The pink box, scuffed and torn, had lain in a file drawer for years. Inside, a brittle audiotape held the soft, lilting voice of Flannery O’Connor, one of America’s most revered authors.
Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, a University of ֱ at Lafayette English professor, came across the reel-to-reel tape last spring while cleaning out a filing cabinet in her office. “As soon as I saw it, I remembered that one of my colleagues had given it to me years ago. I was busy at the time and had simply forgotten about it,” she said.
O’Connor had spoken at Our Lady of Wisdom Catholic Church, on the University’s campus, in November 1962, two years before her death from complications of lupus. Her topic was “The Catholic Writer in the Protestant South.”
“Someone had the foresight to make a recording,” Wilson said. She was unsure of the condition of the 50-year-old tape, so she enlisted the help of the University’s Center for ֱ Studies, which specializes in digitizing media.
What emerged was a 35-minute recording of O’Connor and audience members.
O’Connor addresses them in a distinctive South Georgia drawl. They respond with applause and frequent laughter.
“Although she was a serious author, she certainly did not take herself seriously,” said Wilson, who frequently teaches courses about Southern women writers, including O’Connor.
In her writings, O’Connor dispensed dark humor and employed bizarre, larger-than-life characters.
“She believed that the way to the spirit was through the flesh, through the physical. She said she had to create grotesque figures, so that people living in the 20th century would sit up and take notice,” Wilson said.
O’Connor published two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away, and two collections of stort stories. Two of her stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People,” are often included in anthologies.
Wilson helped organize a symposium, held at Our Lady of Wisdom’s Jeanmard Center in November, where participants heard excerpts of the recording. A copy of the tape is available for on-site listening at Edith Garland Dupré Library.
O’Connor seemed to be “trying out material” on her audience, Wilson noted. Much of the content of her speech appears in a collection of essays, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, which was published in 1969.
When the late John Leonard, book critic for The New York Times, reviewed the collection, he equated O’Connor with Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald, calling her one of literature’s “finest prose stylists.” The book, he said, “should be read by every writer and would-be writer and lover of writing.”