In 1943, eighteen-year-old Mary Flannery O’Connor went north on a summer trip. Growing up in Georgia—she spent her childhood in Savannah, and went to high school in Milledgeville—she saw herself as a writer and artist in the making. She created illustrated books “too old for children and too young for grown-ups” and dryly titled an assemblage of her poems “The Priceless Works of M. F. O’Connor”; she drew cartoons and submitted them to magazines, noting that her hobby was “collecting rejection slips.”
On her travels, she and two cousins visited Manhattan:
Chinatown, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Columbia University. Then they went to
Massachusetts, and visited Radcliffe, where one cousin was a student. O’Connor
disliked both schools, and said so in letters and postcards to her mother. (Her
father had died two years earlier.) Back in Milledgeville, O’Connor studied at
the state women’s college (“the institution of higher larning across the
road”). In 1945, she made her next trip north, enrolling in the Iowa Writers’
Workshop, where she dropped the Mary (it put her in mind of “an Irish
washwoman”) and became Flannery O’Connor.
Less than two decades later, she died, in Milledgeville, of
lupus. She was thirty-nine, the author of two novels and a book of stories. A
brief obituary in the Times called her “one of the nation’s most promising
writers.” Some of her readers dismissed her as a “regional writer”; many didn’t
know she was a woman.
We are still learning who Flannery O’Connor was. The
materials of her life story have surfaced gradually: essays in 1969, letters in
1979, an annotated Library of America volume in 1988, and a cache of personal
items deposited at Emory University in 2012, which yielded the “Prayer
Journal,” jottings on faith and fiction from her time at Iowa. Each phase has
deepened the portrait of the artist and furthered her reputation. Southerners,
women, Catholics, and M.F.A.-program instructors now approach her with
devotion. We call her Flannery; we see her as a wise elder, a literary saint,
poised for revelation at a typewriter set up on the ground floor of a farmhouse
near Milledgeville because treatments for lupus left her unable to climb
stairs.
O’Connor is now as canonical as Faulkner and Welty. More
than a great writer, she’s a cultural figure: a funny lady in a straw hat,
puttering among peacocks, on crutches she likened to “flying buttresses.” The
farmhouse is open for tours; her visage is on a stamp. A recent book of
previously unpublished correspondence, “Good Things Out of Nazareth”
(Convergent), and a documentary, “Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from
Georgia,” suggest a completed arc, situating her at the literary center where
she might have been all along.
The arc is not complete, however. Those letters and
postcards she sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars
only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman. In
Massachusetts, she was disturbed by the presence of an African-American student
in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway
lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and
black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms
repulsed her.
It’s not fair to judge a writer by her juvenilia. But, as
she developed into a keenly self-aware writer, the habit of bigotry persisted
in her letters—in jokes, asides, and a steady use of the word “nigger.” For
half a century, the particulars have been held close by executors, smoothed
over by editors, and justified by exegetes, as if to save O’Connor from
herself. Unlike, say, the struggle over Philip Larkin, whose coarse,
chauvinistic letters are at odds with his lapidary poetry, it’s not about
protecting the work from the author; it’s about protecting an author who is now
as beloved as her stories.
The work largely deserves the love it gets. O’Connor’s
fiction is full of scenarios that now have the feel of mid-century myths: an
evangelist preaching the gospel of a Church Without Christ outside a movie
house; a grandmother shot by an escaped convict at the roadside; a Bible
salesman seducing a female “interleckshul” in a hayloft and taking her wooden
leg. The late story “Parker’s Back,” from 1964, in which a tattooed ex-sailor
tries to appease his puritanical wife by getting a life-size face of Christ
inked onto his back, is a summa of O’Connor’s effects. There’s outlandish
naming (Obadiah Elihue Parker), blunt characterization (“The skin on her face
was thin and drawn as tight as the skin on an onion and her eyes were gray and
sharp like the points of two icepicks”), and pungent speech (“Mr. Parker . . .
You’re a walking panner-rammer!”). There’s the way the action hurtles to an end
both comic and profound, and the sense, as she put it in an essay, “that
something is going on here that counts.” There’s the attractive-repulsive force
of religion, as Parker submits to the tattooer’s needle in the hope of making
himself a holy image of Christ. And there’s a preoccupation with human skin,
and skin coloring, as a locus of conflict.
O’Connor defined herself as a novelist, but many readers now
come to her through her essays and letters, and the core truth to emerge from
the expansion of her body of work is that the nonfiction is as strong and
strange as the fiction. The 1969 book of essays, “Mystery and Manners,” is both
an astute manual on the craft of writing and a statement of precepts for the
religious artist; the 1979 book of letters, “The Habit of Being,” is bedside
reading as wisdom literature, at once companionable and full of barbed, contrarian
insights. That they are books was part of O’Connor’s design. She made carbon
copies of her letters with publication in mind: fearing that lupus would cut
her life short, as it had her father’s, she used the letters and essays to
shape the posthumous interpretation of her fiction.
Even much of the material left out of those books is tart
and epigrammatic. Here is O’Connor, fresh from Iowa, on what a writing program
can do for a writer:
It can put him in
the way of experienced writers and literary critics, people who are usually
able to tell him after not too long a time whether he should go on writing or
enroll immediately in the School of Dentistry.
Here she is on life in Milledgeville, from a 1948 letter to
the director of Yaddo, the writers’ colony in upstate New York:
Lately we have
been treated to some parades by the Ku Klux Klan. . . . The Grand Dragon and
the Grand Cyclops were down from Atlanta and both made big speeches on the
Court House square while hundreds of men stamped and hollered inside sheets.
It’s too hot to burn a fiery cross, so they bring a portable one made with
electric light bulbs.
On her first encounter, in 1956, with the scholar William
Sessions:
He arrived
promptly at 3:30, talking, talked his way across the grass and up the steps and
into a chair and continued talking from that position without pause, break,
breath, or gulp until 4:50. At 4:50 he departed to go to Mass (Ascension
Thursday) but declared he would like to return after it so I thereupon invited
him to supper with us. 5:50 brings him back, still talking, and bearing a sack
of ice cream and cake to the meal. He then talked until supper but at that
point he met a little head wind in the form of my mother, who is also a talker.
Her stories have a non-stop quality, but every now and then she does have to
refuel and every time she came down, he went up.
Reviewers of O’Connor’s fiction were vexed by her
characters’ lack of interiority. Admirers of the nonfiction have reversed the
charge, taking up the idea that the most vivid character in her work is
Flannery O’Connor. The new film adroitly introduces the author-as-character.
The directors—Mark Bosco, a Jesuit priest who teaches a course on O’Connor at
Georgetown, and Elizabeth Coffman, who teaches film at Loyola University
Chicago—draw on a full spread of archival material and documentary effects. The
actress Mary Steenburgen reads passages from the letters; several stories are
animated, with an eye to O’Connor’s adage that “to the hard of hearing you
shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” There’s
a clip from John Huston’s 1979 film of her singular first novel, “Wise Blood,”
which she wrote at Yaddo and in Connecticut before the onset of lupus forced
her to return home. Erik Langkjaer, a publishing sales rep O’Connor fell in
love with, describes their drives in the country. Alice Walker tells of living
“across the way” from the farmhouse during her teens, not knowing that a writer
lived there: “It was one of my brothers who took milk from her place to the
creamery in town. When we drove into Milledgeville, the cows that we saw on the
hillside going into town would have been the cows of the O’Connors.”
In May, 1955, O’Connor went to New York to promote her story
collection, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” on TV. The rare footage of O’Connor
lights up the documentary. She sits, very still, in a velvet-trimmed black
dress; her accent is strong, her demeanor assured. “I understand you are living
on a farm,” the host prompts. “Yes,” she says. “I only live on one, though. I
don’t see much of it. I’m a writer, and I farm from the rocking chair.” He asks
her if she is a regional writer, and she replies:
I think that to
overcome regionalism, you must have a great deal of self-knowledge. I think
that to know yourself is to know your region, and that it’s also to know the
world, and in a sense, paradoxically, it’s also to be an exile from that world.
