Chapter 4

Robert Giroux, Sally Fitzgerald, and The Habit of Being

A Good Man Found: Robert Giroux and The Complete Stories

In the Winter 1970 issue of Studies in Short Fiction, Landon C. Burns, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, published “A Cross-Referenced Index of Short Fiction and Author-Title Listing,” an exhaustive index of over two hundred different short-story anthologies in print at the time. While some of the anthologies were for specialized markets (such as Hill and Wang’s American Negro Short Stories) and the oldest of them was first published in 1933, almost all the other anthologies were published in the 1950s and 1960s and bore generic names such as Harper & Row’s The World of Short Fiction or Bantam’s Fifty Great Short Stories. The index became something of an English professor’s industry standard: Burns offered numerous supplements, from the second in 1976 to the twentieth in 1993. His work is useful in generally gauging short-story writers’ penetration of the midcentury anthology market and, more specifically, how often O’Connor’s work was being assigned to undergraduates in the decade after her death. While readers today might agree with R. Neil Scott of the Georgia College Library that O’Connor’s stories are “represented in virtually every introductory literature anthology used in American universities,”1 such was not always the case, and Burns’s index allows us to see O’Connor’s literary star rising.

A statistical analysis of Burns’s index reveals that European short-story writers (and one Russian) dominated the anthology market and best appealed to what editors and professors understood to be the needs of students in literature courses. O’Connor was represented in 29 percent of the anthologies, just behind Poe (31 percent) and—perhaps surprisingly—ahead of Hawthorne (24 percent).² Her most widely anthologized story was “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” appearing in five times as many anthologies as “The Displaced Person,” which reviewers had hailed in 1952 as O’Connor’s masterpiece.³ Anthologists apparently found the story of the Misfit to be most representative of O’Connor’s art. However, while O’Connor had joined the ranks of the widely anthologized, readers in 1970 still had no complete edition of her short stories, from her earliest works completed for her MFA at the University of Iowa to those she had hidden in her hospital bed.4 O’Connor had needed an editorial champion and found, to the lasting benefit of her art and reputation, Robert Giroux. From his first editorial encounter with her in 1954 and throughout her career—indeed for many years long after her death—Giroux helped transform her literary identity throughout the English-speaking world from that of “interesting regional writer” to a major figure in American literature.

In his 2008 New York Times obituary of Giroux, Christopher Lehman-Haupt described the editor as a behind-the-scenes advocate of literary excellence whose work complemented that of his senior partner: “If the flamboyant Roger Straus presented the public face of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, presiding over the business end, Mr. Giroux made his mark on the inside, as editor-in-chief, shaping the house’s book list and establishing himself as the gold standard of literary taste.”⁵ Speaking in 1981, Bernard Malamud expressed a similar idea: “If Robert Giroux represents good taste, Roger Straus knows what to do with it.”⁶ Two accomplishments that Giroux took pride in were having brought O’Connor (and Wise Blood) to Harcourt, Brace when he worked there as an editor and eventually bringing her full catalog to the firm that included his name. An author’s editor, Giroux guided to publication all of O’Connor’s work from 1960 onward and capped his efforts with the 1971 publication of O’Connor’s The Complete Stories, a critical and financial success that confirmed O’Connor as a writer with regional settings but universal themes. In his history of the modern American literary marketplace, James L. W. West III warns, “It is tempting to idealize and even romanticize the relationships between authors and editors,”⁷ but Giroux and O’Connor seem to have reached an ideal to which any author and editor might aspire.

Giroux was highly respected by his colleagues and the authors with whom he worked, and a brief look at his editorial style and assumptions exemplifies how and why he became O’Connor’s publisher and advocate. He was renowned for his devotion to literature, a devotion sparked in the classroom of Mark Van Doren and in the pages of the Columbia Review, where he and the poet John Berryman published the first work of Thomas Merton.⁸ According to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Giroux was a man “never misled by politics, by the list of cheap bestsellers, or by the futile machinations of the word-jugglers.”⁹ His prizing art over commerce was noted by Caroline Gordon, who, upon the publication of Everything That Rises Must Converge, wrote to Giroux:

It must be a satisfaction to be able to serve the cause of good letters and, at the same time, promote a kind of theological understanding which has been woefully absent from contemporary literature—until recently. I am astonished when I have time to pause and reflect on some of the changes that have come about since I began writing professionally. You have certainly had your share in bringing them about. Publishing Flannery’s stories must have been a real joy.10

Long before the 1971 publication of The Complete Stories and the introduction he composed for the volume, Giroux was building O’Connor’s reputation and affecting the larger literary scene. Giroux felt an almost vocational sense of duty toward the cause of promoting literature: as he stated in 1972, the publisher had to promote sales but also had “another obligation, and that is to keep the middling book in print, or bring new ones out. Because if he doesn’t the source of writing and of literature is going to dry up.”¹¹ That a publisher with such an attitude found an author with no pretentions to market dominance or her books rivaling the sales of Love Story or The Godfather is one of the happiest events in the story of O’Connor’s reputation.

In what may be the highest praise that can be lavished on an editor, Giroux was viewed by more than one author as “the professional heir to Maxwell Perkins.”¹² Giroux’s standard procedure when dealing with writers was to get out of their way—a simple-sounding and Perkinsesque practice that other editors sometimes found difficult. Susan Sontag noted that Giroux and his house perfected “the civilized art of non-interference.”¹³ Like Perkins, Giroux knew his writers’ habits and personalities well enough to know who needed prodding and who needed to be left undisturbed. Perkins’s advice to F. Scott Fitzgerald is an apt analogy to Giroux’s approach to his authors: “Don’t ever defer to my judgment. You won’t on any vital point, I know, and I should be ashamed if it were possible to have made you, for a writer of any account must speak solely for himself. I should hate to play . . . the W. D. Howells to your Mark Twain.”¹⁴ Giroux was not an editor who advised O’Connor on how best to grapple with her thematic concerns or artistic performance; O’Connor shared ideas about her work with Caroline Gordon much more than she did with Giroux. Rather, Giroux, like Perkins, worked tirelessly to support his authors emotionally and get their works into readers’ hands. As a result, and again reminiscent of Perkins, he felt as loyal to his authors as they did to him. Roger Straus noted, “Bob Giroux did not once suggest that authors follow him, but I remember counting that, over the first few years, seventeen authors made their way in our direction. . . . This is a triumphant following that few editors have ever achieved or could achieve again.”¹⁵

Giroux’s correspondence proves how seriously he took the responsibility of maintaining O’Connor’s reputation and keeping her in the public eye. In 1973, for example, a creator and distributor of educational materials contacted Giroux, asking permission to quote O’Connor in a filmstrip. Giroux wrote to O’Connor’s agent, Elizabeth McKee, “Although I dislike the whole approach, I have to admit that it might result in young people becoming interested in Flannery’s work who would otherwise never hear of it.”16 This is just one example of dozens of requests that Giroux could have easily denied but over which he paused to consider how they might affect the long-term growth of O’Connor’s reputation. (He did grant permission in this instance.) Giroux responded to requests from high school and college students seeking information on O’Connor for their term papers, casual readers who wanted information on O’Connor for their local literary societies, book collectors who sought information about first editions, ordinary readers who spotted typographical errors, and even an Argentine graduate student who asked if she could visit him when she came to New York to get a better sense of O’Connor’s work.¹⁷ He also proved instrumental to David Farmer, whose Flannery O’Connor: A Descriptive Bibliography (1981) relied on detailed information that Giroux provided concerning when many of O’Connor’s stories were first published, and in what order. In one of the more humorous letters Giroux received, a casual reader complained that the hardcover copies of Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, and Mystery and Manners were out of print and had been “bought up by people who (understandably) will not yield up their copies for love or money”; the writer informed Giroux, “If you are not going to publish them again, we will each have to find an owner of an O’Connor book, get in his will, and wait for him to die.”¹⁸ Giroux apologized for the books being out of print in hardcover and added, “I’m not surprised to learn that they are rarities in the used-copy market; she’s the kind of writer readers don’t give up on.”¹⁹ Neither did Giroux, as is demonstrated by his efforts in making The Complete Stories a reality and increasing O’Connor’s readership.

On August 3, 1964, O’Connor’s mother telegraphed the news of Flannery’s death to Giroux, who wrote to her four days later offering his condolences and suggesting that FS&G’s moving forward with plans to publish Everything That Rises Must Converge would testify to her daughter’s life and work: “Perhaps the greatest memorial we, as publishers, can pay her memory is the publication of her stories which as you know has been in progress since the spring. We would like to go ahead with this.”²⁰ Giroux added that the collection would feature “perhaps a special preface by Robert Fitzgerald if he would be willing to do it” and closed with, “It is an honor to be her publisher, but I also considered myself her friend and yours.” Regina’s blessing in all matters of her daughter’s publication was a requirement, one that would become even more important in the late 1970s as Giroux and Sally Fitzgerald worked to secure copies of O’Connor’s letters for The Habit of Being. Robert Fitzgerald may have been the literary executor of O’Connor’s unpublished work, but Regina’s position as executor of the estate and mother of the artist had to be recognized. Giroux first wrote officially to propose The Complete Stories to Robert Fitzgerald in 1966, a year after the publication of Everything That Rises Must Converge, arguing “there are many good reasons for doing this book” and noting how its publication would further O’Connor’s reputation: “Though some of the stories are not at her top level, they are still good and should be available as part of her total body of work. . . . One of my lesser reasons for advocating the project is to give Flannery another chance at the National Book Award. . . . Chiefly I think of the book as a document and as a tribute to Flannery’s singular contribution to the art of the short story.”21 Giroux thus imagined The Complete Stories as a statement or artifact testifying to O’Connor’s talent as much as a book to be read and enjoyed. The very existence of the collection would, Giroux hoped, be another leap forward for O’Connor’s reputation.

The Complete Stories, however, would not be published until 1971, seven years after her death, partly because of wrangling over reprint permissions for the stories that O’Connor wrote for her MFA at the University of Iowa. There was interest among rival publishers in the years following O’Connor’s death to publish selections from O’Connor’s thesis, The Geranium; Giroux wrote to Regina to express his disapproval of any such publications because he felt they would detract from the impact of The Complete Stories.²² In 1970 the Windhover Press, a publisher of very limited editions of fine books and previously unpublished works by recognized authors based at the University of Iowa, sought permission to publish The Geranium on the grounds that O’Connor had developed her style while at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.²³ Giroux again wrote to Regina expressing his disapproval of a rival edition; he also wrote to Robert Fitzgerald, asking him to deny Windhover’s request (which Fitzgerald did) and to grant his permission to publish the contents of The Geranium as part of The Complete Stories. Giroux also worked with Elizabeth McKee, O’Connor’s agent and representative of the literary estate, to secure the rights from Harcourt, Brace for the stories originally collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find. He feared that Harcourt, Brace would not “give in easily”²⁴ and had similar fears regarding Robert Fitzgerald, who was concerned about publishing the stories from The Geranium, since they seemed less than O’Connor’s best.25 Both of these fears, however, proved premature: Harcourt, Brace gave its permission and Fitzgerald gave his, allowing Giroux to move ahead with his project and write to Elizabeth McKee, “I believe I’ve finally got Robert Fitzgerald housebroken as far as copyright goes.”²⁶

One request that Fitzgerald denied, however, was to compose an introduction to the proposed volume. In a letter to Giroux, he explained that he had said all he had to say about O’Connor in his introduction to Everything That Rises Must Converge: “I couldn’t add anything substantial to what I wrote for Everything,” he stated, “or write anything better.”²⁷ Rather than turn to another of O’Connor’s friends or fellow authors, Giroux decided to write the introduction himself. That he sent drafts of it to Regina, Elizabeth McKee, and the Fitzgeralds reflects his determination to portray O’Connor in a way true to her character and in a way that would enhance her status among readers, both those coming to her work for the first time and those revisiting the roads traveled by the Misfit and Manley Pointer. It also reveals his shrewd diplomacy. Like Robert Fitzgerald in his introduction to Everything That Rises Must Converge, Giroux presented himself as an insider whose opinions on O’Connor’s art and character deserved notice. Also like Fitzgerald’s, Giroux’s introduction instructed critics how they should respond to the volume.

