Flannery O’Connor: the wisest blood

The novels and short stories of America’s most important Catholic writer of fiction, born 100 years ago, sometimes pigeonholed as ‘Southern Gothic’, are more universal than almost any other writer of her time

On 21 March 1925, just four days before Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, the legislature of neighbouring Tennessee signed into law a bill promulgated by state representative John Washington Butler that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. Two months later, in a test case carefully contrived by the American Civil Liberties, a young high school science teacher called John Scopes was prosecuted for breaching the Butler Act by teaching evolution out of the state’s approved textbook. The stage was set for an epic legal encounter, partly conducted out of doors because of the heat (weather, not argument), between the liberal Clarence Darrow and the rhetorically conservative William Jennings Bryan, who railed against the toxic influence of what he dismissed as “an unproven hypothesis”.

The Scopes “monkey” trial exerted a deep influence on the American psyche. It is impossible to believe that the anti-aristocratic and opportunist Snopes clan in William Faulkner’s fiction (to whose manifest shortcomings incest and even bestiality were subsequently added) is not a direct reference. Less obviously so, the mummified dwarf stolen from a museum and movie-promoting gorilla in Flannery O’Connor’s first novel Wise Blood are also more obliquely related to the evolution controversy, which still rumbled on in the South even when she was writing a quarter of a century later.

O’Connor is arguably America’s most important Catholic writer of fiction, not least in the sense that she is one of the few who wrote her fiction directly out of her ­experience as a Catholic and out of her profound Thomist thinking. She is more often pigeonholed as a “Southern” novelist, to which the additional qualifier “Gothic” attaches almost by magnetism. And by that is usually meant a tendency to the grotesque, the religiose and the violent. But like the so-called magical ­realists of the South American “Boom”, who said there was nothing at all magic in their writing – they were just reporting the reality – so O’Connor insisted in a famous letter that any “grotesque” elements in her work were either the casual reactions of a lazy northern literary establishment, for whom “Southern” ­inexorably led to “Gothic” and Gothic to “grotesque”, or simple reportage of the reality she best understood. For O’Connor, violence and pain were simply the outworkings of a grace that she saw immanent in all created things and she insisted that a Christian mind, or what she called Christian realism, was above any imputation of sentimentality. Her own pain was lifelong. Lupus had killed her father and was to afflict her all her days. When her letters weren’t about ­obstinate editors and matters of theological concern, they were largely about her medical treatments.

That the work was full of violence is beyond doubt, but the violence was visited on and by mostly evangelical Protestant characters who are being turned by experience towards a Catholic understanding of redemption. The central character of Wise Blood, Hazel Motes (is that a further echo of Scopes, Snopes?), blinds himself with lye, after a false preacher is revealed to have faked his own blindness. The child protagonist of The River is swept away by the waters which he believes are baptismal. Baptism, suicide and murder are implicated together in her second and last-completed novel The Violent Bear It Away, with baptism again cast as violent ambush. In the earlier novel, “wise blood” is what a young crazed zookeeper (How is animal different from man? is her steady question) believes he has in place of divine support; Enoch (!) sees a gorilla advertising a jungle movie and waits to shake its hand, only to be told, and this is deliciously done, to “Go to hell”.

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In trying to found his own godless religion, Motes finds himself outmanoeuvred by a conman’s “Holy Church of Christ Without Christ”. The youthful hero of The Violent Bear It Away has been kidnapped and raised as a prophet by his great-uncle. When the old man dies, Francis (also known as Tarwater) starts to dig a grave but falls into a slumber – moonshine rather than angelic visitation – and immolates, as he believes, the old man’s body in their burning house. He then escapes to the city and seeks out his schoolteacher Uncle Rayber who lives alone with an idiot son, Bishop, whom Francis tries to baptise by stealth; again, the line between immersion and drowning is held in high tension. When he returns to the great-uncle’s farm, he learns that an old black worker had actually buried the old man’s body. Between that and the forceful baptism of the boy, Francis realises that his calling as a prophet is complete.

One talks of an artist’s “vision” metaphorically, but for O’Connor, seeing was the “habit of art”, a concept she borrowed from Jacques Maritain. Her imagination was originally formed in cartoons, a not insignificant impact on her writing style. She could catch a character in two descriptive lines. But she was never simply an instinctive writer. Unlike most of her peers, she could speak with clear authority about her art. She lectured throughout the United States and essays such as “Fiction is a Subject with a History”, “The Catholic Novelist in the South” (“It is interesting that as belief in the divinity of Christ decreases, there seems to be a preoccupation with Christ-figures in our fiction”) and “The Regional Writer” are essential and by no means incidental reading.

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Her correspond­ence was also astonishing. In 1955, she received a fan letter from an Atlanta file clerk called Betty Hester, anonymised as “A” in the published correspondence. O’Connor invited her to write again, “I would like to know who this is who understands my stories”, but clearly saw in the non-academic Hester a mirror and sounding board. That first summer, she declared “I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic.” And that is what she always strove to be, not just Catholic but conscious of how it set her almost totally at odds with the reading public. “One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, the whole reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation: that is, nobody in your audience.”

How much easier it was as a result of this to set her on the shelf marked “Southern” with a Dewey Decimal cross-ref. to “Gothic”, and not to set her forth, more than almost any other writer of her time, as universal. The Library of America edition of her Collected Works has all the fiction, the salient essays and some of the most revealing letters. It fits in a coat pocket or a small bag, however far you are travelling.

Brian Morton is a Scottish writer, journalist, broadcaster and farmer.