In Rough Country (8 page)

Most biographies trudge along the surface of a life, amassing and presenting facts, like rubble on a shovel, in which a very few precious gems might be visible; this pioneering biography of Bernard Malamud presents gem-like aphorisms like those quoted above, and insights and observations of the biographer's, on virtually every page. It is rare that a biographer succeeds in evoking, with a novelist's skill, such compassion for his (flawed, human) subject; yet more rare, that a biographer succeeds in so drawing the reader into the shimmering world he has constructed out of a small infinity of letters, drafts, notes, manuscripts, printed texts, interview transcripts, etc., that the barrier between reader and subject becomes near-transparent.

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor
by Brad Gooch

S
hort stories, for all the dazzling diversity of the genre, are of two general types: those that yield their meanings
subtly, quietly, nuanced and delicate and without melodrama as the unfolding of miniature blossoms in Japanese chrysanthemum tea, and those that explode like firecrackers in the reader's face. Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) came of age in a time when subtlety and “atmosphere” in short stories were fashionable—as in the finely wrought, understated stories of such classic predecessors as Anton Chekhov, Henry James, James Joyce and such American contemporaries as Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, and Jean Stafford—but O'Connor's plain-spoken, blunt, comic-cartoonish and flagrantly melodramatic short stories were anything but fashionable. The novelty of her “acidly comic tales with moral and religious messages”—in Brad Gooch's aptly chosen words—lay in its frontal assault upon the reader's sensibility: these were not refined
New Yorker
stories of the era in which nothing happens except inwardly, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent means. An escaped convict called The Misfit offhandedly slaughters a Southern family in back-country Georgia (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”)—a conniving old woman marries off her retarded daughter to a sinister one-armed tramp named Shiftlet, who immediately abandons the girl and drives off with the old woman's car (“The Life You Save May Be Your Own”)—an embittered young woman who has changed her name from Joy to Hulga, crippled by the loss of a leg (in a “hunting accident” when she was ten), is seduced by a hypocritical young Bible salesman who steals her wooden leg (“Good Country People”)—boy-arsonists set fire to a wooded property out of pure meanness, like latter-day prophets “dancing in a fiery fur
nace” (“A Circle in the Fire”)—a widowed property owner who imagines herself superior to her tenant-farmers is gored to death by their runaway bull (“Greenleaf”)—a mentally disturbed girl reading a textbook called
Human Development
in a doctor's waiting room suddenly throws the book at the head of a garrulous middle-class woman who imagines herself superior to “poor-white trash” (“Revelation”). In the novella-length
Wise Blood
(1952), O'Connor's first book publication, the fanatic Hazel Motes proclaims himself a prophet of the “Church without Christ” and does penance for his sins by gouging out an eye—in O'Connor's second, kindred novel
The Violent Bear It Away
(1960), the fanatic young Francis Marion Tarwater drowns an idiot cousin while baptizing him, is drugged and raped by a sexual predator, revives and lurches off, like Yeats's rough beast awakened, “toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping.”

In the 1950s, when Flannery O'Connor first began to publish such idiosyncratic and mordantly comic fiction as
Wise Blood
and the story collection
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
(1955), the seemingly reclusive young writer from Milledgeville, Georgia—in Brad Gooch's description a “sleepy community at the dead center of Georgia” of which O'Connor said dryly, “We have a girls' college here, but the lacy atmosphere is fortunately destroyed by a reformatory, an insane asylum, and a military school”—was perceived as a younger cousin of such showier, more renowned and best-selling Southern Gothic contemporaries as Carson McCullers and Truman Capote.
¹
In the wake of the more robust tall-tale Gothicism of William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell, with its encoded
social/political significance, and unambiguous heterosexuality, the extreme, effete, self-consciously grotesque and sexually ambiguous fiction of McCullers and Capote attracted a good deal of quasi-literary media attention: recall the simperingly effeminate dust jacket photo of Truman Capote for his debut novel
Other Voices, Other Rooms
(1948), and the scandalous quasi-literary life of the precocious McCullers who published her first, widely acclaimed novel
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
(1940) at the age of twenty-three, and by the age of thirty, given to alcoholic excess and a disastrous private life, was a burnt-out case despite the considerable achievement of
The Member of the Wedding
(1946). How ironic that during their turbulent, highly publicized lifetimes McCullers and Capote were far more famous than Flannery O'Connor, of whose invalided private life little was known, or might be said to be worth knowing; as O'Connor observed to a friend, “As for biographies, there won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.”

