U.S. Hunger on the Rise

 

KIM LAWTON, anchor: The Obama Administration launched a new initiative this week encouraging Americans to help fight hunger in their communities. The campaign is called  “United We Serve: Feed a Neighbor.” It urges people to donate money to local soup kitchens and food banks and also to volunteer their time and talents. The effort comes amid new government reports that hunger is on the rise in the US. Forty-nine million Americans struggled to put food on the table this past year—that’s an increase of 13 million—and a record number of Americans, 36 million, now receive food stamp assistance.

Joining me with more on all of this is Candy Hill, a senior vice president at Catholic Charities USA. Candy, it seems like this time of year, every year, we hear appeals from groups saying “Oh people are hungry, you need to give.” What makes this year different?

CANDY HILL, Catholic Charities: Well, we certainly are seeing such an increase, and new people that have never come to Catholic Charities for services before. Some of them are even our donors, and some of them are our former board members, so we see a real crisis in the number of people coming and who need assistance this year over the other years that we’ve been in business.

LAWTON: And there’s been some talk of food insecurity, I mean we’re not talking about starving in the streets, but we’re talking about people who are just having a harder time feeding their families?

post02b-ushungeronriseHILL: Yes, and I think when we talk about food insecurity we’re really talking about people not having food for three meals a day, so we find parents who are scrimping or not having a meal themselves in order to feed their children, and seniors who are making choices between whether they buy medicine or feed themselves, and in a country as great as this country we shouldn’t have people doing that.

LAWTON: And this is a function of the economy and all of the repercussions of that?

HILL: I think this is a perfect storm. We see the economy, and the people that we serve certainly were struggling before the collapse of Wall Street, but they were struggling first and will be the last to recover in this recovery.

LAWTON: And to what extent is it difficult in these tough economic times to make appeals for groups like yours, to say to people, give money to hungry people when individuals might be thinking, you know, I don’t know how I’m going to feed my own family?

HILL: Exactly. Well, what I would say as Americans we’ve always risen to the occasion, and this is one of these occasions. Our neighbors are suffering and we need to dig deep into our own pockets. The government has a role to play, all of us have a role to play, and we need to reach out and help each other during this really tough time.

LAWTON: Well, speaking of the government’s role, the U.S. government is urging people to give more in this new initiative, but is that enough? I mean, is it enough for individuals to give $20, a $100 or whatever, or do we need systematic changes in policy?

HILL: Well, I think long term we need systematic changes, but you know that’s a long term strategy and right now we have a short term problem, and so we need people to give and we also need the government to step up and do its part as well.

LAWTON: Are you pleased that the administration is having this initiative?

HILL: Absolutely, because I think it brings, it highlights always when the administration speaks on something and gives information, it helps connect to the things that we’re doing on the ground, and so this initiative, certainly, I think will highlight the need, but also the really creative things that are happening across America to try and meet the needs of individual people.

LAWTON: Yours is a faith-based organization. A lot of groups are trying to help the hungry. What is the specific role for religious groups and those from the faith community?

HILL: Well certainly we have a 2,000-year tradition that we’re supposed to feed the hungry and we take that very seriously and so we’ve been doing this for decades across the country and we see it as a moral issue, that people shouldn’t have to go hungry in a country as rich as ours, and we’re going to continue to try and meet the needs of people in local communities across this nation.

LAWTON: Again, we hear all the time people are hungry, people are hungry, the poor are always with us. Are there solutions? Is it possible to end hunger?

HILL: I absolutely believe it, and certainly the government is calling on that and Congress is as well. We have to think creatively. We have to think about 21st century solutions to 21st century problems, and the safety net in this country is badly torn and weakened, and we need to not just fix it. A repair is not sufficient. We really need to think about how do we eliminate the need for programs like food stamps, and like donations to feed the hungry through a food bank or a soup kitchen, and if we have the political will to do it in this country we can change this. You know, Bobby Kennedy forty years ago called attention in the Mississippi Delta to children being hungry, and yet today you and I are sitting here having the same conversation four decades later. We just need to rise to the occasion and have the political will to change it.

LAWTON: All right, Candy Hill, thank you very much.

HILL: Thank you as well.

Health Care Costs and the Elderly

 

Click here to view the original July 24, 2009 story.

JANE STROM: Happy Birthday.

AL (Jane Strom’s father): Thank you.

JANE STROM: Do you know how old you are?

AL: Yeah.

JANE STROM: How old are you?

AL: I don’t know.

JANE STROM: How old are you? You are 90, 90 years old…

LUCKY SEVERSON (Contributing Correspondent): Not long ago, Dr. Joel Strom and his wife, Jane, were so convinced that Jane’s father was close to death, notwithstanding the attention he was receiving from ten specialists, they put him in a hospice, and then he got better.

DR. JOEL STROM (Cardiologist and Professor, University of South Florida Medical School): Part of it was that he had one person who took care of him. They cut out all the referrals because they didn’t expect him to live long, and they cut out all the medicines.

