Matters of Faith and Fiction

...The best writers create the illusion that the conduct of their characters is not predetermined in any way...

...Moreover, this label and the others tend to turn her work into evidence for a case study of Flannery O'Connor, the sick Southern Catholic woman writer...

...the South was thick with social complexity...

...I think it's a lot of baloney," she says in a letter, "about having to love the characters in a book for them to be worth writing ibout.'' The point is that the work of the best writers conforms to the notion-a commonplace of the Judeo-Christian tradition- that man is responsible for his actions...

...Yet she found to her dismay that many people preferred to think about her poor sick, or poor Catholic, self rather than about what she had written...

...O'Connor is a Catholic writer...

...Free, she might have said, to cast a cold and comic eye on moral complacency, on the innumerable ways in which people congratulate themselves for being superior...

...Belief," she says in "On Her Own Work," "is the engine that makes perception operate...

...she thought them out too carefully and consequently they are schematic and wooden...

...She immersed herself in Teilhard de Chardin, but the theologians who most influenced her were two French Thomists, Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson...

...included in a course on the female imagination (otherwise the adjective is supererogatory...

...Armed with such remarks, the reader is apt to regard her stories as religious puzzles that require solution...

...Her Christian skepticism went hand in hand with a belief in Catholic orthodoxy...

...One such reader was John Hawkes, the novelist...

...Christian dogma, she says, "in no way limits my freedom as a writer and...

...He is a good friend of mine," she continues, "and I have had this out with him many times, to no avail...

...Social scientists-and, of course, Marxists and Freudians-usually get to the point rather quickly...

...O'Connor knew that she could write, as she often did, about people who were haunted by religious questions and still make them believable...

...And free to dwell-if only for a moment-on mysterious actions that are both unexpected and inevitable, actions that she thought are a sign of God's grace...

...Good fiction cannot offer a banquet of fine sentiments, cannot be complacently edifying...

...These people, as well as friends who wanted to swap confessions about neuroses, she let off gently, giving them advice without lecturing to them...

...Her faith enabled her to plumb those depths yet not succumb to parochially modern ways of understanding experience...

...Thick with terrible mystery and thin in comic manners, the novels are her weakest performances, as she herself knew...

...As Southerners, they were credible characters...

...Her work, in fact, bears a superficial resemblance to the photography of Diane Arbus, the photographer of grotesques, and the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, which are filled with violence...

...The regional lore that suffuses both her letters and her fiction makes it seem as if O'Connor were preoccupied with the South...

...As O'Connor says in "Novelist and Believer": "It is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of come-dy...

...On the subject of the feminist business," she says in a letter, "I just never think...of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine...

...Today's reader," she says in "Novelist and Believer," "if he believes in grace at all, sees it as something which can be separated from nature and served to him raw as Instant Uplift...

...O'Connor's faith, then, both is and is not relevant to understanding her fiction...

...No doubt, O'Connor will be subjected to the critical strategies of feminists, will be served up in innumerable courses, lectures, and essays as a "woman artist," but she herself would have found the phrase both puzzling and amusing...

...Yet disciplined by her faith, O'Connor was neither foolishly proud nor falsely modest about what she accomplished in fiction...

...Writing is a craft to be mastered, not an outlet for self-expression...

...She was a genial and gregarious woman, and her letters do not smell of illness and negation...

...The novelist and the believer, when they are not the same man, yet have many traits in common " The novelist's aim, she says (paraphrasing Conrad), is "to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe " Which is not the same thing as saying that a novelist must love his characters...

...O'Connor thought James was probably right about most of the country, but not about the South...

...Several comic-serious moments in O'Connor's work stay in the mind: the elderly white lady trying to befriend a black boy on a bus in a Southern town ("Everything That Rises Must Converge...

...The stories she likes best are usually those that critics have praised the most...

...To speak of O'Connor as a Catholic writer encourages such solemn readers because it makes her work more earnest than it is...

...She implies that such knowledge makes it all too easy to let characters serve as illustrations of a larger point...

...James said that America lacked manners, that the texture of American life was thin...

...O'Connor has always been praised as a masterful storyteller, but her letters, as well as several essays collected in Mystery and Manners, reveal that she is also an expository writer of intelligence and wit-one, moreover, whose speculations about art and faith are among the most luminous of our time...

...In her letters and essays, O'Connor continually ponders the relation between faith and art, usually proceeding by negation, by saying what Catholic fiction should not be...

...At least she calls herself a Catholic writer in one essay, and she says in a letter that "I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas...

