Art for People with Hope
happy birthday, Flannery
[Image: “Peahen and hibiscus,” Bian Lu, 14th c., Chinese, courtesy of the Met Collection’s Open Access gallery, public domain]
This essay was originally given as a talk at St. Mary’s parish in Iowa City, where Flannery O’Connor attended Mass when she was studying for her MFA in creative writing. This version has been lightly edited from the original.
To stare down our own limitations requires courage. The more our limitations fall into the category not of charming and self-exploitable ‘vulnerabilities’ but of raw, unvarnished, ugly flaws, the more courage is going to be required.
The minute we hear a statement like that, most of us tend to do one of two things. Either we start digging around down inside our souls with something sharp, something like a scalpel or maybe just a pen nib, looking for the thing in us that corresponds exactly to that truth we’ve just heard about. Or else we start laying down thick, sticky concrete and slapping bricks into it, building up some kind of defense against finding that very truth, against hearing anything even so much as resonant with its echo.
Instead, let’s imagine ourselves in another life. Here we are in Iowa City, one of the major pilgrimage sites of the American literary community, so it might not be too hard to imagine that you are a writer. But imagine knowing deep down that you are not just any writer, but the struggling kind of literary artist obsessed with metaphors for sight and clarity and revelation, whose whole work, integrity, and even identity depends on a claim to clear vision. Imagine knowing deep down all the while you make this claim, knowing, in the depths of your soul, that you are suffering from a profound spiritual astigmatism. You might be tempted to shout out, to whoever you think blinded you—maybe your mother, maybe your father, maybe your God—to shout out, as Flannery O’Connor’s monstrous double Asbury Fox shouts in his letter in her story “The Enduring Chill,” “I have no imagination. I have no talent. I can’t create. I have nothing but the desire for these things. Why didn’t you kill that too? ... Why did you pinion me?”
To give yourself plausible deniability, you might want to shout this out in the mouth of a fictional character you yourself created. You might want to shout it out in a way that puts an ironic veil over it, a way that makes it sound funny, even though it is stealing your sleep at night, even though it is running you through every day like a nail to the palm, a thorn to the brow, a lance to the ribs. You might want to shout it out because it is stealing your sleep and running you through. You might be tempted to demand answers, like Jacob wrestling the angel, saying I will not let you go until you bless me: Why, God, why would you give me such a desire to do the thing that seems to be just what you want of me, just what you made me for, the one thing that I could do that would be most in Your service, the one thing that would make the fullest use of all my gifts and all my powers—and then position me in the exact way that seems to make that service the most impossible?
Something like this really does seem to have been Flannery O’Connor’s cri de coeur toward the end of her life. As is implicitly unfolded in her last, unfinished work, Why Do The Heathen Rage?, O’Connor seemed to be increasingly drawn toward the project of writing about larger moments and movements, matters of national importance, at the precise moment when her own circle of immediate experience was shrinking intolerably due to illness.
In trying to connect O’Connor’s legacy in art and life with the spiritual needs of our time, I have to stare down not only her limitations but mine as well. For I have to own up front that in my own efforts as a fiction writer O’Connor has been often a model and sometimes an obstacle and always, inevitably, a kind of spiritual mother—or at least the kind of impressive older sister you envy and question, admire and oppose and define yourself in reference to.
Commentators who reduce O’Connor to her failings also tend to leave out the vitality and reality of the good that was also in her soul. They tend to forget that spiritual struggle is real struggle. The battles we win in the soul are real victories with real consequences. The ones we lose there are just as real, and they can lead to real destruction. As O’Connor herself once observed, “People without hope not only don’t write novels, they don’t read them.” Judging by the reading trends alone, and maybe others, America is at present behaving like a country without hope.
Can O’Connor nudge us in a better direction? I don’t necessarily intend to make a case for that one way or the other. But here in this place, where a good deal of her adult conscience was formed, I have good hope of getting closer to the heart of who she was. Here at St. Mary’s, O’Connor first learned that she did not have to write as though for the St. Anthony Messenger in order to be a good Catholic and a good writer. Here in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is where she learned to say: “Because I am a Catholic, I cannot afford to be less than an artist.” Here, she came to know that she could live with no illusions. She would have to, and she did, face herself as she was. Can we find the courage in ourselves to do the same?
