How appropriate that Flannery O’Connor should have been born on the Solemnity of the Annunciation: the liturgical feast celebrating the willing acceptance of a God-given vocation. As we marked Miss O’Connor’s centenary three months ago — and yes, boys and girls, it was Miss O’Connor, as no one would have been more repelled by the neologism Ms.—that’s the dimension of her life that struck me most powerfully: her embrace of the challenging vocation of writing, shaped in her case by the vocation of suffering.
Some years back, shortly after the Polish edition of my Letters to a Young Catholic (which includes a section on Miss O’Connor) was published, I got a sulfuric e-mail from a Polish priest. How dare I, the biographer of John Paul II, recommend such a vile author to impressionable young Catholics? Turns out that the good father had found a Polish translation of that quintessential O’Connor short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and had been shocked, shocked, by that quintessential O’Connor character, the homicidal Misfit. In a return email, I explained that Flannery O’Connor’s unique aesthetic (Catholic + gothic + American Southern) was exceptionally difficult to translate, and suggested he might give Miss O’Connor a second try by reading her letters in The Habit of Being.
I hope he did. Because I agree with Chilton Williamson Jr. that the posthumously published Habit of Being was Flannery O’Connor’s best book: an agreement I record with some trepidation, given critic Bruce Bawer’s recent assertion in The New Criterion that Miss O’Connor was the best American short story writer of the twentieth century (take that, Papa Hemingway!) In Habit, and in her own voice, she traces the arc of her often-difficult life as a lupus-afflicted author of fiction while revealing herself as one of the most gifted Catholic apologists of her time. And by “apologist,” I don’t mean someone who bludgeoned others into the act of faith by the ahistorical, logical rigor of irrefutable syllogisms. Rather, Flannery O’Connor’s apologetics were grounded in a profoundly humanistic grasp of the deep theological truths of the Creed, coupled with a penetrating insight into the cultural obstacles that modern life posed to a Christian apprehension of those truths.
The first and perhaps most obvious of those obstacles was modernity’s loss of a grip on good and evil. Writing to her friend Betty Hester about a “moronic” New Yorker review of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery suggested that “the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.”
Or, as she also wrote, “When I see [my] stories described as horror stories, I am always amused because the reviewer always has got hold of the wrong horror.” Why? Because the reviewer, like so many of our contemporaries, had grown up in a culture in which “evil” had been psychologized, the confessional had been exchanged for the analyst’s couch, and the biblical personification of evil, Satan, had been turned into a cartoon character.
As that reference to Nietzsche suggests, the Flannery O’Connor on display in The Habit of Being also understood, as early as the 1950s, that at the root of modernity’s confusions over good and evil was the nihilism that was tacit then but quite explicit today: the notion that there are no givens in the human condition, such that everything about us is plastic, malleable, and subject to change by assertions of the will. Miss O’Connor would not have been surprised, therefore, by some recent legal madness in what FDR’s political fixer Jim Farley used to describe as the “Soviet of Washington:” a statute (recently upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) that allows a fully, er, equipped man who “identifies” as a woman complete access to a women’s spa, including the “right” to bathing with 13-year-old girls.
Flannery O’Connor, who died in 1964, did not live to read the Second Vatican Council’s declaration that “Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling” (Gaudium et Spes, 22). But then she didn’t have to. For as her epistolary apologetics demonstrate, she fully understood that the answer to the nihilism underwriting today’s real horrors is the Incarnation, by which Christ reveals the truth about us to us.
Related at CWR:
• “Flannery O’Connor and the Habit of Incarnational Art” (June 6, 2015) by Carl E. Olson
• “Reading Flannery O’Connor for the first time” (May 20, 2016) by Dr. Kelly Scott Franklin
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The problem for many reading O’Connor, or for that matter Faulkner, is that they can’t figure out whether the writer is racist or writing about racism. For O’Connor racism and violence were a big part of growing up in the South. I can easily see why someone would be shocked by A Good Many is Hard to Find. I was shocked. And to this day I’m not sure exactly what O’Connor was trying to get at. But that’s okay. That story seeps into your blood and no antibiotic can get rid of it. I love Flannery’s work.
I love Flannery, too. Race relations in America were different back then & they looked a certain way in the deep South. I think violence in her stories is a device to get our attention about Grace, but racism can speak more about the environment she lived in & described. And she describes it very accurately.
The plot analysis at Sparks Notes makes sense but doesn’t address race or racism.
Basically, the grandmother’s superficial self-interested religion is insufferable and harmful to herself as well as her family. Only at the end, almost too late, does she see the Misfit as a son. Only then does the Misfit realize that killing is no fun, or not an answer to anything. Grace, given to both the hypocrite (grandma) and the non-believer (Misfit), enlightens and transforms both in the end.
https://www.sparknotes.com/short-stories/a-good-man-is-hard-to-find/plot-analysis/
Miss O’Connor is not “racist,” despite the energetic efforts of the secular liberals–along with a few religious types–to tar her with that brush. She does, in her stories, present representatives of both the white and black communities (and their relationships) as she saw them and uses their own speech patterns as one way of doing so. Her faith, informed by love and deeply held, will not allow a place for racism.
Mr. Weigel is right in recommending The Habit of Being as an aid in understanding this author. For those who want to go deeper, see Marion Montgomery’s three-volume work, The Prophetic Spirit and the Age. The first volume is Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home. But the other volumes–Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy and Why Poe Drank Liquor–contain God’s plenty of insightful commentary on Miss O’Connor as well in relation to those two writers as well as to a host of others in the Western tradition.
The Montgomery title is actually The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age. Mea culpa. See also his The Hillbilly Thomist: Flannery O’Connor, St. Thomas and the Limits of Art (2 vols). And one more: The Trouble with You Innerleckchuls (Christendom College Press).