SEVERSON: Dr. Strom is a cardiologist and a professor at the University of South Florida Medical School. Like every doctor we spoke with, Strom is fed up with the health care system.

DR. STROM: It’s not a broken system. There is no system. Medical care is haphazard. Medical care is disorganized. There are pockets of superb care. There are pockets of very mediocre care.

SEVERSON: If Medicare costs are any measure, Miami-Dade County should have the best senior care in the country. The federal health program spends over $16,000 a year per patient. That’s about double the 2006 national average. Brian Keeley is the CEO of Baptist Health South Florida, the largest nonprofit health care system in that part of the state. He says huge Medicare costs do not translate to better health care.

BRIAN KEELEY (CEO, Baptist Health South Florida): We know that more can be injurious to people, and more health care services, more aggressively providing those services, can result in lower levels of care.

SEVERSON: He says there are several factors that bloat health care costs in the Miami area.

KEELEY: There’s a huge imbalance between the number of specialists and primary care physicians, and we have such a high percentage of specialists down over here, they utilize resources more, technology more.

SEVERSON: Dr. Strom, a specialist himself, says one reason there is such a shortage of primary care physicians is that Medicare doesn’t reimburse them enough for patient visits.

DR. STROM: If you spend a lot of time with a patient you will starve to death as a physician because you will only get paid for a certain amount of time. In fact, a lot of physicians will actually steer patients to their offices to have tests performed, because they collect both the professional component, and if they own the equipment, the technical component.

SEVERSON: Dr. Gloria Weinberg is a geriatrician and chair of the department of medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach. She says when young doctors, fresh out of medical school and burdened with school loans, discover how much less a primary physician earns, they choose a specialty where they can make more money.

DR. GLORIA WEINBERG (Geriatrician and Chair, Department of Medicine, Mount Sinai Medical Center): If you look at the reimbursement, you are going to come away after paying expenses, if you are lucky, with $40 or $50 an hour. That’s not going to help the youngsters go into a field of medicine and pay off loans and do everything else that needs to be done.

SEVERSON: Here in Miami, a typical senior citizen will see a doctor 106 times during the last 2 years of their lives. Not just one doctor, several—specialists who will then prescribe a battery of expensive tests and procedures: MRIs, ultrasounds, CAT scans, and an astonishing assortment of drugs. It’s because that’s the kind of care patients around here often demand. Dr. Weinberg:

DR. WEINBERG: Patients are very sophisticated. They come, and they say, “I have a headache.” You take a headache history. They are not satisfied if you say, “You don’t need a scan.” They want a scan. If you are pushed, and you are suspicious enough, and perhaps you suggest a CT, which is less expensive than an MR, some of them will come to you and say, “I want an MR. I hear it’s more sensitive.” We have had patients in our center tell us, “If you don’t do what I’m asking I’m going to sue you.”

SEVERSON: The threat of lawsuits forces many doctors to practice defensive medicine, ordering more tests and procedures to protect themselves from being sued. Health care professionals here cited malpractice suits as another factor behind spiraling costs, and Medicare fraud in South Florida, particularly in the home health care industry, has been described as rampant.

KEELEY: The Miami Herald reported about a month ago that the FBI and CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] indicated that fraud was about $2.5 billion per year in Miami-Dade County. That, in and of itself, is a huge, huge difference, comparing our cost structure to the rest of the country.

SEVERSON: About 50 million Americans are uninsured, and that includes 30 percent of the population around Miami. Many of that number are undocumented and in the US illegally. Whatever their status, most who need care end up in a hospital emergency room where, by law, they cannot be refused treatment.

DR. WEINBERG: It’s our ethical responsibility to treat that patient as we would any other. That patient can go down the path of having a cardiac catheterization, ultimately having a pacemaker, a defibrillator at $30,000, ongoing medical care, and then we face the problem, when we discharge the patient, where does the patient get the follow-up care, and the hospital doesn’t get reimbursed for it.

SEVERSON: Perhaps the biggest chunk of Medicare expenditures, something like 30 percent, goes to end-of-life care for aging Americans. Professor Anita Cava directs the University of Miami business ethics program. She says Americans need to rethink the way we look at end-of-life medical care.

PROFESSOR ANITA CAVA (Director, University of Miami Business Ethics Program): I think we in the United States really need to reconsider our relationship with end of life and to realize it’s a natural process and that perhaps ending life in a more humane and comfortable way at home with family, rather than trying to prolong it for another day or week or month, is perhaps the best way to go.

SEVERSON: Joe Gasperovich would take exception to the ethical argument for withholding expensive medical treatment for aging, failing Americans. He was born in 1919 and would prefer to prolong his life as long as possible.

SEVERSON (speaking to Joe Gasperovich): If they say we need to go do a $1,000 CAT scan, is there a point, an age you reach where you should say no, I’ve lived 90 years?

