Flannery O’Connor and Moral Blindness
In the summer of 1955, after the publication of her seminal collection of short stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor received a fan letter from a clerk working in a credit bureau in Atlanta. The clerk had taken issue with The New Yorker’s negative review of O’Connor’s book and asked O’Connor whether these stories were really “about God.”
As insights go, this one was not especially keen. Since the publication of her novel, “Wise Blood,” which O’Connor later described as “comic novel about a Christian malgré lui” the Georgia author had been labeled as a Catholic writer, writing with a confrontational brutality many readers found unendurable. Her misfits, murderers, perverts and pious Christians were forever pulverized under her castigating, and often self-righteous glare. Why was O’Connor so cruel to characters who so patently needed redemption? Couldn’t she, as her imperious mother pleaded with Robert Giroux, write about “nice people?”
What Hester identified was O’Connor’s scorching conviction that there really were not “nice” people, only the saved and those in need of salvation. O’Connor’s stories relentlessly flay conscience toward often-imperfect revelation. Weighty, weird, wondrous and cruelly ironic, O’Connor’s fiction may have been the last gasp of a literature that engaged with the supernatural world.
A new, workman-like biography of O’Connor, “Flannery: A Life,” by Brad Gooch has been published and it is long overdue. What it reminds us of is not just the searing prose and daring parables of this Southern Catholic writer. It also reveals of the paucity of good literature that is fearless in its use of religious allegory.
The biggest rise in publishing in the past few years has been the increase in spiritual/religious books, although the line between spirituality and self-help tends to be too slender for my taste. O’Connor would have recoiled at any moniker other than “writer,” but she wrote with a cudgel-like insistence on mortality and grace. If that meant that a simple doctor’s visit by a good Christian woman could result in that woman being set upon by a stranger, lunging at her throat and calling her an “old warthog from hell,” so be it. As O’Connor said, “Grace changes us and change is painful.”
O’Connor’s acid sense of humor, which often derived from clueless characters oblivious to the overwhelming promise made to them, leavened her stories with mirth that seemed a little naughty for a devout Catholic.
Although I first discovered O’Connor in a high school anthology, it wasn’t until I was in my early 20s, living alone in a rented room in the eastern part of this state, that I appreciated the emphatic ferocity of her faith. Violence might be the opposite of grace, but O’Connor was unafraid to use it as a vehicle. That marvelous line that the misfit utters after he has just murdered an imploring grandmother, “She would have been a good woman if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” – could pretty much suit all of us.
O’Connor, who didn’t own a television until a congregation of nuns gave her one in 1961 said she wrote these gothic stories to shock a morally blind world. As she said, “To the hard of hearing you shout and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”
Most of O’Connor’s stories were written in the 1950s, those halcyon days of peace and good manners to which many would have us return. It’s harrowing to conjecture what she would have made of the more apocalyptic drone of today’s violence – the Columbine shootings, the Virginia Tech slaughter, or the annihilative tendencies of ex-lovers to blow away those they professed to love.
In 1960, reading from one of her more popular speeches, she wrote, “We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions.” As a writer, O’Connor was on a quest for the “redemptive act,” the shattering act of horror that gives humanity “the chance to be restored.” At the end of her life, she asked for prayers to send her “the kind of grace that deepens perception.”
In 1964, O’Connor died of lupus, the disease that has claimed her father. She was 38. Her book, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a line drawn from one of her heroes, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, was published posthumously. After her death, one of her fervent admirers, the Trappist Thomas Merton wrote “when I read Flannery O’Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles.”
Though 21st century readers hardly lack for horror in literature, it is often gratuitous horror of the Brett Easton Ellis/A.M. Homes variety. O’Connor never apologized for her horror nor did she ladle it wantonly. “The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism,” she said once. “When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.”