Flannery O’Connor
Commentary Bk
We now have all the work by which Flannery O'Connor will be remembered in the world. Of her last stories, collected in Everything That Rises Must Converge,1 it is certainly,
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Commentary Magazine
We now have all the work by which Flannery O'Connor will be remembered in the world. Of her last stories, collected in Everything That Rises Must Converge,1 it is certainly, the just praise, and may be the highest after all, that they are up to her first ones. She wrote best in the short story and has left a handful of them at least that are likely to last as long as literacy. When she died at thirty-nine last year, it was with her work done, I think, and work of an imaginative order and brilliance rare in the world at most times, perhaps always in American writing. Her friend, Robert Fitzgerald, has added to the book an introduction that gives at once an intelligent assessment of her work and a view of the harrowing human cost that always has to be paid for writing with the grainy toughness and originality of Flannery O'Connor's. She died of lupus, the blood disease that had also killed her father. Her doctors diagnosed it in 1950 when she was twenty-five and were able to stop it for a time, first with ACTH and then with something even newer than that. But she was forced to go and live on her mother's farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, and in her last years, it was hospitals, ACTH, crutches, gradual wasting, the hospital, a coma, and on August 3, 1964, death. In what appears to have been her one concession to the literary personality, she raised peacocks. But more than any other writer of her generation, she went her own way, and she sent out of Georgia in those years two collections of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find in 1955, and now Everything That Rises Must Converge, that contain some of the surest and most original comic writing ever done by an American.

Her novels are another matter. They suffer, I think, from an excessive violence of conception. They are the children of a rape or, better, of a five-months birth, on their way to being something perhaps very fine, but not there yet. Wise Blood, which she brought out in 1952, seems more the work of somebody who has a Master's degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in pocket—as she had—than a book that has seen its way to saying something. Though the early train scenes have some wildly comic writing, the book as a whole seems as much a product of the determination to write a full-length novel as of anything more august. Ford Madox Ford used to say that nobody should be permitted to write a novel before forty. He was right, of course, and somebody should see to the whole matter, perhaps the Congress. Mistakes about it cost dearly. (Norman Mailer comes to mind, who is now ready to write The Naked and the Dead.)

Flannery O'Connor's other novel, The Violent Bear It Away, has passages of great and strange beauty—the scenes toward the end, for example, leading up to young Tarwater's walk back to the city—but it makes a mistake that the stories never make: the vehicle plainly does not fit the tenor. The whole novel is based on the idea that young Tarwater has inherited a compulsion to baptize from his mad preacher uncle. At the level of metaphor, the idea is entirely sound: large numbers of people do wish to convert us to their beliefs, i.e., to baptize us. But concretely and physically, where metaphor should have its base, it ceases entirely to work, for nobody inherits, I think, and very few acquire, the compulsion to push other persons under water. And it is on a physical drowning, a literal baptizing, that all of The Violent Bear It Away centers. I honor the Flannery O'Connor novels. They are mistakes of a promise that nobody else could have managed, and they have passages of great brilliance. But her strength was at the epiphany (a term of Joyce's now unfortunately become jargon), the leading of the reader up to a dazzling revelation in a moment of time or away from that moment on the waves of its resonance. “Good Country People” is an example of the one and “Revelation” of the other. For the longer stretches of time and the wider range required of the novel, she did not have the gift.

Aside from her years at the University of Iowa and a short time in New York and Connecticut, Flannery O'Connor lived her whole life in Georgia, though it is well to remember that the lupus had a lot to do with keeping her there toward the end of her life. She once expressed a desire to go out to California to press her researches into vulgarity, but on the whole she was a rooted Southerner. Louis D. Rubin saw her once at a meeting of writers where she was asked “how she felt, as a Southerner, to be writing in the shadow of William Faulkner.” And he has recorded her wonderfully laconic reply: “Well, nobody likes to get caught on the tracks when the Dixie Flyer comes through.” Faulkner's As I Lay Dying was apparently one of a few books she pressed on friends. And her debt to Faulkner is plain, mainly I should say in her refusal to deal with life in abstractions and in her power with regional detail—clay roads, stands of pine, barns, and so forth—and the gritty concreteness of language that are the badge in narrative and in style of that refusal. Her “major” at the Woman's College of Georgia had been the social sciences, and yet in her books to speak the bright language of those studies is infallibly the sign of the fool and generally of the knave as well. In this way, Flannery O'Connor was, I suppose, a Southern writer. The South gave her her terrain and the people she wrote about first and last. And William Faulkner gave her a start at a way of treating them. But her way of seeing them was her own and would have been the same, I think, if she had lived in North Dakota or Nova Zembla. Her writing is so different from that of the other Faulknerians—so different from that of Capote, for example, or the even more girlish Williams—that one is taken even less far than usual by labels like “Southern” or “Faulknerian” when talking about her books.

