S1: Welcome to the habit podcast conversations with writers about writing.
S1: I'm Jonathan Rogers, your host. Flannery O'Connor's 100th birthday would
S1: have been this week. She was born on March 25th, 1925,
S1: in Savannah, Georgia. In the firmament of 20th century American letters.
S1: Her star was one of the brightest, and it burned
S1: all too briefly. She died at the age of 39
S1: of lupus, a disease that had caused her pain and
S1: debility since the age of 25. O'Connor's short stories and
S1: novels are often shocking in their violence and horror, though
S1: they are also as hilarious as they are horrible. She
S1: once wrote, in general, the devil can always be a
S1: subject for my kind of comedy, one way or another.
S1: I suppose this is because he is always accomplishing ends
S1: other than his own. Perhaps the most shocking thing about
S1: O'Connor's fiction is the fact that it is shaped by
S1: a thoroughly Christian vision. If the world she depicts is
S1: dark and terrifying. It is also the place where grace
S1: makes itself known. My subject in fiction is the action
S1: of grace and territory largely held by the devil, she wrote.
S1: O'Connor's broken world. Our world is the stage whereon the
S1: Divine Comedy plays out. The following essay is adapted from
S1: the introduction to my 2012 book, The Terrible Speed of
S1: Mercy A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor, with a few additions.
S1: Flannery O'Connor was 27 years old when her debut novel,
S1: Wise Blood, was published. She was small, of frame and
S1: sweet faced, in spite of the fact that she had
S1: already lived for two years with the lupus that would
S1: kill her before her 40th birthday. She was mostly quiet
S1: in public, but when she did speak, she spoke in
S1: the lilting tones of Georgia's Piedmont. She did not, in short,
S1: come across as a force to be reckoned with. While
S1: visiting friends in Nashville, O'Connor encountered a man who put
S1: into words what many of the people who met her
S1: must have been thinking about. The young author of Wise Blood.
S1: That was a profound book, he said. You don't look
S1: like you wrote it. O'Connor described the whole scene in
S1: a letter to Elizabeth and Robert Lowell. She said, I
S1: mustered up my squinty assed expression and snarled, well, I did.
S1: Flannery O'Connor, who lived a comfortable, conventional, pious, middle class
S1: existence on a dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, wrote stories
S1: that were like literary thunderstorms, turning on sudden violence and
S1: flashes of revelation that crashed down from the heavens, destroying
S1: even as they illuminate. Nothing about O'Connor's outward demeanor would
S1: suggest that such storms surged within her. Hers was a
S1: quiet life, not free from trouble by any means. She
S1: was sick, but her life was regular and stable, except
S1: for four and a half years in her 20s, years
S1: spent training as a writer in Iowa, New York and Connecticut.
S1: She spent her whole life in Georgia under her mother's roof.
S1: Her mother could be domineering, but she was solicitous of
S1: Flannery's health and well-being, and she always gave her daughter
S1: the space to do her work, even if she didn't
S1: always understand or appreciate the work her daughter was doing.
S1: Flannery O'Connor and her mother lived a most regulated, most
S1: devout life on the farm they called Andalusia, just outside Milledgeville, Georgia. There,
S1: every morning, including Sundays, she spent four hours writing stories
S1: about street preachers, prostitutes, juvenile delinquents, hardscrabble farmers, sideshow freaks,
S1: murderers and charlatans, while her mother tended to the business
S1: of the house and farm. Then, at noon, the O'Connor
S1: women drove back into town, where they had lunch at
S1: the Sanford House Tea Room among the hatted and white
S1: gloved ladies of Milledgeville's patrician class. According to biographer Brad Gooch,
S1: Flannery was especially fond of the Sanford House's fried shrimp
S1: and peppermint chiffon pie. No, Flannery O'Connor did not look
S1: like she could have written Wiseblood or the violent beard away,
S1: or a good man is hard to find. Nothing about
S1: her life story seems to account for the particular genius
S1: the seedy, violent, even trashy genius that defines her fiction.
S1: She wrote of the great mysteries she wrote in The
S1: Great Mysteries, she was a mystery herself. In The Life
S1: You Save May be Your own. Mr. Shiftlet speaks to
S1: the mysteries of the human heart in his first meeting
S1: with Lucy Crater. Lady, he said, and turned and gave
S1: her his full attention. Let me tell you something. There's
S1: one of them doctors in Atlanta that's taken a knife
S1: and cut the human heart. The human heart? He repeated,
S1: leaning forward out of a man's chest, and held it
S1: in his hand, and he held his hand out, palm up,
S1: as if it were slightly weighted with the human heart,
S1: and studied it like it was a day old chicken.