So that you have a great deal of detachment.
That is a profound and stringent definition of the writer’s
calling. It locates the writer’s art in the refinement of her character: the
struggle to overcome an outlook that is an obstacle to a greater good, the
letting go of the comforts of home. And it recognizes that detachment can leave
the writer alone and apart.
At Iowa and in Connecticut, O’Connor had begun to read
European fiction and philosophy, and her work, old-time in its particulars, is
shot through with contemporary thought: Gabriel Marcel’s Christian
existentialism, Martin Buber’s sense of “the eclipse of God.” She saw herself
as “a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness” and saw the
South as “Christ-haunted.”
All this can suggest points of similarity with Martin Luther
King, Jr., another Georgian who was infused with Continental ideas up north and
then returned south to take up a brief, urgent calling. Born four years apart,
they grasped the Bible’s pertinence to current events, and saw religion as the
tie that bound blacks and whites—as in her second novel, “The Violent Bear It
Away,” from 1960, which opens with a black farmer giving a white preacher a
Christian burial. O’Connor and King shared a gift for the convention-upending
gesture, as in her story “The Enduring Chill,” in which a white man tries to affirm
equality with the black workers on his mother’s farm by smoking cigarettes with
them in the barn.
O’Connor lectured in a dozen states and often went to Atlanta to visit her doctors; she saw plenty of the changing South. That’s clear from her 1961 story “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” (The title alludes to a thesis advanced by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw the world as gradually “divinized” by human activity in a kind of upward spiral.) A white man, living at home after college, takes his mother to “reducing class” on a newly integrated city bus. The sight of an African-American woman wearing the same style of hat that his mother is wearing stirs him to reflect on all that joins them. The sight of a black boy in the woman’s company prompts his mother to give the boy a gift: a penny with Lincoln’s profile on it. Things get grim after that.
The story was published in “Best American Short Stories” and
won an O. Henry Prize in 1963. O’Connor declared that it was all she had to say
on “That Issue.” It wasn’t. In May, 1964, she wrote to her friend Maryat Lee, a
playwright who was born in Tennessee, lived in New York, and was ardent for
civil rights:
About the Negroes,
the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the
James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it
feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too.
M. L. King I dont think is the ages great saint but he’s at least doing what he
can do & has to do. Don’t know anything about Ossie Davis except that you
like him but you probably like them all. My question is usually would this
person be endurable if white. If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a
minute. I prefer Cassius Clay. “If a tiger move into the room with you,” says
Cassius, “and you leave, that dont mean you hate the tiger. Just means you know
you and him can’t make out. Too much talk about hate.” Cassius is too good for
the Moslems.
That passage, published in “The Habit of Being,” echoed a
remark in a 1959 letter, also to Maryat Lee, who had suggested that Baldwin—his
“Letter from the South” had just run in Partisan Review—could pay O’Connor a
visit while on a subsequent reporting trip. O’Connor demurred:
No I can’t see
James Baldwin in Georgia. It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance
and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I
observe the traditions of the society I feed on—it’s only fair. Might as well
expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia. I have read one of
his stories and it was a good one.
O’Connor-lovers have been downplaying those remarks ever
since. But they are not hot-mike moments or loose talk. They were written at
the same desk where O’Connor wrote her fiction and are found in the same lode
of correspondence that has brought about the rise in her stature. This has put
her champions in a bind—upholding her letters as eloquently expressive of her
character, but carving out exceptions for the nasty parts.
Last year, Fordham University hosted a symposium on O’Connor
and race, supported with a grant from the author’s estate. The organizer,
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, edits a series of books on Catholic writers funded by
the estate, has compiled a book of devotions drawn from O’Connor’s work, and
has written a book of poems that “channel the voice” of the author. In a new
volume in the series, “Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor”
(Fordham), she takes up Flannery and That Issue. Proposing that O’Connor’s work
is “race-haunted,” she applies techniques from whiteness studies and critical
race theory, as well as Toni Morrison’s idea of “Africanist ‘othering.’ ”
O’Donnell presents a previously unpublished passage on race and engages with
scholars who have offered context for the racist remarks. Although she is
palpably anguished about O’Connor’s race problem, she winds up reprising those
earlier arguments in current literary-critical argot, treating O’Connor as
“transgressive in her writing about race” but prone to lapses and excesses that
stemmed from social forces beyond her control.
The context arguments go like this. O’Connor was a writer of
her place and time, and her limitations were those of “the culture that had
produced her.” Forced by illness to return to Georgia, she was made captive to
a “Southern code of manners” that maintained whites’ superiority over blacks,
but her fiction subjects the code to scrutiny. Although she used racial
epithets carelessly in her correspondence, she dealt with race courageously in
the fiction, depicting white characters pitilessly and creating upstanding
black characters who “retain an inviolable privacy.” And she was admirably
leery of cultural appropriation. “I don’t feel capable of entering the mind of
a Negro,” she told an interviewer—a reluctance that Alice Walker lauded in a
1975 essay.
All the contextualizing produces a seesaw effect, as it
variously cordons off the author from history, deems her a product of racist
history, and proposes that she was as oppressed by that history as anybody else
was. It backdates O’Connor as a writer of her time when she was a
near-contemporary of writers typically seen as writers of our time: Gabriel
García Márquez (born 1927), Maya Angelou (1928), Ursula K. Le Guin (1929), Tom
Wolfe (1930), and Derek Walcott (1930), among others. It suggests that white
racism in Georgia was all-encompassing and brooked no dissent, even though (as
O’Donnell points out) Georgia was then changing more dramatically than at any point
before or since. Patronizingly, it proposes that O’Connor, a genius who prized
detachment, lacked the free will to think for herself.
Another writer of that cohort is Toni Morrison, who was born
in Ohio in 1931 and became a Catholic at the age of twelve. Morrison published
“Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” in 1992. “The
fabrication of an Africanist persona” by a white writer, she proposed, “is
reflexive: an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the
fears and desires that reside in the writerly consciousness.” Invoking
Morrison, O’Donnell argues that O’Connor’s fiction is fundamentally a
working-through of her own racism, and that the offending remarks in the
letters “tell us . . . that O’Connor understood evil in the form of racism from
the inside, as one who has practiced it.”
The clinching evidence is “Revelation,” drafted in late
1963. This extraordinary story involves Ruby Turpin—a white Southerner in
middle age, the owner of a dairy farm—and her encounter in a doctor’s waiting
room with a Wellesley-educated young woman, also white, who is so repulsed by
Turpin’s condescension toward people there that she cries out, “Go back to hell
where you came from, you old wart hog.” This arouses Turpin to quarrel with God
as she surveys a hog pen on her property, and calls forth a magnificent final
image of the hereafter in Turpin’s eyes—the people of the rural South heading
heavenward. Some say this “vision” redeems the author on That Issue. Brad
Gooch, in a 2009 biography, likened it to the dream that Martin Luther King,
Jr., spelled out in August, 1963; O’Donnell, drawing on a remark in the
letters, depicts it as a “vision O’Connor has been wresting from God every day
for much of her life.” Seeing it that way is a stretch. King’s “I Have a Dream”
speech envisioned blacks and whites holding hands at the end of time; Turpin’s
vision, by contrast, is a segregationist’s vision, in which people process to
Heaven by race and class, equal but separate, white landowners such as Turpin
preceded (the last shall be first) by “bands of black niggers in white robes,
and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like
frogs.”