In bringing O’Connor’s spiritual legacy into focus, a legacy of art for people with hope, I want to lean on two posthumously published texts of hers, the Prayer Journal written when she was in her early twenties, and Why Do The Heathen Rage?, the unfinished novel whose early pages she was exploring on and off and mining for story ideas up until the time of her death from lupus when she was thirty-nine. Precisely because they were never meant for public eyes, these papers bring us closer to the unmasked or unveiled reality of who O’Connor was, what she wanted, and where she felt God moving in her life. Though not everyone in this room may actually be a literary writer, I hope these texts will help us understand not only who O’Connor was but what it is all writers do in their unique vocations, the spiritual work all humans are called to take up in this world, and how the project of telling stories to ourselves and to each other is inseparably bound up with both of these realities.
As I’ve already shared, this effort gets inevitably into personal territory for me. At the age of seventeen, too young yet to realize how you can get yourself in a lot of trouble imitating the quirks of the saints and forgetting about their virtues, and having read nothing of hers but the title story of her collection “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” you might say I chased Flannery up here to Iowa City. Like her, I was born in the Deep South and raised in the Catholic faith. Like her, I knew from a young age that I was called to write. And when I was admitted to the two-week summer high schoolers program, the Young Writers’ Studio, I was, as she described herself in a letter to Caroline Gordon, “right young and very ignorant. .... I thought what I was doing [in writing] was mighty powerful (it wasn’t even intelligible at that point) and liable to corrupt anybody that read it and me too.” One place where we differed, among others, was in our sense of where we needed to be when and why. In my two short weeks here, I thought I felt and saw enough to make me believe that the writing life wasn’t ever going to be for me. But a few years later, when I discovered O’Connor’s letters and essays, she gently challenged those perceptions and helped me to learn one of the first and most important lessons any writer has to: The real work of writing begins not on the surface but in the heart. The real work is the hard excavation of honesty, the refusal of facile and crowd-pleasing glibness, the renunciation of easy exits in favor of the elusive but transformative truth. She set me free from the initial clutches of mimetic desire in the writing life—sort of. She set me free, in the moment when that freedom was most important and would gain me the most space to work, from the desire to copy anyone but her. But remember, I was “right young and very ignorant.” I hadn’t yet learned about the kinds of messes we can get ourselves into when we copy the saints’ foibles instead of their virtues.
In the same time period, her art overturned other and at least equally important illusions. My first encounter with her short story “Revelation” was exactly the kind of shock to the system that O’Connor says aesthetic realism should be. Flannery first opened my eyes to the reality of how racial prejudice within a soul really looks and works. Her ability to do this was rooted in her lifelong meditation on the nature and workings of fictional art and the nature and dignity of the human person. It was rooted in her craft training and in her Catholic faith.
In her own efforts to achieve a greater vision, and in her efforts to carve a sui generis path for a woman writer of her time, Flannery may have had the benefit of this intellectual foundation, but she still had to fly more or less solo. Her childhood environment didn’t give her a lot of help, beyond the purely practical support her mother would later offer her in her illness. According to her biographer Brad Gooch, Flannery as an undergraduate chose to major in social science instead of English. This was to avoid the well-intentioned but ultimately soul-deforming ministrations of a certain gentlemanly old professor. Like other early teachers of hers, this professor wanted to turn her wild comic genius into some pallid ornamental hothouse orchid, genteel and conformist. Flannery to her credit was having none of it. But the reading she then had to do for her social science major, was full of logical positivism, materialism, and flattening naturalism. All this theory vexed and complicated rather than clearing or lighting up her sense of her intellectual way. It was as if the spirit of the age threw tar in her path, setting her up to slip and fall.
When she came here to Iowa City in 1945, she started out as a student in the journalism program. She had been a cartoonist for her college paper, and perhaps at one point she thought of the cartoonist’s art as a possible lifelong outlet for the divine irony that constantly burst out of her. But within three weeks of that fall semester’s start, she had already walked into the office of Paul Engle, then director of the Writers’ Workshop. She spoke to him in such a thick Georgia drawl he couldn’t understand her. (I had similar experiences when I was up here for the first time at seventeen. I didn’t always sound nonregional.) Frustrated, Engle asked her to write down what she’d said on a pad of paper. So she wrote: “My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writers’ Workshop?”