If the story of the backward-walking chicken is the most often-told biographical anecdote concerning O’Connor, the story of her first meeting with Paul Engle at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop runs a close second. The anecdote, which first appeared in Giroux’s introduction to The Complete Stories, is a test case of how a single incident can be retold and reshaped to suit the teller’s aims in the short term and affect the subject’s reputation in the long one. In July 1971, the year of The Complete Stories’ publication, Paul Engle wrote to Robert Giroux in response to Giroux’s questions about Engle’s first meeting with O’Connor when he was director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Noting the difficulty of describing O’Connor “in any way worthy of her,”²⁸ Engle told of their first meeting, when she entered his office and spoke in a Georgia accent so thick that it sounded like “a secret language” to which Engle was unable to respond: “I asked her to repeat. No comprehension again. A third time. No communication. Embarrassed, suspicious, I asked her to write down what she had just said on a pad. She wrote, ‘My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writers’ Workshop?’” Engle then explained how he and O’Connor came to enjoy a “strange and yet trusting relationship” and how she impressed him with both her stories and work ethic. His letter fosters the image of O’Connor as (in his words) “imaginative, tough, alive” but also, as he describes her stories, “quietly filled with insight.” Engle mentioned that O’Connor preferred to have him preserve her anonymity when reading her work aloud during workshops; he also told of a time when he realized that her scene of a young man and woman about to make love rang false because O’Connor was “improvising from innocence.” Although O’Connor was uncomfortable with asking Engle’s advice on how to make the scene more believable—and did so in the privacy of Engle’s car “with the windows rolled up”—she withstood any social unease for the sake of her art: “She was uncomfortable, but the wish to have it right dominated.” Distinguishing her from “the exuberant talkers who serenade every writing class with their loudness,” Engle portrayed her as a meditative, awkward young woman whose work was unlike anything he had yet encountered at Iowa.

Giroux begins his introduction with the story of this meeting, a story that he knew from Engle’s letter and that he quotes extensively. After retelling the scene of O’Connor writing her request on a pad, Giroux quotes Engle’s initial assessment:

At their first meeting in his office in 1946, Mr. Engle recalls, he was unable to understand a word of Flannery’s native Georgian tongue . . . “I told her to bring examples of her writing and we would consider her, late as it was. Like Keats, who spoke Cockney but wrote the purest sounds in English, Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive: just like Flannery herself. The will to be a writer was adamant; nothing could resist it, not even her own sensibility about her own work.”29

This is not, however, how the seventy-five-year-old Engle retold the story in 1983 to a Washington Post reporter, who wrote a long profile of Engle’s time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In this version, O’Connor’s southern roots are heightened (some might say caricatured), and Engle presents a decidedly less polished figure:

She came out of the red dirt country of Georgia. She walked into my office one day and spoke to me. I understood nothing, not one syllable. As far as I knew, she was saying, “Aaaaraaaraaarah.” My God, I thought to myself, this is a retarded young girl. Then I looked at her eyes. They were crossed! Finally, I said, excuse me, my name is Paul Engle. I gave her a pad—believe me, this is true—and said would you please write down what you’re telling me. And she wrote, “My name is Flannery O’Connor. I’m from Milledgeville, Georgia. I’m a writer.” She didn’t say, “I want to be a writer.” She said, “I am a writer.” I said do you have any writing with you. She had one of the most beat-up handbags I’d ever seen. It must have been put in an old-fashioned water-powered washing machine and churned for a day. She handed me this paper. I read four lines. You don’t need to eat all of an egg to know if it’s good or bad. I looked at her and said to myself, “Christ, this is it. This is pure talent. What can I do? I can’t teach her anything!” I taught her a little. She had a few problems—with her society, her illness.30

Here, the addition of “I am a writer” makes O’Connor seem even more forceful and confident, despite her not having yet produced any substantial work; whether or not anyone’s talent can be appraised, even by one as sharp as Engle, after only “four lines” is debatable. More interesting is that Giroux used the anecdote as a true account of O’Connor without, perhaps, fully believing it, or at least not finding that it reflected his experience with her. In a 2007 interview, he stated that O’Connor’s accent “seemed to bother people in New York, but I never had any trouble understanding her. Never like Paul Engle. And you know, you’d think she spoke a foreign language or something. I thought she was very clear. I had no trouble with her.”³¹ That Giroux did not express any of these sentiments in his introduction suggests that he, like many reviewers of The Complete Stories, found the anecdote too perfect a hook on which to hang his portrait of the artist as an outsider, waiting to be literally and figuratively understood. As the newspaper editor in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance remarks, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Reviewers of The Complete Stories and later biographers have found in this anecdotal legend a representative moment for their collective creation of O’Connor’s reputation. Soon, O’Connor would be, as she later remarked, shouting (in her Georgia accent) to the hard of hearing. Paul Elie notes that Giroux’s portrayal of O’Connor as “plainspoken, charming, shy and yet sure of herself, and with good reason”³² was one that resonated with many readers of The Complete Stories, as it seemed to suit the strange young woman whose fiction would explore spiritual themes without any ambiguity or hesitation. In his biography, Brad Gooch refashions the scene to enhance his overall portrayal of O’Connor as socially awkward (and perhaps to soften some of Engle’s rough edges as seen in his 1983 retelling, which Gooch used as a source). In Gooch’s version, O’Connor enters Engle’s office after a “gentle knock” on his door, what Engle in his letter to Giroux called a “shy knock”:

After he shouted an invitation to enter, a shy young woman appeared and walked over to his desk without, at first, saying a word. He could not even tell, as she stood before him, whether she was looking in his direction, or out the window at the curling Iowa River below. A hulking six foot four inch poet, in his thirties, with wavy dark hair, alert blue eyes, and expressive eyebrows, Engle quickly took the lead. He introduced himself and offered her a seat, as she tightly held onto what he later described as “one of the most beat-up handbags I’ve ever seen.”33

Gooch emphasizes Engle’s “hulking” physical features as a means of characterizing O’Connor as unafraid and determined to follow her vocation; he changes Engle’s original description of O’Connor as “cross-eyed” to her gazing in one of two possible directions. If the scene as Engle, Giroux, or Gooch presents it is not wholly accurate, it is in the spirit of the reputation that Giroux works to fashion in his introduction: that of O’Connor almost as a visitor from that strange country “where silence is never broken except to shout the truth.”³⁴ As with the backward-walking chicken and the iconic peacock, the temptation to not use this anecdote as somehow ultimately reflective of O’Connor’s character and art proved too strong for later critics and readers to resist.

At the time of The Complete Stories, there were no biographies of O’Connor, but only appreciations such as those collected in Esprit. Giroux’s introduction, like Robert Fitzgerald’s, characterized O’Connor as undeterred by those who could not figuratively understand her. Giroux states that when he first met O’Connor, he “sensed a tremendous strength” and recognized her as “the rarest kind of young writer, one who was prepared to work her utmost and knew exactly what she must do with her talent” (viii). He then proves his own assertions with evidence from O’Connor’s correspondence with John Selby, her first editor at Rinehart, who disapproved of the shape that Wise Blood was taking. Giroux next quotes O’Connor’s then-unpublished letter to her agent, Elizabeth McKee, in which she complains that Selby feared leaving the novel to her “fiendish care” and that he spoke to her in a tone appropriate to “a slightly dimwitted Campfire Girl” (x). Giroux depicts Selby as a self-satisfied littérateur who could not recognize the obvious excellence of Wise Blood; Paul Elie has it exactly right when he speaks of Giroux “casually assuming her greatness”³⁵ as he writes of O’Connor’s feud with Selby. Readers are invited to see, with the benefit of hindsight, O’Connor as Giroux states he did at their first meeting and to congratulate themselves for doing so.

Like Fitzgerald, Giroux uses the initial reception of Wise Blood to suggest O’Connor’s literary peculiarity and her initial friction with the critical community. Stating that “I was disappointed with the reviews more than she was; they all recognized her power but missed her point” (xii), Giroux recalls Fitzgerald’s assertion in his introduction to Everything That Rises Must Converge: “The reviewers, by and large, didn’t know what to make of it” (xviii). But Giroux again invites readers to congratulate themselves for not “missing her point,” noting, “We reissued Wise Blood in 1962, on the tenth anniversary of the original publication, and it lives on in both cloth and paperback editions. Didn’t some wise man define a classic as a book that does not stay out of print?” (xiii). The fact that readers were holding The Complete Stories was proof of their sophistication. Such an assumption would have been unimaginable with a copy of Wise Blood nineteen years earlier.

The “wise man” mentioned by Giroux was Mark Van Doren,36 but the wise man on whom the remainder of Giroux’s introduction relies for making its argument about O’Connor’s greatness is Thomas Merton. Giroux describes O’Connor’s and Merton’s mutual admiration: Merton gave Giroux a copy of A Meditation to give to O’Connor, and she was very interested in the Abbey of Gesthsemani in Kentucky where Merton then lived. Giroux compares O’Connor to Merton in several important ways: both died (in the by-now familiar phrase of appreciation for O’Connor) “at the height of their powers,” both Catholics possessed “deep faith,” and both were “as American as one can be” (xiii). Few moments in the story of O’Connor’s reputation are as clearly marked as this: all the previous critical commentary about her region seemingly worked toward this moment, where Flannery O’Connor became a fully American—rather than only southern—author. Not once does Giroux mention Caldwell, McCullers, or Faulkner: O’Connor had achieved escape velocity from the South that once seemed to contain and, in some readers’ opinions, restrict her art. Giroux argued that O’Connor’s work could “only be understood in an American setting” (xiv), an important distinction and one that shows the increasingly widening lens through which O’Connor’s fiction was being viewed. Such a lens demanded a comprehensive and definitive version of her stories, which Giroux argues were best arranged (unlike her two previous collections) in chronological order. This desire to publish and preserve a definitive edition of O’Connor’s work—from the stories that comprised her master’s thesis to “Judgment Day,” a reworking of her very first story—was one that Giroux felt himself able to fulfill and for which the critical community and general readers were grateful.

Critics responded to The Complete Stories with all the enthusiasm that Giroux, as both friend of the author and partner in the firm publishing her works, could desire. The response to his “fascinating-to-all-O’Connor-fans”³⁷ introduction reveals his words were seen as a benediction and guide to readers when approaching O’Connor’s fiction. While some critics vaguely complimented Giroux by calling his introduction simply “charming,”38 “discreet,”³⁹ or “useful,”⁴⁰ others praised it as “illuminating,”⁴¹ particularly, in the words of Robert Drake in Modern Age, as “perceptive and sympathetic” because Giroux offered a glimpse of O’Connor’s “fortitude and integrity” and “does not do Miss O’Connor the disservice of indiscriminately praising all the stories.”⁴² Such a disservice was seen in other reviews, most notably Martha Duffy’s in Time, in which she seemed eager to atone for her magazine’s past dismissals of O’Connor’s art: “This collection brings together for the first time in one book all of Miss O’Connor’s stories. Everyone is good enough so that if it were the only example of her work to survive, it would be evident that the writer possessed high talent and a remarkably unclouded, un-abstract, demanding intelligence.”⁴³ To Drake and like-minded reviewers, that Giroux did not offer this kind of “indiscriminate praise” of O’Connor made his portrait of her all the more truthful.

