I find myself regretting … that [Henry James] never had an opportunity to read Flannery O'Connor's short stories and novels. I think that he would have felt a kinship with her that might have transcended his innate conviction that the writing of novels—a difficult and dangerous task, to begin with—is a task for which men are by nature better fitted than women.

If he had lived to read Miss O'Connor's stories, I suspect that he would also have derived from them the pleasure which any of us feels when he finds his own words coming true. For this young woman, who died in 1964 at the age of thirty-nine, comes nearer than anyone I can think of to enacting the role of "the American girl" whom James foresaw as charged with such great responsibilities. (pp. 124-25)

Her task, I think, resembled James's own task in many particulars. I believe, however, that the chief resemblance between the two writers consists in the fact that each was faced with an obstacle which, for a fiction writer, is almost always insuperable in his own lifetime. In order to create the world of illusion—which for him embodied fictional truth—both writers had to use a technique which was revolutionary. (p. 125)

Of [the young fiction writers who write from a Catholic background] Flannery O'Connor seems to me the most talented—and the most professional. My admiration for her work was first evoked when, in the line of duty, I contemplated the structure of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and found it written "in the one way that is mathematically right"—to borrow a phrase from James's notebooks. (p. 127)

Her best work, however, whether in the novel or the short story, has an outstanding characteristic. It is never "promiscuous." [Gordon earlier defined "promiscuous" in the Jamesian sense to mean a fiction that is not constructed so that every incident contributes to a "single impression."] Her story is never "jerry-built"—if I understand James's use of that term. Indeed, it seems to me that she has a firmer grasp of the architectonics of fiction than any of her contemporaries. She has written four short stories, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Good Country People," "The Displaced Person," and "The River," which seem to me nearly to approach perfection. "The Enduring Chill," "A Circle in the Fire" and "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" do not seem to me as successful.

But when Miss O'Connor falls short of her best work, the flaw is always in the execution of the story, not in its structure. In her architectural creations a turret may loom indistinctly or a roof line will slant so steeply that the eye follows it with difficulty but turret and roof and even battlements indistinctly limned are nevertheless recognized as integral parts of the structure. All her work is based upon the same architectural principle. This principle, fundamental but in our own times so fallen into disrepute that it has actually come to be thought of as an innovation, is, I think, the fact that any good story, no matter when it was written or in what language, or what its ostensible subject matter, shows both natural and supernatural grace operating in the lives of human beings. Her firm grasp of this great architectural principle is, I believe, in large part, responsible for Miss O'Connor's successes. A variety of causes may account for her failures or near-failures. Chief of them, of course, is the immense difficulty inherent in her subject matter. The chasm between natural and supernatural grace is sometimes an abyss, so deep that only the heroes—in fiction as in real life—can bear to contemplate it. (p. 128)

The serious student of Miss O'Connor's stories will find it profitable, I think, to compare her life's work with that of Henry James. The novels of his "later" period deal with the imposition of supernatural grace upon natural grace. (p. 132)

I do not know that Miss O'Connor was consciously influenced by the novelist Henry James's work. I am inclined to think that the affinity between the two writers is instinctive and unconscious. One of Miss O'Connor's "prophets," Hazel Motes, who preaches the "Church Without Christ," strongly resembles the elder Henry James. Both men have one lifelong preoccupation: theology. In the case of both men it is coupled with an inability to believe in the divinity of Christ. Both men are indifferent to worldly goods. (p. 134)

James left us, along with the prodigious body of his work, a complete, detailed record of his life as an artist. Those of us who still cannot read his novels, cannot plead in self-defense that he has not given us any clue how to go about reading them, for he has given us explicit directions.

Miss O'Connor is almost as well documented as to her artistic intentions. (p. 135)

During his lifetime, Henry James never found the reader he so ardently desired but I think that in Flannery O'Connor there was a disciple of whom he could have been proud. (p. 136)