S1: And lady, he said, allowing a long, significant pause in
S1: which his head slid forward and his clay colored eyes brightened.
S1: He don't know no more about it than you or me. Why?
S1: If he was to take that knife and cut into
S1: every corner of it. He still wouldn't know no more
S1: about it than you or me. No amount of poking
S1: around in the external events and facts of Flannery O'Connor's
S1: life could get at the heart of her. There's no
S1: accounting for Flannery O'Connor or her heart in those terms.
S1: The outward constraints that O'Connor accepted and ultimately cultivated made
S1: room for an interior world as spacious and various as
S1: the heavens themselves. Whole worlds orbited and collided in there.
S1: Her natural curiosity was harnessed and directed by an astonishing
S1: intellectual and spiritual rigor. She read voraciously, from the ancients
S1: to contemporary Catholic theologians to periodicals to novels. Everybody who
S1: has read Wiseblood thinks I'm a hillbilly nihilist, she wrote
S1: in a letter to a friend. In fact, she wrote,
S1: she was a hillbilly Thomist. The raw material of her
S1: fiction was the lowest common denominator of American culture. But
S1: the sensibility that shaped the hillbilly raw material into art
S1: shared more in common with Thomas Aquinas and the other
S1: great minds of the Catholic tradition than with any practitioner
S1: of American letters, high or low. There was nobody doing
S1: what she was doing when she was working on Wiseblood,
S1: she got sideways with an editor named John Selby at Rinehart,
S1: the publisher that originally planned to publish the book. Selby
S1: didn't understand what she was doing with Wiseblood, and recommended
S1: that she make huge changes to make it more palatable
S1: to readers. In response to Selby's suggestions, O'Connor wrote this
S1: I can tell you that I would not like at
S1: all to work with you, as do other writers on
S1: your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may
S1: have are very much connected with the limitations you mention.
S1: I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think
S1: that the quality of the novel I write will derive
S1: precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of
S1: the experience I write from. In short, I am amenable
S1: to criticism, but only within the sphere of what I
S1: am trying to do. I will not be persuaded to
S1: do otherwise. There are two things that I want to
S1: point out about this remarkable communication. First, Flannery O'Connor was
S1: 23 years old and unpublished when she wrote this to
S1: the editor, who would seem to have the power of
S1: life and death over Wiseblood. Even at that point, she
S1: was so committed to her peculiar vision that she wouldn't
S1: be swayed. Second, I want to draw your attention to
S1: that phrase, the peculiarity or aloneness of the experience I
S1: write from. When she wrote that she wasn't raising peacocks
S1: on a dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, she wrote from
S1: the storied Yaddo artist colony, where she was working alongside
S1: such literary lights as Robert Lowell and Malcolm Cowley. She
S1: was fresh off three years at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then,
S1: as now, one of the most respected MFA programs in
S1: the country. On the strength of her performance at Iowa,
S1: certain tastemakers in the literary establishment were already welcoming her
S1: and recognizing her as one of the great talents. When
S1: she wrote of her aloneness, she was writing from a
S1: place very near the epicenter of American letters. From very
S1: early in her career, she jealously guarded her aloneness. Her
S1: peculiarity for her peculiarity was the peculiarity of a prophet.
S1: Her voice was the voice of one crying in the wilderness.
S1: Perhaps the surest measure of O'Connor's sense of calling was
S1: her willingness to be misunderstood. She didn't expect her literary
S1: audience to understand what she was up to. She wrote,
S1: many of my ardent admirers will be roundly shocked and
S1: disturbed if they realize that everything I believe is thoroughly moral,
S1: thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give
S1: my work its chief characteristics. Nor was she especially bothered
S1: when her co-religionists misunderstood her, which was just as well
S1: for almost all of the Christians who knew her work
S1: misunderstood it. A real ugly letter from a woman in
S1: Boston was typical. She said she was a Catholic, and
S1: so she couldn't understand how anybody could even have such thoughts.
S1: O'Connor made it clear in her letters and essays, however,
S1: that she wrote such shocking fiction not in spite of
S1: her Christian faith, but because of it, she wrote. It
S1: is when the individual's faith is weak, not when it
S1: is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest,
S1: fictional representation of life. Flannery O'Connor wrote what she saw,
S1: and she saw a world that was broken beyond self-help
S1: or instant uplift, but a world also in which transcendence
S1: was forever threatening to break through. Welcome or not. Therefore,
S1: O'Connor set herself against not only the religious skeptic, but
S1: also the religious believer who thinks that the eyes of
S1: the church, or of the Bible, or of his particular
S1: theology have already done the seeing for him. O'Connor's challenge.