Other reviewers praised Giroux’s chronological assemblage of the stories while also noting the peculiar effects of such an arrangement. Writing in the Southern Literary Journal, Melvin J. Friedman imagined that “rearranging the stories might be likened by some critics to the heresy of reordering Joyce’s Dubliners or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio” but also acknowledged that a chronological arrangement “lets us in on the subtle and gradual maturing of a remarkable talent.”⁴⁴ In the Southern Review, Frederick P. W. McDowell noted that Giroux’s arrangement “allows us to see her cumulative development as an artist” and “trace the deepening and maturity of her creativity.”⁴⁵ Paul Elie, however, argues that Giroux’s ordering “undid the careful selection and discrimination that O’Connor had brought to her short fiction,” since it suggested that her master’s thesis and early versions of chapters of her novels were equally as important as her masterpieces: “ ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ was sandwiched between ‘Enoch and the Gorilla’ and ‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy,’ between an excerpt and a trifle.”⁴⁶ But Elie’s sensible objection is the exception to the general rule of critics’ appreciating Giroux’s instinct as an editor and insight as a reader. Just as Joyce arranged the stories in Dubliners to better convey the theme of paralysis, Giroux arranged those in The Complete Stories to better convey his chosen theme: the growth of O’Connor’s talent over time. Whether or not “Greenleaf” and “A View from the Woods” are better than “The River” or “A Circle in the Fire” can be debated, but this was Giroux’s contention, and he wanted to argue it in the table of contents.

As mentioned earlier, the first reviewers of The Complete Stories capitalized on the anecdote about O’Connor’s first meeting with Paul Engle to foster the impression of O’Connor as an outsider in terms of both geography and thematic concerns. After retelling the story of Engle’s difficulty in understanding his future student, Joel Wells in the National Catholic Reporter stated that O’Connor “proved to be one of those very, very few who live up to and surpass the promise-detectors’ fondest dreams.”47 But the anecdote of the provincial student with prodigious talent resonated in other ways, even when it was not explicitly mentioned. Writing in the New York Times, Thomas Lask praised the stories as “shining examples of what a good many critics look for: regional stories with universal truths.”⁴⁸ O’Connor’s southern foundations were, once again, recognized as a means by which she could explore larger issues—ones even recognizable to readers of the New York Times. The formidable Guy Davenport, writing in National Review, used the anecdote to emphasize O’Connor’s roots and how, for southern writers, the “grand rhythms and terse realities” of the Bible “turn up in their prose as naturally as a shrug rises in a Frenchman’s shoulders.”⁴⁹ Earlier critics pigeonholed her characters as types, outsiders separate from mainstream life belonging to “the genus Southern Neanderthal”⁵⁰ and examples of what might today be called “the Other”; with The Complete Stories, critics such as Richard Freedman in the Washington Post argued that the southern accent pervading O’Connor’s work created “an unparalleled picture of the Deep South—at once horrifying and hilarious—as a metaphor for the human condition when the 20th century lurched past its halfway mark.”⁵¹ Freedman’s review succinctly recast O’Connor’s life and death to suit the critical consensus of her as an outsider: “As a Southerner she was cut off from the dominant American culture of the North. As a Catholic she was further cut off from the dominant Protestantism of the South. And as a sufferer for half of her life from the progressive arthritic disease of lupus, she became an invalid who, in 1964, was ultimately cut off from life itself.”⁵² To Freedman, O’Connor’s three-part outsider status “allowed her to see life around her with ultimate objectivity.”⁵³ No longer was O’Connor only a reporter sending dispatches from below the Mason-Dixon line.

One way of gauging whether an author’s reputation has taken root in the consciousness of readers is the frequency by which a “typical” character or pattern for that author is spoken of as if its elements are common knowledge. Such is the case when one describes a regime as Orwellian or a bureaucracy as Kafkaesque. While “O’Connoresque” is not part of any lexicon outside of English departments, the critical response to The Complete Stories revealed a growing assumption that there was such a thing as a typical O’Connor situation or a character who could be described as a typical O’Connor type. Chesterton once noted that the force and reach of Dickens’s reputation was seen in people’s casually referring to someone as “a perfect Pecksniff”;54 an examination of O’Connor’s critics reveals the growing sense that her thematic concerns and artistic performance had created something unique that would forever become part of her reputation and of American literature. Reviewing Everything That Rises Must Converge, critics spoke of O’Connor types, such as “the self-righteous who consider themselves saved by good deeds,”⁵⁵ the person who finds him-or herself “doing the right things for the wrong motives,”⁵⁶ or “an anguished human being, trying to control the circle of his existence.”⁵⁷ Reviewers of The Complete Stories continued this trend of noting the O’Connor type as something like her own brand. For example, writing in the New York Times Book Review, Alfred Kazin stated, “People in her stories are always at the end of their strength. They are at the synapse between what they are (unknown to themselves) and what they do,”⁵⁸ while a critic for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution later wrote, “Her trademark is the ostensibly good character who is not, you come to realize, really as nice as the villain of the same story.”⁵⁹ Others noted ways in which these types encounter similar ends. In his Commentary review of Everything That Rises Must Converge, Warren Coffey stated that O’Connor’s “paradigm story” was “a kind of morality play in which Pride of Intellect (usually Irreligion) has a shattering encounter with the Corrupt Human Heart (the Criminal, the Insane, sometimes the sexually Demonic) and either sees the light or dies, sometimes both.”⁶⁰ Reviewing The Complete Stories in Newsweek six years later, Walter Clemons distilled O’Connor’s stories into a pattern that echoes Coffey’s: “An O’Connor story often begins with a confident figure on a front porch, armed with platitudes, facing down a suspicious-looking stranger. Before it’s over, safety has been violated, pride is stolen, and the whole house of cards in which a spurious life has been conducted may be pulled down.”⁶¹ The front porch Clemons mentions could take a number of forms: the literal porch in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” or a figurative fortress of self-assurance, such as the tarpaper shack in “The Artificial Nigger,” Motes’s Essex in Wise Blood, or Rayber’s room at the Cherokee Lodge in The Violent Bear It Away.

These remarks about O’Connor’s types recall the initial perception of her “limitations” but with a marked change in attitude toward that supposed deficiency. Many reviewers of Everything That Rises Must Converge complained of O’Connor’s narrow range and repetitive plotting; such complaints resurfaced in some reviews of The Complete Stories, as when, for example, John Alfred Avant, in Library Journal, stated that O’Connor “reiterated the same themes with too little variety,”62 or when John Idol, in a review for Studies in Short Fiction, stated that her tendency to shock her reader became repetitious to the point where the impact was lessened with each character’s death.⁶³ A survey of the reviews of The Complete Stories, however, reveals that while O’Connor’s repetitiousness was still acknowledged, it was recast as an example of her persistence in examining a complex subject. Depth was finally beginning to triumph over breadth. For example, Richard Freedman noted that “Miss O’Connor had her obsessive themes and her special provenance, which becomes abundantly clear when her stories are read in toto. Yet, the fecundity of her imagination saved her from being merely repetitious, and each story has its peculiar ambience and personality.”⁶⁴ Robert Drake described the collection as comprised of stories similar in form and content, but not resulting in any repetitiveness or loss of quality:

One cannot help but think James would have commended her for being so faithful to the writer’s sacred office and that Hemingway would also have praised her accordingly—both of them, one remembers, extremely limited writers as well. Miss O’Connor, too, found—or was there found for her?—early in the day what for her was the one thing needful, what her one story was; and she served it well and faithfully all her days.⁶⁵

This critical revision, this transformation of a supposed fault into an argument for her excellence, illuminates how a writer’s reputation can be revisited and revised as it is being formed. In a later review of the Faber & Faber imprint of The Complete Stories published in the United Kingdom, a critic for New Statesman and Society stated, “These deft parables have often been confused with a trick of telling the same story over and over again. Yet the reader is always arrested by the ferocious attention to detail, and O’Connor’s forms are no more routine than cut diamonds.”⁶⁶ In his previously cited review for Newsweek, Walter Clemons offered a tongue-in-cheek mea culpa: “It takes some readers (I was one) a while to understand” that O’Connor’s work is “more than a superb Punch-and-Judy show.”⁶⁷ As the watchwords we have previously examined showed their wear—and were still showing it, as when the New Statesmen noted that “the term ‘Southern Gothic’ doesn’t do her justice”⁶⁸—so

did this past complaint. The old defect had become a new strength and a well-earned claim.

Giroux was grateful for the critical approval of The Complete Stories and equally appreciative of the letters he received from his publishing colleagues and readers from across the country and overseas. William Jovanovich, who had become chairman of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1970, wrote a thank-you letter to Giroux, praising him for his work.69 Jovanovich was not unique in his desire to compliment Giroux for The Complete Stories: one reader wrote Giroux to thank him for “bringing Flannery O’Connor’s work to us all,”⁷⁰ while another wrote to inform him, “Miss O’Connor’s fiction always excites the hell out of me,” telling Giroux he deserved the highest praise for “the very handsome volume” he had “turned out.”⁷¹ Denver Lindley, O’Connor’s final editor at Harcourt, Brace before she moved to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, wrote to tell Giroux that he imagined O’Connor would have been thrilled by the peacocks on the dust jacket.⁷² One of the more striking pieces of fan mail came from Hajime Noguchi, author of Criticism of Flannery O’Connor, the first book written about O’Connor in Japan: Noguchi thanked Giroux for his efforts and praised his introduction.⁷³ As usual, Giroux personally responded to such letters with humility and grace, noting in one, “I consider it a tragedy that she died so relatively young, and at the height of her power.”⁷⁴

In addition to many accolades from a full spectrum of readers, The Complete Stories also received the 1972 National Book Award for fiction—the first time that the award was given posthumously. The history of O’Connor and the National Book Awards is one of near-misses with jurors who compared O’Connor to authors who offered works more mainstream than O’Connor’s examinations of literal grace under pressure.⁷⁵ As Joel Wells noted, the unspoken rule seemed to be that O’Connor “simply couldn’t be assimilated into the fine gears of the literary establishment—no Pulitzer or National Book Award.”⁷⁶ In 1972, however, The Complete Stories rose above nine other National Book Award finalists, including Updike’s Rabbit Redux, Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland, and Love in the Ruins, the second novel by fellow southern Catholic Walker Percy. The conferring of a National Book Award is, of course, not necessarily indicative of a winning text’s literary quality. However, a work being nominated at all suggests that it has been vetted, if not accepted, by the critical community, since the five judges selected by the National Book Foundation have always been, according to the foundation, “published writers who are known to be doing great work in the genre or field, and in some cases, are past NBA Finalists or Winners.”⁷⁷

The 1972 National Book Awards were controversial and closely watched by readers and publishers. The NBF had been working to rebuild some of its own reputation after a decade of insinuations that the awards were merely “an elaborate marketing enterprise of the New York publishing establishment”⁷⁸ or, in the words of Anthony West (who served on the 1967 jury), “a farce in the realm of General Foods’ Salesman of the Year Awards, a matter of intramural stroking.”79 The previous year’s jury, led by William Styron, threatened to resign if the best-seller Love Story was listed as a final nominee.⁸⁰ In 1972 the NBF introduced a new category, “Contemporary Affairs,” into which The Last Whole Earth Catalogue fell—a title that prompted Garry Wills, one of the judges, to resign in protest over what he saw as a bending of the rules that allowed a work with an editor, rather than author, to be considered.⁸¹ The awards ceremony was also the site of what the New York Times described as “deep worry about the decline of the quality of life in the face of commercialism and technology.”⁸² But in the midst of all of the critical hand-wringing and debates over the quality of the winners, the jury’s revising of the rules so that O’Connor could be given a posthumous award was not met by any controversy; as the Washington Post noted, “Few were surprised at the selection,”⁸³ and, as reported in the Savannah News-Press, the decision to recognize The Complete Stories “aroused no dispute.”⁸⁴ This was not the first time that the rules had been bent for O’Connor: in 1966 the NBF explicitly prohibited judges from conferring “special awards or honorable mention,”⁸⁵ but the fiction judges (Paul Horgan, Glenway Wescott, and J. F. Powers) flouted the rule by noting the recent death of O’Connor at the awards ceremony and honored her as “a writer lost to American literature” whose work “commands our memory with sensations of life conveyed with an intensity of pity and participation, love, and redemption, rarely encountered.”⁸⁶ Nor would it be the last, as we shall see in an examination of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Speaking as one of the five fiction judges in 1971, Joseph Heller called O’Connor “among the most distinguished American writers” and added, “her Complete Stories contains her best fiction writing.”⁸⁷ That Heller, like his predecessors in 1966, referred to O’Connor and her art as “American,” rather than “southern,” affirms the argument of Giroux’s introduction and O’Connor’s reach extending beyond the South.

