In Rough Country (9 page)

(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:

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'Hara
⁴
—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 child 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 fiction
⁵
—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:

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:

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:

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

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

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.”

We can define the author's lifelong and variegated
irritation
in this context—Catholic, conservative, anti-liberal and
anti-“progressive”—as a folksy variant of the fear and loathing of the strong by the weak which Nietzsche defined in
On the Genealogy of Morals
as
ressentiment
—the “imaginary revenge” of puritanically repressive Christians against their more pagan adversaries: “Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant affirmation of oneself, slave morality immediately says No to what comes from outside, to what is different, to what is not oneself: and
this
No is its creative deed.” Revulsion for the strong—the “normal”—by the weak—the “invalided”—can't account for the genius of O'Connor's prose fiction but provides a way of comprehending its messianic zeal.

Not the shimmering multi-dimensionality of Modernism but the two-dimensionality of cartoon art is at the heart of the work of O'Connor, whose unshakable absolutist faith provided her with a rationale with which to mock both her secular and bigoted-Christian contemporaries in a succession of brilliantly orchestrated short stories that read like parables of human folly confronted by mortality: “‘She would of been a good woman'”—the murderous Misfit says of an annoyingly garrulous Southern woman at the conclusion of O'Connor's “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”—“‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.'”