MR. GASPEROVICH: No, I want more.

SEVERSON: You want more years?

MR. GASPEROVICH: Everybody—nobody want to die.

SEVERSON: Dr. Weinberg says the decisions about the ethics of distributive justice for society as a whole are often much more difficult when the doctor is meeting with a patient one-on-one.

DR. WEINBERG: The health care dollars, an inordinate amount, go to taking care of people in the last 6 months of their lives. But how do you know when those last 6 months are? You have a person who has worked all their life, paid taxes, done very well, and now they are 80, and they have a heart attack. That may be the person who lives 10 or 15 more years. Are we going to say no just because of age? That’s a very, very slippery slope.

SEVERSON: There is a huge ethical discussion about who should make these end-of-life decisions—the patient, the family, doctors, the government? Brian Keeley says some decisions are easier to make. For instance, Medicare should only reimburse for treatments and drugs that are known to work.

KEELEY: It ought to be evidence-based. If something is proven not to work, I don’t think the federal government ought to be paying for it. I don’t think anybody ought to be paying for it, except for the private patient.

SEVERSON: Dr. Weinberg says too many patients receive expensive treatments and surgery in their final years that very likely won’t prolong their life.

DR. WEINBERG: So if you have an Alzheimer patient who, your own belief may be, it’s time to let this person go naturally, and the family is telling you, “I’m the surrogate, and I’m insisting that a feeding tube be put in,” you cannot make the decision not to put the feeding tube on your own, even though you think it’s futile care, at least in the state of Florida.

SEVERSON: Dr. Weinberg says her 95- year-old mother has a living will that stipulates she will not be kept alive on a ventilator. Brian Keeley says preparing for end of life is not something that’s culturally accepted in South Florida.

KEELEY: Other parts of the country where people plan for end-of-life care, with the use of hospices and palliative care and what have you—down here there’s less usage for that, so people go to die in the hospitals.

SEVERSON: Everyone seems to agree that health care reform is urgently needed and that health care should be a right and not a privilege and that it should extend to everyone. They also agree that South Florida is a good place to start.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Lucky Severson in Miami.

Note: Since this story first aired in July 2009, Dr. Joel Stroms’ father-in-law, Al Godin, passed away.

Wintley Phipps

 

Click here to view the original April 10, 2009 story and additional Wintley Phipps videos.

Pastor WINTLEY PHIPPS (singing at National Prayer Service, Washington National Cathedral):  “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound . . .”

KIM LAWTON:  Grammy-nominated Gospel singer Wintley Phipps is a familiar voice at big national events. At President Barack Obama’s National Prayer Service following his Inauguration, Phipps’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” brought the entire National Cathedral audience, including the new president and first lady, to their feet. But he says it’s just as meaningful to him when he sings in places like prisons.

Pastor  PHIPPS: There is a sense that you’re giving hope to people who really need it.

LAWTON:  For Phipps, who is also a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, music is a ministry and, he says, one of the deepest expressions of his Christian faith.

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Pastor PHIPPS: Music is almost to me an echo of the sounds of the divine world, and when you hear these sounds, it stirs something deeply spiritual within you.  Music also is the most powerful way of impressing the human mind with hope.

LAWTON: Hope has been a hallmark not only of Phipps’s musical career, but in his charitable efforts as well.  In 1998, Phipps founded the Dream Academy, a national nonprofit for at-risk kids. Born in Trinidad, he says hope was crucial in overcoming his own at-risk childhood.

Pastor PHIPPS: I was born to a troubled home, and I used to get away from my parents’ troubles — I had a little red tricycle, and I’d go in the back yard of my house, and I would turn the tricycle on its side and use one of the backside wheels as a steering wheel, and I would sit there for hours, and I would dream that I was flying to faraway places in the world and meeting important people when I was six, seven years old, and then I wanted to be like Tom Jones.  I’d go around the house singing, “It’s not unusual to be loved.”  I just wanted to be Tom. But something was missing to me.

LAWTON: Despite a difficult family life, Phipps says his mother always prayed for him and told him that God had a special plan for his life.  As a teenager, Phipps embraced her faith as his own.

Pastor PHIPPS:  At the age of 16, God walked into my life and said, “I’ve seen your dreams. Give me your dreams, and I’ll let you see what I’ve been dreaming for you.”

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Singing at National Prayer Service

LAWTON:  He attended an historically black Seventh-day Adventist college in Alabama, where he met Linda, now his wife of 32 years.  Then, Phipps says, God began providing opportunities for him to sing in national venues such as a 1984 appearance on “Saturday Night Live” with Jesse Jackson.  He came to the attention of Billy Graham’s team and became a frequent performer at the evangelist’s crusades.

Pastor PHIPPS (singing in Washington): “Talk about a child that do love Jesus.”

LAWTON: Phipps also became a favorite in Washington. He’s sung for every president since Ronald Reagan.