Giroux used the occasion of his accepting the award on behalf of O’Connor’s mother, Regina, as an opportunity to urge O’Connor’s significance upon a world gone wrong. In what the New York Times described as “an indictment of literary and moral standards,”⁸⁸ Giroux noted, “In an age of mendacity, duplicity, and document shredders, the clear vision of Flannery O’Connor not only burns brighter than ever but it burns through the masks of what she called ‘blind wills and low dodges of the heart.’”⁸⁹ He offered O’Connor’s oft-repeated jest about southern writers still being able to recognize freaks, thus affirming O’Connor’s sense of humor as well as her transcendent moral vision. Giroux also took aim at past detractors and used O’Connor’s own words against them: “When she was foolishly criticized for writing mainly about one region,” he noted, “she said, ‘The region is something the writer has to use to suggest what is beyond it.’”90 Brad Gooch recounts a conversation he had with Giroux in which the publisher described a “contretemps with a celebrated author backstage at the awards ceremony”: when the unnamed author asked Giroux, “Do you really think Flannery O’Connor is a great writer? She’s such a Roman Catholic,” Giroux responded, “You can’t pigeonhole her. That’s just the point. I’m surprised at you, to misjudge her so completely. If she were here, she’d set you straight. She’d impress you. You’d have a hard time outtalking her.”⁹¹ While Gooch does not reveal the identity of the “celebrated author,” the person in question seems like one of O’Connor’s readers from the 1950s, wrestling with Wise Blood and A Good Man Is Hard to Find and trying to categorize O’Connor in an attempt to contain her. After he drafted his acceptance speech, Giroux sent a copy of it to Regina, ending his letter with, “I’m greedy and I’m now hoping for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, to be announced in May,”⁹² but Giroux’s greed here, as always, was more for readers than revenues, more for another boost to O’Connor’s reputation than the increased sales that would accompany the award. (As it happened, The Complete Stories was not nominated for the Pulitzer.)

One notable voice raised against the jury’s decision was the editorial page of the New York Times, which devoted nearly a full column arguing against O’Connor or any deceased author being awarded the NBA. The desire of many critics to avoid erring on the side of conventionality, and in doing so failing to recognize a Melville or Stendhal in their midst, was acknowledged and described as understandable. However, the Times argued that bestowing the award on deceased writers, such as O’Connor and Allan Nevins, the winner for history that year, was unjustifiable because of the recipients’ present reputations—the very reputations that the award was meant to boost. Nevins had been “widely and deservedly recognized in his lifetime by both his academic peers and the general public as a great historian,” and O’Connor had achieved a similar stature: “Miss O’Connor was a brilliant and original writer. The quality of her work is not in dispute. But the work was praised by all serious critics in her own lifetime, and although not a popular writer, she had a devoted following.”⁹³ The Times was straightening the road her reputation had traveled and filling in the potholes, assuming its then-present status as a fact: “all serious critics” did not praise her work until after the mid-1960s, and even then, the word “all” is as problematic as the adjective “serious.” Arguing that literary prizes spur living authors onto greater works and that such prizes are “robbed of their meaning when living writers have to stand aside for the famous dead,” the Times articulated the argument that one’s reputation could reach a level at which further recognition was superfluous and even unfair to living, working authors. Similar sentiments were expressed a year later, when, in “Confessions of a Book Award Judge,” Christopher Lehman-Haupt described his experiences on the 1972 National Book Awards jury. According to Lehman-Haupt, Joseph Heller was the force behind what Lehman-Haupt called “The Tricky Little Question” of bestowing the award on O’Connor. Lehman-Haupt, who felt that his choice, The Book of Daniel, would easily take the award, ends his description of the judges’ debates with Heller calculatingly suggesting O’Connor’s Complete Stories and his own reaction to Heller’s maneuverings: “It wasn’t a bad choice, of course. No one could seriously object. . . . But it wasn’t a good choice either. It didn’t call attention to a previously uncelebrated novelist. It didn’t bestow hitherto withheld recognition. It didn’t anoint. It was, come to think of it, a predictable result of mixing politics with art.”94 Such a mixture is what Lehman-Haupt thought he would avoid, but Heller proved to be too able a politician. To the great pleasure of Giroux and his firm, the NBF disagreed with the Times and Lehman-Haupt and assumed that the building of one’s reputation was not a zero-sum game where the dead could rob the living of their due.

In that same year, 1972, Regina donated her daughter’s papers to Georgia College, O’Connor’s alma mater, from which she had graduated in 1945 when it was Georgia State College for Women. The papers included over two thousand pages of drafts of Wise Blood alone as well as other manuscripts, letters, memorabilia, and ephemera. From our current vantage point, O’Connor’s papers being archived at Georgia College seems natural and expected. However, as a Georgian columnist for the Marion Telegraph noted at the time, “The generosity of Mrs. Edward F. O’Connor in making this gift is overwhelming, since on the open market, bids for the collection might easily have been in the five-figure category; such universities as Texas, Yale, Harvard, and others with wealthy, generous contributors to their libraries, would probably have bid high for the possession of the materials of the young author whose stature as a writer continues to grow.”⁹⁵ Not surprisingly, the staff of the Georgia College Library was thrilled by Regina’s largess. Gerald Becham, the initial curator of the collection, said, “It is unusual for such a small college library to be given such a valuable manuscript collection. Manuscripts of writers of Miss O’Connor’s stature are usually deposited in large research libraries. Through Mrs. O’Connor’s generous gift, the collection at the Georgia College Library has been greatly enhanced.”⁹⁶ Charles E. Beard, director of the library, said that the collection would give the library “preeminence in primary sources for a total picture of Flannery O’Connor, the writer and the person.”⁹⁷ This “total picture” is one of O’Connor’s reputation at this moment, when The Complete Stories had been met with overwhelmingly favorable reviews, when its author had been posthumously given the National Book Award, and when O’Connor’s personal life began to be viewed as a subject worthy of popular and critical interest.

Soon after Regina decided to donate her daughter’s papers to Georgia College, Governor Jimmy Carter declared Sunday, January 16, 1972, as Flannery O’Connor Day. A subsequent proclamation made by Savannah mayor John P. Rousakis proudly echoed Governor Carter’s declaration. The official proclamation notes that O’Connor, a “native of Savannah, attained fame in the literary world as an author,” and that “her talent as a writer was accorded recognition from many quarters.”98 Rousakis’s proclamation lists among her accomplishments “two Kenyon Fellowships, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a Ford Foundation grant, the Henry Bellamann Foundation Award, and two O. Henry awards for best short story of the year” and states that “her works are being used in seminaries and other institutions of learning for religious education.” The proclamation also, like some of the original southern reviewers of Wise Blood, claimed O’Connor as a local hero, universality be damned: “WHEREAS the citizens of Savannah, Miss O’Connor’s native city, are indeed proud of her accomplishments and consider such recognition fitting and proper for someone who lived here until she was 14 and received her early education at Sacred Heart School and St. Vincent’s Academy,” Mayor Rousakis urged the citizens of Savannah to recognize and celebrate Flannery O’Connor Day. He also asked his constituents to “use this occasion to reflect on the valuable contributions to literature made by this talented native daughter, and to pause with a prayer of thanksgiving to Almighty God for her life and good works.” O’Connor the writer of fiction was now an occasion for prayer or, as the counterman in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” calls Lucynell Crater, “an angel of Gawd.” Both of these political pronouncements list O’Connor’s achievements and insist on a growing interest in her work; they offer, in short, a reputation-by-résumé that reflects, in language part publicity puffery and part commodification, how her native state regarded O’Connor at the time.

In its coverage of the reception at Georgia College Library on Flannery O’Connor Day, the Milledgeville Union-Recorder ran a full-page story and extensive photo spread that began by speaking of O’Connor as if she were a kind of magician: “The curtain of mystery which covers the creative process and particularly the creative process of Flannery O’Connor was lifted briefly today at Georgia College during the public showing of the Flannery O’Connor Collection at Georgia College’s library.”99 The initial exhibit featured selections from the Wise Blood manuscripts and O’Connor’s plan for the novel as well as her christening dress, paintings, cartoons, and a report card that urged the young O’Connor to “work on her spelling.”¹⁰⁰ The woman was now as interesting as her work. Drawings of the proposed Flannery O’Connor Room (which would be dedicated in 1974) were also displayed, and O’Connor’s appearance on the 1955 television interview show Galley Proof was screened every half-hour. Over eight hundred people attended the reception in order to view these materials; this once local hero had become a figure worthy of note on a grander scale.¹⁰¹ The program for the event blazoned critical blurbs from names with a great deal of clout, such as Alfred Kazin, all praising The Complete Stories. That the program also featured a chronology of O’Connor’s life again shows a growing interest in her biography.¹⁰² More than ever before, readers were fascinated by the person who had written such material, a fascination that would be fed by the publication of The Habit of Being in 1979.

A less-publicized yet still-revealing dedication also occurred in 1972, when Regina O’Connor bequeathed something other than manuscripts to a grateful institution. In the week before the reception at Georgia College, Regina donated several of her daughter’s peafowl to Stone Mountain Park, a popular site in Georgia that features the eponymous landmark as well as a restored plantation. O’Connor’s by-then iconic birds had been left to wander near the enormous bas-relief of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson; O’Connor was still very much claimed by her native Georgia. In its coverage of the presentation of the peafowl, the Union-Recorder proclaimed that “only Stone Mountain itself is more enduring than the works of Flannery O’Connor.”¹⁰³ The work belonged to the world, but the woman still, according to many admirers, belonged to the South.

Sally Fitzgerald and The Habit of Being: Courting Regina

The story of Sally Fitzgerald’s tireless negotiations with Regina to obtain the letters that would be collected in The Habit of Being (1979) is one in which those close to O’Connor—her friend, her publisher, and her mother—worked in and out of concert to fashion O’Connor’s reputation. Many letters poured into Giroux’s office inquiring who was writing O’Connor’s authorized biography or, in some cases, offering the writer’s services to tackle the job him-or herself. While many unknown and would-be biographers (such as the managing editor of the Boston Monthly) sought Giroux’s advice and approval, more notable writers also showed interest in such a project. For example, in 1964 the American playwright Leonard Melfi wrote Giroux that he wanted to write a biography of O’Connor and asked his advice on how to proceed; ten years later, Mark Harris, known for his baseball novel Bang the Drum Slowly, did the same.104 As he did to all such requests, Giroux responded by stating that no authorized biographer had yet been chosen. To both Melfi and Harris, however, Giroux added some words concerning the difficulty of such a project, regardless of who was undertaking it: to Melfi, he wrote that a biography of O’Connor would not be “an easy life to do because the most significant aspects of it were all interior and creative,”¹⁰⁵ while he informed Harris, “Flannery’s short life was an interior one, characterized by illness and concentration on her work.”¹⁰⁶ O’Connor herself had first expressed these ideas in a 1958 letter: “There won’t be any biographies of me, because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.”¹⁰⁷ Despite his caution to these would-be biographers, Giroux was soon guiding the hand of another potential biographer—Sally Fitzgerald—in her efforts to bring O’Connor’s life to her readers. To Giroux, ever protective of his friend’s reputation, only an O’Connor insider would do.

