ENGL 4310

The letters are so fun to read. I'm enjoying seeing Porter's and O'Conner's personalities. I found it really interesting to read Porter's letter on Hemingway's death, (p.586). She didn't love his work and seems quite upset at his death. I found a comment she maid about letter writing that I thought interesting too, (p.405):

. . . for letters I always thought were meant to be personal messages standing
instead of talk between two persons who are not arguing, or trying to convert
each other to anything, or writing essays for posterity or even the present
public--so the free-er and easier the tone, the nearer it comes to a letter,
seems to me.

I've been interested in O'Connor's little insights she gives about her own writing. I want to better understand the religious element she presents and she gives us some great information. In several of her letters she states that she writes what she writes because she is a Catholic. She says in her letter on p.930 that "If my stories are complete it is because I see everything as beginning with original sin, taking in the Redemption, and reckoning on a final judgment." In another, p.952, she says: "I believe an the Church teaches that God is as present in the idiot boy as in the genius." This belief is most definitely seen in her writing. She mentions that she thinks herself to be a writer who believes in "distortion" rather than a realistic writer (p.932), and she seems to extend or distort her idea that God is present in the idiot boy to God is present in several of her "vulgar" characters. I use vulgar because that is how she describes the characters she creates. She explains this idea in her agreement of thought with Guardini in a letter on p. 953:

I think his supreme external attribute is vulgarity and that the vulgar
must be saved and that generally this is accomplished by the vulgar, or vulgarer
than they. Who may be closer to God even than the Idiot Boy.

Wow! I love that. It is fascinating to me that she associates herself as such (she describes herself as a cross between Hulga and Nelson p. 954 ). One other statement I have to add to this. She creates the characters she feels comfortable with or capable of being.

Hulga in this case would be a projection of myself into this kind of
tragic-comic action--presumably only a projection, because if I could not stop
short of it myself, I could not write it. Stop short or go beyond it, I
should say. You have to be able to dominate the existence that you
characterize. That is why I write about people who are more or less
primitive.

She makes me laugh that she thinks herself so primitive and such a monster even. I love her next letter, p.962, where she has been referred by her friend as cupid. She replies with "I'd rather be the Minotaur or the Gorgon or that three-headed dog at the river Styx, or Anybody."