Welcome to the habit podcast conversations with writers about writing. I'm Jonathan Rogers, your host. Flannery O'Connor's 100th birthday would have been this week. She was born on March 25th, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. In the firmament of 20th century American letters. Her star was one of the brightest, and it burned all too briefly. She died at the age of 39 of lupus, a disease that had caused her pain and
debility since the age of 25. O'Connor's short stories and novels are often shocking in their violence and horror, though they are also as hilarious as they are horrible. She once wrote, in general, the devil can always be a subject for my kind of comedy, one way or another. I suppose this is because he is always accomplishing ends other than his own. Perhaps the most shocking thing about O'Connor's fiction is the fact that it is shaped by
a thoroughly Christian vision. If the world she depicts is dark and terrifying. It is also the place where grace makes itself known. My subject in fiction is the action of grace and territory largely held by the devil, she wrote. O'Connor's broken world. Our world is the stage whereon the Divine Comedy plays out. The following essay is adapted from the introduction to my 2012 book, The Terrible Speed of Mercy A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor, with a few additions.
Flannery O'Connor was 27 years old when her debut novel, Wise Blood, was published. She was small, of frame and sweet faced, in spite of the fact that she had already lived for two years with the lupus that would kill her before her 40th birthday. She was mostly quiet in public, but when she did speak, she spoke in the lilting tones of Georgia's Piedmont. She did not, in short,
come across as a force to be reckoned with. While visiting friends in Nashville, O'Connor encountered a man who put into words what many of the people who met her must have been thinking about. The young author of Wise Blood. That was a profound book, he said. You don't look like you wrote it. O'Connor described the whole scene in a letter to Elizabeth and Robert Lowell. She said, I mustered up my squinty assed expression and snarled, well, I did.
Flannery O'Connor, who lived a comfortable, conventional, pious, middle class existence on a dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, wrote stories that were like literary thunderstorms, turning on sudden violence and flashes of revelation that crashed down from the heavens, destroying even as they illuminate. Nothing about O'Connor's outward demeanor would suggest that such storms surged within her. Hers was a
quiet life, not free from trouble by any means. She was sick, but her life was regular and stable, except for four and a half years in her 20s, years spent training as a writer in Iowa, New York and Connecticut. She spent her whole life in Georgia under her mother's roof.
Her mother could be domineering, but she was solicitous of Flannery's health and well-being, and she always gave her daughter the space to do her work, even if she didn't always understand or appreciate the work her daughter was doing. Flannery O'Connor and her mother lived a most regulated, most
devout life on the farm they called Andalusia, just outside Milledgeville, Georgia. There, every morning, including Sundays, she spent four hours writing stories about street preachers, prostitutes, juvenile delinquents, hardscrabble farmers, sideshow freaks, murderers and charlatans, while her mother tended to the business of the house and farm. Then, at noon, the O'Connor women drove back into town, where they had lunch at the Sanford House Tea Room among the hatted and white
gloved ladies of Milledgeville's patrician class. According to biographer Brad Gooch, Flannery was especially fond of the Sanford House's fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie. No, Flannery O'Connor did not look like she could have written Wiseblood or the violent beard away, or a good man is hard to find. Nothing about her life story seems to account for the particular genius the seedy, violent, even trashy genius that defines her fiction. She wrote of the great mysteries she wrote in The
Great Mysteries, she was a mystery herself. In The Life You Save May be Your own. Mr. Shiftlet speaks to the mysteries of the human heart in his first meeting with Lucy Crater. Lady, he said, and turned and gave her his full attention. Let me tell you something. There's one of them doctors in Atlanta that's taken a knife
and cut the human heart. The human heart? He repeated, leaning forward out of a man's chest, and held it in his hand, and he held his hand out, palm up, as if it were slightly weighted with the human heart, and studied it like it was a day old chicken. And lady, he said, allowing a long, significant pause in which his head slid forward and his clay colored eyes brightened. He don't know no more about it than you or me. Why? If he was to take that knife and cut into
every corner of it. He still wouldn't know no more about it than you or me. No amount of poking around in the external events and facts of Flannery O'Connor's life could get at the heart of her. There's no accounting for Flannery O'Connor or her heart in those terms. The outward constraints that O'Connor accepted and ultimately cultivated made room for an interior world as spacious and various as the heavens themselves. Whole worlds orbited and collided in there.
Her natural curiosity was harnessed and directed by an astonishing intellectual and spiritual rigor. She read voraciously, from the ancients to contemporary Catholic theologians to periodicals to novels. Everybody who has read Wiseblood thinks I'm a hillbilly nihilist, she wrote in a letter to a friend. In fact, she wrote, she was a hillbilly Thomist. The raw material of her
fiction was the lowest common denominator of American culture. But the sensibility that shaped the hillbilly raw material into art shared more in common with Thomas Aquinas and the other great minds of the Catholic tradition than with any practitioner of American letters, high or low. There was nobody doing what she was doing when she was working on Wiseblood, she got sideways with an editor named John Selby at Rinehart,
the publisher that originally planned to publish the book. Selby didn't understand what she was doing with Wiseblood, and recommended that she make huge changes to make it more palatable to readers. In response to Selby's suggestions, O'Connor wrote this I can tell you that I would not like at all to work with you, as do other writers on your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention.
