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-story 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 Georgia State sweater with a bulldog on the front, ‘to create an unfavorable 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.
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 favor 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. . . 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 practicing 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’.
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 recognized 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 humor 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 neighbor, 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.’
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?
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 tumors, 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.
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