"'Everywhere I go,' the novelist Flannery O'Connor said, 'I'm asked if I think universities stifle writers.' Frankly, she'd reply, 'they don't stifle enough of them.'"
So begins an article (not on-line) in the latest issue of Claremont Review of Books (Spring 2004) by Scott Walter entitled "The Strange Case of a Hillbilly Thomist." It's a review of a few books about O'Connor, including Flannery O'Connor: Spiritual Writings edited by Robert Ellsberg, and Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism by Henry T. Edmondson III.
A Southerner, O'Connor wrote two novels and several collections of stories; she was a political and theological conservative, and a Catholic.
Once, after arriving at a famous literary soiree at 8 pm -- an evening that included Mary McCarthy and Robert Lowell -- (she later said) that by 1 am "[I] hadn't opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say."
Then, at one point, conversation turned to the Eucharist and McCarthy said it was a lovely symbol. O'Connor spoke: "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it."
She was admired by the literati, even as she saw through them....
According to Walter:
"After Iowa [State University] she spent time at Yaddo, an artists' colony where she worked to finish her novel and socialized with other guests, including Alfred Kazin, Edward Maisel, and Robert Lowell. Her distrust of 'innerleckshuls' only deepened at Yaddo, as she observed that their self-indulgence in drugs, alcohol, and sex were matched with 'arty' phoniness and a cowardly conformity to secular leftism. Still, Yaddo allowed her to bear down on her novel [Wise Blood], and she gained her peers' respect. Kazin was impressed by her faith, 'so rare in America that it makes her stand out in every possible way. To me she is one of the few writers of that post-war generation who will live for a very long time.'"
Walter reports that O'Connor's views on education can be intuited from a letter of hers that reported on a conversation she had with the conservative philosopher and author of The Conservative Mind -- Russel Kirk:
"ME: I read old William Heard Kilpatrick died recently. John Dewey's dead too, isn't he?
KIRK: Yes, thank God. Gone to his reward. Ha ha.
ME: I hope there's children crawling all over him.
KIRK: Yes, I hope he's with the unbaptized enfants.
ME: No, they would be too innocent.
KIRK: Yes. Ha ha. With the baptized enfants."
She marked the following sentence in her copy of Kirk's book: "Abstract sentimentality ends in real brutality."
At one time O'Connor had written in an essay:
"If other ages felt less they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness....[But when] tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and the fumes of the gas chamber."
What's interesting about her stories is their reality; her curious eyes recommend a bracing approach to life. A few pages can be an ordeal.
Walter quotes T.S. Elliot as saying of her stories -- "[I] was quite horrified by those I read. She has certainly an uncanny talent of a high order but my nerves are just not strong enough to take much of a disturbance." Walter goes on: "She sets the stories in her backwoods South and peoples them, as she readily confessed, with 'freaks.'...Puzzlement over their meaning can be lessened by reading the essays and letters. The latter brim with her humor and her steely-eyed insights into literature, religion, and the modern world."
Walter adds:
"O'Connor devoted her life to her art, and she devoted her art to a battle against relativism and the nihilism she saw had spawned it. She celebrated both reason and faith as part of an objective approach to reality and railed against the twin falsehoods of sentimentality and pornography. She decried the former wherever she found it -- in subjectivist philosophy, in best-selling novels, and, as Giannone quotes, in the 'sugary slice of inspirational pie' common in the popular piety of her day."
Posted by Rick Penner at April 7, 2004 11:45 PM