Pastor PHIPPS: I’ve never had a manager or never had an agent, and yet some of the most wonderful moments that a singer could ever dream of have happened to me, and I believe it’s providential.

LAWTON: The idea for the Dream Academy came after he got involved with a prison ministry.

Pastor PHIPPS: I did not know that so many young men in prison looked like my sons, and when I saw it I was shaken. One of every three young black men in America between the ages of 18 and 30 are in prison today or supervised by the court system either on probation or parole.

LAWTON: Phipps then learned that 60 percent of the young people who end up in prison are the children of prisoners. He wanted to break the cycle of intergenerational incarceration. The Dream Academy offers after-school mentoring and interactive academic tutoring to children of prisoners and kids falling behind at school.

post02Pastor PHIPPS: One of the most exciting things that can ever happen in a child’s life is to know that , “You mean God thinks about me?  Or God dreams about me?”  And he’s got a dream for my life?”  And when you catch a little glimpse of what that dream is, wow, it changes everything.

LAWTON:  Phipps has enlisted the support of some of his famous connections for the project.  One of his biggest benefactors is his longtime friend Oprah Winfrey.  The lesson of faith, he says, is that things aren’t always as they seem and that hardship can be overcome.  In these uncertain economic times, he’s released a new music DVD called “No Need to Fear.”

LAWTON:  It’s a theme he finds throughout the old spirituals that he often performs.

Pastor PHIPPS (singing): “Swing low sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home . . .”

The Negro spiritual teaches us that you’re going come up rough sides of mountains, and you’re going to have difficulties.  But faith gives you that ability to weather any storm.

(singing): “I looked over Jordan and what did I see?”

LAWTON:  It’s the core theme as well for the song that has become his signature, “Amazing Grace.”  He finds great spiritual lessons in the history of the song.

Pastor PHIPPS:  A lot of people don’t realize that just about all Negro spirituals are written on the black notes of the piano, and they just keep recurring.  Probably the most famous white spiritual that’s built on this slave scale was written by a man by the name of John Newton who, before he became a Christian, used to be the captain of a slave ship and many believe heard this melody that sounds very much like a West African sorrow chant (hums “Amazing Grace”).  And it has a haunting, haunting, plaintive quality to it that reaches past your arrogance, past your pride, and it speaks to that part of you that’s in bondage, and we feel it. We feel it. It’s just one of the most amazing melodies in all of human history.

(performing “Amazing Grace” on stage): “To sing God’s praise than when we’ve  first begun. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Amen.”

LAWTON: Another lesson, he says, on how hope always triumphs. I’m Kim Lawton in Vero Beach, Florida.

The Right War Gone Wrong

by David E. Anderson

When it began eight years ago, the war in Afghanistan was the right war, the good war, the moral war.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the effort to capture Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders and to drive from power their Taliban protectors had the moral and ethical support of most Americans, as well as much of the international community. President George W. Bush laid out the rationale to Congress: “The leadership of al-Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country. In Afghanistan, we see al-Qaeda’s vision for the world.”

It was a widely shared view. Michael Walzer, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, and one of the foremost experts on just and unjust wars, called Afghanistan a “classic” case of the just war. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral statement arguing for “the right and duty of a nation and the international community to use force if necessary to defend the common good by protecting the innocent against mass terrorism.”

“Afghanistan has been the West’s ‘good war’ until now,’’ wrote Michael Daxner, president emeritus of the University of Oldenburg in Germany, this summer in the World Policy Journal.  “In recent history, there has rarely been another intervention with so much institutional legitimacy and so little questioning of strategy and perspective as there has been with Operation Enduring Freedom and the International Security Assistance Force [ISAF].” Daxner also served as special counselor to the United Nations mission in Afghanistan.

The initial military campaign in Afghanistan appeared to be a resounding success. A small band of American forces overthrew the Taliban in less than three months, drove them out of Kabul, and apparently had both the Afghan Taliban force and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda on the run.

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Photo: US Air Force

But somewhere along the way Afghanistan got lost, its moral rationale muddied as the Bush administration quickly turned its focus to the unnecessary war, the morally unjustifiable war, the war against Iraq. The Afghanistan effort went astray, starved of resources and attention. It became, first, America’s forgotten war, and then a conflict beset with its own strategic and policy complexities as well as moral ambiguities.

Over the years, “as the mission has changed and become larger and more complex, these initial judgments have been subject to further consideration,” David Cortright, director of policy studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, told an audience there on Sept. 1.  As RAND Corporation political scientist Seth Jones has written in his recent book on the American experience in Afghanistan, In the Graveyard of Empires (Norton, 2009), “Despite the idealism of the initial campaign and the success of military operations, the United States squandered this extraordinary moment. … And by 2006, tensions in Afghanistan had “escalated dramatically and Afghanistan was leveled by a perfect storm of political upheaval in which several crises came together.”

