O’Connor Correspondence Includes Musings on Plot and the Smell of Magazines

Posted 7 June, 2007 in Flannery O'Connor |

The correspondence between Flannery O’Connor and Elizabeth “Betty” Hester, which William Sessions has called “probably the most important collection of letters in American literature in the latter part of the [20th] century,” has been drawing a steady stream of O’Connor scholars, and even a few fans, to Emory University since the letters were unsealed on May 12. Hester donated the entire correspondence to Emory in 1987, with the proviso that the letters remain sealed for twenty years.

A Canada.com article hints at some of the letters’ subjects, including O’Connor’s advice to ignore plot while creating a story: “You would probably do just as well to get that plot business out of your head and start simply with a character or anything that you can make come alive … Wouldn’t it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write rather than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you.”

But perhaps the most startling, if absolutely characteristic, revelation in the Canada.com article is that O’Connor subscribed to National Geographic because she liked the smell, which she describes as an “unforgettable, transcendent . . . and very grave odour … If Time smelled like National Geographic, there would be some excuse for its being printed.”

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