After revising “Revelation” in early 1964, O’Connor wrote
several letters to Maryat Lee. Many scholars maintain that their letters (often
signed with nicknames) are a comic performance, with Lee playing the
over-the-top liberal and O’Connor the dug-in gradualist, but O’Connor’s most
significant remarks on race in her letters to Lee are plainly sincere. On May
3, 1964—as Richard Russell, Democrat of Georgia, led a filibuster in the Senate
to block the Civil Rights Act—O’Connor set out her position in a passage now
published for the first time: “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle
& a segregationist by taste anyway. I don’t like negroes. They all give me
a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly
the new kind.” Two weeks after that, she told Lee of her aversion to the “philosophizing
prophesying pontificating kind.” Ravaged by lupus, she wrote Lee a note to say
that she was checking in to the hospital, signing it “Mrs. Turpin.” She died at
home ten weeks later.
Those remarks show a view clearly maintained and growing
more intense as time went on. They were objectionable when O’Connor made them.
And yet—the argument goes—they’re just remarks, made in chatty letters by an
author in extremis. They’re expressive but not representative. Her “public
work” (as the scholar Ralph C. Wood calls it) is more complex, and its
significance for us lies in its artfully mixed messages, for on race none of us
is without sin and in a position to cast a stone.
That argument, however, runs counter to history and to
O’Connor’s place in it. It sets up a false equivalence between the
“segregationist by taste” and those brutally oppressed by segregation. And it
draws a neat line between O’Connor’s fiction and her other writing where race
is involved, even though the long effort to move her from the margins to the
center has proceeded as if that line weren’t there. Those remarks don’t belong
to the past, or to the South, or to literary ephemera. They belong to the
author’s body of work; they help show us who she was.
Posterity, in literature, is a strange god—consecrating
Dickinson and Melville as American divines, repositioning T. S. Eliot as a man
on the run from a Missouri boyhood and a bad marriage. Posterity has favored
Flannery O’Connor: the readers of her work today far outnumber those in her
lifetime. After her death, the racist passages were stumbling blocks to the
next generation’s encounter with her, and it made a kind of sense to sidestep
them. Now the reluctance to face them squarely is itself a stumbling block, one
that keeps us from approaching her with the seriousness that a great writer
deserves.
There’s a way forward, rooted in the work. For twenty years,
the director Karin Coonrod has staged dramatic adaptations of O’Connor’s
stories. Following a stipulation of the author’s estate, she uses every word:
narration, description, dialogue, imagery, and racial epithets. Members of the
multiracial cast circulate the full text fluidly from actor to actor, character
to character, so that the author’s words, all of them, ring out in her own
voice and in other voices, too.
How Racist Was
Flannery O’Connor? By Paul Elie The New Yorker , June 15 , 2020
Editor’s
note: This spring, Amy Alznauer sent us an advance copy of her new children’s
book The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor. It launched the same day that The
New Yorker published Paul Elie’s, “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” The
timing couldn’t have been more perfect or terrible. We were curious to know what Alznauer
thought. As a feminist and one of the
curators of a future Emory University exhibit on the work of O’Connor and Benny
Andrews, she had a lot to say. Her column reveals some of the blind spots in
Elie’s essay about the odd, peacock-loving writer from Milledgeville, Georgia.
Paul Elie
has a new piece in The New Yorker, sensationally titled as an exposé: “How
Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” Elie argues that practically everyone — the
executors, editors, exegetes, and fans — have “side-stepped,” “held close,”
“justified,” or “downplayed,” American author Flannery O’Connor’s racist
remarks, which she made in correspondence throughout her life.
The
apparent occasion for this piece is the recent release of Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s
newest book Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor. A component of this book is O’Donnell’s
original research in the O’Connor archives and with the O’Connor estate, which
brings to light a few additional racist comments in O’Connor’s letters and
postcards.
I read Elie’s piece with my mouth falling open,
more incredulous as I read. Not because I was shocked to discover that O’Connor
made blatantly racist remarks throughout her life. That has been known by
anyone who has cared to look ever since the 1970s. What surprised me was his
minimization or omission of so many of the people who have written on O’Connor
and race. He claims that the reluctance to face these facts keeps us from
“approaching her with the seriousness a great writer deserves,” implying that
no serious engagement has yet happened. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that
much of the work he misreads or flat-out ignores has largely been done by women
and Black Americans.
But first,
I'd like to note that the very occasion for Elie’s essay is problematic. Elie
seems to think that O’Connor’s racism has been newly firmed up by O’Donnell’s
discovery and publication of a few additional offensive O’Connor letters and
postcards. This strikes me as a particularly unreflective thing to say, an
error which O’Donnell herself does not make. “People of color,” she says, “who
live a different reality with regard to the pervasiveness of white racism,
would likely find [these discoveries] less surprising.”
Let’s begin
with Alice Walker. Elie mentions Walker, noting that her brothers once
delivered milk to the O’Connor farm, and also references in passing the 1975
essay Walker wrote on O’Connor, “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of
Flannery O’Connor.” But he doesn’t say much of substance about it. This is
particularly surprising because Elie knows this piece well, and spent two pages
summarizing Walker’s story in his celebrated book (which I myself happen to
love) The Life You Save Might be Your Own.
In this
powerful personal essay, Walker travels to Milledgeville to visit both the
dilapidated house her family lived in for a year (which had since been
converted into an open shed for storing hay) and O’Connor’s well-preserved
estate just down the road.
Walker
embarked on this voyage and wrote about it, she says, in order to get “the
whole story” and not have her life, literature, and history “split up.” For
when she first read O’Connor, she says, “the perfection of her writing was so
dazzling I never noticed that no black Southern writers were taught.” When she
finally discovered these Black writers, she put O’Connor’s books away in rage
and shut her out. Until, she began to miss her.
Walker
maintains this push-pull throughout the entire essay. Her anger culminates in
the moment when she stands on O’Connor's porch and knocks at the door.
“What I
feel in the moment of knocking is fury that someone is paid to take care of her
house, though no one lives in it, and that her house still, in fact, stands,
while mine — which of course we never owned anyway — is slowly rotting into
dust. Her house becomes — in an instant — the symbol of my own disinheritance,
and for that instant I hate her guts.”
A few
minutes later, walking about the yard, “listening to the soft sweep of the
peacocks’ tails,” she says, “She also cast spells and worked magic with the
written word. The magic, the wit, and the mystery of Flannery O’Connor I know I
will always love.”
Then,
immediately after declaring her love for O’Conner, Walker says, “I also know
the meaning of the expression ‘Take what you can use and let the rest rot.’”
One does not come away from Walker’s essay feeling that anything has been
side-stepped, justified, or downplayed.
She wrote this 45 years ago.
Or take
writer and theater critic Hilton Als, not mentioned once in Elie’s “exposé,”
who in 2001 wrote an essay titled, “This Lonesome Place: Flannery O’Connor on
race and religion in the unreconstructed South.” Als calls O’Connor’s work
original, honest, electric, and genius. But in response to her refusal to see
James Baldwin in Georgia and also how her illness caused her to “cleave to the
world as she knew it,” he says, “Her regionalism was both a strength and a
weakness; the emotional distance caused by her physical suffering was the axis
on which both her comedy and her cruelty turned.” And I should add that this article, like
Elie’s, appeared in the New Yorker.
Or consider
artist Benny Andrews, whom Elie also fails to mention, whose paintings now hang
in the MoMA and who was born five years after O’Connor, just 30 miles from
Milledgeville. In 2005, Andrews illustrated O’Connor’s short story Everything
that Rises Must Converge for an elephantine limited edition. In a stunningly
beautiful afterword, Andrews set himself the task of describing why he chose to
illustrate a story by O’Connor, a task which required, he said, facing up to
the deeper meaning of her roots.
“To many of
her kind,” he wrote, “we were just a few years and steps removed from being
living farm equipment … No, Flannery O’Connor would not have given me an
audience during her lifetime. I would have never been invited to her home or
probably been given much time to say anything of significance at her lectures.”
A few
paragraphs later Andrews wrote, “I’ll say up front, Flannery O’Connor is in my
mind a great writer. She depicted things bigger than the physical world she
lived in. Nevertheless, she also retained a lot of the very worst that she
lived in. The truth is that the society that she lived in was sustained by
cruelty, oppression and murder. It was an inhumane world.” Again, in Andrews’
writing, there is no rug in sight under which O’Connor’s racism might be swept.