Through her radically truncated career, O'Connor's outwardly sensational, quirkily “Christian” fiction aroused mixed critical responses and modest sales; yet, though she was to die of lupus at the young age of thirty-nine, leaving behind a relatively small body of work, her reputation has steadily increased in the intervening years, while those of McCullers and Capote have dramatically shrunk. Having long exhausted his talent by the time of his alcohol-and drug-related death in 1984, at the age of sixty, Capote is now most regarded for his “non-fiction novel”
In Cold Blood
, atypical among his work;
McCullers may be remembered as a precociously but unevenly gifted writer of fiction for young adults whose work has failed to transcend its time and place. In such anthologies as
The Best American Short Stories of the Twentieth Century
edited by John Updike, Flannery O'Connor is included with one of her most frequently reprinted stories, “Greenleaf,” while McCullers and Capote are missing altogether. Indeed, no postwar/posthumous literary reputation of the twentieth century, with the notable exception of Sylvia Plath, has grown more rapidly and dramatically than that of O'Connor whose relatively small body of work has acquired a canonical status since her death in 1964.
²

All this, in the face of O'Connor's unfashionable religious sensibility, in a mid-twentieth-century secular/materialist literary culture indifferent if not inhospitable to conservative Christian belief of the kind that seems to have shaped every aspect of the author's life. It's instructive to learn, for instance, in Gooch's meticulously detailed account of O'Connor's parochial-school background in Savannah, Atlanta, and her similarly circumscribed girlhood in Milledgeville, that O'Connor was born to an “Old Catholic” family with social pretensions on the mother, Regina's, side: a lifelong tug-of-war seems to have been enacted between the (quietly, slyly) rebellious Flannery and (stubborn, self-righteous and unflagging) Regina whose effort to mold her daughter into “the perfect Southern little girl” were doomed to failure. Instructive, too, to learn that the precociously gifted O'Connor thought of herself as “ancient” while still a child; the great trauma of her girlhood was her father Edward's death, from lupus, when O'Connor
was fifteen, an event perceived by the stricken girl as a sign of God's grace equivalent to “a bullet in the side.” “I can with one eye squinting take it all as a blessing.” In retrospect, the title
Wise Blood
acquires a painfully ironic significance: O'Connor was destined to die of the incurable disease inherited from her father as if there were, in a cosmology of an unfathomable and mysterious cruelty condoned by the inscrutable God of the Roman Catholic faith, a “wisdom” in this tainted blood. In O'Connor's more transparent religious stories, that read like eccentric comic-strip parables—“The Enduring Chill,” “Revelation,” “Parker's Back,” “The Artificial Nigger”
³
—meaning is suggested in blunt forceful images, as in the religious sonnets of John Donne or the metaphysical love-poems of the self-doubting Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins; these stories can be read, if not fully grasped, without recourse to Catholic dogma. (In his persuasive essay on O'Connor's work in
Sewanee Review
, 1962, “Flannery O'Connor's Devil,” John Hawkes suggests that despite O'Connor's professed concern for morality, “the driving force of the immoral creative process transforms the author's objective Catholic knowledge of the devil into an authorial attitude in itself in some measure diabolical.” [
The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor
, by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.] Of course, O'Connor herself denied such an attitude—
her
devil wasn't a merely literary devil but the “objective” Devil of Catholic theology.

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 repeat
edly 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:

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.