Flannery O’Connor died more than six decades ago, on Aug. 3, 1964, of complications from lupus. She was only 39 years old. Today, March 25, would have been her 100th birthday, and it is an interesting thought experiment to consider what she would have thought, said or written if she had been granted further length of years. (The filmmaker and a chronicler of O’Connor’s life, Elizabeth Coffman, offered some options last week in America.)
Perhaps no author’s name has appeared in America more often than O’Connor’s over the years—unless you count the 300 different Jesuits named John Connolly—with the first mention coming in a 1956 short editorial. The editors denounced the jury of the National Book Award that year for naming John O’Hara’s Ten North Frederick the “most distinguished novel of 1955.” One wonders, they wrote, “what our English cousins are going to say,” and that with “finely artistic and decent books like Robert Penn Warren’s Band of Angels and Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find in the running, the selection of the O’Hara piece is doubly lamentable.”
In the seven decades since, everyone from archbishops to actors to eclectic Jesuits named Hootie has opined on O’Connor in America’s pages. Nothing compares, however, to the 1957 essay by Flannery O’Connor herself, “The Church and the Fiction Writer.” The prose in that essay is unmistakably hers, blunt and precise and, on occasion, more than a little sly. Her first line is a good example: “The question as to what effect Catholic dogma has on the fiction writer who is a Catholic cannot always be answered by pointing to the presence of Graham Greene among us.”
It should have been a great coup for the magazine, as O’Connor was already famous for Wise Blood and A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, but it wasn’t America’s finest hour. The magazine’s formidable literary editor, Harold C. Gardiner, S.J., decided to add a line of his own to the essay—and to delete a later paragraph. O’Connor, reported her Jesuit friend James “Hootie” McCown, was “furious.”
(In Father Gardiner’s defense, if editors had to pay obeisance to every author who was furious at being edited, no magazine anywhere would publish anything ever.)
When her short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge came out in 1965, not long after O’Connor’s death, reviewer William B. Hill, S.J., was a bit taken aback. “It is a grim collection, representative of Miss O’Connor’s intense awareness of the tragic,” he wrote. “The introduction by Robert Fitzgerald is a glowing tribute to a woman whose Catholic life was much more optimistic than her fiction.” O’Connor wouldn’t necessarily have disagreed; she once described her stories as being about “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”
Around the same time, the English professor Albert Griffith wrote in America that “in the dozen or so years of her brief career, Flannery O’Connor’s literary existence seemed predicated on two accidents of her birth: she was a Southerner and she was a Catholic.” (Pat Conroy shakes his head in recognition.) However, with the publication of Everything That Rises Must Converge, Griffith wrote, “There is some indication that the reviewers this time are not letting the two great factors of region and religion completely obfuscate the central critical problem: what was the great secret of her startling originality? With the brief official canon of her work now apparently complete, it has become easier to recognize the uniqueness of her total vision and to see that no other author, Southern or Catholic, antecedent or contemporary, has ever written quite like Flannery O’Connor.”
In a 1979 review for America of Sally Fitzgerald’s collection of O’Connor’s letters, The Habit of Being, John R. May commented on what O’Connor’s correspondence revealed about her faith. “Critics and readers who have tended to categorize O’Connor as a ‘traditional’ Catholic will have to revise their opinions in the light of these letters; whereas her faith was both catholic and orthodox for the times, its orthodoxy was that of the great theological minds that made the Second Vatican Council possible,” May wrote. “Her Catholicism, moreover, was decidedly progressive and responsibly informed.”
O’Connor didn’t have a lot of illusions about the church. In a 1958 letter to Cecil Dawkins found in that volume, O’Connor wrote that “It’s our business to try to change the external faults of the church—the vulgarity, the lack of scholarship, the lack of intellectual honesty—wherever we find them and however we can.” In another letter, praising the late Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan of Atlanta, she admitted that he exceeded her expectations: “Usually I think the church’s motto is The Wrong Man for the Job.”
Another archbishop, George Niederauer of San Francisco, contributed an essay to America in 2007 on “Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Vision.” Archbishop Niederauer, who had earned a doctorate in English literature from the University of Southern California as a young priest, noted that while “O’Connor was a supreme artist in fiction, she was also a particularly valuable witness to the Catholic Church and its leaders in this country….Hers is the testimony of a watchful, honest, faith-filled and eloquent layperson; and she had much to say about the experience of living the faith within the Catholic Church, especially in a society and a culture that had marginalized genuine Christian faith and practice.”
Last year, America published a review by Sophia Stid of Jessica Hooten Wilson’s Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Why Do the Heathen Rage?’ “With this close and careful excavation, Hooten Wilson teaches us how to read O’Connor, and how to let O’Connor read us,” Stid wrote. Referencing perhaps the most famous line O’Connor spoke, regarding the Eucharist—“Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it”—Stid added that Hooten Wilson “shows us both O’Connor’s sacramental vision and where it ultimately—and painfully—falls short. This way of reading invites us to see where we are falling short, where our own vision fails us: where we make the mistake of seeing symbols, instead of sacraments.”
When Flannery O’Connor died in 1964—during, Archbishop Niederauer pointed out, the headiest days of the Second Vatican Council— her obituary in The New York Times noted that “In Miss O’Connor's writing were qualities that attract and annoy many critics: she was steeped in Southern tradition, she had an individual view of her Christian faith and her fiction was often peopled by introspective children.”
A more poetic tribute appeared in America two months after O’Connor’s death, when Mary Agnes, O.S.C., (identified only as “Sister Agnes”; many thanks to Nick Ripatrazone for the sleuthing that led to proper identification of her and several other women religious who wrote poetry for America) published “In Memory of Flannery O’Connor.” Sister Agnes, a contemplative nun, had clearly read everything O’Connor ever wrote. Some lines from her poem:
In Christ her story spread.
she who was reticent where angels tread
knew how the peacocks that she farmed could weave
cerulean symbols, all those radiant eyes
rising together in divine surprise!
She’d see it. Then point out a silly head
and publish stories of their raucous cries,
knowing this side of heaven symbols leave
a limited perception. Now her eyes perceive
clearly in heaven what we darkly read.
•••
Our poetry selection for this week is three poems about Flannery O’Connor from Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s “Andalusian Hours.” Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Doris Grumbach, L.G.B.T. pioneer and fearless literary critic
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