S1: Her calling was to offer up the truths of the
S1: faith to a world that, to her way of thinking,
S1: had mostly lost its ability to see and hear such truths.
S1: She wrote, when you can assume that your audience holds
S1: the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little
S1: and use more normal means of talking to it. When
S1: you have to assume that it does not, then you
S1: have to make your vision apparent by shock to the
S1: hard of hearing you shout. And for the almost blind,
S1: you draw large and startling figures to smugness and self-reliance
S1: and self-satisfaction in all its forms, from pseudo intellectualism to phariseeism,
S1: to fundamentalism, to the false gospel of postwar optimism with
S1: its positive thinking gurus and its can do advice columnists
S1: and its faith in modern science. Oconnors fiction shouts, thus
S1: saith the Lord! The violence, the sudden death, the ugliness
S1: in O'Connor's fiction are large figures drawn for the almost blind.
S1: If the stories offend conventional morality, it's because the gospel
S1: itself is an offense to conventional morality. Grace is a scandal.
S1: It always has been. Jesus put out the glad hand
S1: to lepers and cripples and prostitutes and losers of every stripe,
S1: even as he called the self-righteous. A brood of vipers
S1: in a good man is hard to find. O'Connor's most
S1: widely read story, it is painful to see a mostly
S1: harmless old grandmother come to terms with God and herself
S1: only at gunpoint. It is even more painful to see
S1: her get shot anyway. In a more properly moral story,
S1: she would be rewarded for her late breaking insight and
S1: her life would be spared. But the story only enacts
S1: what Christians say. They believe already that to lose one's
S1: body for the sake of one's soul is a good
S1: trait indeed. It's a mystery, and no small part of
S1: the mystery is the reader's visceral reaction to truths he
S1: or she claims to believe already. O'Connor invites us to
S1: step into such mysteries, but she never resolves them. She
S1: never reduces them to something manageable. O'Connor speaks with the
S1: ardor of an Old Testament prophet in her stories. She's
S1: like an Isaiah who never quite gets around to comfort ye,
S1: my people. Except for this, there is a kind of
S1: comfort in finally facing the truth about oneself. That's what
S1: happens in every one of Flannery O'Connor's stories. In a
S1: moment of extremity, a character, usually a self-satisfied, self-sufficient character,
S1: finally comes to see the truth of her situation. She
S1: is accountable to a great God who is the source
S1: of all. She inhabits mysteries that are too great for her,
S1: and for the first time there is hope, even if
S1: she doesn't understand it yet. In O'Connor's unique vision, the
S1: physical world, even at its seediest and ugliest, is a
S1: place where Grace still does its work. In fact, it
S1: is exactly the place where Grace does its work. Truth
S1: tells itself here, no matter how loud it has to shout.
S1: Brad Gooch has pointed out that the phrase like something
S1: out of Flannery O'Connor has entered the vernacular as a
S1: kind of shorthand to describe a funny, dark, askew moment.
S1: He might have added that the phrase is also used
S1: to describe a wide range of phenomena around the edges
S1: of American culture, from religious manias to violent crimes to
S1: family dysfunction and reality TV freakishness of every stripe. That phrase,
S1: like something out of Flannery O'Connor, is a wave of
S1: the hand and a wink that says, we already know
S1: what to think about this person, about this situation, don't we?
S1: We already know what to think about two seed in
S1: the spirit Predestinarian Baptists in trailer park criminals and Florida man.
S1: Just as we already know what to think about serial
S1: killers and backwater racists and ignorant Bible salesmen who stump
S1: from country to country town. Except that in O'Connor's fiction,
S1: it turns out that we don't know what to think
S1: about them after all. Her fanatics and freaks can never
S1: safely be ignored or dismissed, for they have. The unsettling
S1: habit of telling the truth in A Good Man is
S1: hard to find. The misfit understands things about Jesus that
S1: the grandmother never has. The freak show hermaphrodite in a
S1: temple of the Holy Ghost, has a grasp on theological
S1: truths that have eluded the good Catholics in the story.
