In Rough Country

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In the primly didactic, earnestly school-girlish and forthright essays and letters posthumously published under the titles Mystery and Manners (1969) and Flannery O’Connor: Spiritual Writings (2003), O’Connor speaks at length and repeatedly of her identity as a writer—“I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic” (Spiritual Writings)—“The universe of the Catholic fiction writer is one that is founded on the theological truths of the Faith, but particularly on three of them which are basic—the Fall, the Redemption, and the Judgment. These are doctrines that the modern secular world does not believe in” (Spiritual Writings). O’Connor never suggests the slightest ambiguity concerning the supernatural underpinnings of her work—its calculatedly “incarnational” aspect (“The Nature and Aim of Fiction”) [Mystery and Manners]—and her role as a writer possessed of an “anagogical vision”—“the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or situation.” (Mystery and Manners). It isn’t surprising that O’Connor might casually identify herself as a “thirteenth-century” Roman Catholic or that she cherishes the didactic possibilities of her art:

  The medieval commentators on Scripture found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text: one they called allegorical, in which one fact pointed to another; one they called topical, or moral, which had to do with what should be done; and one they called anagogical, which had to do with the Divine life and our participation in it…I think it is this enlarged view of the human scene that the fiction writer has to cultivate if he is ever going to write stories that have any chance of becoming a permanent part of our literature.

  “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”

  Writing fiction empowered by such a vision has no analogue within the secular universe—only the mystically committed writer could imagine that her writerly efforts might aid in her very salvation.

  For instance, O’Connor offered this modest assessment of the elliptically autobiographical The Violent Bear It Away: “The book is a very minor hymn to the Eucharist.” [The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald]. Yet more modestly, O’Connor seems to have thought of her writing as “an adjunct to her Roman Catholic faith” [Flannery O’Connor, A Life by Jean W. Cash], and spoke often in letters of the inspiration she drew from reading specifically Catholic writers (Lord Acton, John Henry Newman, Philip Hughes, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the “lofty lucent prose of Thomas Aquinas”); “I read theology,” O’Connor boasted, “because it makes my writing bolder.” By temperament and training puritanical, if not virulently anti-sexual, O’Connor was drawn to the writings of the eminent French Catholic novelist François Mauriac whose books addressed “the irreconcilability of sexual passion with the world of pure spirit” in her mid-twenties, as a graduate writing student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, O’Connor was so timid about sexual matters that she worried that an obscure “seduction” passage in one of her Workshop stories was “liable to corrupt anybody that read it and me too.” (O’Connor’s solution was to seek advice from an Iowa City priest who told her, commendably, that she “didn’t need to write for fifteen-year-old girls”—though there is no evidence in O’Connor’s fiction that she ever did write about anything remotely sexual, let alone salacious or obscene. The closest is the implied pederast rape scene at the end of The Violent Bear It Away.) Religious belief seems to be irrevocably fused, in O’Connor’s imagination, with extreme sexual repression characteristic of the 1950s—like one of her fanatic adolescent preachers O’Connor was given to denouncing the “fornication” of New York City without having any firsthand experience of the city and to have impressed Elizabeth Hardwick, in 1949, when they’d met at Yaddo, as “like some quiet, puritanical convent girl from the harsh provinces of Canada…A plain sort of young, unmarried girl, a little bit sickly. And she had a very small-town Southern accent…whiney. She whined. She was amusing.” Gooch includes a somewhat caddish account by a Harcourt, Brace textbook salesman named Erik Langkjaer who in 1954 forged a romantic sort of friendship with O’Connor which seems to have involved mostly long, intimate drives into the Georgia countryside.

  “I may not have been in love,” [Langkjaer recounts in an interview] “but I was very much aware that she was a woman, and so I felt that I’d like to kiss her…She may have been surprised that I suggested the kiss, but she was certainly prepared to accept it.”

  Yet, for [Langkjaer], the kiss felt odd. Remarkably inexperienced for a woman of her age [near-thirty], Flannery’s passivity alarmed him. “As our lips touched I had a feeling that her mouth lacked resilience, as if she had no real muscle tension in her mouth, a result being that my own lips touched her teeth rather than lips, and this gave me an unhappy feeling of a sort of memento mori, and so the kissing stopped.”