Like Giroux, Elizabeth McKee, O’Connor’s agent, had also received many requests by potential biographers. In what would become something resembling a form letter, McKee responded to a professor from the University of Cincinnati by saying that her office had been approached by “a number of scholars who wanted to know personal details” but that they could not be provided: “Because the Estate and her publishers will at some future time probably publish or authorize a book concerning the personal life of Flannery O’Connor and her publishing and agency associations during her lifetime and career, we have adopted a firm rule that we cannot furnish such material to anyone who wants to independently publish a book about Flannery and her works.”¹⁰⁸ Such requests prompted McKee to speak with Regina about an authorized biography; Regina was not opposed. McKee reported the conversation to Giroux and added her thoughts about the benefits of choosing an official biographer:

A good biography would stem all the inaccuracies about Flannery which are published these days. And if one could find a good writer for such a project the writer would have the enormous advantage of Regina’s cooperation and her introductions to people who knew Flannery intimately. She said hesitatingly that she wished you would write one but she was afraid that you wouldn’t have the time. I said that I doubted, too, that you would undertake such a project but that I would tell you. We both agreed that Robert Fitzgerald would not be the proper writer.109

If Robert was not the “proper writer” for such a work, McKee, Regina, and Giroux regarded Sally as the natural choice: Giroux wrote of Sally in 1977, “No one could be better equipped to write the biography.”¹¹⁰ In early 1978 Sally applied for a fellowship from Radcliffe to compose a work tentatively entitled, Flannery and Regina: A Biographical Study of Flannery O’Connor. In her application for the fellowship, Sally presented her bona fides as half of the team that edited and helped bring Mystery and Manners to light, as well as her then-current work in preparing the edition of O’Connor’s letters that would become The Habit of Being. Noting in her application that Regina would have burned O’Connor’s letters but for Sally’s intervention, Fitzgerald expressed her confidence in getting anything she needed in order to create a compelling biography. She added that there were books “under maternal seal” at Andalusia teeming with O’Connor’s annotations but that she believed she could also “gain access to this material.”¹¹¹ Giroux endorsed Sally’s project, writing in his letter of recommendation, “As [O’Connor’s] publisher, I am deluged with requests from writers who want to write her life” and that he sent such requests to Regina, who “always turned them down.”¹¹² He observed that Sally, however, had claimed in her application that Regina had “recently asked Sarah H. Fitzgerald to undertake this work, demonstrating her keen awareness” that “Ms. Fitzgerald is uniquely qualified for the job.” Radcliffe awarded the fellowship in April 1978, and Sally began working on the project while simultaneously editing the letters. There is significance in all parties’ eagerness to confirm Sally as the authorized biographer: O’Connor’s mother, her publisher, and her agent all wanted someone to present O’Connor’s character to the world in a manner they saw as accurate and that would avoid any potential dents in the armor of her reputation. What none of them could have foreseen was that the title Flannery and Regina would come to take on greater significance than any of them realized when they began collecting O’Connor’s letters in earnest.

Interest in publishing O’Connor’s letters also gained momentum after her death. In 1967 Jean Wylder, one of O’Connor’s classmates at the University of Iowa, wrote to John Farrar to propose an edition of O’Connor’s letters; Farrar responded that Robert Fitzgerald was already under contract to collect them.¹¹³ Yet no contract between FS&G and a writer was drawn, so Farrar was either mistaken or warding off potential competition: attached to his same letter of refusal was a note from an assistant asking Wylder if she had any letters of her own that they might use. A short time after Wylder’s inquiry, Giroux wrote to Regina who had, almost prophetically, suggested a volume of O’Connor’s artwork and cartoons much like the one released in 2012; Giroux responded that he did not think it wise to publish the artwork by itself, but mentioned the possibility of including it in “the collection of Flannery’s letters” that “one day must be brought out.”114 The plan for publishing O’Connor’s letters, however, remained in the background until 1974, when Giroux wrote Robert Fitzgerald, telling him, “We continue to receive inquiries about an edition of Flannery’s letters. . . . I wonder if the time has come for us to contract with you and Sally to edit such a book.”¹¹⁵ Noting the rise of O’Connor’s reputation, Giroux added, “It’s our impression that interest in Flannery’s work, and in everything about her, increases every year.” However, what stands out from this letter, in hindsight, are Giroux’s words about Regina: “I’ve discussed this with Elizabeth McKee, who is keen for you both to do it, but she thinks it should be first cleared by Regina—probably by phone. Assuming you agree the time has now come for such an edition, would you undertake to obtain Regina’s blessing? If she agrees, as I can’t help thinking she will, I’d like to draw up an agreement.” Giroux’s noting that the project should be “cleared by Regina—probably by phone” as if he knew that Regina had to be handled with care and that Fitzgerald could be more convincing in conversation than in writing, merits attention. While this blessing was in fact finally obtained, it did not come without a number of difficulties and caveats, all of which related to how Regina sought to steer O’Connor’s reputation as a daughter more than as an author. Regina’s blessing, as Sally was to learn, was a limited one that initially entailed what Sally viewed as a whitewashing of a reputation but that Regina viewed as the upholding of decorum and good manners.

Robert Fitzgerald responded to Giroux’s request with enthusiasm: “Sally and I talked over the possibilities of an edition of Flannery’s selected letters and agreed that we were all for it, that it should be done.”¹¹⁶ In the same letter, Fitzgerald added that Sally would do most of the work and expressed his assurance that “Regina will trust her judgment on the letters,” a claim that would latter appear as an overconfident assessment of just how much Regina trusted Sally. Giroux wrote Regina in the autumn of 1974, excited about the project. Sally Fitzgerald wrote to Giroux during the same period to outline her plan: the volume would not present a complete edition of O’Connor’s letters but offer enough of them “to sketch for us a recognizable self-portrait of the artist as a remarkable young woman whose lineaments, guessed at from a distance, have often been forbiddingly misdrawn.”117 The ensuing collection, for example, features none of the letters that O’Connor wrote to her mother every day when she lived with the Fitzgeralds in Connecticut for much of 1949 and 1950. Sally Fitzgerald, however, felt confident that she could provide a faithful portrait of O’Connor through the medium of her correspondence.

The next phase of the project predictably entailed a scramble for the letters themselves with Sally making inquiries across the country. Giroux assisted her whenever he could. In September 1973, for example, he wrote to the University of Texas to ask for the letters deposited there; in June 1975 he wrote to the poet and critic G. Roysce Smith, asking for any letters O’Connor had written to him or his fellow poet George Marion O’Donnell. Giroux’s requests reveal his desire to help fashion the kind of three-dimensional portrait Sally envisioned: he noted to Smith, “What may seem unimportant by itself perhaps might be a key piece in the total mosaic.”¹¹⁸ His language here recalls that of Charles Beard, the director of the library at Georgia College, who stated that the 1972 donation of O’Connor’s papers would allow scholars to form a “total picture” of O’Connor.

A more tangled request illustrates the pains Giroux took to create that “total mosaic.” As he assisted Sally in her search, Giroux learned that Duke University had, in 1961, been given a cache of letters by various correspondents, many of them members of the Gossett family.¹¹⁹ In March 1976 he wrote to Mary Louise Black of Duke University Press to inquire about the letters, complaining that all requests for them addressed to the librarians at Georgia College “have got nowhere.” Giroux asked Black to act discreetly on his behalf:

I wonder if you’ll act as my intelligence agent in the matter. Can you find out if anyone—a qualified scholar, for instance—is allowed to see them and under what circumstances? . . . Can you look into it quietly without ruffling anyone’s bureaucratic feathers? . . . I want to get all the facts I can. Did someone, for example, sell the letters to Duke and were considerations of secrecy imposed? . . . The circuitous paths in the literary life never cease to amaze me.¹²⁰

Black responded with interesting news about a notice in American Literary Scholarship, an annual review by Duke University Press that surveys scholarly work published in the past year. The notice concerned an article by Thomas Gossett in a recent issue of the Southern Literary Journal in which Gossett described O’Connor’s reactions to contemporary figures such as Isak Dinesen and J. F. Powers (both of whose work she enjoyed). What intrigued Black was Gossett’s note that he and his wife possessed “about one hundred and thirty-five letters and postcards from her, most of them written to other people” but that Regina, as executor, “has so far decided not to release them for publication” and prohibited Gossett from directly quoting them.121 The trickiness of the situation was due to the difference between physical paper and the words printed on it, a difference of which Giroux was fully aware: as he later wrote to Maryat Lee, “The recipients of the letters own the pieces of paper, but the words and their use for publication belong to Flannery’s estate. This is an aspect of copyright law that few people are familiar with—understandably, since it is a complicated distinction.”¹²² Libraries and individuals may have treasured O’Connor’s letters as the wonderful artifacts that they were, but Regina held the rights to publishing their contents. Giroux was concerned by Regina’s decision, since he had been acting on the assumption that the he and Sally, perhaps because of their closeness to O’Connor, would be granted permission by her mother to print any of the letters that they chose. Still, Giroux was motivated by Gossett’s use of the phrase “so far” and wrote to Sally that there was still the potential that they would receive the permission they sought: “The one ray of hope is Regina’s saying that she wants more time to think about allowing publication of the very letters you and I have been assuming we can publish.”¹²³ Tactfully, he advised Sally to “drop Regina a line, telling her of your plans.”¹²⁴ Nine days later, Giroux sent Sally a copy of Gossett’s article, which revealed a challenge to their current project: “I don’t see how we can bring out a book of her letters without including this large batch of 135 letters which has been deposited (under seal) at Duke University. Since Regina has refused to allow Gossett to quote from the letters, she may well refuse to make copies available for your book. Once again, Regina is the key to the problem. . . . I hope you can get her to cut the Gordian knot.”¹²⁵ Unbeknownst to Giroux and the Fitzgeralds, Regina had recently been engaged in other negotiations about her daughter’s letters—negotiations that suggested the Gordian knot was still awaiting its Alexander the Great.

Regina had her own ideas about the propriety of publishing her daughter’s letters or those of anyone else. Approximately a month before Giroux had written to Sally about their problem, O’Connor’s friend and frequent correspondent, the playwright Maryat Lee, had composed an article for the Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, which had begun in 1972 under the editorship of Caroline Gordon. Lee’s article reminisced about the year in which she had first met O’Connor, and she had wanted to quote from O’Connor’s letters to her. Anticipating Regina’s sensitivity about this request, Lee sent Giroux a copy of her yet-to-be-sent letter to Regina, asking if she should make any changes for the sake of diplomacy. Giroux thought that Lee had struck the right tone in her request so that, in Lee’s words, “O’Connor could speak for herself and not have it filtered.”126 Regina, however, denied Lee’s request on the grounds that her daughter was not alive to grant permission or defend herself from any repercussions that might result from such publication: “I couldn’t give you or anyone else permission to quote from letters I haven’t read,” she wrote Lee, adding, “I’m sure you understand how I feel about this.”¹²⁷ This editorial principle recast as an emotion sparked a heated correspondence between these two women, one who wanted to humanize O’Connor’s public persona and one who wanted to guard it. Lee responded by asserting her assumptions about the positive effects from quoting O’Connor’s unpublished letters: “It is important right now to encourage publication of her letters to balance the odd fancies and notions some of the literary bigwigs have about her interests. Some of the things you may not think are anybody’s business, you know, but since my purpose in this reminiscence is to show how many things interested Flannery, not just a narrow range of things, I think it is useful.”¹²⁸ Lee mentioned, in the same letter, a rumor she had heard about Sally’s work on what would become The Habit of Being and stated, “I hope it’s true, for I feel her beautiful letters will extend her place in the world of ‘letters,’ and that we have reached a time when the world is hungry to know more of her and the letters will help enlarge her already considerable influence.” Regina, however, persevered, not out of mere stubbornness or a desire for control, but because she was genuinely concerned about her daughter’s reputation and betraying her privacy:

Maryat, about the letters, I can’t help but feel Flannery wrote those letters just to you and I wonder if she would like them published. (I’m trying to be honest with you.) I don’t know any other way. I appreciate what you said in your letter and it would be nice for people to know another side of her, but people are funny and those who believe that there is no other side, you simply can’t change them.¹²⁹

This “other side” of O’Connor was exactly what Fitzgerald and Giroux had sought to convey in their introductions to her books; remember, there was very little biographical work done on O’Connor until decades after these essays. Regina did add, “Please give me a little more time to think about it” before closing—a portent of her eventually relenting. She wrote to Lee again a few days later, saying that Lee could quote the letters directly but only after specific “personal references” were deleted.¹³⁰ The grateful Lee responded that same day, thanking Regina for her permission and expressing her confidence that the letters “would correct some misconceptions afloat”¹³¹ about O’Connor, such as that she was a homebody who only cared for her writing and her church. What truly stands out in Lee’s response regarding O’Connor’s reputation is Lee’s assertion that her friend was well aware that her reputation would extend beyond Milledgeville and continually evolve after her death: “I’ve come to think that Flannery was quite aware that she would or could become a celebrated person—even more than when she was alive.” She added that she had “solid reason to believe” that Flannery thought her letters would someday be published. Lee attempted to comfort Regina by telling her that readers would not be looking for private or salacious material; rather, most readers were “people who want to know and take to their hearts not only the literary works, but the person (as seen in letters) who wrote them for the simple reason that such persons give them courage and company.” In short, Lee viewed the publication of letters as a means to heightening readers’ appreciation of an author’s work and life—a view that Regina agreed with, as long as people’s feelings were not hurt. To her, a “total picture” or a “total mosaic” was acceptable in theory, but her daughter’s privacy trumped literary portraiture.