...Yet a qualification is necessary: O'Connor sometimes claims that the themes of her stories are explicitly Christian if not Catholic...

...Oates herself, in a recent review of The Habit of Being,* a selected and edited collection of Flannery O'Connor's letters, calls her a ''woman artist," the adjective "woman" presumably flagging O'Connor as worthy of being * Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.00...

...It would be wrong to ascribe O'Connor's furious dismissal of the review in Time to self-defensiveness, as if she were embarrassed by her disease...

...This is an election I always wait for The other one I look for is Miss North Georgia Chick...

...All my stories," she says in a letter, "are about the action of grace on a character who is not very will ing to support it " And she says of "The Artificial Nigger," one of her best stories, that "what I had in mind to suggest with the artificial nigger was the redemptive quality of the Negro's suffering for us all...

...But her letters, of course, are about her life, and they do refer to her struggle with lupus, a disease that struck her in her mid-twenties...

...Since his wife died, he has been in love with the bird bath...

...At first glance, it would seem that Flan-nery O'Connor is a prime candidate for "womanization...

...She felt less charitably towards literary critics who claimed that her lupus provides a clue to the nature of her work...

...A devout Catholic, she wrote stories about the strange doings of Southern Baptists...

...The Manichean novelist doesn't contemplate the world, he merely looks down at it-looks down at a world of uniform grayness, a world without distinctions, where men, capable of neither good nor evil, are merely various shades of beastliness and banality...

...and in another she complains to a symbol-hunting English professor, "I think you folks sometimes strain the soup too thin...

...The great advantage of being a Southern writer," she says in "Writing Short Stories," "is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners...

...Only once, in the last year of her life, when she was in and out of hospitals, do we detect a note of despair: "Prayers requested," she adds as a postscript to a letter...

...Yet it would be wrong to say that O'Connor's work and O'Connor's faith are entirely separable...

...Of course some writers lend themselves to this approach better than others-Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath come to mind-but even Jane Austen has recently been analyzed in such fashion...

...The label is certainly more appropriate than that of woman writer, sick writer, or Southern writer...

...Yet what does it mean...

...He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists '' What Catholic writers should resist is the notion that their art should explicitly serve their religion...

...She does not say that we need to have such beliefs, or even be aware that she has them, in order fully to appreciate her work...

...I can barely force myself along.'' O'Connor is a very good judge of her own work...

...All of her work, in fact, is shaped by the notion that a sense of mystery-call it a Catholic sense, call it what you will-should be grounded in an awareness of the manners of ordinary life...

...When a friend later told O'Connor that the reference was to John's "The lame shall enter first," O'Connor's reply was: "This may be because the lame will be able to knock everybody aside with their crutches...

...Fiction, as she knew, is a harsh taskmaster: "You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much...

...Hers was the faith of a Christian skeptic, which (she says to a young writer who had befriended her) "will keep you free-not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you...

...She was, it is clear, a shrewd judge of human nature...

...She writes about her disease matter-of-factly, at times even with humor, but she does not go on about it at length, as if she wants to spare her friends the dreary details of living as a semi-invalid...

...Lupus makes the news...

...Like Henry James, one of her favorite writers, O'Connor thinks that two qualities make for good fiction: "One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners...

...Hood, the incumbent swan, who "eats out of a vase, as a matter of fact, and has a private dining room...

...O'Connor does not think it wise for Catholic writers to stamp their faith on their creations...

...Her lack of mobility did force her to lead a sheltered life, but she was by no means a recluse...

...She relished such occasions, although they wore her out, and she obviously enjoyed corresponding with a wide variety of people...

...O'Connor, who calls herself a "hillbilly Thomist," paraphrases Aquinas: "A work of art is good in itself," she says, and "what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God...

...In twentieth-century fiction," she says in the same essay, "it increasingly happens that a meaningless, absurd world impinges upon the sacred consciousness of author or character...

...The material is no more exalted than any other kind of material and the idea of making it right is what should be applied to all making...

...Like Nabokov, a writer she liked, O'Connor was fond of absurd bits of Americana...

...The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom...

...One of the ruling assumptions of the women's movement is that a so-called female imagination gives women writers a special field of vision, a peculiar angle of inquiry...

...It is a reader, we might say, who does not approach her work solemnly, trying to "look through'' the manners in order to discover the mystery: here a moment of grace, there an act of redemption...

...O'Connor obviously enjoyed playing the role of a Southern redneck to her friends in the Northeast and Midwest, Only a few months before she died, she teased Richard Stern, a novelist who was teaching at the University of Chicago, that her "state of being...

