Probably the most authentic voice of literature is that of the story-teller. I found myself thinking about it while reading Miss O’Connor’s posthumous book of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge. Dramatists, poets, essayists go at reality in their own peculiar ways. The story-teller dips it out with a generous ladle, and if she has talent, the result will be a true delight.

It’s a year since Miss Flannery O’Connor died at Piedmont Hospital, after an incredible literary life of about fifteen years. Suffering painfully most of that time, she produced two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away and two collections of short stories. A Good Man Is Hard To Find and the present one. She lit a persistently bright flame in America’s literary world, and her admirers and critics will not let her die. It is a sad thing that her fellow Georgians know so little of her. A columnist last week wrote that copies of her latest book could not be found in Atlanta’s bookstores -- he should have called the Notre Dame Book Shop.

She was a deeply religious Catholic. “She was Catholic in the oldest and truest sense of the word,” as Professor John Clarke of the University once wrote. She herself reflected her own grasp of what it meant:

“When people have told me that because I am Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.” Her faith infused her vision, but the Bible-quoting rural South gave her the materials. She once said that if she should live in Japan 20 years and then try to write a story about the Japanese, the characters would all talk like Herman Talmadge! She is a part of Milledgeville, a part of rural Georgia, a part of the South - these identities give her vigor and vision.

Symbols she could use, and irony. Style she had in the grotesque forms that cried out at the plainness and ugliness of our world. But as you read Everything That Rises Must Converge, the subtle is forgotten in the straight-forward tales she is telling -- of Julian’s mother on a bus finding a giant of a Negro woman wearing a purple and green velvet hat exactly like her own -- and the tragedy that ensued. Or of Mrs. May’s overseer’s wife who cut out morbid newspaper stories of women who had been raped and criminals who had escaped, and train wrecks and plane crashes, and buried them in the earth as she fell flat over them mumbling and groaning. The men are angular in their virtues, the women are ridiculous in their sentiments. But stories emerge - sharp, understandable tales of a people in need of redemption. She wrote of the South, but her vision was of the world.

Flannery once wrote Sister Mariella Gable: “I probably have enough stories for a collection but I want to wait and see what this turns out to be that I am writing on now.” When I asked her, at her farm in Milledgeville in 1962, what she was presently working on, she replied -- “I’ll have to wait and see how it turns out.” I didn’t understand what she meant then. But now as I read the book that appeared after her death, I think I do.

Paul J. Hallinan

Archbishop of Atlanta