“Tough-minded, laconic, with a marvelous wit and an absolute absence of self-pity, she made me understand, as never before or since, what spiritual heroism and beauty can be. There was nothing soft in it, no ‘radiance,’ no conventional serenity. She could be cutting, as in her remarks about certain writers she thought were frauds or about the kinds of stupidity she encountered in some of her admirers. She could exhibit impatience, doubt, pleasure in compliments, great distress at unfavorable reviews. But she was almost entirely free from calculation, from concern with what might be expected of her, and from any desire to question her fate or move into outrage.

“She went to mass every day, said grace, and wasn’t ashamed of saying ‘Our Lady.’ But as she writes in a number of essays in this book, her Catholicism was mainly a matter of belief in mysteries and in the perilous balance between grace and the despoliation of the self. She was the furthest thing from a moralist; I never heard her make a moral judgment that wasn’t first or at the same time a philosophic or an aesthetic one.

“She was extremely firm in almost all her judgments and possessed nothing of what we like to call an ‘inquiring’ mind. But this wasn’t the consequence of her Catholicism or of her being Southern, as some unsympathetic critics have argued. Being with her I had the feeling that just as her fiction cost some effort to go beyond its immediate exotic data, its local colorations, and apparently perverse violence, so she had to be seen as only tactically ‘narrow’ or unsophisticated. For one thing, her illness had put her against the wall, so that being interested in anything that wasn’t fiercely to her purpose in the small space she had to operate in was a rare luxury. Beyond this, she wasn’t being called upon to ‘know’ anything; she was an artist, and I think she was right in what she wrote in ‘The Nature and Aim of Fiction’: ‘there’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once.’ To write is to sacrifice what you think you know.”

— from Richard Gilman, “On Flannery O’Connor,” in Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, edited by Rosemary M. Magee (University Press of Mississippi, 1987)

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