  (As O’Connor’s earlier infatuation with the young, attractive, charismatic poet Robert Lowell, whom she’d encountered in a manic state at the Yaddo writers’ colony, in 1948, remained unrequited, so O’Connor’s relationship with Langkjaer must have been terribly disappointing to her, if not devastating, when, not long after this clumsy encounter, Langkjaer fell in love with a Danish woman whom he eventually married.) O’Connor’s reaction to Langkjaer’s abrupt departure from her life—the writer’s inspired revenge on her erstwhile “material”—can be gauged by the brilliantly acidulous short story “Good Country People,” clearly modeled after O’Connor’s thwarted romance, in which a crudely manipulative Bible salesman kisses the one-legged philosophy Ph.D. Joy/Hulga prior to running off with her wooden leg:

  he put his hand on her back again and drew her against him without a word and kissed her heavily.

  The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain. Even before he released her, her mind, clear and detached and ironic anyway, was regarding him from a great distance, with amusement but with pity. She had never been kissed before but she was pleased to discover that it was an unexceptional experience and all a matter of the mind’s control.

  As Nietzsche tersely observed: “A joke is an epitaph on the death of a feeling.” So sorrow in love might be transformed, through the corrosive alchemy of art, into something that, if a sour sort of compensation, can lay claim at least to a kind of quasi-permanence.

  More touching than O’Connor’s relationship with Langkjaer, and far more crucial to her emotional life, was O’Connor’s close friendship of many years with an ardent admirer of her fiction named Betty Hester who’d been “dishonorably discharged” from the military for something called “sexual indiscretion” Gooch is gentlemanly and tactful in suggesting that O’Connor herself may have been attracted to Hester, as to another intimate friend of this period, the “irrepressible” Maryat Lee, in ways other than merely Platonic. To the Atlanta novelist and critic Greg Johnson, to whom Betty Hester wrote more than forty years after O’Connor’s death, Hester said, “As you must sense, I did love her very, very much—and, God knows, do.” Yet with what prissy didacticism O’Connor declares herself homophobic: “As for lesbianism I regard that as any other form of uncleanness. Purity is the twentieth-century’s dirty word but it is the most mysterious of the virtues.”

  In this engaging, sympathetic and yet intellectually scrupulous biography of O’Connor—something of a virtuoso performance, for a biographer whose previous sympathetic subject was the extravagantly and unapologetically “impure” Frank O’Hara4—Brad Gooch provides the ideal biographical commentary: his voice is never obtrusive, yet we feel his judgment throughout; his allegiance to his subject is never in doubt, yet we sense his critical detachment, especially in his tracing of the ways in which “Flannery”—as Gooch calls O’Connor—seems to have mapped out a strategy of survival for herself. The most poignant sections of Flannery are the later chapters when, trapped in her mother’s house in the back-country Georgia she’d once hoped to flee, forced to remain a chi
ld as a consequence of her crippling illness, O’Connor bravely strove to redeem her situation through her art and through every outward gesture of her intractable faith—including even a visit to Lourdes in 1958. (Though no one visits Lourdes without the implicit hope of experiencing a miracle, O’Connor cast herself as something of an “accidental pilgrim” who joked that she was “one of those people who could die for his religion sooner than take a bath for it”—meaning an immersion in “holy water.”) Even as her lupus steadily worsened, O’Connor remained an unfailingly devout Catholic waking each morning, early, “as soon as the first chicken cackles,” with a ritual reading of prayers from a breviary before being driven into Milledgeville by Regina to attend 7:15 A.M. mass at Sacred Heart Church; her writing life was compressed into just a few hours, but these hours were precious to her, under the protection of her mother. On her very deathbed O’Connor was determined to work—“My my I do like to work…I et up that one hour like it was filet mignon.” O’Connor’s childlike dependence upon her formidable mother—the model, as Gooch suggests, for a striking number of older, garrulous, smugly self-centered and self-righteous Southern women in O’Connor’s fiction5—was paralleled by her childlike dependence upon religious ritual and custom, an unswerving faith in the literal—i.e., not merely “symbolic”—Eucharist, believed by Catholics to be the actual blood and body of their savior Jesus Christ. To believe in such seeming illogic is the test of a Catholic’s faith, characterized by O’Connor as submission to the mystery at the core of our spiritual beings:

  If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it to the experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery. [“Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”]

  Only in the final years of her life did O’Connor come to feel dissatisfaction with her “large and startling figures” as a mode of artistic expression, as Gooch poignantly draws a parallel between the physical exhaustion of her worsening lupus and her sense of the limitations of her art. In a letter to a Catholic nun O’Connor asks for the woman’s prayers:

  I’ve been writing eighteen years and I’ve reached the point where I can’t do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things that I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing.