I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. In short, I am amenable to criticism, but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do. I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. There are two things that I want to
point out about this remarkable communication. First, Flannery O'Connor was 23 years old and unpublished when she wrote this to the editor, who would seem to have the power of life and death over Wiseblood. Even at that point, she was so committed to her peculiar vision that she wouldn't be swayed. Second, I want to draw your attention to that phrase, the peculiarity or aloneness of the experience I
write from. When she wrote that she wasn't raising peacocks on a dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, she wrote from the storied Yaddo artist colony, where she was working alongside such literary lights as Robert Lowell and Malcolm Cowley. She was fresh off three years at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then, as now, one of the most respected MFA programs in the country. On the strength of her performance at Iowa, certain tastemakers in the literary establishment were already welcoming her
and recognizing her as one of the great talents. When she wrote of her aloneness, she was writing from a place very near the epicenter of American letters. From very early in her career, she jealously guarded her aloneness. Her peculiarity for her peculiarity was the peculiarity of a prophet. Her voice was the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Perhaps the surest measure of O'Connor's sense of calling was her willingness to be misunderstood. She didn't expect her literary
audience to understand what she was up to. She wrote, many of my ardent admirers will be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realize that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics. Nor was she especially bothered when her co-religionists misunderstood her, which was just as well for almost all of the Christians who knew her work misunderstood it. A real ugly letter from a woman in
Boston was typical. She said she was a Catholic, and so she couldn't understand how anybody could even have such thoughts. O'Connor made it clear in her letters and essays, however, that she wrote such shocking fiction not in spite of her Christian faith, but because of it, she wrote. It is when the individual's faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest,
fictional representation of life. Flannery O'Connor wrote what she saw, and she saw a world that was broken beyond self-help or instant uplift, but a world also in which transcendence was forever threatening to break through. Welcome or not. Therefore, O'Connor set herself against not only the religious skeptic, but also the religious believer who thinks that the eyes of the church, or of the Bible, or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him. O'Connor's challenge.
Her calling was to offer up the truths of the faith to a world that, to her way of thinking, had mostly lost its ability to see and hear such truths. She wrote, when you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it. When you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock to the
hard of hearing you shout. And for the almost blind, you draw large and startling figures to smugness and self-reliance and self-satisfaction in all its forms, from pseudo intellectualism to phariseeism, to fundamentalism, to the false gospel of postwar optimism with its positive thinking gurus and its can do advice columnists and its faith in modern science. Oconnors fiction shouts, thus
saith the Lord! The violence, the sudden death, the ugliness in O'Connor's fiction are large figures drawn for the almost blind. If the stories offend conventional morality, it's because the gospel itself is an offense to conventional morality. Grace is a scandal. It always has been. Jesus put out the glad hand to lepers and cripples and prostitutes and losers of every stripe, even as he called the self-righteous. A brood of vipers
in a good man is hard to find. O'Connor's most widely read story, it is painful to see a mostly harmless old grandmother come to terms with God and herself only at gunpoint. It is even more painful to see her get shot anyway. In a more properly moral story, she would be rewarded for her late breaking insight and her life would be spared. But the story only enacts what Christians say. They believe already that to lose one's body for the sake of one's soul is a good
trait indeed. It's a mystery, and no small part of the mystery is the reader's visceral reaction to truths he or she claims to believe already. O'Connor invites us to step into such mysteries, but she never resolves them. She never reduces them to something manageable. O'Connor speaks with the ardor of an Old Testament prophet in her stories. She's like an Isaiah who never quite gets around to comfort ye, my people. Except for this, there is a kind of
comfort in finally facing the truth about oneself. That's what happens in every one of Flannery O'Connor's stories. In a moment of extremity, a character, usually a self-satisfied, self-sufficient character, finally comes to see the truth of her situation. She is accountable to a great God who is the source of all. She inhabits mysteries that are too great for her, and for the first time there is hope, even if
she doesn't understand it yet. In O'Connor's unique vision, the physical world, even at its seediest and ugliest, is a place where Grace still does its work. In fact, it is exactly the place where Grace does its work. Truth tells itself here, no matter how loud it has to shout. Brad Gooch has pointed out that the phrase like something out of Flannery O'Connor has entered the vernacular as a kind of shorthand to describe a funny, dark, askew moment.
He might have added that the phrase is also used to describe a wide range of phenomena around the edges of American culture, from religious manias to violent crimes to family dysfunction and reality TV freakishness of every stripe. That phrase, like something out of Flannery O'Connor, is a wave of the hand and a wink that says, we already know what to think about this person, about this situation, don't we?