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She owed almost as much, I should say, to Ring Lardner and Nathanael West as to Faulkner. To Ring Lardner, the satirist's trick of catching cliché as it falls and freezes the banality of a life or mind. (“If I can help a person, all I want is to do it. I'm above and beyond simple pettiness,” one of her social workers says.) What we hear is the oiliness of that. We hear our attitude. The satirist hears and freezes on the page what is said. Much of Ring Lardner's writing is journeyman stuff, but in four or five stories he proved what nobody would have ventured to imagine: that the methods of classical English satire, the methods of Swift, worked for American life too. He proved that if you let those ballplayers and song-writers and movie-stars talk in their own accents for very long they would explode themselves more shatteringly than anybody could hope to do from the outside. Starting from there—and it tells us something of her independence that she should have started with somebody as much out of fashion as Ring Lardner—Flannery O'Connor went on to make merry with the pretensions of social workers and intellectuals and anxious mothers and wives of Dixie hog-farmers. With an ear as fine as Lardner's own for dialect and for the way of a man with a cliché, Flannery O'Connor had what is even rarer, a conscious and austere control of the art of the story. She avoids the wandering and the sprawl that are the inherent dangers of Lardner's method—however racily the ball-player talks, he often becomes tedious in his brainlessness and illiteracy—by always telling her stories in her own person and thus staying on top of her matter.

Nathanael West's Miss Lonely-hearts was another of the books, Robert Fitzgerald tells us, that Flannery O'Connor used to press on her friends. And her debt here, though not plain, is again extensive. To extreme and painful situations she brought, as West did, a great deal of mocking ironic poise. If she has no girls without noses, she has them with artificial legs and with acne-blued faces. She has one-armed men and men covered with tattoos, and she is fond of thrusting this grotesque part of humanity into confrontations with characters more comfortably housed in the flesh. Her purpose in all this, and West's, is not, I think, that of the Fat Boy in Dickens: “I wants to make your flesh creep.” Rather, these violent confrontations and the violent action that grows out of them show her willingness to take a chance on the assertion that behind the grotesquerie and violence a God presides. West, using the same surreal methods, questioned that assertion. Miss O'Connor's success in making hers stick in a literary way varies a good deal, from stories like “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” which strikes me as rather pat and wan, up through such later brilliant successes as “The Enduring Chill” and “Revelation.” The latter is, oddly, her most Westian story. It takes place in a doctor's waiting room and involves a righteous hog-farmer's wife and a fat Wellesley girl with a messy case of acne and an anxious mother. The farmer's wife rattles on, for all the world like Robert Burns's Holy Willie, about God's special favors to her: “If it's one thing I am . . . it's grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself, and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is.’” The Wellesley girl listens to many minutes of this and then breaks down all over the room, exploding into manic pain and hatred and screaming, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” For her pains, she gets a shot in the arm and a trip to the mental ward. This much is out of Nathanael West, but the resolution of the story is Flannery O'Connor's own. The hog-farmer's wife is brought to ask for the first time if 180 pounds of flesh as comfortably appointed as hers can really be headed for hell. The story ends with her being carried out on the waves of that question. Nathanael West has greater range and greater knowledge of the world, but he does not, I think, cut this deep. Flannery O'Connor had from him the daring to face big questions and part of the technical dash to get them stated in fiction, but her way of resolving them was her own.