Jones argues, and most experts seem to agree, that as US policy in Afghanistan drifted, Pakistan emerged as a sanctuary for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, allowing them to regroup and mount renewed and more widespread attacks. Afghan governance became “unhinged” with corruption, and “the international presence, hamstrung by the US focus on Iraq, was too small to deal with the escalating violence.”

Now US and coalition casualties continue to mount. The United States had lost more than 900 troops, and October was the deadliest month so far, with 59 American soldiers killed. British combat losses have crossed the 200 mark, and the battlefield situation is worsening as the Taliban and its insurgent allies are not only waging fierce resistance to the ISAF but also extending their control over increasingly large swaths of Afghanistan territory. The top US military officer, Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Boston Globe in late August that the Taliban and its alliance with the al-Qaeda terrorist network are stronger than ever, and in other interviews he has characterized the military situation in Afghanistan as “deteriorating.”

Public opinion has also been turning against Obama’s “war we must win,” According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 52 percent of respondents see the war in Afghanistan as not worth its costs, although 55 percent say they have confidence the president will choose a strategy that will work. In a Quinnipiac University poll released on November 18, American voters say 48 – 41 percent that fighting the war in Afghanistan is the right thing to do, down from 52 – 37 percent last month.

British public opinion is more skeptical. A poll published in the Aug. 29 Daily Telegraph found that 62 percent oppose British troops staying in Afghanistan. Only 26 percent favor remaining, and this month the Catholic bishop who heads the military diocese of Great Britain, speaking in a homily at a requiem mass for the fallen, urged resolution in Afghanistan “as speedily as possible.”

While conservatives and Republicans generally continue to support the war and call for more US troops for the effort—the Quinnipiac poll found 68 percent of Republicans think the United States is doing the right thing fighting in Afghanistan—some conservative pundits are beginning to turn against the effort. The columnist George Will, in a widely circulated Sept. 1 column, called on the US to begin “rapidly reversing the trajectory of America’s involvement in Afghanistan” and fight the war in such a way as to end US combat fatalities, suggesting US lives have been “squandered.” Will faulted both the goals and the strategy being pursued.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the antiwar movement that mounted a large but ultimately futile effort against the US invasion of Iraq is regrouping to challenge Obama, somewhat reluctantly, on Afghanistan. A wide variety of groups, including veterans’ organizations and coalitions of grass roots groups, such as Win without War and United for Peace and Justice, plan teach-ins, demonstrations, and lobbying at aimed raising questions about the cost of the war.

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Photo: U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Andrew Smith

Religious voices and ethical questions are also being raised. This month, a group of 77 United Methodist bishops signed a letter to the president calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of all forces and saying there is no path to military victory in Afghanistan. An open letter from a range of progressive religious leaders led by evangelical Christian activist and Sojourners magazine editor Jim Wallis called for a “humanitarian and development surge” in Afghanistan and exhorted the president to “let the nonmilitary strategies lead the way.” Last month, the US Catholic bishops sent a letter to the president’s national security advisor, General James. L. Jones, urging the administration to review its use of military force “to insure that it is proportionate and discriminate” and to “develop criteria for when it is appropriate to end military action in Afghanistan.”

In a recent issue of Commonweal, the independent and lay-edited Catholic review of religion, politics, and culture, Boston University history and international relations professor Andrew Bacevich wrote in a piece entitled “The War We Can’t Win: Afghanistan and the Limits of American Power” that “fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible.” As for what the US should do, Bacevich suggests that “a sense of realism and a sense of proportion should oblige us to take a minimalist approach,” adding that “we can’t eliminate every last armed militant harboring a grudge against the West. Nor do we need to.”

The mainline Protestant journal Christian Century editorialized in its Sept. 8 issue that “it is time to ask: What is the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and how does it serve peace in the region and the American interests?” America, the national Catholic weekly magazine published by the Jesuits, asked earlier this month about Afghanistan, “What are we achieving there? Do we have the ruthlessness and patience to stay in this fight? With our nation printing money to pay its bills, can we really afford to maintain this long war?” “Nothing about the mission in Afghanistan is clear,” concluded a Sept. 25 Commonweal editorial, “least of all its connection to American security. All wars, including necessary wars, involve difficult choices. If President Obama chooses to keep us in Afghanistan, he must do a better job of explaining his reasons and expectations to the American people—especially to the families of soldiers serving there. He can no longer ask Americans to assume that saving Afghanistan from the Taliban is the same thing as saving American from Al Qaeda.”

The Rev. John Langan, SJ, a professor of philosophy and Catholic social thought at Georgetown University, first posed the question of “whether we’re making real progress toward morally important goals” eight years ago in a 2001 interview with Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, just one month after the US bombing of Afghanistan had begun. Today he says the answer to that question is no. Even when explicit consideration of just war ethics seems absent from current strategic debate, says Langan, “a lot of ethical issues are present in policy planning,” especially questions about whether our goals are attainable and worth pursuing. “I wish,” says Langan, “I was seeing a debate about what is worthwhile versus are we meeting the demands of the generals.” On this point, he says, he sees parallels with Vietnam and what he calls “a deeply ingrained tendency in the military that if a problem resists us, bring more resources to bear and we will prevail.” In Afghanistan, he observes, “we are forced to fight in cautious and disagreeable ways,” and “we never get very far from the possibility of tragedy.”