We already know what to think about two seed in the spirit Predestinarian Baptists in trailer park criminals and Florida man. Just as we already know what to think about serial killers and backwater racists and ignorant Bible salesmen who stump from country to country town. Except that in O'Connor's fiction, it turns out that we don't know what to think about them after all. Her fanatics and freaks can never
safely be ignored or dismissed, for they have. The unsettling habit of telling the truth in A Good Man is hard to find. The misfit understands things about Jesus that the grandmother never has. The freak show hermaphrodite in a temple of the Holy Ghost, has a grasp on theological truths that have eluded the good Catholics in the story. Wise bloods Hazel motes may or may not be crazy in the head, but his heart pumps a wise blood that finally brings him back to the ultimate truth that
he tries so strenuously to escape. In common usage, like something out of Flannery O'Connor is a license not to take a person or situation very seriously. But O'Connor did take her grotesque characters seriously. They seem to carry an invisible burden, she wrote. Their fanaticism is a reproach, not merely an eccentricity. When we gawk at O'Connor's characters and mock them, it is easy to assume that O'Connor must be mocking them too. We should be open to the possibility, however,
that O'Connor is mocking us. In the violent, buried Away, old Tarwater is a self-appointed prophet with a penchant for baptizing children without their parents or guardians approval. His nephew, the enlightened schoolteacher Raber, is convinced that the old man is insane. The reader is inclined to agree. O'Connor. Not so much. The modern reader will identify himself with the schoolteacher, she wrote, but it is the old man who speaks
for me. In Flannery O'Connor's body of work, there are as many kinds of misfit and maimed soul as there are stories the street preacher, the prostitute, the moonshiner, the serial killer, the hermaphrodite, the idiot, the bumpkin, the false prophet, the reluctant prophet, the refugee, the amputee. The con man. The monomaniac. The juvenile delinquent. Perhaps the phrase like something out of Flannery O'Connor is so widely applicable because there is such a wide range of characters in her fiction.
But there is one other character type that appears in O'Connor's short stories at least as often as The Freak. Most of her stories involve a figure who is convinced that he or she already knows what to think, whose certainty and self-righteousness have been a shield against the looming reality of sin and judgment and redemption. Joy Halga, the one legged philosopher in good country people. Julian, the social
justice warrior. And everything that rises must converge. Asbury, the invalid and failed artist and the enduring chill throughout O'Connor's body of work. The complacent and self-reliant are confronted with a choice they can clutch at their own righteousness like a drowning man clutching at a cinder block. Or they can let it go, admit that they have been fools, and so enter into life. So the central figure in O'Connor's fiction, as it turns out, is neither the freak
nor the fanatic, nor the felon, but the Pharisee. If we cannot see ourselves in the lunatics and deviants, surely we can see ourselves in the upright and the self-assured, who turn out to be so wrong about themselves and the people around them. Which is to say, we have all been one way or another, like something out of
Flannery O'Connor. Where does vision like that come from? I wouldn't say it came from her physical suffering, but I will say that her physical suffering and its attendant limitations sharpened and disciplined her vision and her work. She wrote, I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense, sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. To the end of her short life.
O'Connor was stewarding her energy so that she could devote what little she had to writing. Two weeks before she died, she sent a letter to pen pal Janet McKane in which she reproduced the prayer to Saint Raphael that she prayed every day. O Raphael, lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us. Raphael, angel of happy meeting. Lead us by the hand toward those that we are looking for. May all our movements be guided by your light and transfigured with your joy.
Angel Guide of Tobias. Lay the request we now address to you at the feet of him on whose unveiled face you are privileged to gaze. Lonely and tired, crushed by the separations and sorrows of life. We feel the need of calling you, and of pleading for the protection of your wings, so that we may not be as strangers in the province of joy, all ignorant of the concerns of our country. Remember the weak, you who are strong,
you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder. And a land that is always peaceful, always serene and bright, with the resplendent glory of God. It's an amazing thing to think about this woman who made a name for herself with stories of earthly terror and grotesquerie, meditating every day on the province of joy, preparing herself lest she be ignorant of the concerns of her true country. All
that darkness was in the service of eternal brightness. All that violence was in the service of peace and serenity. And finally, at the age of 39, the writer whose every story was a thunderclap took her place beyond the region of thunder. There won't be any biographies written of me, O'Connor wrote, because for only one reason lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
Her life wasn't as uneventful as all that, but it was true that her life was mostly free of the drama and self-indulgence and entanglements that have made for more exciting copy in some of her peers biographies. There were no blow ups or meltdowns or crack ups or addictions in Flannery O'Connor's life. There was mostly a quiet attention to the work at hand, and a willingness to settle in and pay attention, to look, to listen until truth tells itself, no matter how loud it has to shout.
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