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She was—that rare thing among Catholic writers in this century—a Catholic born. The Catholicism never gets stated in her stories, but it is always assumed, and it always glimmers in the distance as a kind of unwritten and implied Paradiso for the dark comic goings-on in the stories themselves. As an American Catholic, Flannery O'Connor was, of course, a Jansenist. (In America, an occasional Italian escapes this, but not enough to count; the Irish never, at least in my experience-though the late President Kennedy seems to have carried very dashingly whatever Jansenist scars he might have had.) At the end of her life, she liked to read the books of Teilhard de Chardin, one of which provided the title for Everything That Rises Must Converge. But her mind and imagination were formed long before this and by teachers less bland. The intellectual source of Catholic Jansenism, so far as it has one, is Pascal, the greatest mind the Catholic Church produced in its last encounter with the world. In order to attack, the scientific rationalisms of his century, he had to point to the abyss of spirit they had blithely opened, and in order to attack the pride that he thought animated them, he had to carry further than most Catholic thinkers had done the idea of human depravity. Man's intellect was an abyss of pride and the affections of his heart corrupt. He was saved from his puniness in a universe vaster than he dared to imagine only by the wonderful mercy of God, on whom Pascal is driven to make his desperate wager of faith. This Jansenism has taken many forms in the world and got around in it a good deal. The most famous variant of it is the Irish one, and the most plausible explanation of how it spread and took hold there is that of Sean O'Faolain, who sees it as having been brought over by exiled priests of the ancien régime at the time of the Revolution and installed in Irish seminaries such as Maynooth, with the connivance of the British masters of Ireland and in return for assurances of the political conservatism of the clergy. There, supposedly in response to something in the Irish character itself, depravity becomes identified with sex and sin almost co-extensive with sexual sin. And in this form Jansenism reached America with the immigrants. I have gone a long way from Flannery O'Connor and Milledgeville, Georgia in all this, and yet I think that Jansenism, more than anything else, explains both her very considerable power at the short story and her limitations. The pride of intellect, the corruption of the heart, the horror of sex—all these appear again and again in her books, and against them, the desperate assertion of faith.

Out of these themes grows the paradigm story, for Flannery O'Connor, like most authors, had a paradigm story which she wrote again and again, in her case a kind of morality play in which Pride of Intellect (usually Irreligion) has a shattering encounter with the Corrupt Human Heart (the Criminal, the Insane, sometimes the Sexually Demonic) and either sees the light or dies, sometimes both. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” which is perhaps a better paradigm than story anyway, will illustrate. We meet a social worker named Sheppard—shepherd, I suppose, though the author once wrote to a professor of English who had asked about the symbol-value of one of her characters' names, “As for Mrs. May, I must have named her that because I knew some English teacher would write and ask me why.” Sheppard, who disbelieves in God and the devil, has undertaken to rehabilitate the thieving club-footed Rufus Johnson by taking the boy into his own household, buying a new shoe for the bad foot, and providing access to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Johnson, who at fourteen boasts of his possession by Satan, is the corrupt human heart that Flannery O'Connor saw as beyond the reach of any therapy but the grace of God. He steals, peeps into windows, lies, smashes up houses, dances in Sheppard's dead wife's girdle, and—just at the point where Sheppard admits the failure of therapy—drives his would-be benefactor's son to suicide and goes off insisting to the police that Sheppard had made sexual advances to him.

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That is the paradigm, and though not all the stories are written to it, not even all the best ones, a good many are and the point, I think, is that God gets asserted out of the abyss of the human heart. “The Lame Shall Enter First” is itself a reworking of The Violent Bear It Away, where the paradigm may also be seen. Variations of it appear in “Revelation” and “The Enduring Chill,” where Irreligion appears as mere Conventional Religiousness—low-on-the-hog Protestantism in the one and high-tea Catholicism in the other. The Corrupt Heart can become a pathological killer—the Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” or a shifty Bible salesman in “Good Country People” or a whore in “The Comforts of Home.” In a somewhat lower key, the redneck grandfather in “The Artificial Nigger” is appalled to discover himself capable of telling a lie denying kinship with his own grandson.