“So why did
I take this dare?” Andrews asks. “The reason is that I’ve looked into
O’Connor’s works, and I’ve found more than the superficial, much more. She
confronts the leaping flames and churning waters. I’ve looked into her works,
and I have found revelations.” Is this, too, a failure to approach a great
artist with the seriousness she deserves?
Elie does
mention Toni Morrison, but again strangely not the passages in her 2017 book
The Origin of Others, which explicitly discuss O’Connor and race. In the
foreword for this book, Ta-Nehisi Coates summarizes, “Morrison’s book joins a
body of work, evolving over the last century, that has effectively argued for
the indelible nature of white racism.” And later, “Racism matters. To be an
Other in this country matters – and the disheartening truth is that it will
continue to matter.” To get at the idea of how Othering happens, Morrison
analyzes the journey of O’Connor’s character Mr. Head and his nephew Nelson to
the big city. She writes, “Flannery O’Connor exhibits with honesty and profound
perception her understanding of the stranger, the outcast, the Other.”
Morrison
also mentioned O’Connor in a 2016 interview for Natur & Kulturs with Nadifa
Mohamed. Their final exchange goes like this:
NM: Who do
you admire now?
TM: There’s
a woman I love, she’s really hostile, Flannery O’Connor, she’s really really
good.
Does Elie
exclude these statements by Morrison because they don’t fit his argument? Or
does he think Morrison herself is at risk of overlooking O’Connor’s personal,
racist statements, yet another failure to approach her with the seriousness a
great author deserves? What seems much truer is that Morrison, Walker, Als, and
Andrews, never side-step O'Connor's racism; rather, it is known implicitly and
viscerally as an ingrained fact.
And this
brings me to Elie’s central claim that commentators, O’Donnell included, have
largely contextualized O’Connor’s racist remarks away. “The context arguments
go like this,” he says. “O’Connor was a writer of her place and time, and her
limitations were those of ‘the culture that had produced her.’” In other words,
these many commentators (he doesn’t list them) grant O’Connor agency as a
writer, but see her racism as a product of her time. O’Donnell, Elie asserts,
“winds up reprising those earlier arguments in current literary-critical argot,
treating O’Connor as ‘transgressive in her writing about race’ but prone to
lapses and excesses that stemmed from social forces beyond her control.”
But just as
he omitted the writings of so many, he omits much of O’Donnell’s painstakingly
careful analysis. “Though O’Connor’s art often constitutes a victory over her
own prejudices, that victory is a partial one,” says O’Donnell. And later,
comparing O’Connor and Faulkner, she says, “The complicated nature of
O’Connor’s attitude deserves similar attention … Rather than try to deny,
defend, or resolve her contradictions, it seems more fruitful to explore them,
to discover and document the particular ways in which they manifest themselves
in her writings.”
Elie
worries that a “neat line” has been drawn “between O’Connor’s fiction and her
other writing where race is involved.” He worries that critics, and we have to
assume he is targeting O’Donnell (or possibly Ralph Wood) since he doesn’t cite
any others by name, have at once used her letters and essays in an “effort to
move her from the margins to the center” but have chalked up her racist remarks
as “literary ephemera.” Elie then declares, as if he is the only one who has
thought of it, that the letters “belong to the author’s body of work; they help
show us who she was.” Lest this comment hit readers with the force of
revelation, let's be clear that O’Donnell’s entire book is devoted to exactly
that, engaging both her stories and her correspondence:
“This study
explores the complexity, the development, and the limitations of O’Connor’s
vision with regard to race as embodied in her writings, and the radical
ambivalence in which her attitudes toward race are rooted. This ambivalence
manifests itself in O’Connor’s correspondence … as well as in her fiction.
Accordingly, the study will examine the relationship between the ideas about
race expressed in her letters and those represented in the stories.”
In Elie’s
essay, which complains repeatedly about side-stepping and down-playing, it is
particularly troubling to find him adopting a similar approach. In order to
shore up his own argument, which seems intended to offer himself as one of the
only people willing to look O’Connor and race squarely in the eye, Elie has
mischaracterized the work of O’Donnell and largely ignored the writing of so
many on this very subject. One comes away from the essay with the distinct
impression that O’Connor and race has been a topic that almost every critic
(until now!) has largely tiptoed around or minimized. And indeed, the ensuing
Twitter storm often referenced Elie’s “discoveries.”
In contrast
to Elie’s tendency toward omission, O’Donnell devotes the first chapter of her
book to outlining “the treatment of race in O’Connor criticism from the 1970s
to the present.” The chapter begins with Alice Walker and then moves on to
other scholars, only one of whom (Ralph Wood) Elie mentions. Melvin Williams in
his essay, “Black and White: A Study in Flannery O’Connor’s Characters” offers
a counter to Walker. “Black characters are for the most part only ‘issues’
instead of people,” says Williams. “They never change, never are explored on a
more than superficial level.” Feminist scholar Claire Kahane, O’Donnell says,
argues along similar lines. Then, to further complicate the landscape,
O’Donnell writes:
“This
critique of O’Connor’s black characters has continued to develop and
proliferate in O’Connor studies, though there are plenty of critics who counter
it as well, among them Toni Morrison, Ralph Wood, and Doreen Flower, all of
whom see in O’Connor a more complex and knowing treatment of race more in
keeping with Walker’s view.”
So, what
are we to do with this complicated terrain? Elie is concerned that the
reluctance to face up to O’Connor’s racist remarks is a stumbling block to
taking her seriously. But as I have
shown here, many writers have already provided a portrait of a dazzling,
profound, and revelatory writer who at the same time is cruel, has parts of
herself that should be left to rot, and who retained much of the inhumane world
she lived in. These writers were not
waiting for Elie’s belated invitation to take O’Connor and race seriously.
In the
final paragraph of his essay, Elie almost acknowledges that this important work
has already begun. For he says that the way “forward” can be seen in the
theatre productions of O’Connor stories by Karin Coonrod (another brilliant
woman) completed twenty years ago. Rather than summarize Coonrod’s work, which
Elie actually does quite nicely, I would like to offer another model for going
“forward.”
Benny
Andrews concludes his afterward with an arresting metaphor: “The Negro and the
white lady have met down at the crossroads but that’s just where they are, at
the crossroads. It is up to the reader of the story and the viewer of my art
work to look at two Southerners and wonder, wonder, and hopefully wonder more.”
Flannery
O’Connor’s words (all of them) will ultimately be judged by the same test all
authors endure — the slow assessment of history: the combined, complex,
intertwined effect of time, people, life, and the world. But here, at this
moment in history, if we wish to engage with O’Connor, we might imagine
ourselves standing at a crossroads, aware of all of it, the cruelty, the rot,
and the power of her brutal revelations, which led her to truth about the
grotesque heart of the South and the very heart of being human. Or as Als puts it “the shit and the stars.”
Update: An earlier version of this used the
words afterward and forward. They have been corrected to foreword and
afterword.
On Flannery O’Connor and race : A response to Paul
Elie. Essay by Amy Alznauer
The Bitter Southerner , June 25, 2020.
In a recent New Yorker essay, Paul Elie asks, “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” His headline aims to be incendiary, to rile people up, to give us a scapegoat for our rage against racism. Racism is obviously a serious sin. But Elie’s portrait of the author is incomplete. Because he misreads much of O’Connor’s writing, he concludes that she was unrepentantly racist. But O’Connor did not embrace bigotry. Like all of us, she was a sinner who struggled to purge herself of prejudices she knew were immoral. And she boldly fought racism—in both others and in herself—the best way she knew how: by writing stories.
