In Error

I must confess to a bit of a blunder in yesterday's post. I referred to Flannery O'Connor's earliest publication as being the stories collected in The Geranium - but whilst this was definitely her first collection of stories, it was not published as such. Remarkably the stories comprised the thesis for her Master of Fine Arts degree. Although four of the stories were published in various magazines around about the time of composition, two saw the light of day only posthumously, one of these being The Crop which she thought of as unpublishable.

That's particularly ironic considering that the central character of the tale is a lady who aspires to be a writer of fiction. In truth, though, the gap between the talentless, foolish Miss Willerton and her abundantly talented creator could hardly be wider. And it's a mark of O'Connor's gifts that she keeps a cold, forensic distance from the pathetic 'Willie' - as her protagonist sees herself when she is taken entirely into the odd fantasy-fiction that emerges from her attempts to write her story about sharecroppers - whilst managing to make her both a genuinely moving figure and a richly comic one.

There's something both wonderful and a little chilling about the distance between Ms O'Connor and the ordinary writer (whatever that means - which I suppose is partly what The Crop is about.) That's why I have so little concern about the idea posited in some quarters that she'll be somehow 'cancelled' as a writer. That won't happen as long as she remains in print. There will continue to be readers who'll happily surrender to her magic.