Though I have dwelt at some length on the horror of sex as an element in American Jansenism and in Flannery O'Connor's books, I do not wish to overstate this, because it seems to me that her record in the whole matter is better than that of almost any Catholic writer of the century. “Good Country People” is a story a man would give his right arm to have written. Manley Pointer, an itinerant Bible salesman, leads Hulga Hopewell, a thirty-two-year-old Ph.D. in philosophy—she tells him she is only thirty, a great stroke—into a barn, where, after not quite seducing her, he steals her wooden leg. Sex here is both terrible and wildly funny. Yet “Good Country People” alone among the Flannery O'Connor stories explodes out of the kind of encounter between a man and a woman that Chekhov thought of as the most basic of human and fictional situations. For the rest, she has so many stories about households with feuding mothers and daughters or mothers and sons that her work, read in the aggregate, begins to take on the repressed, house-bound quality that life has in that Irish Jansenism I have talked about, the exact thing that Joyce planted a bomb under in Portrait of the Artist and sent a burying party to deal with in “The Dead.” Outside of “Good Country People,” even in it for that matter, sex generally has something of the demonic about it for Flannery O'Connor—the homosexual attack on young Tar water in The Violent Bear It Away, for example, or the club-footed boy leering in at windows in “The Lame Shall Enter First.”

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In talking of her obsession with human corruption, I have not wanted to suggest that Flannery O'Connor spent all her evenings or even any of them with the volumes of Pascal. She often insisted, though, that she was Catholic of the old school and made no bones about her disdain of those who would make of religion a set of symbols with perhaps a certain literary use in the world. Her mind and imagination were formed in the Catholicism preached from American pulpits, taught in parochial schools, and whispered in confessionals. Her story, “The Enduring Chill,” has a wry, affectionate portrait of a Father Finn which hits off beautifully the type that American Jansenism has so often produced. He is the type that American seminaries appear for many years to have bred and, on the whole, it was not a bad choice. Father Finn is half-blind and half-deaf, and has a grease-spot on his vest. He has no intellectual attainments, but he is kindly and morally serious. Men like him kept the faith and dispensed the sacraments, the offices in which they chiefly shine, through the wreck of faith in the 19th century when even so great a collector of lost causes as Matthew Arnold abandoned that of religion as impossibly lost.

When they have tried to raise this Jansenism to intellectual expression, however, they have generally fared less well. The books of the American Jesuit critic Fr. Harold Gardiner are an example. Writers are all right with Fr. Gardiner, or mostly so, if they observe the Sixth and the Ninth Commandments.2 This is sometimes called Fr. Gardiner's Range. Writers observe these two Commandments when they represent copulation as taking place on weekdays, outside of Lent, in months with an R in them, with one's wife in a received Western position, without looking. I may have left something out, but it is many years since I have been able to get through any of Fr. Gardiner's books. The scheme seems overly simple, and I admit there is an element of caricature in it, but what has always astonished me about Catholic writing in this century is that, despite the subtle minds it has produced (Mauriac, for example) and the formidably accomplished writers (Waugh, for example), it has always taken essentially Fr. Gardiner's view of sex (with Ford Madox Ford the one considerable exception). More than anything else, this horror of sex has robbed Catholic writing of the range, the sanity, and the shrewd and generous humanity that it had when Geoffrey Chaucer rang for the last time the great Catholic bell and rang it in plague-time too.