I wonder if we can find anything like the courage it took O’Connor to walk into that office, expecting to be misunderstood. To change tracks so many times, until she found the one that was right for her. I wonder if we can find the courage it took to sit in front of a notebook and write down the following: [quote] “About hope, I am somewhat at a loss. It is so easy to say I hope to—the tongue slides over it. I think perhaps hope can only be realized by contrasting it with despair. And I am too lazy to despair.” From here she goes on to consider the materialist theoretical vision of the interior life, which has always led her into despondency: [quote] “My mind is in a little box, dear God, down inside other boxes. There is very little air inside my box.” In this line we get a feel for what the Psalmist means by saying the heart is deceitful above all things: though O’Connor never uses these words, she evidently feels the slipperiness of all the language we use to articulate and define and communicate ourselves, the inevitable filtering and distortion that comes in when we have to borrow other people’s language to do it. She is so much at a loss that she will change horses in the middle of the stream, saying “Dear God, please give me as much air as it is not presumptuous to ask for. Please let some light shine around all the things around me so that I can what it amounts to I suppose is be selfish.” She had the courage of the realist to distrust her steps on a path when she knew there was tar underfoot.
It's a bad idea to canonize people prematurely. It’s my private opinion that Flannery herself would have been equally amused and annoyed by pictures of her own head enhaloed by peacock feathers in the light of a soft-focus glow. But if the long process we undertake in the Church’s eventual wisdom one day sorts and sifts her into the realm of the blessed, I wonder if she will not only be added to the growing list of patron saints of writers, but also be named a patron saint of self-knowledge.
In her Prayer Journal from her MFA years, she writes of her desire to integrate her knowledge of the things of God with her considerable imagination, wit, and talent through the medium of love. One problem she faced in all this was that, to her mind, hell seemed more visible and plausible than heaven. She writes, “I don’t want to fear to be out, I want to love to be in ... It is a matter of the gift of grace. Help me to feel that I will give up every earthly thing for this.” And in short order, that there be no confusion, she adds, “I do not mean becoming a nun.”
This part of her self-perception would change, sort of. Later in her letters, O’Connor would say that she thought the modern world was so strung out that some people probably would have to lay down their lives for it and devote their whole energies to healing it, in a way that would call them to celibacy. The gift of celibacy goes beyond just the ordinary chastity of fidelity, ordinary faithfulness to a single partner. Celibacy encompasses a full gift of self to God by renouncing any sexual relationship and saving all energy for His service. For the mature Flannery, she felt that the circumstances of her illness and her isolation on the family farm at Andalusia had given her just such a vocation whether she wanted it or not. From hints she drops in the journal and the letters, we know she did not particularly want it. She would have loved to fall in love and marry. She knew the state of her health put her in no position to do this. At no time did she feel any real draw to the cloister, to, as she put it in a letter, “disappear and never be heard from again,” to be pulled into that particular shape by the demands of a rule of prayer and community life. But, without using this language for it, she did eventually feel a sort of vocational pull to the very life she lived: a life Catherine de Hueck Doherty might have called a poustinia, a bare-bones but hospitable dwelling in a desert place, a place of retirement from the distractions of the outside world, to which people from that outside world might desire to make pilgrimage and to rest and communicate with a person living that set-apart life. Through letters and visits, O’Connor made of Milledgeville her own poustinia, a sort of implicit answer to the radical communitarianism of the inhabitants at the nearby Koinionia Farm.
In Why Do The Heathen Rage?, O’Connor implicitly critiques enchanted-enclosure communitarianism by having her cranky authorial scout Walter Tilman take potshots at Friendship Farm, a thinly veiled Koinionia. But she also tips her hand a bit to show some imaginative sympathy for Friendship Farm’s life and mindset. She does so through the character of Oona Gibbs, Walter’s correspondent, who is set up by the plot structure as a shatterer of Walter’s misapprehensions. Oona’s function in the sketchy and incomplete plot is as a revelator, an overturner of illusions and a spur to communion. She is an outline, to be sure, but the outline is tremendously indicative of certain authorial preoccupations. Oona’s manifesto, given in quoted interior monologue, does not belong to the mature O’Connor but could perhaps have belonged to the writer of the Prayer Journal: “I exist. Nothing matters but absolute honesty. I will look for the absolute core of truth in every human being I meet. I will not be frightened. There is nothing to be frightened of.” Reminiscent of the Journal, too, is O’Connor’s description of Oona’s appearance: “Nothing distinguished her face but its look of not taking in enough air.”