S1: Wise bloods Hazel motes may or may not be crazy
S1: in the head, but his heart pumps a wise blood
S1: that finally brings him back to the ultimate truth that
S1: he tries so strenuously to escape. In common usage, like
S1: something out of Flannery O'Connor is a license not to
S1: take a person or situation very seriously. But O'Connor did
S1: take her grotesque characters seriously. They seem to carry an
S1: invisible burden, she wrote. Their fanaticism is a reproach, not
S1: merely an eccentricity. When we gawk at O'Connor's characters and
S1: mock them, it is easy to assume that O'Connor must
S1: be mocking them too. We should be open to the possibility, however,
S1: that O'Connor is mocking us. In the violent, buried Away,
S1: old Tarwater is a self-appointed prophet with a penchant for
S1: baptizing children without their parents or guardians approval. His nephew,
S1: the enlightened schoolteacher Raber, is convinced that the old man
S1: is insane. The reader is inclined to agree. O'Connor. Not
S1: so much. The modern reader will identify himself with the schoolteacher,
S1: she wrote, but it is the old man who speaks
S1: for me. In Flannery O'Connor's body of work, there are
S1: as many kinds of misfit and maimed soul as there
S1: are stories the street preacher, the prostitute, the moonshiner, the
S1: serial killer, the hermaphrodite, the idiot, the bumpkin, the false prophet,
S1: the reluctant prophet, the refugee, the amputee. The con man.
S1: The monomaniac. The juvenile delinquent. Perhaps the phrase like something
S1: out of Flannery O'Connor is so widely applicable because there
S1: is such a wide range of characters in her fiction.
S1: But there is one other character type that appears in
S1: O'Connor's short stories at least as often as The Freak.
S1: Most of her stories involve a figure who is convinced
S1: that he or she already knows what to think, whose
S1: certainty and self-righteousness have been a shield against the looming
S1: reality of sin and judgment and redemption. Joy Halga, the
S1: one legged philosopher in good country people. Julian, the social
S1: justice warrior. And everything that rises must converge. Asbury, the
S1: invalid and failed artist and the enduring chill throughout O'Connor's
S1: body of work. The complacent and self-reliant are confronted with
S1: a choice they can clutch at their own righteousness like
S1: a drowning man clutching at a cinder block. Or they
S1: can let it go, admit that they have been fools,
S1: and so enter into life. So the central figure in
S1: O'Connor's fiction, as it turns out, is neither the freak
S1: nor the fanatic, nor the felon, but the Pharisee. If
S1: we cannot see ourselves in the lunatics and deviants, surely
S1: we can see ourselves in the upright and the self-assured,
S1: who turn out to be so wrong about themselves and
S1: the people around them. Which is to say, we have
S1: all been one way or another, like something out of
S1: Flannery O'Connor. Where does vision like that come from? I
S1: wouldn't say it came from her physical suffering, but I
S1: will say that her physical suffering and its attendant limitations
S1: sharpened and disciplined her vision and her work. She wrote,
S1: I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense,
S1: sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip
S1: to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company,
S1: where nobody can follow. To the end of her short life.
S1: O'Connor was stewarding her energy so that she could devote
S1: what little she had to writing. Two weeks before she died,
S1: she sent a letter to pen pal Janet McKane in
S1: which she reproduced the prayer to Saint Raphael that she
S1: prayed every day. O Raphael, lead us toward those we
S1: are waiting for, those who are waiting for us. Raphael,
S1: angel of happy meeting. Lead us by the hand toward
S1: those that we are looking for. May all our movements
S1: be guided by your light and transfigured with your joy.
S1: Angel Guide of Tobias. Lay the request we now address
S1: to you at the feet of him on whose unveiled
S1: face you are privileged to gaze. Lonely and tired, crushed
S1: by the separations and sorrows of life. We feel the
S1: need of calling you, and of pleading for the protection
S1: of your wings, so that we may not be as
S1: strangers in the province of joy, all ignorant of the
S1: concerns of our country. Remember the weak, you who are strong,
S1: you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder. And
S1: a land that is always peaceful, always serene and bright,
S1: with the resplendent glory of God. It's an amazing thing
S1: to think about this woman who made a name for
S1: herself with stories of earthly terror and grotesquerie, meditating every
S1: day on the province of joy, preparing herself lest she
S1: be ignorant of the concerns of her true country. All
S1: that darkness was in the service of eternal brightness. All
S1: that violence was in the service of peace and serenity.
S1: And finally, at the age of 39, the writer whose
S1: every story was a thunderclap took her place beyond the
S1: region of thunder. There won't be any biographies written of me,
S1: O'Connor wrote, because for only one reason lives spent between
S1: the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
S1: Her life wasn't as uneventful as all that, but it
S1: was true that her life was mostly free of the
S1: drama and self-indulgence and entanglements that have made for more
S1: exciting copy in some of her peers biographies. There were
S1: no blow ups or meltdowns or crack ups or addictions
S1: in Flannery O'Connor's life. There was mostly a quiet attention
S1: to the work at hand, and a willingness to settle
S1: in and pay attention, to look, to listen until truth
S1: tells itself, no matter how loud it has to shout.
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