Elie notes
that in private correspondence, O’Connor used inexcusable racial slurs, and
confessed to friends that she struggled between the Christian in her, who
believed that all are God’s children, and the Southern white lady in her, who
was trained to see black people as inferior. Elie declares O’Connor a racist
because of these letters, and suggests that O’Connor scholars are unwilling to
see or speak of them. Never mind that scholars have wrestled for years with the
letters Elie quotes. (Elie draws his provocative quotations from Angela Alaimo
O’Donnell’s Radical Ambivalence, which I review in the forthcoming
August/September issue of First Things.) Elie does not show us the other side
of O'Connor: the O’Connor who was an integrationist, if a gradualist one; who
had black friends in Iowa and New York; who was close with activists such as
Father McCown and Tom and Louise Gossett, and twice invited John Howard Griffin
to visit her home; who kept a portrait of Louise Hill, her mother’s African
American housemaid, in her room; who reviewed a biography of the African
American minister Richard Allen and declared it would transform readers. Elie
omits all these details.
Most
important, Elie does not sufficiently examine O’Connor's fiction, much of which
condemns racism. To fully understand O’Connor, we must study her novels and
short stories. That is where we find her ultimate commitments, both religious
and moral. Through her fiction, O’Connor exorcised the demons that possessed
her.
Rather than
preach to the choir, O’Connor tried to change those who thought differently; in
her fiction, she often moved racist characters from sin to redemption. For the
past five years, I have been editing O’Connor's third novel, which she was
working on when she died. It is called Why Do the Heathen Rage? The plot
centers on a white man who writes letters to a white woman, a civil rights
activist in New York. In his correspondence with her, this man pretends to be
black. He is testing whether she loves people as much as she claims she does.
O’Connor planned for the novel to end with his conversion, his comeuppance. The
story takes a close look at Koinonia, the integrationist farm in Americus,
Georgia, established by the Baptist radical Clarence Jordan. Why Do the Heathen
Rage? shows that O’Connor did not shy away from difficult conversations, but
used her fiction to call for Southerners to repent of racist attitudes.
African
American writers have often lauded O’Connor’s work as contending with racism.
Hilton Als notes that O’Connor started writing “less than a hundred years after
Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and just a decade after
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.” Unlike those writers, he says,
O’Connor did not treat her black characters with “patronizing sentimentality.”
She wrote with courage as she pointed a finger at racial bigots—and at the
bigotry she saw in herself.
Elie’s most
egregious error is his misreading of “Revelation.” O’Connor wrote this story
from her hospital bed as she struggled against lupus in the winter of 1963,
months before she died. It concerns a racist Southern woman, Ruby Turpin, who
is humiliated in a doctor’s office by a sophisticated Wellesley student named
Mary Grace. Mrs. Turpin has been expressing her disdain for the “white trash”
she considers as worthless as black people, much to the silent disdain of
sour-faced Mary Grace. Inwardly, Mrs. Turpin thanks Jesus for not making her
black, white trash, or ugly. She suddenly shouts aloud, “Thank you, Jesus, for
making everything the way it is!” Mary Grace responds by hurling a book at
Turpin, striking her in the eye, knocking her down, and attempting to strangle
her. With eyes of accusation burning, Mary Grace whispers, “Go back to hell
where you came from, you old wart hog!”
The moment
scandalizes Mrs. Turpin, and at the end of the story, she stands atop a fence
by her pig pen and yells at God for allowing her to be thus disgraced. Although
the insult came from a stranger’s lips, it is as though God has called her out.
She shouts at the Lord, “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from
hell too?” O’Connor could just as well be aiming the question at herself: How can
I be a sinner and a believer at the same time? How can I be racist and write
stories against racism? When Mrs. Turpin rages and roars one final time, “Who
do you think you are?,” the question echoes back to her from the tree line, as
though God were speaking the words. O’Connor suggests that the proud woman must
be knocked down to her rightful place, humbled before the Lord.
As the sun
sets, Mrs. Turpin receives a vision at her pig pen. She beholds a bridge
extending from the earth “through a field of living fire.” She sees a
congregation of souls dancing and leaping in a great heavenward procession—both
“white trash” and black people in white robes. Mrs. Turpin observes that those
like herself and her husband Claud trail at the end of the line. Elie interprets
this as a vision of segregation—people separated by race and class even while
processing to heaven. But O’Connor is actually alluding to the biblical
teaching that the first will be made last and the last first. The vision puts
Ruby Turpin in her place, so to speak, as she watches small-minded
“virtues”—her “dignity” and “common sense and respectable behavior”—being
“burned away” in the purgatorial fires. After this revelation, Mrs. Turpin
literally steps “down” from where she stands and descends the “slow way” back
home.
In the
final summer of her life, when she was about to receive treatment for lupus,
O’Connor jokingly wrote to her friendly antagonist Maryat Lee that she would
sign her name as “Mrs. Turpin” when she was checked into the hospital. Elie
interprets this as yet another sign of racism: O’Connor, he says, is
identifying with her racist character. But this is another misreading.
“Revelation” does not lift up Mrs. Turpin as a model, but calls for her and
those like her to repent. By referring to herself as “Mrs. Turpin,” then,
O’Connor was repenting of her own serious faults. No wonder that O’Connor
writes in her essays that it is the Christian novelist’s duty to unmask the
devils that possess us. “Revelation” holds a mirror up to the author herself.
In this reflection, O’Connor sees herself possessed by racist prejudices and in
need of purgation.
If we cast
out all writers who ever struggled with sin, we will be left without a single
one. If we start scapegoating O’Connor, we will end by rejecting many eminent
writers who fought racism in their work—Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Fyodor
Dostoevsky. It is unfair to lambast O’Connor without recognizing how her work
has helped us combat racist attitudes. As we make strides to uproot bigotry from
our nation and seek justice on behalf of those who have suffered unjustly, we
should see Flannery O’Connor not as a hindrance but as someone who helped us
come a long way.
Jessica
Hooten Wilson is the Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of
Dallas.
How
Flannery O’Connor Fought Racism . By Jessica Hooten Wilson. First Things , June
24 , 2020
According
to one of her cousins, Mary Flannery O’Connor was ‘a very peculiar child’. When
she was six, she drew countless pictures of chickens. To discourage classmates
from sharing her lunch, she would sometimes take castor oil sandwiches to
school. Her own recollection of herself is characteristically acerbic: ‘a
pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a
you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’. Her father, Edward O’Connor, was
an estate agent, and she grew up in a four-storey house in Savannah, Georgia,
but she seems to have chafed against the gentility of her surroundings. ‘I was
born disenchanted,’ she later said. Aged ten, she wrote a book called My
Relatives. According to her mother, Regina, ‘no one was spared.’ Three years
later, as a result of her father’s ill-health, the family moved to
Milledgeville, a town of six thousand. Milledgeville’s only distinguishing
feature was its lunatic asylum, the largest in the world at the time. After
graduating from high school in 1942, O’Connor enrolled at the Georgia State
College for Women, where she read social sciences, then went to the University
of Iowa on a scholarship to study journalism. While still in her twenties, she
started to show symptoms of what was eventually diagnosed as lupus, the
autoimmune disease that killed her father. Apart from a few nights, she spent
the rest of her life in Milledgeville, where she raised peacocks, attended
mass, drove a ‘hearse-like’ black Chevrolet and wrote fiction in a University
of Georgia sweater with a bulldog on the front, ‘to create an unfavourable
impression’.
O’Connor’s
ideas about her writing were unambiguous. In a letter to John Lynch, a reviewer
and an academic at Notre Dame, in 1955, she says: ‘I feel that if I were not a
Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to
feel horrified.’ She described herself as a ‘hillbilly Thomist’: like Aquinas,
she believed that all creation is good. Evil represented the absence of good,
or the wrong use of it, she said, and without grace, ‘we use it wrong most of
the time.’ O’Connor’s best-known characters – Hazel Motes in Wise Blood,
Francis Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away – are embodiments of that
predicament or struggle. They wander in a wilderness of the spirit. They are in
a constant and desperate search for grace. Here is Tarwater, towards the end of
the novel:
He remained
motionless except for his hands. They clenched and unclenched. What he saw was
what he had expected to see, an empty clearing. The old man’s body was no
longer there. His dust would be mingling with the dust of the place, would not
be washed by the seeping rains into the field. The wind by now had taken his ashes,
dropped them and scattered them and lifted them up again and carried each mote
a different way around the curve of the world. The clearing was burned free of
all that had ever oppressed him. No cross was there to say that this was ground
that the Lord still held. What he looked out upon was the sign of a broken
covenant. The place was forsaken and his own.