In the same sketched-out scene Oona hovers over her mother, whose age and ailments reflect O’Connor at the end of her life, “trying to goad her [the mother] into being herself.” Here we have an astonishing image of the boxed-in interior life, the divided soul: the younger self standing over the older self trying to remind her of who she once was, who she could have been, the way an idealistic daughter might berate a well-meaning but wrongheaded mother. A blessing and a torment. The implied author, holding hands with the effaced narrator, stands to one side watching, appalled and transfixed. It puts me in mind of St. Teresa of Avila’s image for the soul that has spent too long looking at itself: St Teresa says that soul will be paralyzed, “like a bird with broken wings.” At this late stage of life, with the clarity of the end pressing down on her, O’Connor knew that the isolation that had once served her art’s gestation and birth had come to be a hindrance to its growth and development. At the same time, she was too honest to pretend to have received an illumination that she had not. Perhaps she had prayed for it—in later life she was extremely reticent about her prayer life—but from the art, we can infer that she longed for it and that it had not yet come.
O’Connor knew that, as the poet Richard Wilbur later put it, “love calls us to the things of this world.” She also knew that most of what we experience here on earth is filtered to us through the distorted lenses of self-interest, false self-images, and various kinds of self-referential desires. To win through to the true self is an achievement we can by no means take for granted. She did not perhaps fully have in view what we would find if we did win through to the true self, or why it might matter for us to do so. Yet her own Catholic tradition would have provided the resources for this, in the very same philosophy of Jacques Maritain from which O’Connor drew so much knowledge about the pursuit of art. That same personalist philosophy holds, with the authentic tradition down the ages, what St. Teresa of Avila articulates about the reality of the soul in The Way of Perfection: that it is like a tar-covered crystal. That is, good but obscured. Good but damaged. In need of cleansing. Not in need of cleansing away, or totally erasing, a sense we could more easily take away from Luther’s famous image of snow-covered dung. I wonder how intentional this literary inversion could have been on the part of St. Teresa, who—not unlike O’Connor—famously and constantly and a little disingenuously protested that she was an uneducated woman. But sparkling or uneasily glistening, we are no doubt creatures of the earth, with something a little muddy or dusty inevitably clinging to us. O’Connor would even famously say that if you scorn yourself getting dusty, you shouldn’t write fiction, because it isn’t a grand enough job for you. Still her intuitive sense of life, like every student of American literature’s, was shadowed to some extent by Puritan lines of influence on religious thought in America, which Harold Bloom famously argued, have tended to be Gnostic rather than orthodoxly Christian. Gnosticism tends to make us view ourselves as dung and nature itself as inherently disgusting—a line of thought that, as is revealed in Richard Wilbur’s poem “Shame,” tends to make people either try to vanish from view totally or else slip into radical exposure and debauched self-destruction.
All this would have been lurking already in the psyche of the young writer of the Prayer Journal. Her education had taken her all the way through the language of academic psychology, at the height of the now discredited Freudian influence, and out the other side. Her implicit struggle with this language is not that it goes too deep into the person but that it does not go deep enough: at best, she experiences that language as playing around in the muddy depths without ever bringing the truth at the heart to light. And she also had the intuitive sense, ineluctable in the very concept of sainthood and the idea of the Eucharist, that at the heart of each of us there lies—or at least there is suitable room for—something splendid, immortal, something that endlessly refracts and magnifies the light. We cannot get rid of that light, God’s constant presence in us and to us and for us. We can only turn away from it—or toward it.