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Some years ago, and before he went on to higher things, Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote an acute book of literary criticism, Maria Cross, in which he dealt with recurring “imaginative patterns” in eight Catholic writers—Mauriac, Bernanos, Greene, Waugh, and others, all of them worlds removed from Flannery O'Connor. Her writing in general owes almost nothing to theirs, though Manley Pointer has something perhaps of Waugh's Basil Seal about him. So it is the more remarkable to find behind Miss O'Connor's writing the exact pattern that O'Brien has found behind that of her European fellow Catholics and near contemporaries: a pattern of intense and incommunicable pain arising from sex and transformed by religion into art. It is, of course, a Jansenist art, and it arises this way: “Man remains nailed to his mother. When he seeks to break loose, to find ‘paradise’ in loving another woman, he becomes aware of his crucifixion. Crucifixion—in which the cross [the woman] suffers equally with the sacrifice [the man]—is punished for being the cross, is the only form of love.” All the writers that O'Brien was talking about were men, but when the necessary changes have been made, his idea will work for Flannery O'Connor's books too. O'Brien says further of these writers: “Through their acceptance of the holy mysteries, of the cross, they turn what might have been—what is, perhaps, in many—a private and incommunicable suffering, into public utterance and communion with others. . . . The individual's private suffering partakes of, is the same as, the general sufferings of humanity. The sense of history reaches the writer not intellectually, through the acceptance of a program—as with a Stalin prizeman—but from below, through all the deepest feelings which animate his work.” As surely as it is behind the comic writing of Waugh, this pattern is also behind the comic writing of Flannery O'Connor. The pain and the acceptance of pain are behind the art, which is where they surely belong, not in it. This it is that enables Waugh to take the long view, to write with immense comic assurance of the most painful kinds of human experience—death itself, for example, or cannibalism for that matter. In the same way, Flannery O'Connor fits into a comic view of the world such things as manic killers, deformed bodies, intense hatreds, and violent deaths. With all of this, her comic art, like Waugh's, is able to live as merry as cup and can. The one thing that both of them find too terrible in the world to contemplate is ordinary sexual experience, love as anything other than a crucifixion—though it must be granted that both writers are admirably open when put against a Mauriac or a Graham Greene.

Lawrence Durrell has written somewhere that D. H. Lawrence had one important idea, the idea of a good lay, but had made the mistake of trying to build the Taj Mahal around it. James Joyce had more than one idea but nonetheless built Ulysses around the same one, the yesses at the end. To spiritualize sex, as Lawrence does, or to give it an importance it does not have, as Joyce does, is no less a mistake than the Jansenist insistence that it is not there at all, or if it is, that it is too painful to contemplate. Henry Miller is closer to sanity in the whole matter, I think, and I mean specifically the low comedy sex episodes in a few of his books, not the lowing that arises when he begins to think world thoughts. We have here the spectacle of three writers variously gifted but all in full flight from historical Christianity—Joyce from Irish Jansenism, Lawrence from English Dissenting Protestantism, and Miller from German-American Lutheranism. What they are all fleeing is the Jansenist or Calvinist—and they come to much the same thing—nightmare of sex. It is more than a remarkable fact that they found it necessary to do so. To do their work, they needed to connect with ordinary life over a range of experience that the Christianity they knew did not permit. They have surely made their own mistakes, but Catholic writing has much to learn from them. Pascal himself has a sentence that fits the case: “Greatness is not displayed by standing at one extremity but rather by touching both ends at once and filling all the space between.” A Chaucer managed it, for a time at least, but of course there are not many of those. On the other hand, there is no reason to close off the possibility. Ab esse ad posse is an argument that keeps its force. Catholic writing has often had in this century great austerity and control, as it has again in the stories of Flannery O'Connor. It can never make peace with the world, but I think at last it is going to have to make its peace with Henry Miller. The cost of not doing so is the loss of range and humanity and the retreat to an ever more waspish perfection in ever smaller literary forms. That is the direction in which Flannery O'Connor's writing sometimes fails. “The Comforts of Home,” for example, does “Good Country People” over in reverse gear, which is more ingenious than efficient. And Everything That Rises Must Converge, which has excellent and varied stories, has none as raucously funny as “The Artificial Nigger” or “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” in her earlier collection. She would not go wider than her ground, and nobody could have gone deeper there.

She had done her work, I think, when she died and done it very well. It is all native stone of her own quarry. She found the human heart a pretty dark place, as most writers have done who have cared to look very long. But she was not a hater, and she never trafficked in despair. She did much of her writing with death more or less in the next room but went on until she had sent into the world the tough and brilliant comic stories of which all readers now become, in an old formula, the heirs and assigns forever. “Nothing is here for tears . . . nothing but well and fair.”

1 Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 269 pp. $4.95.

2 According to Jewish and Protestant teaching, these would be the Seventh and Tenth Commandments—Ed.