While Sally was preparing The Habit of Being, Lee was interested in producing an annotated edition of letters from O’Connor to her and had already contacted Regina about such a collection. Sally had disliked the way that Lee had portrayed O’Connor in the Flannery O’Connor Bulletin piece for which she had sought Regina’s permission to quote the letters. She wrote Giroux, “I greatly fear that Maryat’s accounts would be subject to the same rules of dramatic rearrangement. She wanted, after all, to be a playwright.”132 Sally here gives the first indication of what would become her editorial principle of not interfering with the voice to be heard in the letters. She wrote Lee and asked for copies of her letters from O’Connor—but never indicated to Lee that the letters would appear in The Habit of Being, an omission that Lee rightly resented and which she expressed to Sally in an angry letter.¹³³ Sally responded by writing Lee that she “planned to give a great deal of importance to Flannery’s friendship with you” and that she hoped Lee would help her “put together a good and objective book about our rare friend.”¹³⁴ The yoking of “good and objective” reflects Sally’s assumptions about how to best further O’Connor’s reputation: by trusting the letters to speak for themselves, without any critical adornment. Lee fumed to Giroux—who had seen a copy of Sally’s letter—that any commentary she offered in her proposed edition of the letters would be honest and faithful to Flannery.¹³⁵ Giroux tactfully refereed, writing Lee that he appreciated her intentions but that, legally, Regina—and, by extension, Sally—had the advantage. Lee did not appreciate what she viewed as Giroux’s sophistry, and expressed as much in subsequent letters to Regina and Sally. But she did relent in her pursuit of her own collection, and her letters from O’Connor run throughout The Habit of Being. Sally’s unadorned version of O’Connor had come another step closer to reality.

Lee’s skirmish with Regina over these letters for a personal reminiscence in a journal prefigured the longer battle that occurred between Sally and Regina over hundreds of letters for a book. Sally had sent Regina a number of Flannery’s letters that she wanted to include in what would become The Habit of Being and asked her permission to reprint them. Regina returned them to Sally with enough editorial demands to warrant Sally’s responding in a long letter dated May 1, 1977. Many of Regina’s requests were matters of what she regarded as good manners, as when she asked that Sally edit the letters in which O’Connor referred to her Uncle Louis by his first name: the thought of Flannery calling him “Louis” in print seemed scandalous to Regina, who feared that this would make her daughter seem like she had not been raised well. Sally noted, “We can’t, of course, change Flannery’s wording” and urged Regina to view this detail as one that would allow O’Connor to be seen as more three-dimensional:

I wish you would think over again whether to use the name of the uncle. Flannery always called him Louis—and there wasn’t the slightest disrespect in her doing so. She was crazy about him, and admired him very much, as well. But if she is made to call him only “Uncle” then it begins to sound a little unreal. She ought to sound as real as possible. Reality was what Flannery prized, both supernatural reality, and the reality that is part of everyday life. . . . I hope you will reconsider and let her call him by the name she always used for him and to him. Especially as he is shown to be so very nice in the letters.136

Regina eventually relented on this point. In other parts of Sally’s letter, she argues for the same practice of letting O’Connor sound like herself, rather than a version her mother thought more proper. For example, Regina expressed her dismay over any association in print between O’Connor and alcohol, which, as one can detect in Sally’s reply, Regina assumed made her daughter seem more like F. Scott Fitzgerald than Thomas Merton: “By ‘drank with this one and that one,’ Flannery obviously meant that she had a glass of sherry at some literary cocktail party. There isn’t the slightest suggestion anywhere that she ‘drank,’ or went out drinking. I’ll cut it out if you want me to, but I don’t think it is at all misleading, really.” Sally’s use of “obviously” here reveals a hint of exasperation. Sally was also aware that when O’Connor lived with her and Robert in Connecticut, she sometimes ended the day with a martini as she and her landlords conducted their literary discussions—a fact that Robert had already mentioned, in print, in his introduction to Everything That Rises Must Converge.137 However, she knew better than to play this card against Regina at this time: if she wanted to foster what she saw as an honest image of O’Connor, she had to cajole her mother.

Sally’s response contains other such moments when one can imagine her shaking her head in disbelief yet communicating her ideas in diplomatically strained language. For example, Sally wrote that O’Connor’s mentioning Brainard Cheney’s past occupation as speechwriter for the governor of Tennes see was no poor reflection on Cheney or the governor, since “All governors, presidents, etc. have speech-writers working for them” because “They really don’t have time to write their own speeches.” She similarly had to explain that “whiskey priest” was “a very well-known joking term, not made up by Flannery” and certainly not the slur on the priesthood that Regina imagined. Sally, however, became more emphatic when Regina suggested they remove O’Connor’s 1954 letter to the Fitzgeralds in which she described Robert Lowell’s decision to leave the church: “I really don’t think it is too personal. This is Flannery at her best. Very few people had the courage to tell him what they thought. He made a rather public scene about leaving it, and said to many people what she quotes him as saying to her. I think it is better to let her say exactly what she said to him in return.” Clearly, the two women had different ideas of what constituted “Flannery at her best”: Sally prized her friend’s honesty while Regina prized unruffled feathers. Sally won this particular battle: the letter was eventually included in The Habit of Being. And, in a reminder of the sometimes comic note that these negotiations struck, Sally also informed Regina that O’Connor’s mention of Lowell spouting “some other claptrap about Henry Adams being a Catholic anarchist”¹³⁸ was no cause for concern: “Henry Adams . . . was a Boston writer who died a hundred years ago. No problem about mentioning him.”¹³⁹

This is not to say that Sally was insensitive to personal issues being put into print: while she told Regina that she did not think Allen Tate would “mind the reference to his getting ‘mobbed,’” since O’Connor’s term referred to “rowdy students” and not Tate himself, she parenthetically added, “I am of course omitting all references to the domestic struggles and sorrows of the Tates throughout the collection,” since “That is the kind of thing that I think has no place in the book.” Similarly, in her comments about the term “whiskey priest,” Sally states that some of O’Connor’s remarks about “the very Irish parish priest in Milledgeville” could be “toned down” since the person was still alive. Sally’s responses throughout her work on The Habit of Being generally reveal her desire to tread carefully in the epistolary presence of Regina.

Sally was less constrained in her correspondence with Giroux. The day after she composed the response to Regina, she wrote to inform him, “Regina is sharpening her blade”140 and enclosed a copy of her May 1 letter concerning O’Connor’s uncle Louis and other matters. She also bore worse news about a second batch of letters that Regina had just returned with a new set of demands: “Her objections to letting Flannery speak in [the first batch] were as nothing to her objections to the second, far more interesting, batch. Which she tore to pieces. Gutted. I found it yesterday when I got home. I felt sick when I saw what she wants to do, and the shell she is willing to leave.” Sally’s frustration here reflects her assumption that a reputation is better formed by an author’s own words than a “shell” left by others. Sally informed Giroux that she planned to write Regina a letter “on the general principle of allowing Flannery to be herself” and remind her that “if Flannery had written her stories to please Milledgeville, or to refrain from displeasing it, nothing whatever would have come of her work.” That each woman’s point of view was sympathetic only heightened the drama, and Sally even sympathized, to an extent, with Regina and her concerns: “Obviously,” she continued in her letter to Giroux, “I don’t want her to wound or embarrass living people. . . . Flannery herself was careful not to hurt people deliberately. But Regina’s scruples are not of the same kind.” Sally promised Giroux that she would send him a copy of her next letter to Regina, one in which she hoped to be “careful and effective.” She also asked Giroux not to mention any of these dealings to Elizabeth McKee or to communicate with Regina himself, “lest she feel beleaguered.” Courting Regina for the sake of a more genuine portrait of O’Connor would take some tact and political skill. Giroux responded that he found her first letter to Regina “excellent” and that he would not intervene in her plans unless asked; he also offered her his moral support, ending his letter with, “Flannery—of all writers!—should not be falsified.”¹⁴¹

Sally’s next letter to Regina reads as a primer for anyone interested in collecting an author’s letters in the interest of furthering a literary reputation. Unlike her previous letter, in which she enumerated her points as they related to specific items in specific letters, this one pleads in eleven paragraphs to let O’Connor speak for herself. Regina had requested, for example, that O’Connor’s letters to Fr. James McCown, in which she discussed a number of theological issues, be excised; Sally responded that Fr. McCown had already removed anything he thought too personal when he donated the letters to Vanderbilt University and that Regina was not seeing the reputation-forest for the trees of social unease: “They are very good examples of the kind of open, frank, joking, but deeply serious and mutually respectful friendship it is possible for a Catholic to have with a priest. You know, most non-Catholics don’t know that such a thing is possible. I do hope you will consent to have these letters made public. Flannery’s loyalty to the church was strongly determined throughout her life, and that fact alone gave her the right to criticize what she felt deserved criticism. Fr. McCown certainly thought nothing she said offensive.”142 Regarding Regina’s request that O’Connor’s remark about not wanting to bathe at Lourdes (“I am one of those people who could die for his religion easier than taking a bath for it”¹⁴³) be removed on the grounds of near-blasphemy, Sally responded that O’Connor’s balking at the act was not “unnatural,” that “Many, even most, people would, and wouldn’t mind saying so,” and, most importantly, that when in a subsequent letter O’Connor “ascribes the unexpected recalcification of her hip bone to Lourdes, she does more to bear witness, and is more humble and truthful, than she would have been if she had held her tongue in the beginning.” Sally thus appealed to Regina as both a friend of O’Connor’s and a Catholic, implying that by allowing O’Connor to “speak her mind on both scores,” Regina would be affecting the reputation of her daughter and her church in a more positive way. Reminding Regina that one reviewer of Mystery and Manners praised the work because “there is always audible the sound of her voice speaking; never the sound of a machine clattering,” Sally sought to impress upon Regina her editorial principle, much like Giroux’s, of non-interference.

Sally also urged Regina to consider ways in which a more open edition of O’Connor’s letters would suit her daughter’s personality and writing. Statements such as “I do truly believe that her own strong respect for everyday reality and the concrete ought to be honored by letting her speak,” and “Let her talk about your life together: she does you proud, and you would do her proud to recognize that and let her speak freely,” characterize Sally’s tone and overall appeal. Her penultimate paragraph carries her most earnest plea for allowing the voice that spoke so truly about so many issues to surface in her letters—which were, according to Sally, the cause of greater and more meaningful discomfort than O’Connor’s mentioning neighbors by name or questioning the decisions of a priest:

I think that we have to remember that if Flannery had written in her stories only what would please the townspeople, she never would have written everything that has made her one of the most honored of modern American writers. As you said to me, “she had a message.” She observed and made live the world around her, in her stories—and in her letters, as well. So the letters carry the message, too. Ought we to stifle her voice, in that case? She always made people think, even if she didn’t always make them comfortable. She will make them think by her letters, too, if we let them speak for her.

