In 1946, a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop kept a notebook, not for stories but for prayers. A Prayer Journal (2013), published almost fifty years after Flannery O’Connor’s death, shows a young writer asking God for a talent she does not yet trust — and fearing what success would do to her soul.
O’Connor had arrived at the University of Iowa in 1945, a twenty-year-old from Milledgeville, Georgia, who had partly hoped to make a living drawing cartoons. The Workshop was young then — it had been founded in the mid-1930s — and Iowa City was a long way, culturally and climatically, from Baldwin County. What she became over the two years the notebook covers was the writer of the stories collected in her thesis: spare, violent, funny fiction in which the fear of God arrives, usually, in a pickup truck. The prayers run alongside that apprenticeship, sometimes in the same week as the drafts. They are not devotional ornament. They are working documents — petitions from the shop floor of a craft.
The most quoted passage has the precision of her best sentences, which is the point of reprinting it:
Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon... I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me push myself aside.
The image is astronomical, and the theology is exact. The obstruction is the self’s own shadow — not sin in the pulpit sense, not wickedness, but the ordinary planet she happens to stand on. She does not ask for the self’s demolition; she asks for a clear line of sight. It is a novelist’s metaphor, not a sermon’s: concrete, checkable, drawn from something you could stand outside and look at. Twenty years later, her characters would be people for whom no such line exists, and the stories would be about what the shadow does to anyone who mistakes it for the sky.
The rest of the notebook is a negotiation over talent. There is gratitude when Accent magazine published “The Geranium” in 1946, her first story in print; there is worry about the vanity that praise might farm in her, the head that success would swell; there is the plain, unembarrassed sentence that sums up the whole ledger: “I want so to love God all the way. At the same time I want all the things that seem opposed to it — I want to be a fine writer.” The comma splice is doing honest work. She refuses to pretend the two desires are not pulling at the same rope, and she asks God to hold the middle.
Petitionary prayer, on the page, has a grammar: direct address, second person, no introduction, no scenery. It is the same grammar as her letters — the correspondence later gathered as The Habit of Being (1979) — and the journal reads like a letter to the one correspondent who could not be charmed. There is no performance in it, because there is no audience. The irony, where it surfaces, is the kind you permit yourself with someone who already knows the truth it is covering.
Related stories: Bonhoeffer: Letters and Papers from Prison · What We Mean by Spiritual Reading.
Readers of the fiction will recognize the arrangement, because it is the fiction’s own. O’Connor’s mature account of her region — set down later in Mystery and Manners (1969), the posthumous collection of her essays — is that “the South is hardly Christ-centered, but it is most certainly Christ-haunted.” The notebook shows the haunting from the inside, before it had anywhere to go but prayer. The grotesques she would become famous for were not decoration or shock; they were, on this evidence, the doctrinal consequence of a sight she already knew to be damaged. She prayed for cleaned glass. The stories dramatize the dirt, because stories can only dramatize the dirt.
What the notebook does not contain is more remarkable than what it does. There is no illness in it. Her father had died of lupus in 1941, when she was fifteen; in 1951 the same disease was diagnosed in her, and she returned from New York to the family farm at Andalusia, to crutches, to the peacocks, to the years of writing that made her reputation. In 1946 none of this was scheduled. She was praying over a talent whose terms of use — the disease, the farm, the deadline of dying at thirty-nine in 1964 — had not yet been disclosed to her.
That is the notebook’s real subject: vocation before information. She does not know what the talent is for; she asks only that it not be wasted and that she not be ruined by it. The two requests pull against each other like weights on a scale — one toward production, one toward preservation — and the prayers are the sound of the scale working. Writers on art and faith have needed whole treatises to make that argument. She made it in brief, dated bursts, alone at a library table, and then put the notebook away.
The book exists because the notebook survived in her papers, held at Georgia College in Milledgeville, and because the scholar W. A. Sessions prepared it for publication; Farrar, Straus and Giroux brought it out in 2013. It is a slim object: prayers, a few pages long each, handwritten in a student’s hand that stays twenty-one years old. Nothing in it foresees the fiction’s fame. Nothing in it foresees anything. That is its quality — a document of asking, written before the answer’s shape was known.
She is buried in Milledgeville, the same town where the notebook now rests, a short drive from the farm. The handwriting has not aged. The fiction it was praying for grew up fast, and kept, all its life, the prayer’s exact proportions: talent as a loan, sight as the emergency, the self as the thing standing in the way.