Grace and Race in Dixie

...Ultimately, however, what dilutes the impact of Flannery O'Connor's South is Coles' self-righteous preachiness, his obvious desire to use O'Connor as a vehicle for fighting his own wars with various unnamed intellectuals...

...It is not Faulkner's infamous Snopes clan, but the Bun-drens of As I Lay Dying who are the proper literary ancestors of many of her characters...

...Her smart-alecky cynicism, her sardonic quips, seem to mask a terrible vulnerability as well as the rage which suffuses the stories...

...An example is her story, "The Displaced Person...

...Hers is a religion of the Holy Spirit-or the Devil...

...Put another way, as a literary critic he is a celebrator...

...And as Coles well knows, Lillian Smith played a prominent role in theCivil Rightsmovement...

...In thus claiming that O'Connor belongs to the realistic tradition, not the grotesque, Coles invokes her own testimony: "I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic...

...The range of emotions displayed by her characters, or demanded of the reader, are quite narrow...

...Like many Southern intellectuals she had the irritating habit of trying to "put on" the Yankees...

...Indeed, O'Connor specifically urged this Faulkner novel on a friend in one of her letters...

...Drawing upon his own experience in the South during the early 1960s (including a meeting with the writer), Coles seeks to demonstrate that O'Connor's fiction grew out of her sensibility as a Southern intellectual, her Roman Catholicism and her daily contact with the plain folk of the New South...

...For all of Faulkner's distressing inconsistencies on the racial crisis, he frequently exhibited considerable civic courage...

...Indeed, he seems merely to affirm and support them...

...In his adroit analysis of it, Coles also shows-As did the film of Wise Blood-that O'Connor had a wonderful ear for the tone, pace and rhythm of speech without being a local color writer in the usual sense of the term...

...His hectoring asides and flagrant use of inverted commas to signal knowing dissociation have by now become tics in his writing- At one point Coles says of O'Connor that "she wasn't excessively self-critical-A clever kind of pride...

...A life so shadowed by disability and death no doubt required bottomless reserves of will and courage...

...Coles rightly commends O'Connor's personal integrity and toughness...

...That same kind of pride, far from being clever, makes this book less than it might have been...

...O'Connor was drawn to this passion as an antidote to the smugness of the Catholic Church...

...Though trained as a child psychologist, Coles has always opposed literary reductionism-that is, explaining everything through pathology and neurosis...

...But if Coles succeeds in highlighting the social roots of O'Connor's vision, he fails to seriously confront the limits of her fiction or her personal and political opinions...

...The moral basis of poetry is the accurate naming of the things of God," O'Connor wrote in 1956...

...Then there is the ever-present question of race...

...In his new book, based on three lectures delivered at Louisiana State University, Robert Coles promises us a chance to understand the power-And limits-of a major artistic presence...

...Curiously, Coles slights this dimension of O'Connor's fiction and the sheer anger and rage it expresses...

...at times it does not seem to matter which...

...One wonders, too, why Coles never discusses the effect of O'Connor's illness on her personality or the work itself...

...O'Connor's fiction, for instance, lacks psychological subtlety or nuance...

...Yet the letters reveals a woman who could also be needlessly cruel...

...In the words of one ante-bellum observer quoted in Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll, while black religion was "fiery glad" white religion was "fiery mad...

...Practically without fail, it appears to divide or destroy, rather than unite or heal...

...In his treatment of O'Connor as a distinctively Southern intellectual, Coles relentlessly attacks the pretensions of the secular, progressive intellectuals who generally have their homes north of the Mason-Dixon line...

...Further, Coles quotes O'Connor saying, "All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it...

...Coles wisely avoids presenting O'Connor as a Catholic lay theologian, although he does emphasize her wide reading in Church history and theology...

...Not that Coles is uncritical...

...And in too many of her stories, violence provides an easy resolution...

...instead, he portrays her as a sympathetic observer of both the foolishness and the insight the religious impulse can give rise to when unchecked by the institutional weight of the Church...

...he never hesitates to explicate from those aspects of O'Connor's work that reveal her contact with reality, rather than her alienation from it...

...Coles prefers to interpret O'Connor's refusal to condemn the white South and her distaste for liberal pieties emanating from the North, as acts of courage...

...admirable, not at all...

...Theologically, O'Connor flirted with the inverted form of sentimentality that marked Christian thinking in the 1950s-the belief that the great sinner was nearer salvation than the lukewarm believer, that whatever melted the "hardness of the heart," was preferable to the complacency of the dutiful communicant...

...He reads her "Everything Which Rises Must Converge" as a brave exposure of the provinciality of the half-baked intellectual who has contempt for the unenlightened racial attitudes of his mother...

...The Baldwin matter aside, no amount of special pleading will convince me that O'Connor's behavior was anything other than a timid failure of leadership from someone who might have made a difference...

...Several other stories and The Violent Bear It Away voice this same attack on the pridefulness of the educated...

...Surely it would not demean her achievement to explore these issues...

...O'Connor's wisecracking neutrality, her "plague on both your houses" stance was typical of Southern "moderates" in the early 1960s...

...If Eudora Welty is the rose of Southern writers, O'Connor is the prickly pear...

...The regional locutions and deliberate misspellings in her letters presumably are meant to show her cunning, but they are often transparent to the point of being embarrassing...

...O'Connor's fictional world is filled with rural and small-town white folk plus sprinklings of poor blacks-people struggling against the force of economic circumstances and subject to wrenching social change, yet generally estranged form the larger political process...

...but even where he finds fault, he usually ends by excusing...

...He finds her refusal to meet James Baldwin in Georgia in 1964 not only understandable but almost admirable...

...Reviewed by Richard King Author, "A Southern Renaissance," "The Party of Eros" The publication last year of Flannery O'Connor's letters, The Habit of Being, and the release of the film made from her first novel, Wise Blood, have reawakened interest in the life and work of this gifted writer who died of lupus in 1964 at the age of 39...

...One need not be hostile to religion to question the essential nature of the grace she proferred...

...That pronouncement links her social and religious commitment to a kind of artistic realism animated by notions of grace...

...White Southern religion, according to Coles, is a religion of "practical heresies," shot through with anti-institutional and Manichean tendencies...

...Understandable, perhaps...