“Will I ever understand anything?”. The greatness of Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor was Flannery O’Connor right from the start, even before she became so. Even as a very young girl, she merely dreamt of herself as a writer and practised by perfectly aligning her personality with her written words. These were initially written in a diary, in a notebook she had titled ‘Advanced Mathematics’, as if they were study notes, to keep her mother’s curiosity at bay.

Now, thanks to the editing of Fernanda Rossini and Alessandro Matone for the Milan-based publisher Edizioni Ares, that diary is available to Italian readers for the first time in a small volume entitled "Diari. Matematica avanzata e Diario di preghiera". The first covers the period from 29 December 1943 to 6 February 1944: a few months of feverish self-discovery.

The second, however, spans more than a year, from January 1946 to September 1947, and here we clearly see O’Connor beginning to write one of her masterpieces, "Wisdom in the Blood". She was fifteen when she entrusted her thoughts to the notebook. Her beloved father, who had encouraged her to achieve great things, died of systemic lupus erythematosus in ’41, and Mary Flann – who had not yet dropped the name Maria – had to cope with immense grief, a loss that God had perhaps imposed upon her precisely to help her find her own path and to fight, on her own, to follow it. She does not want to remain just another Miss O’Connor, forced to teach (“the very thought disgusts me”) and to spend her time “twiddling her thumbs”. Writing thus became her battle against the banality of life, and as Benedetta Centovalli—a scholar of O’Connor to whom she has dedicated many pages—observes in the introduction, explicitly titled ‘Adoration and Struggle’: for Flannery, ‘writing is both devotion to God and to the word; it is a constant grappling with language to probe the mystery of existence’.

The writer from Savannah is someone who does not hesitate to punch her guardian angel because she wants no intermediaries between herself and God; indeed, in the second diary, she addresses Him directly. Every page is both a prayer and a conversation, often beginning with ‘Dear God’, ‘My dear God’ or ‘Dear Lord’. The entries function both as a plea and as a reckoning; they express gratitude when He provides the idea for a story and pose desperate questions: ‘Will I ever manage to understand anything?’. Flannery also engages with the writers she admires – Bernanos, Kafka, Proust. And she never relinquishes her own powerful and natural gift: humour, which is very often directed at herself. Yet running between the lines is a profound philosophical reflection: ‘Perversion is the final result of the denial of, or rebellion against, the supernatural love that descends from the unconscious super-consciousness of the Id.’ This places her squarely in Freud’s realm, another of her passionate readings.

In these diaries, as elsewhere, once again – and even before she began writing short stories and novels – Flannery O’Connor proves herself to be a bewildering, often unsettling writer, yet one endowed with a charm all her own, which is irresistible. As one of the editors of these diaries, Alessandro Matone, admits in a closing note (A Monument to Her Mind), one might at first glance, rather superficially, find them pointless and off-putting – as he himself did – but on closer reading one discovers just how highly O’Connor elevates the literary craft. For she ‘places her own creation on the same level as Creation’ and ‘this is not a matter of megalomania, but of recognising the greatness of one’s own actions in the world as a response to a divine call, to a vocation’. And so, if we may feel distant from such a deeply religious writer, ‘it is because of that distance which is called respect – the respect due to the greatest’.