Howard Rhodes, a religious studies professor at the University of Iowa, teaches a course every fall on war and peace in Western religious thought. The lack of informed public debate about Afghanistan in just war terms, he suggests, is because “Christian churches and their representatives are largely incapable of articulating how those debates might look,” and “ordinary people in churches are not well prepared to be engaged” in them. Our weakened just war discourse, he adds, “reflects the pressure of pacifism” and an “erosion in ordinary citizens’ ability to engage in any discourse other than protest.”

Yet moral issues remain inextricably bound up with our broad strategic and political debates, says Rhodes. For him, the most disturbing characteristic of the current moment is that the US is “profoundly unclear” about the kind of world it is using its power to bring about and “extremely unclear about what war is for.”

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DoD photo by Sgt. 1st Class Leonardo Torres, U.S. Army

Duke University ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, a Christian pacifist, has spoken about Afghanistan in similar terms. In an interview earlier this month, he told Religion News Service that “it’s still not clear what we’re fighting for. It’s so deeply ambiguous that it’s hard to fit into just war criteria. The very idea that you begin to assess the justness of a war after the war is already going to happen, I’m sorry, it’s already too late.”

Rhodes says he expects President Obama to go some distance to meet his military advisors’ requests. “All the options are bad,” says Rhodes, “and for the next year the least bad option” is to give General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of US troops in Afghanistan, “as much of what he’s asking for as is tolerable.” McChrystal has made clear again and again that the United States and its allies, facing a serious and deteriorating military situation on the ground, must essentially start over. This will involve not only a new strategy but also a new effort to make the moral and political case for what President Obama has called “the necessary war’’ to the American people, the people of the allied nations in the NATO coalition and, not least, the Afghan civilian population.

“The situation in Afghanistan is serious, but success is achievable and demands a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort,’’ McChrystal said in an Aug. 31 statement as he sent up the chain of command a confidential assessment of the nearly eight-year-old war asked for by Obama when he put McChrystal in charge of the faltering effort in Afghanistan. Three weeks later, the assessment was leaked to the Washington Post, including its warning that without more forces the conflict “will likely result in failure.” Throughout much of the fall, Obama has convened his national security and military advisors for a series of strategy sessions about means and ends and whether to add more US combat forces to the battle. At the end of this year there will be some 68,000 US forces in Afghanistan and another 40,000 NATO troops from US allies such as Great Britain, Germany, and Canada.

At the September event at Notre Dame (and again in the October 19 issue of America in an article reassessing US engagement in Afghanistan), David Cortright argued that as presently constituted the Afghanistan effort, even if originally a just cause, fails under the just war criteria of last resort and probability of success, and he made a two-point challenge to current policy, even as refined and redefined by Obama and McChrystal.

“I would argue, and many did even at the beginning of the US military mission, that war is an inappropriate means of countering al-Qaeda so that the fundamental strategic assumption [of U.S. policy] … is subject to debate,” he said. “War is not an instrument that can be used to counter non-state terrorist networks,” he suggested. “It also has many detrimental, unintended harmful consequences.” He cited as an example that war treats “mass murderers as if they were soldiers, thus inadvertently raising the credibility and moral stature of these criminals.”

In his second challenge, Cortright asked why we are at war with the Taliban and argued, as do others, that the strategic assumption lumping together the Taliban and al-Qaeda as inseparable and indistinguishable is wrong. Furthermore, al-Qaeda’s influence in Afghanistan is waning while the Taliban’s is gaining. He suggested, following the argument of Fotini Christia and Michael Semple in their article “Flipping the Taliban” in the July/August 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, that US policy must have a “political ‘surge,’ a committed effort to persuade large groups of Taliban fighters to put down their arms and give up the fight.”

Christia and Semple say Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy, as announced in his March 27 speech and a six-page White House white paper,  acknowledged that integrating reconcilable insurgents will be a key component of US policy. “Yet US policy makers have not adequately developed a vision of how to achieve reconciliation,” they write. “Admitting their lack of knowledge about the precise character of the insurgency, they equate reconciliation with merely cajoling Taliban foot soldiers into crossing over to the US side.”

It is an argument that has won the support of the Christian Century, whose editors have concluded that “working to reconcile the Taliban with the broader interests of the Afghan nation calls for respecting the interests of local Taliban leaders. They are not a monolithic group.”

As the Obama administration seeks to devise a means to implement the McChrystal recommendations—or not, it comes under close scrutiny from politicians and other observers. Noting the failed efforts of past powers, from Alexander the Great to Great Britain and, most recently, the Soviet Union, to subdue Afghanistan, the Christian Century editorial put it bluntly: “To avoid another catastrophe, the president must be held to a clear strategy and a short timeline.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor at Religion News Service. He wrote last year for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on “God and Empire.”

