The publication of Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor has prompted a number of excellent essays about Flannery on the web (see Christopher Benfey here and Joseph O’Neill here ).
I was pleased to see Flannery treated with less than reverence by both writers. Stories like “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” have been lauded to the skies as among the very greatest short stories after written, but I’ve never cared for Flannery at all. Much of her art was no more than school girl snobbishness, making fun of people because they couldn’t pronounce “premiere” or “Evelyn Waugh.”[1]
Worst of all, from my point of view, O’Connor was a relentless Catholic apologist, grinding her morals into your face with a scrupulous lack of subtlety. “The Displaced Person” is a long, padded tale about a Polish DP who ends up working on a Georgia farm. Bringing a Catholic into the rural south allows O’Connor to exercise her limitless contempt for southern white trash almost, well, almost without limit. There’s a near-endless riff on the moronic Shortley clan, which has nothing to do with the story itself, but O’Connor knew that her Yankee readers enjoyed laughing at southern hicks almost as much as she did, so she pours it on.[2]
Reading “The Displaced Person,” one would never guess that a single Jew died in World War II. According to Flannery, it was Catholics who did all the suffering. “The Displaced Person” ostensibly tells the story of a Polish peasant brought by a “Father Flynn”[3] to work for Mrs. McIntyre, a genteel southern lady, a type detested by Flannery almost as much as she detested white trash.[4] The Polish fellow, Guizac, because he’s a Catholic, is a wonder worker: “Mr. Guizac could drive a tractor, use the rotary hay-baler, the silage cutter, the combine, the letz mill or any other machine she had on the place. He was an expert mechanic, a carpenter, and a mason.” To stay in the U.S., he offers to marry a black woman. Naturally, he gets run over by a tractor, Mr. Shortley, Mrs. McIntyre, and a black field hand all linked in the death.[5]
The real point of “The Displaced Person” occurs, not with the murder, which anyone could see coming, but when Father Flynn sees one of Mrs. McIntyre’s peacocks pop its tail. “Christ will come like that!” he said, in a loud, gay voice …” “The transfiguration,” he adds later. Mrs. McIntyre, needless to say, doesn’t get it.
Like Mrs. McIntyre, Flannery kept peacocks, something lots of land-poor southerners did back in the day, though none of the three writers I’ve cited at the beginning of this piece seem to be aware of this practice. White peacocks were particularly prized as being more “pure.” Flannery dislikes Mrs. McIntyre so much that she feels compelled to invent an elaborate backstory to explain why such an oafish creature would come to have such elegant birds. (Naturally, she doesn’t like them.)
O’Connor’s Catholic snobbishness is equally on display in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” a story about a dull as dishwater woman and her brilliant, mischievous twelve-year-old daughter, whom Flannery obviously based on her mother Regina and herself, forced to babysit two boy-crazy fourteen-year-olds, Susan and Joanne, enrolled at the Mount Scholastica Catholic School for Girls in the no-doubt vain hope of keeping them virgins for at least another year. At one point the two girls are serenaded by two would-be beaux, who sing “I’ve found a friend in Jesus,/ He’s everything to me,/ He’s the lily of the valley,/ He’s the One who’s set me free.” In response, the girls raise their “convent-trained voices” in a stirring rendition of “Tantum ergo Sacramentum/Veneremur Cernui;/ Et antiquam documentum/ Novo cedat ritui!”
Excuse me, but since these gals are too dumb to keep their legs together, how likely is it that they would master Latin hymns in, say, six months? And if you’re a boy-crazy teenager, how do you get boys to pay attention to you? By singing Latin hymns? No, Flannery just can’t resist the thought of those “convent-trained voices” raining condescension on those unwashed Protestant hicks, no matter how thoroughly it violates the characters of the two girls that she’s so painstakingly established.
Later, “the child” as Flannery refers to herself, has an intriguing encounter with the two girls. They’ve been to the state fair and they’ve been to the side show and they’ve seen something she wants to know about, a freak who is “a man and a woman both. It pulled up its dress and showed us. It had on a blue dress.” Later, the child imagines the freak working the crowd like a minister: “God done this to me and I praise him.” “Amen. Amen.” “He could strike you thisaway.” “Amen. Amen.” “But he has not.” “Amen.” “Raise yourself up. A temple of the Holy Ghost. You are God’s temple, don’t you know?”
If there was one thing Flannery wanted to know about, it was a man who was a man and a woman both. But after having brought us this close—and she does bring us quite close—she retreats, wrapping things up with a mass—“they were well into the Tantum ergo before her ugly thoughts stopped and she began to realize that she was in the presence of God.” Flannery shows off her Catholic vocabulary—“monstrance,” “surplice,” “censer”—and throws in a nun with periwinkle eyes who gives “the child” just the biggest hug.[6] Later, the setting sun “was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood.” So does that quite take care of everything? Does it make it okay to be a man and woman both?
Afterwords
It’s tough to criticize Flannery too much, because she bore the burden of a crippling, fatal disease—lupus—with a singular lack of complaint. According to what I’ve read, it was lupus that sent her back to Georgia, in her mid-twenties, to live with her mother and her chickens and peacocks. Perhaps if she had been healthy she would have been happy to stay up North and her fiction would have been quite different, but she was so proudly set in her ways that it’s easy to believe that it wouldn’t have been any different at all.
In the articles I’ve read she’s roundly criticized for conspiring with the then-violently Catholic Robert Lowell to expel some communists from Yaddo, the famous writer’s colony, back in the McCarthy days. I must say I don’t feel that sorry for the communists. If you’re going to advocate mass murder, torture, deceit, and oppression, well, you can expect some hard knocks. Intellectuals are always expelling someone for something, and this time at least the expulsions were justified.
Mr. Gooch, Flannery’s biographer, has a difficult time with Flannery’s obvious racism. She liked nigger jokes, and it’s very hard for me to believe that she could conceive of a black man making it to heaven. Her Catholic snobbery piled on top of her social and racial snobbery made her gate very strait indeed.
[1] How do you pronounce “Waugh”? I say “Waw,” a Yankee yawp that would no doubt leave Evelyn either helpless with laughter or speechless with rage.
[2] Did Flannery get paid by the word? She certainly writes as if she did.
[3] Although O’Connor’s ancestry was Irish, she doesn’t handle a brogue very well. Father Flynn says things like “Arrr, give them morrre then.”
[4] Flannery’s genteel women are all based on her mother, whom she loathed.
[5] In case we don’t get it, earlier Mrs. McIntyre tells Father Flynn “As far as I’m concerned, Christ was just another D.P.”
[6] O’Connor attended Catholic school as a child for a number of years, but she found real nuns quite tedious.
