Light On Dark Water

Flannery O’Connor in Paperback

I mean paperback in the sense that it was used fifty or more years ago, when it referred mainly to the small editions badly printed on cheap paper of generally disposable if not trashy fiction–before there was such a thing as "quality" or "trade" paperbacks. For a book to have its original printing in this kind of paperback was about like a movie going directly to video without ever showing in theaters at all. And when publishers decided to put out a paperback edition of a good book, it was generally packaged as if it weren't.

Here's how they treated Flannery O'Connor. This Wise Blood at least has the merit of being not totally inaccurate. It is brutal, and it is passionate, and it is about sin and redemption. But not exactly in the way the cover suggests.

Wise-Blood-Cover

 The main graphic for A Good Man surely refers to the story "Good Country People," and I'm pretty sure Flannery O'Connor didn't have a woman who looked like that in mind for Hulga. The smaller picture must be for "The River," and really is not too bad. I give this artist credit for apparently having some acquaintance with the book. And the last image of that quote from Time is pretty good, really. 

Good-Man-cover

 This edition of The Violent Bear It Away appears to be later, from the late '60s or early '70s. Again, "novel of depravity" is not totally inaccurate, but it's misleading. 

Violence-Cover

All in all, you have to suppose that some of the purchasers of these books were pretty disappointed.

I acknowledge having lifted these images from Crisis, where they accompanied three pieces on O'Connor, and in recompense I'll give you links to them. They're all worth reading. 

This "Caution on the Writings of Flannery O'Connor" is almost touchingly wrong-headed.

But if you will pardon me for saying so in a rather blunt manner, it is a very odd sort of an artist who conjures the gruesome and gratuitous massacre of a grandmother as a backdrop to debating points of systematic theology.

If you read that story, or for that matter any of O'Connor's work, as a set of debating points of systematic theology, you've mistaken the nature of what you're reading.

Much better is this piece by Karen Beebe, "A Good Woman Is Hard to Figure", and this one by Regis Martin, "Flannery O'Connor Fifty Years After". O'Connor died fifty years ago this month, and so there is more than usual talk about her in the Catholic press.

Finally, there is this "Defense of the Grotesque" by R. Jared Staudt, which answers some of the objections in the first piece. 

Maclin Horton

15 responses to “Flannery O’Connor in Paperback”

  1. Louise

    Thanks for alerting me to the fiftieth anniversary of her death.
    And gosh, those covers!

    Reply
  2. Janet

    I’ve said before, and probably here, that the first cover reminds me more of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof than Wise Blood.
    Here is a picture of the cover that was on my PB copy of The Scent of Water. Another disappointment to readers, I’m sure.
    Hope this works.
    Here
    AMDG

    Reply
  3. Janet

    Okay, so it didn’t.
    AMDG

    Reply
  4. Janet

    Well, I see the “here” does work.
    Sorry about the gobbledegook.
    AMDG

    Reply
  5. Mac

    Heh. The link works, anyway. I’ll clean it up later if you like.
    Yeah, that Wise Blood cover does look like it wandered over from the Tennessee Williams section. And the Good Man one from Erskine Caldwell.

    Reply
  6. El Miserable

    I love these old paperbacks, though you are right, not of good quality. Here in my office I have two Thomas Hardy paperbacks, Tess and The Return of the Native. Tess is a 1966 edition sold for 45 cents and is in remarkably good condition. Return of the Native is 1962 for 60 cents (why a higher price four years previous I don’t know) and not in near as good shape. Neither cover is “lurid” in the way these O’Connors are. Considering the stories, especially Tess, they could be. Must be something about the English seeming proper and the Americans seeming less so.

    Reply
  7. Marianne

    In her letters in The Habit of Being, O’Connor talks quite a bit about those dreadful covers. I think she was more amused than anything.

    Reply
  8. Mac

    I would expect that of her. I don’t remember it, though. It’s been quite a long time since I read the letters, and I’ve been thinking I’d like to read them again.
    re American vs. English covers, El Miserable: I thought that at first, but aren’t those English prices on the first and third?

    Reply
  9. Paul

    I don’t think it’s a question of American vs English covers (since El Miserable is giving American prices for Hardy, and these covers give UK prices for O’Connor), so much as perceptions of what will sell British literature on the American market and what will sell American literature on the British.
    “A brutal, passionate novel of depravity in rural Wessex” probably just wouldn’t shift Hardy, however accurate it might be.

    Reply
  10. Mac

    Americans want that posh BBC-drama sort of surface on British imports. And the British want…what, on American imports? passion, brutality, and depravity?

    Reply
  11. Rob G

    Also, Hardy’s an established “classic” writer, while at that time FO’C was a fairly unknown newbie. Easier to sell her work as being in the Williams/Caldwell mode than to portray T.H. as a writer of literary bodice-rippers!

    Reply
  12. Mac

    True.

    Reply
  13. Will

    In a somewhat similar vein, there is also Penguin’s new cover for “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”:
    http://www.nola.com/books/index.ssf/2014/08/new_cover_charlie_chocolate_fa.html

    Reply
  14. jkt

    Well, that’s pretty creepy.
    There was a very persistent pop-up on that website that I’m pretty sure was trying to put malware on my Kindle. It was kind of confusing at first because it said, “Consider cleaning your Mac from junk.
    AMDG

    Reply
  15. Mac

    Bizarre. Definitely in the “what were they thinking?” category.

    Reply

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