Appealing to Regina’s pride in her daughter and recasting O’Connor as a minor prophet herself, Sally hoped that her argument would sway Regina from her reluctance to add pieces to the “total mosaic.” Ending with “We’ll work it out” and typing “With love, as always” above her signature, Sally could only have hoped that Regina would understand the importance of her daughter’s honest, unfiltered voice being heard in her uncensored letters.

Her hopes were dashed when she received Regina’s response. That this letter was typed, unlike the usually handwritten letters that Regina favored, and copied suggested the seriousness of her response and that Regina was expressing herself in the most formal means possible. While Regina began with a joke—“I guess this letter is special to use this carbon paper”144—she twice mentioned that she was at a “disadvantage” by not having all the letters in question at hand, suggesting that this supposedly friendly collaboration was marked by the presence of tough negotiations. Regina quickly got to the point: “I understand that you can’t change Flannery’s words, but as you say we can leave out certain things or paraphrase her actual words—When we went into this I had no idea you wanted to use all the letters to Betty—Just remember she wrote those to Betty as her friend not to the public.” Her objections about O’Connor’s letters to Betty Hester were followed by others, worded even more emphatically and with spelling and syntax that I have not changed:

As to the term “whiskey priest,” I never thought for a minute Flannery was the originator, but we are not use to priest being referred to in that manner, remember that wasn’t for the public but for Betty. The Irish priest is still alive and lives in Atlanta. I want it out. He’s a friend of mine. . . . Cal Lowell, I think it’s to personal and I want it left out. . . . The part about drinking ‘with this one and that one’ I want it left out.

Sally’s previous letter describing the benefits of letting an author speak for herself was not as “careful and effective” as she had hoped. Nothing was about to change Regina’s set opinions; she was eighty years old and confident of her own opinions regarding the difference between literary property and social propriety.

Sally tried one final time to convince Regina of the need to let Flannery be Flannery. Responding to Regina’s questioning Fr. McCown’s right to donate his letters to Vanderbilt, Sally informed Regina that this was a common, legitimate practice and that no one could stop scholars from reading the letters or describing their contents in print. “This is precisely the reason,” she explained, “why I have wanted to use as much as I have—so that Flannery’s own words can be heard, and not just what somebody said she said.”145 In the remainder of this three-page letter dated three days after Regina’s typed response, Sally conceded to some of Regina’s demands, informing her, for example, that she would cut the reference to the “whiskey priest” (although she was unable to resist adding that it was “a joke of course”) and telling her that she would remove O’Connor’s words about being “irked” because an acquaintance had “failed to mention you when she wrote thanking F. for a weekend.” Sally was beginning to show the exhaustion that lay beneath the diplomacy: she reminded Regina that the idea of anyone regarding O’Connor as a drinker was absurd, since it was “abundantly clear from all the letters that Flannery was almost completely abstemious,” and sought to correct Regina’s impression of Robert Lowell as one to whom religious convictions were a private matter and therefore best excised from the letters: “Cal Lowell has never hesitated to announce that he has left the church, and mention of the fact by Flannery simply suggests that she, too, knew what everybody else had also been told. And that she was grieved by his leaving it.” Sally most emphatically argued for the inclusion of O’Connor’s letters to her friend Betty Hester, which Regina thought too personal:

The letters to Betty contain more about Flannery’s reading, her literary and theological interests than almost any other of her correspondence. In some ways, they are the most important letters that she wrote. I have chopped them to pieces, to eliminate the things that she said to her in confidence . . . but many of the things she wrote to Betty are of great public interest in setting down her reading interests and her generosity in helping people out with their own writing.

Regina conceded this point, although Hester only allowed the letters to be published after her identity was changed to “A.” Sally did admit to Regina that she was at a “disadvantage” (as Regina had earlier called it) in not seeing all the letters, but offered a means of rectifying the situation: “I think perhaps it would be better not to bother you with any more of these packets [of letters] that you have to return. Why don’t I simply get the whole manuscript together . . . and when it is entirely finished, as I think it ought to be, I will xerox it and send it off to you, so that you can get a sense of it as a whole, and can ask for any further revisions or cuts you would like to make.” Such a solution hinged on Sally’s hunch that Regina, upon reading the whole of the collection, would view the letters as integral to the “total picture” of O’Connor or, as she remarked earlier in the letter, that people “are not as easily embarrassed as we might think.” Sally tactfully closed the letter by mentioning that she had recently met the cardinal archbishop of Boston and that, when she was introduced to him as the person “working on Flannery’s letters,” the cardinal “spoke very very highly of Flannery.” Mentioning this conversation could not but help her cause.

As we have seen before, Sally found in Giroux a colleague to whom she could vent her frustration. On the same day as her last plea to Regina, she wrote Giroux about her struggles:

Herewith a copy of my letter to Regina, sent today. I feel like the Laocoön. If you don’t want to plow through all three pages, you needn’t. This is just for the record. If you do finish it, you will see that I propose to send her just the completed manuscript, rather than throwing myself on the spears every few days. Maybe the whole thing will make her see that Flannery does not come out badly. Her excisions are often fantastic, I fear, and some of them I will restore in the final version, in the hope that she may not notice, or may have ceased to mind, or may have seen the light of reason. She is so afraid of anything personal that she has crossed out references to Henry Adams and Wyndham Lewis. . . . I do not lose hope, however.146

In her letter to Regina, Sally offered to send the complete manuscript as a way to atone for any past “disadvantages,” while here she remarks that doing so was a way to avoid the “spears” and “fantastic” demands of a mother who would not “see the light of reason.” Sally’s letter, however, again emphasizes just how important this project would be to O’Connor’s reputation: how she would be portrayed (“come out”) in the collected letters was a matter of whose principles about the reprinting of private letters would inform the editing.

By all accounts, Regina was always concerned that her daughter was well regarded by their friends and neighbors and wanted her to be the kind of author who produced work that boosted her reputation as an “admirable” author. Regina once asked Giroux, in the presence of O’Connor, “Mister Giroux, can’t you get Flannery to write about nice people?”¹⁴⁷ And in one pointed letter to Cecil Dawkins, O’Connor fumed over Regina’s desire to have her daughter write a novel more like Gone with the Wind and less like Wise Blood: “Do you think, she said, that you are really using the talent God gave you when you don’t write something that a lot, a LOT, of people like? This always leaves me shaking and speechless, raises my blood pressure 140 degrees, etc. All I can ever say is, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”148 But readers should not regard Regina as benighted or as a philistine; she supported O’Connor in her habit of art throughout her life—a life during which she lived with Regina for all but five of her thirty-nine years. As Jean Cash states, “With limitations of intellect and personality over which she had little control, Regina Cline O’Connor still contributed significantly to the ultimate success of her brilliant daughter.”¹⁴⁹ Sally’s dedication of the book, “To Regina Cline O’Connor in gratitude for letting readers come to know her daughter better,” is an acknowledgment of Regina’s power and that she deserved recognition. The Habit of Being reminds us that those who affect an author’s “ultimate success” and reputation need not be members of the literati.

Like the two other O’Connor insiders who preceded her, Sally used the occasion of an introduction to shape O’Connor’s reputation. By the time that The Habit of Being was published, readers were less in need of the kind of biographical portrait offered by Robert Fitzgerald in 1965 or Giroux in 1971. However, like her predecessors, Sally assumed that readers did need a further correcting of O’Connor’s reputation, this time mostly through the words of the author herself. Sally argues in her introduction that photographs of O’Connor may be empirically accurate but emotionally false and have affected her reputation in an unfortunate, because misleading, way: “The camera was often as unjust as what was written about her.”¹⁵⁰ By analogy, Sally argues that O’Connor’s letters reveal not an invalid confined to her farm with her mother but a vivacious person whose joie de vivre informed her existence: “These letters reveal her to have been anything but reclusive by inclination: to have been, on the contrary, notably gregarious. She enjoyed company and sought it, sending warm invitations to her old and new friends to come to Andalusia. Once her inviolable three-hour morning stint of writing was done, she looked for, and throve on, companionship. . . . She participated in the lives of her friends, interested herself in their work, their children, their health, and their adventures” (xi).

Sally also explains her choice of title, another means by which she sought to affect O’Connor’s reputation. Telling of a time when O’Connor left a copy of Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism at the Fitzgeralds’ home, Sally explains that, just as Maritain explored the “habit of art” or “attitude or quality of mind” as “essential to the real artist as talent,” O’Connor possessed the “habit of being,” defined by Sally as “an excellence not only of action but of interior disposition and activity that increasingly related the object, the being, which specified it, and was itself reflected in what she did and said” (xv)—what might be called, in other academic writing, habitus. In simpler terms, Sally argued that O’Connor’s life was one of her great artistic creations, and she urged readers to study it—through the unadorned letters—as they would O’Connor’s fiction. Perhaps her argument explains why the authorized biography was never completed: the life lived was found, as Sally insisted, in the letters and friendships, not in records of travel or other, more routine components of biographies. Such an idea is much like the one that Giroux shared with Leonard Melfi and Mark Harris when each inquired about becoming O’Connor’s authorized biographer.

In January 1979, shortly before The Habit of Being’s March publication, Giroux wrote to Regina and enclosed a clipping from Library Journal: “The first review is excellent. It’s an advance notice and couldn’t be better.”151 He assured her that anyone to whom she wanted to send a copy had received one, with a card stating, “Compliments of Regina Cline O’Connor.” Also, a few days earlier, he assured Regina of the volume’s quality: “I think Sally did an excellent job of editing and that the book, in its final form, gives the reader an accurate and attractive picture of Flannery—especially her sense of humor.”¹⁵² As other early reviews were published, Giroux kept sending copies to Regina, noting that he was “particularly pleased with Walter Clemons’s reference to you in Newsweek” and that, at a publication-day luncheon at the Players Club, “we shall all drink a toast to you in absentia.”¹⁵³ He also sent her a copy of the book to inscribe for his personal collection; Regina replied to this request and many of Giroux’s letters with appreciation. Giroux wanted to assure Regina that she had done right by her daughter in allowing Sally to present her letters to the world. With Sally’s biography still under construction, Giroux knew that the bridge to Andalusia could not, under any circumstances, be burned. Nor do his papers suggest that he had anything but respect for Regina.

The reviews of The Habit of Being were as universally laudatory as Sally, Giroux, or Regina could have wished. Robert Phillips, in Commonweal, urged his readers, “Buy this book, for the rare insight into one of our rarest, and in her time least-appreciated artists.”¹⁵⁴ If O’Connor was not, as Phillips claimed, given her critical due while alive, critics were now making up for their collective sin of omission. The review in Library Journal that Giroux sent to Regina called the collection “one of the most unique achievements in twentieth-century literature.”¹⁵⁵ John R. May, writing in America, described it as “one of the finest recent instances of a venerable art form and a major contribution to American letters,”¹⁵⁶ while Richard H. Brodhead, in the Yale Review, deemed it the “richest volume of correspondence by an American author to have appeared in many years.”¹⁵⁷ Across the Atlantic, Graham Greene (no doubt a sympathetic reader) described the book as “a fascinating collection of letters by a fine American novelist much neglected over here in her lifetime.”158 Writing in the New York Times, John Leonard stated, “There hasn’t been a better collection of letters since the two-volume set of D. H. Lawrence published by Viking in 1962.”¹⁵⁹ His colleague at the Times, Richard Gilman, noted early in his Book Review assessment that “Byron, Keats, Lawrence, Wilde and Joyce come irresistibly to mind”¹⁶⁰ as one reads O’Connor’s letters. And Michael True, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, called The Habit of Being “one of the great collections of letters in American literature, equal in range and quality to those of Hawthorne and Melville and comparable, in what they tell us about the craft of fiction and writing, to the prefaces of Henry James and the notebooks of Henry David Thoreau.”¹⁶¹ In the Southern Literary Journal, Melvin J. Friedman questioned this level of praise and noted that “O’Connor herself would probably have been amused and slightly embarrassed by this assertion,”¹⁶² but his was the minority report. Several reviewers drew comparisons between The Habit of Being and The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, also published that same year,¹⁶³ while the New York Times’s year-end list of best books included The Habit of Being alongside the recently published letters of Lewis Carroll, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf.¹⁶⁴ Such comparisons marked another rise in O’Connor’s critical clout: no longer was she immediately compared to Caldwell, Williams, or Capote but was now being spoken of, quite casually and earnestly, in the same sentences as the names of the masters she admired. One reviewer even called The Habit of Being an exercise in “essential insight and self-confrontation,” superior to what he saw in Faulkner’s Collected Letters: “scrupulously arranged tedium.”¹⁶⁵ When Carson McCullers was mentioned in these reviews, it was only to illustrate the gulf between her and O’Connor, as when Friedman quoted a letter in which O’Connor described Clock Without Hands as “the worst book I have ever read.”¹⁶⁶ The seed Giroux had planted in his introduction to The Complete Stories about O’Connor transcending the South had germinated.

