The Weekly Sage hopes to regularly bring brief profiles of key contributors to thought and faith before a Christian audience for historical education and awareness of valuable resources.

Flannery O’Connor

–          “There was something he was searching for, something he felt he must have, some last significant culminating experience that he must make for himself before he died – make for himself out of his own intelligence. He had always relied on himself and had never been a sniveler after the ineffable.”[1]

–          “The best American fiction has always been regional. The ascendancy passed roughly from New England to the Midwest to the South; it has passed to and stayed longest wherever there has been a shared past, a sense of alikeness, and the possibility of reading a small history in a universal light. In these things the South still has a degree of advantage. It is a slight degree and getting slighter, but it is a degree of kind as well as of intensity, and it is enough to feed great literature if our people – whether they be newcomers or have roots here – are enough aware of it to foster its growth in themselves.

Every serious writer will put his finger on it in a slightly different spot but in the same region of sensitivity. When Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsmen asked him why there were so many good Southern writers and he said, ‘Because we lost the War.’ He didn’t mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence – as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of our country.

Not every lost war would have this effect on every society, but we were doubly blessed, not only in our Fall, but in having a means to interpret it. Behind our own history, deepening it at every point, has been another history. Mencken called the South the Bible Belt, in scorn and thus in incredible innocence.

In the South we have, in however attenuated a form, a vision of Moses’ face as he pulverized our idols. This knowledge is what makes the Georgia writer different from the writer from Hollywood or New York. It is the knowledge that the novelist finds in his community. When he ceases to find it there, he will cease to write, or at least he will cease to write anything enduring. The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”[2]

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) was an American writer, perhaps best known for her short stories, but also the creator of excellent novels and essays. As the Weekly Sage has so far highlighted two “religious” modern political philosophers, O’Connor ranks as the first strong Christian to be brought before the Bereans audience in this column. While many are likely familiar with her name, a better understanding of what she wrote, and the faith behind her work, may be valuable.

Born in Georgia, where she spent her childhood, O’Connor lost her father to lupus at the age of 13. Despite this personal trauma, she pursued academic achievement vigorously, graduating from college in three years and receiving admission into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. This group of writers was an incredible assembly of creative scholars, including such leading figures as Southern agrarian writer John Crowe Ransom. In this atmosphere, O’Connor flourished, graduating in 1947 with the skills and shaping necessary to apply her voice with special impact.

By 1952, at the age of 27, she had been diagnosed with lupus, the same disease to which her father succumbed. Nevertheless, this revelation inaugurated, rather than ending, O’Connor’s most prolific and heralded period of written work. In her remaining twelve years of life, she published two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and two collections of short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories and Everything That Rises Must Converge, the latter of which was published posthumously.

No doubt her robust Catholic faith empowered O’Connor to thrive through her trials. This faith permeates her writing in ways that appear uniquely powerful and meaningful among modern writers. Her greatest strength may be her ability to portray characters as flawed, struggling with the temptations and tragedies of their environment as well as the turmoil and trauma they have cultivated in their souls. O’Connor’s power of description and illumination are also incredible; the sneers and leers, stares and glares, shirts and birds, sleeves and trees that O’Connor describes all stand out sharply in the reader’s mind. The result was an appropriate and impactful renown, as her posthumously assembled Complete Stories received the National Book Award for Fiction in the United States in 1972.

Nevertheless, despite being well-known, O’Connor lived quietly on her family farm, steadily living out and growing in her faith and expressing her creative vision through God-given talents. As such, she was a decidedly excellent role model for a Christian sage. Her work repays perusal but enriches close study, as I can personally attest. I would unhesitatingly urge the Bereans community to dig into her writing as soon as possible.

Roger Scruton wrote of T.S. Eliot “He was a thorough traditionalist in his beliefs but an adventurous modernist in his art, holding artistic modernism and social traditionalism to be different facets of a common enterprise. Modernism in art was, for Eliot, an attempt to salvage and fortify a living artistic tradition in the face of the corruption and decay of popular culture.”[3] This description is equally true of Flannery O’Connor.

Embracing dialect, unconventional use of dialogue, religious questions, and stark symbolism, O’Connor’s work demonstrates a hand as skilled as any of the skeptical, cynical bohemians that most Americans read in literature classes and think of as American literary leaders. Yet, Flannery O’Connor maintained a humble, religious manner and hope that serve as a double blessing to her audience. Would that more of us achieved as full a use of our gifts, as meaningful an impact on society, as strong a personal faith, and as clear a reckoning with the Fall and the World as O’Connor did, for the glory of God and the spread of the knowledge of His true Word.

P.S. My apologies for the length of this week’s quotes. With a fiction writer, it takes a bit more length to get a full impression of the author, and the beneficial impact of even an acquaintance with O’Connor justified the lengthy excerpts as well, in my opinion.

–          “His mother knew at once what he meant: he meant he was going to have a nervous breakdown. She did not say a word. She did not say that this was precisely what she could have told him would happen. When people think they are smart – even when they are smart – there is nothing anybody else can say to make them see things straight, and with Asbury, the trouble was that in addition to being smart, he had an artistic temperament. She did not know where he had got it from because his father, who was a lawyer and businessman and farmer and politician all rolled into one, had certainly had his feet on the ground; and she had certainly always had hers on it. She had managed after he died to get the two of them through college and beyond; but she had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.

She could have told Asbury what would help him. She could have said, ‘If you would get our in the sunshine, or if you would work for a month in the dairy, you’d be a different person!’ but she knew exactly how that suggestion would be received.”[4]

–          “A blinding red-gold sun moved serenely from under a purple cloud. Below it the treeline was black against the crimson sky. It formed a brittle wall, standing as if it were the frail defense he had set up in his mind to protect him from what was coming. The boy fell back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling. His limbs that has been racked for so many weeks by fever and chill were numb now. The old life in him was exhausted. He awaited the coming of the new. It was then that he felt the beginning of a chill, a chill so peculiar, so light, that it was like a warm ripple across a deeper sea of cold. His breath came short. The fierce bird which through the years of his childhood and the days of his illness had been poised over his head, waiting mysteriously, appeared all at once to be in motion. Asbury blanched and the last film of illusion was torn as if by a whirlwind from his eyes. He saw that for the rest of his days, frail, racked, but enduring, he would live in the face of a purifying terror. A feeble cry, a last impossible protest escaped him. But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend.”[5]

Pondering a question on politics, culture, the Christian life, or really any topic? Submit it to mailbag.bereans@gmail.com! Your question may feature in Matt’s Marvelous Monday Mailbag.

[1] Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works, (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1988), 568.

[2] Ibid, 847-848.

[3] Roger Scruton, “T.S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor,” Intercollegiate Review, Fall 2003/Spring 2004, https://home.isi.org/t-s-eliot-conservative-mentor?utm_source=Intercollegiate+Studies+Institute+Subscribers&utm_campaign=7905d563de-Intercollegiate+Review+November+1+2018&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3ab42370fb-7905d563de-93314321&goal=0_3ab42370fb-7905d563de-93314321&mc_cid=7905d563de&mc_eid=4496a6ce90

[4] Ibid, 550.

[5] Ibid, 572.