In his
introduction to a book of critical essays on O’Connor, Harold Bloom argues that
there is a gulf between O’Connor the lay theologian and O’Connor the
storyteller. In his opinion, the theologian does the storyteller a disservice.
He would rather she had restrained what he calls her ‘spiritual
tendentiousness’; her work is ‘more equivocal than she intended’. John Hawkes
took a similar stance in an influential essay for the Sewanee Review in 1962,
in which he claimed that O’Connor employed ‘the devil’s voice’ for her ‘vision
of our godless actuality’. Responding to Hawkes, O’Connor admitted that ‘the
devil teaches most of the lessons that lead to self-knowledge.’ In the years
since, critics have abandoned a Catholic interpretation of her work in favour
of a psychological and secular approach. If this amounts to a betrayal of
O’Connor’s ‘anagogical vision’, perhaps that’s no bad thing: her blend of crackling
violence and surreal wit often seems closer to David Lynch than Aquinas.
The
theological approach receives a predictably complete expression in Christine
Flanagan’s edition of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The
two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at Yaddo in
1948. Gordon had impeccable literary credentials. As a young writer, she had
been mentored by Ford Madox Ford, who had her read an early draft of her first
novel, Penhally, out loud to him. She was edited by Maxwell Perkins, and had
published eight novels and one short story collection. O’Connor was familiar
with Gordon’s work; she told her that the short story ‘Old Red’ had been ‘the
making of me as a writer’. Gordon was thirty years older, but both women had
grown up in the Deep South – O’Connor in Georgia, Gordon in Kentucky and
Tennessee – and both were practising Catholics. While they lived in an age ‘far
removed from Christ’, as the philosopher Jacques Maritain had put it, they
agreed that Christian dogma remained the perfect ‘instrument for penetrating
reality’.
In early
1951, Gordon read a draft of Wise Blood and wrote to O’Connor praising it as
‘unflaggingly dramatic’ and ‘considerable’, but also singling out scenes she
thought O’Connor had ‘muffed’ and proposing substantial revisions. O’Connor
sent the revised draft to her editor, Robert Giroux, defending the changes by
saying they were ‘all suggested by Caroline’. But as Flanagan points out,
O’Connor was no ‘fragile student’. In a letter to Lowell she tells him that
Gordon reads all her stories and ‘writes me wherein they do not meet the mark’.
While she could be dry or tongue-in-cheek, she wasn’t ungrateful, admitting
Gordon had ‘taught me more than anybody’. It’s not difficult to see why. During
the 13-year correspondence, Gordon discourses at length on the craft of
writing. There are two ways of opening a story, she says: one is with a view or
a panorama, as in Anna Karenina, The Great Gatsby and Death in Venice. The
other is ‘to begin with action, the more violent the better’, as O’Connor does
in The Violent Bear It Away. She tells O’Connor that she sometimes wastes her
material by failing to give it sufficient significance – ‘We need to see your
pigs a little more clearly,’ she writes of one of O’Connor’s final stories,
‘Revelation’ – and criticises her for ‘hurrying over crucial moments too fast’.
‘Anything that’s important,’ she goes on, ‘usually belongs in a sentence by
itself.’ She reprimands O’Connor for resorting to words such as ‘toting’ and
‘squinch’: an omniscient third-person narrator has no business with
colloquialisms. She offers informal lessons on technique, quoting from Percy
Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction: ‘The recording intelligence records more
dramatically when it does not know what it is recording.’ O’Connor agrees in
principle, but can’t resist adding that she was more likely to be influenced by
her mother’s dairyman’s wife than by any writer or academic. Gordon disapproves
of O’Connor’s intensity and recommends what Yeats called the ‘numb line’. And
she isn’t averse to passing on other people’s criticisms: in one letter she
says that her husband, the poet Allen Tate, thinks O’Connor can sometimes be
too ‘flat-footed’ in her effects.
Gordon’s
advice is often ‘damn didactic’, but she was also lavish with her praise.
‘You’re doing something that hasn’t been done before, something so new, so
original, that you have to cut your own way through the underbrush.’ O’Connor’s
‘Good Country People’ is as good as anything Maupassant ever wrote, Gordon
claims: in fact it’s better, since it has something that his best stories lack:
moral seriousness. In a letter from 1958, she acknowledges O’Connor’s talent in
no uncertain terms. ‘I feel like a fool when I criticise your stories. I think
you are a genius ... It really seems presumptuous for me to offer you
suggestions.’
At the
start, Gordon is the mentor and O’Connor the acolyte: some of Gordon’s remarks
have a hint of condescension, as if she believes O’Connor aspires to a position
that she – Gordon – already occupies. There are also moments when she subsumes
O’Connor’s work into her own life. Writing from the American Academy in Rome,
she tells O’Connor that the first chapter of The Violent Bear It Away is
‘simply terrific’, then adds that it reminds her of ‘the little chapels one
sees in the catacombs’. Several hundred breathless words on catacombs follow.
As the
correspondence progresses, a sense of imbalance grows. It’s not only that we
see O’Connor become famous but that we are reading half a century later, when
Gordon has been largely forgotten. The effect of Flanagan’s tightly organised
edition is to play Gordon off against O’Connor, and Gordon suffers by
comparison. Her letters take up at least two-thirds of the book. She tells
long, slightly wearying stories. And there are times when she tries too hard to
impress. It’s here that the balance tips, and it becomes clear that Gordon is
aware, on some level, that O’Connor is the better writer. Towards the end of
the correspondence a self-consciousness creeps in. Responding to ‘Parker’s
Back’, one of O’Connor’s last stories, Gordon’s self-deprecation borders on
cringing: ‘You will understand, I know, that when old Dr G. says she would do
it this way or that she is merely trying to give you, offhand, an example of
the kind of thing she feels ought to be done.’ A week later, O’Connor wrote to
her friend Betty Hester: ‘Caroline gave me a lot of advice about the story, but
most of it I’m ignoring.’
O’Connor’s
letters, by contrast, are almost pointedly succinct and laconic. ‘She wrote me
six pages about grammar and another six about her Christmas vacation,’ she says
of Gordon in 1963. ‘What that woman has is Vitality.’ Where Gordon writes in
measured sentences and makes no attempt to conceal her sophistication, O’Connor
dumbs down. ‘As the good sisters say,’ she writes to Gordon in 1953, ‘Gawd will
reward you for your generosity. I hope quick.’ She deliberately uses bad
grammar. She makes a point of misspelling the word ‘intellectual’. Even in her
most personal letters, O’Connor’s ‘I’ can feel like an assumed persona, the
voice of one of her characters: ‘I ain’t going nowhere else, but am going to
stay home and tend to my proper bidnis.’ Perhaps her epistolary style was
simply a form of self-defence. She wrote, as she says, ‘by smell’, and recoiled
from over-analysing her fiction. In a letter written early on, Gordon admits
that ‘it’s dangerous to become too conscious yourself of what you are doing’,
but the drift of her remarks is always theoretical – she was an ardent
practitioner of the New Criticism – and the reader senses O’Connor learning to
sift through Gordon’s many pages for comments that might prove useful.
According
to Katherine Scott, one of O’Connor’s schoolteachers, ‘it was obvious that she
was a genius. Warped, but a genius all the same.’ Critics have tended to seize
on biographical details, portraying her as a crackpot visionary from the Bible
Belt. Time magazine’s review of The Violent Bear It Away is by no means untypical
in describing her as a ‘retiring bookish spinster who dabbles in the variants
of sin and salvation like some self-tutored backwoods theologian’. Spinster.
