shock strategy in her fiction, targeting the defence mechanisms of a secular culture and its opposite, an overconfident religiousness, both of which she chose to jolt with a certain extremism of plot and style.

That approach is softened but no less forceful in her discursive letters, where we encounter “a woman of steely wit and steely faith, the former alert to the absurdities about her, the latter attuned to first and last things,” in the felicitous words of one commentator.

For O’Connor, however, faith was never cocksure but always something fragile and needing constant nourishment, and she felt a strong solidarity with and compassion for searching unbelievers.