Henry James
O’Connor found much to admire in a fellow writer of foreboding short stories, the Gilded Age assembler of intensely structured style-section copy to her composer of Southern police reports with liturgical time signatures. Henry James, whom she once called “a master of vulgarity,” appears frequently in her letters, in which she told friends what she had liked recently and what they wouldn’t. (Taste is carefully monitored and apportioned in these letters, a dance of shade and recommendation. One correspondent is known to enjoy Emily Brontë; O’Connor admits she’ll have to try reading Wuthering Heights to “see why it fascinates you so…I don’t know anything about her except she lived on the moor. I don’t know what a moor is but I should guess a piece of land that was desolate and damp.”) “I’ve read almost all of Henry James—from a sense of High Duty and because when I read James I feel like something is happening to me, in slow motion but happening nevertheless,” she told her longtime correspondent Hazel Elizabeth Hester in 1955, in a letter included in the collection The Habit of Being. Four years earlier she wrote a professor friend that she read James “thinking this may affect my writing for the better without my knowing how.” Her essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” begins by noting that “there is no literary orthodoxy that can be prescribed as settled for the fiction writer, not even that of Henry James, who balanced the elements of traditional realism and romance so admirably within each of his novels.”
Flannery O’Connor’s friends knew that bringing up the two in tandem would always be appreciated. Literary critic Caroline Gordon started off a review of O’Connor’s short-story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)—friends writing about friends is an old fad—by saying that the stories “exhibit what Henry James, in ‘a partial portrait’ of Guy de Maupassant, called ‘the artful brevity of a master.’ ”
But James was by no means her greatest influence, even if his presence gilds a bibliography with a proper pedigree—or at least she was self-deprecating enough to downplay his effect. In the same 1955 letter (which doubles as a useful syllabus for an aspiring autodidact), O’Connor said that if she had the misfortune of regurgitating forebears in public, she intended “to look dark and mutter, ‘Henry James Henry James’—which will be the veriest lie, but no matter. I have not been influenced by the best people.” In practice she preferred avoiding such questions altogether, as she explained to Cecil Dawkins in 1958, recounting a time when an interviewer asked her to list her favorites from the canon.
I said I liked James and Conrad mighty well and in a minute she said, “And you said your favorite author was James Conrad, now…” If you do manage to say anything that makes sense, they put down the opposite. ... [mehr] https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/flannery-oconnor-reading-list
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