Dabbles. Critics recognised the directness and force of her prose, but unlike
Gordon they queried her use of it. They claimed that the spiritual dimension
was undermined by the violence. The voice, too, posed a problem: it was
detached, idiomatic; its humour withering. They weren’t sure if they were
supposed to laugh. The easiest option was to relegate her work to the margins,
like a form of outsider art. Towards the end of her life, while addressing
students at the Georgia State College for Women, O’Connor referred to the
bewilderment and ambivalence her work attracted, imagining readers complaining:
‘I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.’
Despite the
protests of her neighbour, Charlotte Conn Ferris, who said, ‘I don’t know where
Mary Flannery met those people she wrote about, but it was certainly not in my
house,’ O’Connor reflected the world she lived in, where religion was degraded,
commerce seductive and all-encompassing and racism not only acceptable but
rampant. She was regularly accused of exaggeration, and yet her writing is
never gratuitous or crude. The grotesque isn’t exceptional, O’Connor seems to
be saying; it is all around us. In his introduction to the French edition of
Wise Blood, J.M.G. Le Clézio wrote that ‘if the world that Flannery O’Connor
has created shocks us it is not so much because it is confused and brutal, but
because it is true.’
George & Mae Murray Dorsey
In 1946,
when O’Connor was 21, four African Americans were lynched by a gang of white
men at Moore’s Ford, sixty miles north of Milledgeville. One of the four, Mae
Murray Dorsey, was pregnant. After she was shot, a man cut the foetus from her
body with a knife. The subsequent FBI investigation lasted six months and was
met with obstruction and silence. Alibis were provided for all the
perpetrators. O’Connor must have been aware of the case, though she never
commented on it. The brutality and prejudice endemic in the Deep South at the
time are present in O’Connor too, and she made no attempt to disguise it. Her
offensive remarks to her friend Maryat Lee may have been facetious, or she may
have been playing devil’s advocate, but she was unequivocally disdainful about
the integrationists from the North. When James Baldwin toured the southern
states in 1957, O’Connor had the opportunity to meet him. She chose not to. Her
excuse was that she had to observe ‘the traditions of the society I feed on’. But
perhaps it is also true that she felt tainted. Perhaps she felt that it would
have been fraudulent or hypocritical to pretend she was not unaffected by the
racism of her day. Is the violence in her fiction sadistic? Or does it come
from her own sense of complicity? When Hiram, Bobby Lee and the Misfit murder a
hapless family in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, she narrates the scene with
gleeful wit:
‘Jesus,’
the old lady cried. ‘You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady. I
know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady.
I’ll give you all the money I’ve got!’
‘Lady,’ the
Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, ‘there never was a body
that give the undertaker a tip.’
She is just
as guilty as the characters Hawkes calls ‘wonderfully merciless creations’. She
is just as much of a sinner. Grace means that it is not your place to appraise
others, still less condemn, since they may have a role or a purpose that is
hidden from you. Because of this, O’Connor consistently withholds judgment. The
writer’s role, she said, is not to understand experience, but to understand
‘that he doesn’t understand it’. In this sense her writing is an expression of
grace at work.
It is also
possible, as the critic Josephine Hendin argues, to view O’Connor’s gallery of
characters as ‘projections of their author’s complex, conflicted self-image’.
Systemic lupus erythematosus causes the immune system to attack healthy tissues
throughout the body and O’Connor was gradually and cruelly transformed into one
of her own grotesques. The effects of the disease included hair loss, joint
pain, sores and lesions to her face, arms, neck and back, as well as chronic
fatigue. Initially misdiagnosed, the eventual treatment – ACTH, or
adrenocorticotropic hormone – only intensified her disfigurement, resulting in
fibroid tumours, bone deterioration, muscle atrophy and a swelling of the fatty
tissues. In one letter to a friend, she was characteristically scathing,
describing herself as ‘practically bald-headed on top’ with a ‘watermelon
face’. She died in 1964, aged 39.
I even
misspell intellectual . By Rupert Thomson.
April 2,
2020.
Review
of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and
Caroline Gordon. edited by Christine Flanagan.
Georgia, October 2018
At a little
more than fifty pages, “The Displaced Person” is one of Flannery O’Connor’s
least anthologized stories—and if you share her beliefs about what she called
“topical” stories, it’s also one of the most problematic. O’Connor was wary of
stories that focused squarely and perhaps sentimentally on social issues. Her
own “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” featuring a bigoted white woman
riding a newly integrated bus, was, she feared, just such a story—though in a
letter to a friend she confided that she “got away with it … because I say a
plague on everybody’s house as far as the race business goes.”
In the very
same letter, O’Connor writes that “the topical is poison,” lambasting Eudora
Welty’s famous story “Where Is the Voice Coming From,” written from the point
of view of the man who assassinated the civil rights leader Medgar Evers. “It’s
the kind of story that the more you think about it the less satisfactory it
gets,” O’Connor wrote. “What I hate most is its being in the New Yorker and all
of the stupid Yankee liberals smacking their lips over typical life in the dear
old dirty Southland.”
Like many
in the South, O’Connor abhorred racism but was slow to embrace integration,
feeling that to rush things would lead to more violence. This stance may have
been part and parcel of her attitude toward topical writing. To be topical, she
thought, was to risk arguing for social changes that couldn’t be brought about
by mere idealism, but by the hard, messy, and sometimes violent work of
transforming hearts.
And yet
“The Displaced Person” is undeniably topical, right down to its title—and its
topic makes it peculiarly resonant at present, when governors are vowing to
refuse Syrian refugees and Donald Trump has outlined an arrantly bigoted plan
to bar all Muslims from entering the U.S.
O’Connor
takes her title from the Displaced Persons Act, which, between 1948 and 1952,
permitted the immigration of some four hundred thousand European refugees into
the United States. President Truman signed the bill with “very great
reluctance” for what he saw as its discriminatory policy toward Jews and
Catholics: the Act stipulated that, in order to be eligible, one must have
entered Germany, Italy, or Austria before December 22, 1945, which, according
to Truman, ruled out 90 percent of the remaining Jewish people displaced by the
war. Similarly excluded were the many Catholics who’d fled their largely
Communist countries after the December 22 deadline.
“The bad
points of the bill are numerous,” Truman wrote. “Together they form a pattern
of discrimination and intolerance wholly inconsistent with the American sense
of justice.” He called the decision to enforce the December 1945 deadline
“inexplicable, except upon the abhorrent ground of intolerance.”
Despite the
bill’s restrictions and limits, the public was deeply concerned, as some
Americans are now, with the possibility that “subversives” might infiltrate the
country under the Act—and that the huge influx of refugees would take jobs from
American workers.
According
to Brad Gooch’s biography Flannery, the Matysiaks, a Polish family of four who
would become the basis for O’Connor’s story, arrived in rural Georgia in 1951,
having been eligible for immigration under the Act. They settled in the tiny
town of Gray, Georgia, and they met Regina O’Connor, Flannery’s mother, at
Sacred Heart Church in Milledgeville, the only Catholic Church for miles. By
the fall of 1953 they’d moved into a three-room shack at Andalusia, the
O’Connor homestead. Their new home had a stove, but no indoor plumbing, and its
curtains were made from feed sacks—not much different from the houses James
Agee and Walker Evans had documented nearly twenty years earlier in Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men.
The
Matysiaks were not a complete anomaly. The pastor of Sacred Heart, Father John
Toomey, had worked through the Catholic Resettlement Commission, an
international organization created by Pope Pius XII, to help other refugee
families settle in the area. But O’Connor, who didn’t like to travel much
because of her lupus, drew her inspiration from those who were closest to
her—and so the Matysiaks, having settled almost literally in her backyard,
captured her imagination.