Many reviewers spoke of how the letters demonstrated praiseworthy aspects of O’Connor’s character, a “country humor and shrewd intelligence backed up by a considerable spiritual toughness.”¹⁶⁷ Many reviewers also dwelled on O’Connor’s courage as she faced death, adding to a mythology about O’Connor and her illness that still exists today. In Comparative Literature, Frank E. Moorer and Richard Macksey praised how the letters reveal O’Connor “fighting the energy-sapping advances of her disease but never currying sympathy,”¹⁶⁸ just as Gilman similarly noted that the letters present O’Connor as “heroic” and “a model of valor.”¹⁶⁹ Richard H. Brodhead argued that the letters reveal a woman who did not “permit herself emotions like rage and self-pity”;¹⁷⁰ Paul Gray, in Time, stated, “She had cause to be bitter but never was.”¹⁷¹ Such sentiments about O’Connor as “an exceptionally valiant woman”172 were epitomized in the headline above Edmund Fuller’s review in the Wall Street Journal: “A Gallant Life Amidst Profound Insight.”¹⁷³ The majority of reviewers also mentioned her sense of humor, love of reading, and humility. Only John F. Desmond, in World Literature Today, acknowledged that O’Connor was not a saint but a person: he noted that the letters revealed O’Connor’s “love of truth” but also “streaks of intolerance and righteous anger, of literary and religious dogmatism, of tactlessness and insensitivity.”¹⁷⁴ However, his was a rare voice in a critical crowd that seemed to hold a tacit agreement to not speak ill of the dead.

Amid the collective enthusiasm for the collection, one notes critics using the occasion of their reviews to correct what they saw as misunderstandings of O’Connor’s life and works, especially the idea that she was a recluse, confined to her mother’s house and living like a southern Emily Dickinson. Writing in National Review, J. O. Tate argued that The Habit of Being put to rest the notion of O’Connor’s hermitage: “Any lingering canards about O’Connor’s isolation, which never were true, must henceforth be gone or be damned.”¹⁷⁵ A piece in Kirkus Reviews offered a similar observation: “The idea of the spinster lady with lupus living cut off from the world in Milledgeville, Georgia . . . is dispelled.”¹⁷⁶ Miles Orvell, in the American Scholar, noted that the letters prove that “we would be much mistaken to assume that Flannery O’Connor led a life which was either provincial or reclusive”¹⁷⁷; as John Keates, in the London Spectator, noted, “Immobility does not necessarily imply isolation.”¹⁷⁸ Such an understanding of O’Connor was urged in New Catholic World, in which Helen Ruth Vaughn made the similar point that the “small geography of [O’Connor’s] physical life . . . in no way circumscribed the vast geography of her mind.”¹⁷⁹ Perhaps so many critics (among them Mary Gordon, who wrote of O’Connor’s “isolation”¹⁸⁰) described O’Connor’s “seclusion”¹⁸¹ as a way to account for work that was so strange, so southern, and so Catholic. Much had changed for O’Connor’s reputation since Wise Blood, but the urge to tease out the secret of how she created her work still remained. Some of O’Connor’s admirers routinely dismissed such an urge, as when Paul Granahan began his review by saying he was “always dismayed by the prevailing belief that she was a bizarrely morbid Southerner who hated life in general” and expressed relief that the publication of her letters would “do much to dispel the myth that O’Connor was a sour-tempered and unbalanced individual obsessed with death.”¹⁸² Isolation could be, they argued, a geographical fact but was irrelevant to the “true picture”: as a reviewer for the South Carolina Review stated, “She lived on ‘Andalusia,’ the family farm just outside of Milledgeville, Georgia, but there is no indication in her letters that she felt isolated. . . . Her correspondence helped prevent any feeling of isolation.”183

Reviewers’ praise of O’Connor’s character may have been bolstered by the book’s cover art, which featured a phoenix rising from its regenerative flames. Here, too, Sally had a hand, discovering this woodcut while working on The Habit of Being at Harvard’s Houghton Library and sending a card with its likeness to Giroux, suggesting that he consider it for the cover: “A phoenix, not only appropriate by simply being a bird, but doubly so, considering what F. reveals about her struggle with the first blow of her illness in these new letters now, at twelve years’ distance from her death.”¹⁸⁴ Giroux found the image a perfect representation of what he valued about O’Connor: a month later, he sent a copy of the proposed cover to Sally, calling it “rather unexpected but I think quite good.”¹⁸⁵ While critics would never admit to judging books by their covers, the image of the phoenix, linked with O’Connor’s name, may have helped to reinforce the image of O’Connor that her editor and publisher hoped to sustain.

Besides their effusive praise of O’Connor the woman and artist as viewed through her letters, reviewers also praised Sally Fitzgerald’s skill as an editor and, more importantly in light of the scuffle with Maryat Lee and her negotiations with Regina, her decision to remain in the background and allow O’Connor to speak for herself. In The Nation, Robert B. Shaw praised Sally as an “unobtrusive”¹⁸⁶ editor, while Melvin J. Friedman noted that she had “performed a noteworthy service” by avoiding “the elaborate paraphernalia of the scholarly edition,”¹⁸⁷ praise echoed by Eugene Current-Garcia, who, in Southern Humanities Review, noted the “sheer artistry” of Sally’s editorial decision to provide only a “minimum of commentary.”¹⁸⁸ Less became more, and Sally’s silencing of her own voice heightened O’Connor’s: Josephine Hendin wrote of O’Connor’s voice as heard in the letters and praised Sally for “bringing her back to speak to us again,”¹⁸⁹ much as Janet Varner Gunn, in American Literature, noted, “What we have here in this remarkable collection is a Flannery O’Connor who speaks for herself by speaking to others.”¹⁹⁰ Richard H. Brod-head described the collection as “the record of a remarkable voice.”¹⁹¹ This vindication of Sally’s method surfaces throughout the reviews, as when Paul Gray in Time described her editorial work as “an act of model scholarship” because, “When factual information is needed, she gives it succinctly and then stands back.”¹⁹² Many reviewers singled out O’Connor’s letters to “A.” as the best in the collection, suggesting that Sally’s battle with Regina to include these highly personal letters was worth the cost.¹⁹³ Robert Fitzgerald wrote to Giroux to congratulate him on “the book you and Sally made,” stating that he found it “very much like the water of life.”194 In World Literature Today, John F. Desmond stated that O’Connor’s readers usually “only saw what they wanted to see, not the full reality,” but that Sally presented O’Connor in all her “complexity”¹⁹⁵—a reminder of the “total picture” and “total mosaic” that she and Giroux sought to present through the letters.

Other reviews of The Habit of Being contain more praise for Sally, and the praise of an editor’s work on such a project may be expected. What emerges as a less expected notion is the idea that The Habit of Being was, in many ways, the biography that Sally would never complete. In his National Review piece, J. O. Tate assessed the collection with language that any biographer would thrill to hear in a review of his or her work, noting that Sally deserved praise for “producing the broadest and deepest of all the accounts of O’Connor’s life and mind.”¹⁹⁶ In the Antioch Review, Nolan Miller stated that the collection may not “tell us all there is to know” about O’Connor, but “it is improbable that any biographer will ever be able to surpass it. Or dare try.”¹⁹⁷ Kirkus argued, “These hundreds of letters give O’Connor’s tough, funny, careful personality to us more distinctly and movingly than any biography probably would,”¹⁹⁸ while John R. May wisely described the collection as one superior even to a hypothetical autobiography, since it “lacks a self-conscious design.”¹⁹⁹ May continued, “Together with Robert Fitzgerald’s brief biographical introduction to Everything That Rises Must Converge, it should satisfy, too, our need for a biography,”²⁰⁰ while, in the American Spectator, Miles Orvell wrote, “We have something better than the single view of any biographer: a collection of O’Connor letters that adds up to a complex self-portrait, a volume that should markedly enrich our understanding of a writer whose reputation has continued to grow since her death in 1964.”²⁰¹ And, in both Ms. and Maclean’s, reviewers quoted O’Connor’s stricture about “lives spent between the house and the chicken yard” not providing compelling biographical material and noted, “Her own letters contradict her,”²⁰² since the collection could be read as “the biography that O’Connor thought could never be.”²⁰³ Many readers of this time knew that Sally was working on the authorized biography, but their praise of her editing argued against the need for a conventional account of O’Connor’s formative years and artistic development.

As time passed, Giroux received many inquires about the status of Sally’s project. In a 1985 letter, he wrote that Sally’s authorized biography was “nearing completion” and he hoped to see it published in 1986.²⁰⁴ When he was asked in 1990 by the theologian and translator Elmer O’Brien when and if Sally’s biography was going to be published, Giroux described Sally as a “perfectionist” but assured O’Brien that she was “hard at work on it” and that “When it is ready, I’m confident it will be a good book.”205 Two years later, Giroux wrote the biographer Deborah Baker that Sally had been working on the book for almost ten years and that “the first draft has been completed.”²⁰⁶ Despite his enthusiasm for the project (and his covering for Sally’s delays), Giroux found that Sally had made herself obsolete by doing what she intended: letting O’Connor speak for herself through her letters to the world—a world that did, unlike Dickinson’s, write to her.

The Habit of Being was awarded a National Book Critics Circle Award for 1979; as was the case with the National Book Award, a work by O’Connor was honored by a slight bending of the rules. The NBCC Awards, established in 1974, sought to honor work in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and criticism; the categories have since expanded to include biography and autobiography. At the time of The Habit of Being’s release, however, the judges—for the first time—bestowed a Board Award on O’Connor’s total work, capped by The Habit of Being.²⁰⁷ Sally accepted the award for O’Connor, noting in her speech the importance of “that indomitable survivor,” Regina, and the guidance and enthusiasm of Giroux, who gave O’Connor “the leeway and support she needed while she was writing, and who has continued to serve her well since she had to stop.”²⁰⁸ Her speech crystalized O’Connor’s reputation when Sally mentioned O’Connor’s character and what she valued:

In writing all these letters, over the years, Flannery O’Connor didn’t mean to tell us what she was like. She didn’t think it would matter. Her attention was directed to the given addressee and the subject at hand. What she did think would matter was her fiction, and whether or not that was alive, and well thought of. The honor you are showing her today, more than fifteen years after her death, is proof enough that it was, and is. But what she was like turns out to matter, too, as witnessed by what you say of the place her letters hold in the body of work she left us.²⁰⁹

O’Connor was concerned not with her reputation, but her work’s, a concern that Sally argued was answered by this posthumous recognition and that countered the once-threatening assumptions of Regina. Worth noting here is that all the correspondence, quoted and unquoted here, between Sally and Giroux—like that between anyone connected to this part of O’Connor’s posthumous career—never mentions any financial rewards for publishing The Complete Stories or The Habit of Being. Their editorial work was, of course, motivated by the fact that critical approval would lead to sales, but also the desire to honor their friend by sharing their private understandings of her with the public.