But where is that light in Why Do The Heathen Rage? It isn’t very much in evidence in either of the monstrous doubles, Walter Tilman and Oona Gibbs, who each express a side of the worst that Flannery could find in her own divided soul—the blind would-be visionary, the ineffectual would-be activist. As she unsparingly depicts them both, O’Connor is working out the logical conclusions of incomplete and never-to-be-realized tendencies in herself. Perhaps it is in the mother, who after a lifetime of denying God now clings desperately to the idea of Heaven as she dies, saying over and over, “I want my reward. I want it like a child wants candy. I want it. I want it.” This too might be one of the voices of O’Connor’s polyphonic soul, but one that she might also see as lacking something, the same thing she felt she lacked in the Prayer Journal: a feeling of wanting God for his own sake and not for hers. The images of her last stories, also carved from the draft of her novel, bear this out: The Christ in “Parker’s Back” reflects the image of God in him, but an image that is invisible to his own eyes, inaccessible to him, present in ways that only bring him pain. The image of God in the black souls leaping to Paradise in Revelation is distant and transcendent to Ruby Turpin, available only at a distance; Ruby remains firmly on the ground, unable to participate in the leaping communion of joy, even as one of the staid and sedate souls who proceed calmly upward only to find that “even their virtues were being burned away.”
In the novel draft, by contrast, we get the uneasy sense that it is not only Walter’s pride of intellect but also Oona’s brash confidence in the cleanness of the heart that will be knocked into the dust of their meeting, which never actually takes place.
Yet as we watch her put on and taking off all of these fictional masks, I think we can at least imagine an O’Connor who comes to see, implicitly, that some of these under-realized possible versions of herself, it is a mercy that they are under-realized. There are lines she might have crossed, given the opportunity, that she never crosses; acts she does not commit and therefore does not have to confess. Never has she tried to deceive herself or anyone else as to who she is. Never, in her fiction, has she made a mockery of a black character, the way Walter is tempted into doing by Oona’s provocations.[1] Unlike Walter, she has respected the masks that she knows real black people wear in her presence, and she has not pretended to an ability to see behind them which she does not possess. Never, in fiction or in life, has she fallen into the mimetic traps of young women’s self-referential lives in the city, the way Oona does; she has always had the confidence to be herself rather than to copy others.
True, she did not completely escape a far more destructive mimesis. She lived among and was wounded by the legacy of racism, whose social harms made her less able to write black characters or to imagine social realities that she perhaps hoped for but that she knew did not reflect the context she saw around her. Scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson, in her commentary on Why Do The Heathen Rage?, gently faults O’Connor for not bringing those injustices into clearer focus, and I can hardly disagree. But along with Wilson, I also want to lift up the glimmers of hope O’Connor’s work nevertheless contains.
In “The Enduring Chill,” the story from whose rib O’Connor made the first draft of Why Do The Heathen Rage?, we find one such glimmer of hope. Here is another utterance she might have made her own, this time in the mouth of Randall, one of the black dairy men who Asbury is trying to co-opt into his own facile and false story of premature reconciliation and redemption without full rendering of justice. Both black characters staunchly refuse this instrumentalization, this repurposing of their own choices to serve Asbury’s self-justifying ends. When one of them, Morgan, thinking they are out of Asbury’s earshot, turns to the other, Randall, to ask him why he puts up with Asbury’s nonsense, Randall gives an unmasked and unforgettable answer that could almost have come out of a line from Hopkins and is at the same time wholly and unmistakably his own: “What he do is him. What I do is me.”
And while this scene too ends in a kind of farcical flinch away from seriousness—Randall flippantly suggests that Asbury is the way he is because he wasn’t punished often enough as a child—the moment of possible communion, at least possible mutual understanding, has been glimpsed. For a fleeting moment she has achieved the catharsis of aesthetic justice. She has paid the kind of attention that might lead another person to the action her health made it impossible for her to take. And this catharsis we must count among her legacy’s difficult graces.
The kind of truth fiction alone can tell goes beyond the mere facts of any matter to cut to the heart. To have integrity as a fiction writer is to refuse the commonplace, simplistic, and boilerplate versions of our characters’ stories. It is to resist the commercial, political, and academic instrumentalizations of narrative that tear our gaze away from this context, here, now. It is to deny forces that seek to reinterpret people and events through lenses that do not refine or clarify but, rather, blur and equivocate. The writer of integrity rejects the lure of ideology in favor of refractory, concrete, complex honesty about things as they are, not as we would have them be.