The first
image in “The Displaced Person” is news-reel footage of “a small room piled
high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap, their arms and legs
tangled together, a head thrust in here, a head there, a foot, a knee, a part
that should have been covered up sticking out, a hand raised clutching
nothing”: victims, the reader should intuit, of the Holocaust. The image is
stunning, and the story’s protagonist, Mrs. Shortley, reacts to it with a deep
fear, setting the tone for the rest of the story. Whatever evil had caused the
death of all those people, she thinks, has infected these refugees, and is now
in danger of infecting America:
Watching
from her vantage point, Mrs. Shortley had the sudden intuition that the
Gobblehooks, like rats with typhoid fleas, could have carried all those
murderous ways over the water with them directly to this place. If they had
come from where that kind of thing was done to them, who was to say they were
not the kind that would also do it to others? The width and breadth of this
question nearly shook her. Her stomach trembled as if there had been a slight quake
in the heart of the mountain and automatically she moved down from her
elevation and went forward to be introduced to them, as if she meant to find
out at once what they were capable of.
The word
Holocaust is never used in the story—nor are Jew and Hitler. In the absence of
specificity, the mass murder feels somehow even more mysterious, senseless, and
unspeakable. But it also puts the reader more firmly in Mrs. Shortley’s
perspective: completely lacking any context that would move her to see this heap
of bodies as victims, as human, as people like her.
Mrs.
Shortley’s husband is the caretaker and general handyman on a farm owned by the
widow Mrs. McIntyre. The Shortleys oversee Astor and Sulk, two black men who
have been hired hands for some time. Mrs. Shortley treats them like wayward
children—in her eyes, they should be handled in a way that’s consistent with
“their limitations.”
But trouble
begins when Mrs. Shortley dies of a stroke and a refugee named Mr. Guizac,
known throughout the story as only the Displaced Person, threatens to upset the
social order. With Mr. Shortley gone attending to the funeral arrangements,
Mrs. McIntyre hires the Displaced Person to assume authority over Astor and
Sulk; they complain bitterly that he’s working them too hard. The rest of the
story focuses on Mrs. McIntyre and her struggle to get rid of the Guizacs. “I
will not have my niggers upset,” Mrs. McIntyre says, confronting the Displaced
Person. “I cannot run this place without my niggers. I can run it without you.”
The story
is full of such barbs, suggesting that the perceived racial pecking order
ultimately overrules any notions of Christian charity. “I am not responsible
for the world’s misery,” Mrs. McIntyre thinks to herself as she scolds Guizac.
“The
Displaced Person” brims with overt criticism of Christian racists—but there
seems to have been an even deeper personal and spiritual need for O’Connor to
write about the Matysiaks. In December 1953, just a few months after the
displaced family arrived, O’Connor received a Christmas gift from Catholic
Worker magazine, the publication arm of the movement founded by the Catholic
activist Dorothy Day. The gift was a prayer card printed with “A Prayer to
Saint Raphael”:
O Raphael,
lead us towards those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us!
Raphael, Angel of Happy Meetings, lead us by the hand towards those we are
looking for!
. . .
Lonely and tired, crushed by the separations and sorrows of earth, we feel the
need of calling to you and of pleading for the protection of your wings, so
that we may not be as strangers in the Province of Joy, all ignorant of the
concerns of our country.
According
to Gooch’s biography, the prayer became a favorite of O’Connor’s, eventually
working its way so deep into her imagination that it inspired some of the
rhetoric and imagery in the final section of “The Displaced Person.” Mr.
Shortley, feeling that his job might be at risk, begins complaining to Mrs.
McIntyre, asking her why the Displaced Person should be afforded better
treatment than someone who had “fought and bled and died in the service of his
native land.”
O’Connor is
so often remembered as a misanthropic homebody—but she was comforted by the
idea of a God that gave preferential treatment to the most vulnerable among us.
The very concept of displacement—to be without a community to care for
you—rises to the surface in this story, and, as in much of O’Connor’s work,
ostensibly Christian characters lose the courage of their convictions.
When a
priest tries to calm Mrs. McIntyre down, to help her see the lack of charity in
her thinking, he evokes a version of John 3:16: “When God sent his Only
Begotten Son … ” McIntyre interrupts with words that shake the foundations of
the story:
“Father
Flynn!” she said in a voice that made him jump.
“I want to
talk to you about something serious!”
The skin
under the old man’s right eye flinched.
“As far as
I’m concerned,” she said and glared fiercely, “Christ was just another D.P.”
Reading
O’Connor’s work with broader notions of displacement in mind, you begin to see
it in nearly every story, and even in her personal life. The traveling Bible
salesman in “A Good Country People,” the one-armed con man in “The Life You
Save May Be Your Own,” the senile and disoriented Civil War vet in “A Late
Encounter with the Enemy”—and especially the misfit and grandmother from
O’Connor’s most famous story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the former an
escaped convict who cannot recollect “all he done to deserve the punishment he
got” and the latter a “good Christian woman” who reflects sentimentally on the
old order of the South, an order that is now, in one of O’Connor’s most
hilarious jokes, “Gone with the Wind.”
René Girard
All of
these characters are displaced, if not literally, then figuratively. They’re
either morally rudderless, existentially lost, or both; they cannot accept that
the world has changed and passed them by. These displaced persons are dark
agents of change. Their pitifulness causes them, and the reader, to confront
the radical command to love our neighbor as ourselves, to be like the Good
Samaritan who sets aside deeply engrained bigotry to minister to the needy.
But the
Guizacs’ displacement is different. Mr. Guizac and his family are unique in
O’Connor’s fiction in that they are the only Catholics, and they’re the most
blameless of any of O’Connor’s displaced characters. They are in need of refuge
and willing to work hard to earn their keep. The judgment they confront is the
result of what the theologian Kelly Johnson calls “the fear of beggars,” a
distrust and anger that stems from all that the indigent make us contemplate in
ourselves: our deficiencies, our brokenness. These encounters end, at best, in
neglect, but they can also lead to violence.
As she grew
older, O’Connor became more and more displaced herself. While her friends and
contemporaries were winning grants and traveling abroad, she was marooned in Georgia.
Her only romantic relationship—at least the only one we know about—was with
Erik Langkjaer, a Norwegian traveling book salesman, likely the inspiration for
Manley Pointer in “Good Country People.” He visited her at Andalusia whenever
he was in the area, bringing with him news of the outside world. He had lived
in New York and had an aunt closely connected to Dorothy Day and the Catholic
Worker, which is how O’Connor came to subscribe to their magazine. In a letter
recounting one of her visits with Langkjaer, O’Connor writes, “The only
conclusion we came to about [ministering to the poor] was that Charity is not
understandable … Strange people turn up.”
Indeed,
Christian charity is a constant challenge. Its necessity arises not from any
soggy sense of guilt or social responsibility but from Jesus’s description of
the final judgment, found in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.
Only those who fed the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, clothed the naked,
welcomed the stranger, cared for the ill, and visited the imprisoned will be
gain eternal life. And yet an overwhelming number of Americans, if polls are
still to be believed, consider themselves Christian and believe America to be a
Christian nation, one where the nativity scene is as recognizable as the Stars
and Stripes: a tableau intended to remind even nonbelievers of the virtue of
giving shelter to the weary traveler.
Many of our
self-styled Christian leaders would do well to seek out “The Displaced Person,”
which, like O’Connor’s best work, carries a dark moral force without recourse
to didacticism or sentimentality. In its dogged focus on the obligation of
Christians to help the oppressed, the story shrugs off its topical elements;
O’Connor dwells not on the abominations of the Third Reich but on the long
shadow cast by this kind of evil. In this way, Mrs. Shortley was, in a sense,
correct when she looked upon that pile of bodies in the news reel—violence is a
contagion, as the late René Girard theorized, begetting more violence, which
begets more violence, and on and on and on.
Dave
Griffith is the author of A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in
America. He lives in Northern Michigan, where he directs the creative-writing
program at Interlochen Center for the Arts.
The
Displaced Person : Reading Flannery
O’Connor in the age of Islamophobia. By David
Griffith. The Paris Review , December
10, 2015
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