Flannery O’Connor: My Sullen and Narrow-Eyed Resentment Begins
A collection of Flannery O’Connor’s stories sat on my brother’s bookshelf in the ’70s, but I don’t recall looking into it. Already then I nursed a sullen and narrow-eyed resentment of any writer remotely near me in age, sex, or language who had achieved any renown at all. Living or dead didn’t matter. It stood to reason she probably wasn’t that good. If I read one of her stories in college, I forgot it.
Resentment continues — why do we adore her?
However, if one is aware of the Catholic “New Evangelization” these days, it seems one must know and practically fall down in adoration before Flannery O’Connor. Why? Could it be, the cynic and the jealous child in me asks, because she’s (paradoxically) safe? Yes, her stories are full of rough, unpleasant characters. But she also ticks some safe, saintly boxes for 21st-century America. She died tragically young. Being mid-20th-century Southern, her stories are full of the still-safest social-justice issue of all: race, race, race.
Giving her a chance
I borrowed a copy of Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories from the library, determined to read after all and not be such a child. I read “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead,” “The Geranium,” “Good Country People,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
Irruptions of “grace”? No.
It would never have occurred to me that her stories’ theme is the irruption of the supernatural, of “grace,” into people’s lives, if I had not read that assessment somewhere else. My first idea was that she doesn’t so much write stories as strings of scenes, finished with an unintroduced character’s unrelated comment, which seems profound because the reader knows a fuller story. My second idea was that she doesn’t like Southerners and is trying to show how awful they are—like Old Dudley in “The Geranium,” all set to make friends with his city daughter’s Black neighbor and go fishing with him, until he finds out the man really is a neighbor, an equal, and not a household servant.
Cartoons of amoral bitterness, floating in a nightmare space
After a few more stories I thought, she just likes carnival freaks and likes putting them through carnival freak-show paces. They are hardly even people, more like cartoons of amoral bitterness floating in a nightmare space. I did tease out that the one-legged Joy/Hulda of “Good Country People,” for all her Ph.D. and atheism, could not recognize real evil when she met it in the guise of the Bible-peddling boy who stole her wooden leg. Not being very talented at thinking up stories myself, I question: did Flannery O’Connor invent that plot, or did she chronicle something she saw or heard, which startled because people are what they are universally?
I find a favorite
My favorite of the book has been “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” Its main character is an acid, arrogant girl of twelve simply called “the child.” I can relate. Her mother, though barely seen, is for once a normal, humane woman. The story teaches us things, which I like. For instance, because the plot involves the mother hosting two convent schoolgirls for a weekend, we have reason to see the Latin of Tantum Ergo spelled out as they sing it, in contradistinction to the neighbor boys’ weak and pathetic “I’ve Got a Friend in Jesus.” The child goes to adoration and begs, “Hep me not to be so mean … hep me not to give her so much sass.”
Hep me not to be so mean
So it took six stories out of a collection of thirty-one before I found one that seems to show Flannery O’Connor addressing Catholic matter in her fiction. That seems to explain her cause for contemporary New-Evangelization sainthood.
I wonder if part of her success flowed down to her, already tragic and young and safe, from the elite literary world’s reflexive appetite for South-bashing. Incredible that her stories were published in Mademoiselle. Are there no other Southern Catholic writers? Walker Percy, of course. He adored her too.
And the clever young miss got her start by shrewdly going to the famed University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the ’40s. Well, God bless her. Do they take sixty-year-olds now?
Nancy Wilschke is a lifelong writer and revert to the Catholic faith, whose journey spans early literary ambitions, family life, and a profound spiritual rediscovery. Her book Walking With Mary, Praying for the Unborn offers both a cultural witness and a prayerful act of reparation in defense of life.
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