Integrity is everywhere in Why Do The Heathen Rage?, as O’Connor rages at herself for not being able to see and to feel as her intellect and her conscience tell her she should. Yet her art loosened the constraints she felt daily life laid on her and provided her with a means of imagining better than she could see or feel. As scholar Angela Alaimo O’Donnell observes in her study of race in O’Connor, Radical Ambivalence,
What [O’Connor’s] art afforded her … through the twin agencies of sympathetic imagination and fictive discourse, was a means of pushing back against the prejudices she had been privy to her whole life and had, to an extent, internalized. ... When she makes fun of racists ... in her stories, she is making fun of herself. ... When she makes fun of liberals who want to ingratiate themselves with black people ... she is making fun of herself. And ... when she depicts black people, who may seem on the surface to be the other, she is depicting some aspect of herself.
O’Donnell goes on to describe how O’Connor’s fiction consistently squints at, and wonders about, and sketches out, and interrogates a reimagining of relationship between races in America. In every effort O’Connor would depict the truth as she observed it, not as her conscience would have wished to make it. She would not pretend away the harsh present in false hopes that so doing might help enact a sweeter future. So in her fiction we perceive what was in fact the case at the time: the social reality of segregation trying to eclipse the spiritual reality of equal dignity, and the spiritual reality irrepressibly breaking through in subtle ways. She seems badly to have wanted to show the moment when everything that rises also converges, but she could not depict what she had never seen.
At the end of “The Enduring Chill,” the visiting priest all but roars at Asbury, “The Holy Ghost will not come until you see yourself as you are.” With this words he begins the process that undeceives Asbury about his own pretensions. But, true to the priest’s prophecy, the Holy Ghost does not come until Asbury sees that the death-in-life he has clung to and insisted upon and all but summoned is not real but illusion. The deeper reality is resurrection. The deeper reality is that grace is present in every moment, and only the resistance of our will blocks its way.
For O’Connor the spiritual was the most real thing in life, and the most urgent work not only of the writer but of any human was to learn to see. That is not to say that the material realm lacked reality or importance for her but that no matter how immediate, urgent, tangible, and concrete any matter might be to us, the soul’s needs would always be more immediate, more urgent, more tangible, more concrete. The soul and the body could not be treated as two separate realities with separate sets of concerns, because to do this would be a kind of anti-incarnational fragmentation. And when we talk of O’Connor’s art as incarnational this is no idle platitude. The grace she begged for, she knew would only come as long as she lived in the body and held on: not to the imaginary deaths her cowardice tried to impose on her through fear, but to the one and only real story God was asking her to live, the story that included the fullest practice of her art and her prayer and her attempts to love others in real time and her failures in all three endeavors and her repentance and her determination to get up again and go on until she no longer could.
If the grace in O’Connor’s work is often made manifest only in the most extreme moments, can we really say that our own tendency to fall asleep is not equally in need of waking up? Yet in our time we also have to ask: Is it necessarily a sign of being asleep if we choose to commit to living out our own poustinia, in fidelity, right where we already happen to be? To find not our beach but our desert?
O’Connor ended her prayer journal on the despondent note: “There is nothing more to say of me.” But as Bill Sessions observes in the journal’s foreword, this was far from true. Discouragement did not get the better of her in the end, and Sessions at least believes that her “outlandish hope ... for total commitment to God” was rewarded. Opinions might vary. At least, we can say this much. As a writer, as a person, she was so much herself that her legacy demands of us, no matter who we are, that we take a hard look at ourselves and see both our real distortions and faults and our real virtues and qualities. O’Connor may not have achieved the full moral transformation she hoped for by the end of her life. She may never have learned to see or to say what she wanted to. But she never gave up the openness, the hope, that one day she would wake up to the vision of her own revelation.
We can’t afford to commit ourselves to the hands of God with any less trust. If we can say “By your fruits you shall know them,” then we can know O’Connor by the surges of new creativity, renewed desire for justice, and conversion of heart for which her art has given the occasion. Whether we are writers or not, whether we are believers or not, we could do worse than to live so that one day others might have reason to say the same of us.
[1] For very much of this position I am indebted to Jessica Hooten Wilson’s scholarly commentary in her recent re-presentation of O’Connor’s last manuscripts and to Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s readings in her own book Radical Ambivalence, though the particular formulation of the arguments is my own.
I've only read Wiseblood and "A Good Man is Hard to Find", but I'd really like to know more about Flannery O'Connor's interior life. Would you recommend anything besides Flannery's Prayer Journal to learn more about her inner life?