Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor Read Free Book Online

particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts. I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself.
    Unless the novelist has gone utterly out of his mind, his aim is still communication, and communication suggests talking inside a community. One of the reasons Southern fiction thrives is that our best writers are able to do this. They are not alienated, they are not lonely, suffering artists gasping for purer air. The Southern writer apparently feels the need of expatriation less than other writers in this country. Moreover, when he does leave and stay gone, he does so at great peril to that balance between principle and fact, between judgment and observation, which is so necessary to maintain if fiction is to be true. The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.
    To call yourself a Georgia writer is certainly to declare a limitation, but one which, like all limitations, is a gateway to reality. It is a great blessing, perhaps the greatest blessing a writer can have, to find at home what others have to go elsewhere seeking. Faulkner was at home in Oxford; Miss Welty is usually “locally underfoot,” as she puts it, in Jackson; Mr. Montgomery, your poetry man here, is a member of the Crawford Voluntary Fire Department, and most of you and myself and many others are sustained in our writing by the local and the particular and the familiar without loss to our principles or our reason.
    I wouldn’t want to suggest that the Georgia writer has the unanimous, collective ear of his community, but only that his true audience, the audience he checks himself by, is at home. There’s a story about Faulkner that I like. It may be apocryphal but it’s nice anyway. A local lady is supposed to have rushed up to him in a drugstore in Oxford and said, “Oh Mr. Faulkner, Mr. Faulkner, I’ve just bought your book! But before I read it, I want you to tell me something: do you think I’ll like it?” and Faulkner is supposed to have said, “Yes, I think you’ll like that book. It’s trash.”
    It wasn’t trash and she probably didn’t like it, but there were others who did, and you may be sure that if there were two or three in Oxford who liked it, two or three of an honest and unpretentious bent, who relished it as they would relish a good meal, they were an audience more desirable to Faulkner than all the critics in New York City. For no matter how favorable all the critics in New York City may be, they are an unreliable lot, as incapable now as on the day they were born of interpreting Southern literature to the world.
    Fortunately for the Southern writer, the Southern audience is becoming larger and more responsive to Southern writing. In the nineteenth century, Southern writers complained bitterly about the lack of attention they got at home, and in a good part of this century, they complained bitterly about the quality of it, for the better Southern writers were for a long time unheard of by the average Southerner. When I went to college twenty years ago, nobody mentioned any good Southern writers to me later than Joel Chandler Harris, and the ones mentioned before Harris, with the exception of Poe, were not widely known outside the region. As far as I knew, the heroes of Hawthorne and Melville and James and Crane and Hemingway were balanced on the Southern side by Br’er Rabbit—an animal who can always hold up his end of the stick, in equal company, but here too much was being expected of him.
    Today, every self-respecting Southern college