Flannery O’Connor

 

RAFAEL PI ROMAN, correspondent: Even at the end of her short life, when it became harder and harder for her to walk, Flannery O’Connor went to Mass nearly every day at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Milledgeville, in central Georgia. She lived with her mother in an old plantation house surrounded by 1500 acres of pasture and woods. In her room after church she would write all morning, facing the back of a tall chest so that she would see no distractions. Her output was not massive—two short novels, two collections of short stories, a number of essays, and a lot of letters. But today many consider her one of America’s greatest writers. Since O’Connor’s death, more than 50 books have been written about her, one of them by Ralph Wood of Baylor University.

PROFESSOR RALPH WOOD (Author of Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South): Flannery O’Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced.  That is an astonishing fact. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Emily Dickinson, Frost, Stevens: not one of them Christian, at least not orthodoxly Christian. She is a Southerner and a Catholic, she’s not at the center of American culture, and yet she is our only great Christian writer.

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Prof. Ralph Wood

ROMAN: What makes her increasing popularity even more surprising in these secular times is the fact that O’Connor was a self-proclaimed orthodox Catholic whose subject, in her words, was “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”

O’Connor was the only child in a respected and well-off family. She was fascinated by birds of all kinds, and when she was a little girl a newsreel cameraman came down to film a chicken Flannery claimed could walk backwards. Later on, her hobby centered on peacocks, a bird she saw as her personal symbol, according to her biographer, Brad Gooch.

BRAD GOOCH (Author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor): I think she liked it because it was a comic and gawky bird, like herself. It ate her mother’s flowers and kept everyone awake all night, and then at a certain transfigurative moment tails would open, and here was all this beauty which she saw as a symbol of the way her fiction worked, and also in the Middle Ages the peacock was the symbol of Christ and the church so, you know, it all lined up for her and the peacocks.

ROMAN: As a young woman, O’Connor went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, to the exclusive Yaddo artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, and then to New York City and Connecticut, writing all the way. Then, at the age of 25, she was forced to return home because, like her father before her, she was dying of lupus. It was back in Georgia in the 1950s that she discovered the characters for her stories.

WOOD: Not the cotton belt, not the tobacco belt, but the ugly word the Bible belt, and for O’Connor that was the glory of her region. These were the emarginated people on the sidelines of southern life in small, out of the way places.

ROMAN: She wrote that her Christ-haunted characters are so cut off from orthodox Catholicism that they don’t have a guide and that they are actually involved in a do-it-yourself religion that is kind of comical, sadly comical.

WOOD: She said, look, these are my brothers and sisters. They are as unlike me as they can be when it comes to the church and its sacraments, but they are a whole of a kind of sweated gospel, a gospel that takes God and God’s world with the utmost seriousness, and therefore I’ve got to attend to them.  I cannot dismiss them, saying these are people after my own heart, and I want to write about them sympathetically.

ROMAN: Father Thomas Joseph White is a Dominican priest whose conversion to Catholicism was influenced by O’Connor’s fiction.

FATHER THOMAS JOSEPH WHITE, OP (Theology Instructor, Dominican House of Studies): You don’t have baptism, confession, and the Mass, which she says are, you know, the center of her life. You have instead odd and grotesque, historically surprising events where people encounter the grace of God.


Father Thomas Joseph White

ROMAN: From these people her stories emerged. In “Wise Blood” and “The Violent Bear It Away,” and in twenty short stories, she told dark tales of murder and bigotry and madness, of a preacher of the Church without Christ who puts out his own eyes. Some have asked, is this Christian?

WOOD: She says most sins are committed by acts of immoderation, of excess, but she says there is one and only one quality that can never be sufficiently immoderate, and that is the love of God, and she saw in these backwoods, southern, I call them folk Christians more than fundamentalists, that kind of completely radical love of God in their own way.

ROMAN: Talk about the importance of grace and mystery in her work.

WOOD: Mystery does not mean for her a kind of a fuzzy, foggy, gooey something or other. It’s a very specific term for her. For her the word mystery means that which is inexhaustible in our knowledge of God, that the deeper we go in understanding who the self-declared, self-revealed God is, the more there is yet to understand, so that the greater our knowledge of God also the greater our ignorance of God, so that we know only a thumbnail of what and who God is.

ROMAN: As the civil rights movement changed attitudes and language, O’Connor was sharply criticized for using the N word in her writing.


Brad Gooch, author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor

GOOCH: She couldn’t change that word because that’s the way those people speak.

WOOD: For Flannery O’Connor, race was indeed the curse of the south in the sense that it was the single-most important test which we as white Christians failed. For O’Connor, the mistreatment of black people is a violation of their being creatures made in the image of God.