...Dogma," she says, "is the guardian of mystery...

...Many contemporary writers, O'Connor says, are afflicted with Mani-cheanism, a distorted form of spirituality that regards "the natural world as unworthy of penetration"-regards it with loathing and disgust...

...In the world of women's studies, the critic's job is clear: She (the critic is usually a woman) is supposed to look for the strains in the work that point to the tensions in the life-the tensions that are the result of the writer's "situation" as a woman...

...Typical Southern sense of reality...

...And she managed, when she was up to it, to give readings and lectures at colleges throughout the country...

...O'Connor received many letters from persons who wanted to strain the soup...

...Being orthodox, though, did not mean being dour: O'Connor tells the story of a party she went to at Mary McCarthy's where she was so intimidated by the intellectuals there that she said nothing all evening until Mary McCarthy made a remark about the Eucharist's only being a symbol, whereupon she burst out: "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it...

...Nevertheless, she is grateful to be a Southerner...

...Though how the characters conduct themselves has an air of inevitability about it, that inevitability comes from what we learn about them in the course of the work: Character is destiny...

...I suppose I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome, without regard to sex...

...it is someone who possesses "the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery...

...O'Connor's ideal reader, as she says in "The Nature and Aim of Fiction," is not necessarily someone who possesses an educated mind...

...And all such labels make it easy to miss the humor in her stories -stories that O'Connor herself used to read "over and over and laugh and laugh...

...The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art," she says...

...I even dislike," she says, "the concept artist when it sets you above, all it is is working in a certain kind of medium to make something right...

...O'Connor's novels suffer from too much of the wrong kind of understanding...

...His devil is an impeccable literary spirit whom he makes responsible for all good literature...

...The writer, O'Connor says in a letter that has some bearing on the novels, contemplates an experience-not necessarily his own-but "contemplating it don't mean understanding it so much as understanding that he doesn't understand it...

...The South is simply what she knows, the raw material at hand for shaping into fiction...

...What impelled her to write so often about grotesques and Stephen Miller is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...

...I mention these details because it is important that O'Connor's letters not be thought of as a bleak chronicle of a wasted life...

...Good fiction, O'Connor clearly implies, cannot be based on Manichean premises...

...The same understanding of what O'Connor calls "the natural world" informs her best stories...

...bad or good, we've got them in abundance...

...Subtlety is the curse of man," she exclaims in one letter...

...Her life and work were peculiar indeed...

...I guess you saw Time," she says in a letter...

...She simply had no use for critics who think of literature as displaced autobiography, critics who are more interested in writers as artists than writers as makers...

...The disease went into remission for about 14 years, but the drugs she took to keep it under control were debilitating, damaging her bone structure so that she had to go about on crutches...

...Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome...

...it increases rather than decreases my vision...

...As a fiction writer who is a Southerner," she says in "The Teaching of Literature," "I use the idiom and the manners of the country I know, but I don't consider that I write about the South...

...In these and other stories the gulf that exists between the persons involved is so great that it is both comic and terrible-to use two words that O'Connor says "may be opposite sides of the same coin...

...Another literary heresy, one that takes the opposite stance, is more subtle...

...Her work certainly displays some of the characteristics that are typical of what we call Southern Gothic writing, but the deeper bias of her work is not especially Southern, if by Southern we mean a preoccupation with the past, particularly with the Civil War...

...Usually, she acknowledged that there are, as she says, "perhaps other ways than my own in which this story could be read," but sometimes the strainings disturbed her, especially those that turned her "maimed souls," as she calls the distasteful protagonists in some of her stories, into heroic outcasts...

...Like many handicapped people, she was uncomfortable when someone tried to bestow compassion upon her...

...As her letters make clear, O'Connor patiently and good-humoredly (at least most of the time) resisted the efforts of friends, critics, teachers, and assorted cranks to explain what she was up to by calling her a woman writer, a Southern writer, a Catholic writer, and, yes, even a sick writer...

...But O'Connor most definitely did not want her stories read in this way...

...A Blakean, Hawkes thinks that O'Connor, like Milton, is of the devil's party and that her maimed souls suffer because they are endowed with a creative imagination...

...Such a reading of her work exasperated O'Connor, yet she was remarkably forbearing about it...

...misfits...

...All these moralists who condemn Lolita" O'Connor says, "give me the creeps...

...But O'Connor herself knew that of her 30-odd stories only a small number-perhaps a dozen-were fully realized...

...This reader's favorite word is compassion...

...The way of the novelist, O'Connor suggests, is not the way of the social scientist...

