Sense and Sensibility

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 21^st 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.”

Explaining Random Violence to a Child

The Peculiar Resilience of LISA BOND LASKY

Lisa Bond Lasky was stabbed seven years ago outside a Dunkin’ Donuts shop on North Main Street in Waterbury. Her recovery cost her six months in hospitals and rehabilitation centers.

Sometimes, her daughter asks. She is 4, a curious age.

She points to the scar that runs down her mother’s right calf, long as a ruler and thick as her thumb.

What’s that, Mommy?

“A bad man did that,” Lisa Bond Lasky, 33, tells her daughter. It is true. And it is not.

You can’t explain psychosis to a 4-year-old. You can barely explain it to yourself. You put it behind you. Or you try.

Seven years ago, Lisa Bond Lasky was having a cigarette outside the North Main Street Dunkin’ Donuts where she worked. She was on break. David Blocker, then 36, had walked by her as he threw a quarter on the donut shop counter and asked for a donut. The clerk told Blocker that donuts were 53 cents. He walked out to the parking lot, opened the trunk of his car, pulled out a butcher knife and walked back toward the Dunkin’ Donuts. He spotted Lasky outside, approached her, lifted her left arm up and stabbed her in the chest. Once.

When Lisa Bond Lasky nearly lost her life that day, it was just an ordinary life. Within days she would nearly lose her leg because of a blot clot that formed as a result of the stab wound. For the next few months, she became extraordinary: written, photographed, prayed for and talked about.

Many people dream of notoriety, a swell of love from strangers. But for crime victims, notoriety comes uninvited. These people dream about banality. They dream about getting their life back. Even if it wasn’t an extraordinary life. They dream of withdrawing to the ordinary.

After Lasky was stabbed that afternoon, she reeled back into the shop and grabbed a sweatshirt to staunch the wound. She would need stitches. More than a few. So she figured.

She didn’t imagine that she would almost die, lose her life, her lung, and the entire month of June 1994. Asthmatic, she now breathes with one lung. She does not feel anything below her right knee. Two long scars race down either side of her calf, like tracks of a chisel. The leg injury is a consequence of a blood clot that developed in her leg after the attack. But she stands. She walks. She lists, slightly, to the right. But she has her life back, an ordinary life. A life as a mother of four and a clerk at Dunkin Donuts.

A mother who cannot run after her children.

Lasky’s story is not a story of triumph, but it is not the story of a victim, either.

Ask Lisa Bond Lasky if she still thinks about the attack and she will tell you no. She will tell you that she put it behind her. After all, the man who did this to her, David Blocker, is in a mental institute. A schizophrenic, he was judged not sane at the time of the attack and was sentenced to serve 40 years in a mental institution.

“Sicko,” Lasky concludes. She snickers ironically.

Lasky spent six months in hospitals and rehabilitation centers before she returned to work at Dunkin’ Donuts. She spent one day at the North Main Street shop where she was stabbed. That was it. She transferred to another. She’s worked at four Waterbury Dunkin’ Donuts shops in the last 12 years and said she’s never thought of working elsewhere. How could she explain what happened to her to another employer? Lasky is an ordinary looking woman, thin, of medium height with an angular, heart-shaped face. It is the brilliant blue eyes that get you. They glisten with an almost discomforting frankness. Lasky is tough, terse and non-expansive. She is not philosophical about the attack. She draws no grand conclusions, makes no extravagant claims. She is like the hundreds of crime victims who get bleached out of the limelight after the headlines, fund raisers and trials. She, and they, slip back into the margins of life. They do not claim to be heroes or courageous.

Every now and then a customer will ask Lasky, “Aren’t you the one?” and she will nod acknowledgment sheepishly. A peculiar kind of celebrity.

“I try not to think about it,” Lasky says. “I don’t like to keep thinking about it.” But the letters remind her. The state sends Lasky letters once or twice a year, informing her of changes in Blocker’s condition. The letters come certified. She used to open them. She does not any more.

“I don’t even pick them up any more,” Lasky says. She shakes her head. She grimaces dismissively. “Just throw them in the garbage.” She doesn’t have flashbacks about the attack. She did, at first. She checked her rearview mirror. She checked the locks. Now it is just the leg that bothers her. “The doctor said I should get the feeling back within a year. It’s been seven years. I don’t think it’s happening.”

Part of her wishes the letters didn’t come. But she says she has not tried to get them stopped. She wants to know when he is released. She will be 66 then. Her children will be grown. Maybe then she can tell them. Maybe then she can explain. About the bad man. And what he did to Mommy.

Published, September 16, 2001. c. Republican-American