  Rarely did O’Connor complain, still less protest her fate: “I expect anything that happens.” If she claims, with what sounds like commingled wonder and rage, “I have never been anywhere but sick,” quickly she modifies her statement by adding, aphoristically: “In a sense sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow…Success is almost as isolating and nothing points out vanity as well.” Like many invalids with a predilection for the “spiritual”—the “mystical”—O’Connor seems to have made a connection, as Gooch suggests a kind of “magical thinking,” between her lupus and her writing:

  I was five years writing (Wise Blood) and up to the last was sure it was a failure and didn’t work. When it was almost finished I came down with (lupus) and began to take cortisone in large doses and cortisone makes you think night and day until I suppose the mind dies of exhaustion if you are not rescued…The large doses of ACTH send you off in a rocket and are scarcely less disagreeable than the disease.

  Writing of the fanatic preacher Hazel Motes, under the spell of her medication, O’Connor conceived the notion that

  I would eventually become paralyzed and was going blind and…in the book I had spelled out my own course, or that in the illness I had spelled out the book.

  In the fall of such physical dissolution, how comforting the promises of the Holy Roman Catholic Church—

  As I understand it, the Church teaches that our resurrected bodies will be intact as to personality, that is, intact with all the contradictions beautiful to you, except the contradiction of sin…for when all you see will be God, all you want will be God. [O’Connor, letter, December 16, 1955]

  O’Connor managed a brave public persona, when addressing mostly Southern college audiences by way of “talks” about fiction writing, interviews and essays; it was her habit to assume a defensive pride in what others might define as limitations—“I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing that Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary and guilty”—as in her unapologetic allegiance to her place of birth and her parochial upbringing: “I’m pleased to be a member of my particular family and to live in Baldwin County, Georgia, in the sovereign state of Georgia, and to see what I can see from here” (see Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, edited by Rosemary M. Magee). (As Brad Gooch notes, at this time in the early 1950s Georgia was ranked highest in the nation “in the rate of lynchings and other murders.”) Asked if she would like to meet James Baldwin whose first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), had been published at about the time of Wise Blood, O’Connor replied coolly and very carefully: “No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia. It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion…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.” As O’Connor’s grasp of communism was naively reductive—“On one side we see communism…against God, against Christ, against the Bible”—so O’Connor’s grasp of the civil rights movement was startlingly crude and cruel in its Olympian disdain: “I say a plague on everybody’s house as far as the race business goes.” Yet several of O’Connor’s later stories—“The Displaced Person,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and “The Enduring Chill”—contain striking portraits of black, i.e. “Negro,” characters presented with as much, or more, sympathy than their white neighbors, and in the fragment “Why Do the Heathen Rage?” a black servant named Roosevelt is the only individual who responds sensitively, with tears, to the spectacle of his employer crippled by a stroke. Like William Faulkner—who famously said that, if need be, in the threat of integration imposed by the federal government in the 1950s, he would take up arms and fight on the side of his (white, racist) Mississippi neighbors—O’Connor seems to have been something of a “cultural racist” in her private life but in her “incarnational” art, a writer who transcended the limitations of her time, her place, and her being.

  Is the art of caricature a lesser or secondary art, set beside what we might call the art of complexity or subtlety? Is “cartoon” art invariably inferior to “realist” art? The caricaturist has the advantage of being cruel, crude, reductive, and often very funny; as the “realist” struggles to establish the trompe l’oeil of verisimilitude, without which the art of realism has little power to persuade, the caricaturist wields a hammer, or an ax, or sprays the target with machine-gun fire, transmuting what might be rage—the savage indignation of Jonathan Swift, for instance—into devastating humor. The most elevated psychological realism—the excessively mannered novels of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce—takes as its natural subject the humanness of its characters; the caricaturist has no interest in humanness except to mock it, and to make us laugh. Satire is the weapon of rectitude, a way of meting out punishment. Satire regrets nothing, and revels in unfairness in its depiction of what Flannery O’Connor called “large and startling figures.”

  Though O’Connor usually masked her disapproval of a wide range of threatening twentieth-century–isms—secularism, atheism, liberalism, Marxism—in comic tones, it’s clear from the vehemence with which she frequently spoke in her letters as from the ways in which her fiction punishes her hapless characters that Christianity wasn’t, for O’Connor, primarily a religion of charitable feelings, forgiveness, and “love” but rather a phenomenon requiring the disciplined interpretations of the Roman Catholic Church: “The Church is the only thing
that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and on this we are fed.” It isn’t surprising to learn that O’Connor began her career as a creative artist by drawing cartoons in mockery of human fatuousness and frailty nor that her earliest efforts were satirical pieces; her first “book,” written at the age of ten and assembled by her proud father Edward, was titled “My Relitives.” O’Connor observed with typical acerbic insight: “I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”