...That was really a sickening review and in very bad taste...

...Riding in an elevator in a department store, she was accosted by an old lady who, obviously taken with her handicapped state, suddenly fixed her with moist eye, blessed her, and whispered to her, "Remember what they said to John at the gate, darling...

...Although I am a Catholic writer," she says in a letter, "I don't care to get labeled as such in the popular sense of it, as it is then assumed that you have some religious axe to grind...

...Miss Gum Spirits of Turpentine," she says in a letter, "has just been elected for the year...

...Because O'Connor took a dim view of any attempts to use a writer's work to pry into his life, she not only dismissed "the feminist business," but she was also un-•easy about the word "artist," implying as it does an exalted view of the person doing the writing...

...Everything O'Connor wrote has its comic-terrible moments, but the balance tips toward the terrible in her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away...

...Writing about The Violent Bear It Away, she says: "It is dull and half-done and I will not be able to blame anybody for not liking it...

...Such nosy people, O'Connor implies, are vulgar and irrelevant...

...She was continually pestered with letters from people who wanted to cure her of lupus or Catholicism or both...

...Some knowledge of her faith may help to illuminate the general shape of her work...

...In her letters she often complains about the trouble she is having with the end of a story-an appropriate complaint, since many of her endings are excessively portentous or gratuitously violent...

...She does not mean good fiction by Catholic writers but good fiction by any writer, whatever his beliefs...

...This thing of demanding honesty of people," she wrote to a friend, "is in the upper reaches of extreme Innocence Never, above all things, ask your family to be honest with you...

...The pious style," she says in a letter, "is a great stumbling block to Catholics who want to talk to the modern world...

...Being orthodox, finally, did not mean removing herself from the modern world...

...the poor country white trying to befriend an urban black in the hallway of an apartment house in New York ("Judgment Day...

...In another letter she says that writing has nothing to do with neurosis...

...And being orthodox, moreover, did not mean being puritanical...

...O'Connor doesn't dismiss the kind of knowledge we derive from the social scientists (though she says in a letter that "the only thing that kept me from being a social scientist was the grace of God and the fact that I couldn't remember the stuff but a few days after reading it...

...The critic should concentrate on what was written, not try to use it as a jumping-off point for speculations about the writer's life...

...Any story I reveal myself completely in will be a bad story...

...We cannot begin to understand O'Connor's Catholicism if we think of it as a fortress that she built in order to cut herself off from ordinary life or from the horrors of modern history...

...This imagination is not the result of nature but of nurture: Because women have been victims of one kind or another, women writers have often been preoccupied if not obsessed with the predicament of being a woman, a predicament that shapes their work in distinctive ways...

...This is putting a strain on the human frame it can't bear The last thing I want of my kinfolks is their honesty...

...In another letter she insists that "my lupus has no business in literary considerations...

...At her mother's farm near Milledgeville, Georgia, she entertained a continual stream of visitors...

...There is another reason-perhaps a more important one-why O'Connor is grateful to be a Southerner...

...A lady from Toccoa, Georgia, wrote and enclosed "three tracts of Oral Roberts and a magazine called Healing (crutches in picture...

...ain't much but I'm able to take nourishment and participate in a few Klan rallies.'' She also regales her city friends with news of her peacocks, her ducks, her goose (Clair Booth Loose Goose), her burros (Ernest and Marquita), and Mr...

...Jack Hawkes' view of the devil is not a theological one," she says in a letter to a friend...

...A woman who led a semi-invalid existence, who lived with her mother for most of her adult life, she filled her work with the kind of violence we find in sensationalist tabloids...

...A full medical report...

...But the literature of Instant Uplift, O'Connor realizes, is easily dispensed with...

...I am sick of being sick.'' Far from centering on her illness, O'Connor's letters are full of amusing stories about life on a Southern farm...

...Oeeewarr-rrhggghhh...

...The Catholic writer, she says in "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South," is fortunate "to have the South for his background, because here belief can still be made believable, even if for the modern mind it cannot be made admirable.'* The South is part of the Bible Belt, and Southerners more than most Americans see the world through the lens of religion...

...O'Connor at times was distinctly uneasy about being packaged as a Catholic writer...

...The distortions of her art-and she said that she practiced a distorted realism-would seem to call for speculation about the ordeal of her life...

...There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without," she says in "The Nature and Aim of Fiction," "and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once...

...Entering the house of fiction, the Catholic writer should leave his explicit beliefs at the door...

...A handful of them, mostly written in the last two years of her life, can hold their own with any...