ROMAN: In recent years, O’Connor has become a favorite not only of writers and scholars but of artists and entertainers of all stripes, including Bruce Springsteen, Bono, the Coen brothers, and even Conan O’Brien and the creators of the hit TV series “Lost.”

Professor Bruce Gentry teaches at O’Conner’s alma mater, Georgia College and State University, and edits the Flannery O’Connor Review.

PROFESSOR BRUCE GENTRY (Editor, Flannery O’Connor Review): She always talks about waking people up to the mystery of the world, and I think that puts her in a position that is similar to a lot of people in popular culture. You know, they want to create something substantial, but they also want to do it for a popular audience.

ROMAN: In the process of writing his biography of Flannery O’Connor, Brad Gooch says he came to admire her discipline and determination, particularly during the final months of her life.

GOOCH: She was staying alive through writing, and you see it at the end of her life, where it becomes a real race with death. She’s working on stories which she keeps under her pillow in the hospital so the doctor won’t take them away from her. She’s editing one story after she’s had last rites. So all of this seems to me a very clear kind of sense that this is what’s keeping her alive, or why she’s alive.

ROMAN: O’Connor’s admirers wonder what her legacy will be in years to come. Some say that will depend on whether future readers will understand a writer who saw “the action of grace in territory held by the devil.”

I’m Rafael Pi Roman for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Flannery O’Connor Redux

by David E. Anderson

Readers coming upon the work of Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) for the first time in this first decade of the 21st century can be forgiven for not immediately recognizing her as a “Catholic novelist.” Many of her original readers in the 1950s and early 1960s did not, on first reading, or even second and third readings, know of O’Connor’s personal Catholic commitment nor read her novels and stories of so-called “backwoods prophets”’ and grotesque Southern Protestant and Pentecostal fundamentalists as exemplifying a particular Catholic sensibility.

post_oconnor_peacocksStill, readers found O’Connor brutal, broadly brushed stories compelling, and she is well embedded in the canon of both Southern fiction and most “religion and literature’’ reading lists.

But how has she fared over the past half-century?

Revisiting O’Connor after five decades, it still remains difficult to find that Catholic sensibility she and many of her admiring critics insist permeates her work, and other shortcomings—in particular the almost complete absence of attention to race and the civil rights movement that was convulsing her beloved South as she wrote some of her most powerful works—become increasingly apparent with distance. It can even be argued that the signature elements of her style—character as grotesque, gratuitous violence as the bearer of meaning—no longer shock, no longer convince.

O’Connor made her mark as one of the most original and boldest story-tellers of the mid-century South, writing two novels, two major collections of short stories, and a number of other miscellaneous stories and occasional prose. She was also a prolific letter writer and wrote numerous books reviews, principally for Roman Catholic diocesan newspapers. While mining some of the same social milieu as Faulkner—the poverty-stricken, illiterate backwoods and the small town lower-middle-class gentility—O’Connor imbued her stories and novels with religious imagery and themes drawn primarily from a corner of Protestant and Pentecostal fundamentalism, as well as pre-Vatican II Catholicism.

She had a certain contempt for both her time and her audience, believing her present was not only secular but also mired in nihilism, and considering her principal audience to be unbelievers who needed the shock of her paradigmatic and emblematic violence in order to be brought to belief. “My audience is the people who think God is dead,’’ O’Connor wrote in one letter. In her influential essay “The Fiction Writer and His Country,’’ she argued: “The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

O’Connor defended her approach in a 1955 letter complaining about readers who found her powerful and jarring story “A Good Man is Hard to Find’’ brutal and sarcastic for its depiction of the killing of an entire family, including a sleeping baby, by escaped convicts: “The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.’’

But what she calls “Christian realism” seems more like the judgment of a wrathful God. It is a notion of the human situation so distorted by sin that all understanding of the orthodox Christian conception of humanity created in and retaining the image of God is absent. It was hard then and is equally difficult now for some readers to see grace announced with the point of a gun and a mass murderer as a prophet of God in waiting, or to “be on the lookout,” as O’Connor once told students before reading “A Good Man,” “for such things as the action of grace in the grandmother’s soul, and not for the dead bodies.’’

In any version of Christian realism, dead bodies count; they are not soulless plot appendages. As Joanne Halleran McMullen, in her book “Writing against God: Language as Message in the Literature of Flannery O’Connor,’’ has noted, both the central characters in this story are nameless. Neither the grandmother nor the pathological murderer is given a name. The latter, McMullen notes, is called by what he is—The Misfit—not who he is. “He has no Christian name; it is his depravity that has become specifically ‘incarnate’ in O’Connor’s world.” Grace may somehow be operating in the final gestures between the grandmother and The Misfit when she reaches out to touch him but he recoils as if bitten by a snake—a biblical symbol that is the antithesis of grace. But this seems more apparent in O’Connor’s intention than the story’s realization. In her lecture on the story, O’Connor describes The Misfit as a “prophet gone wrong” who, because of the grandmother’s touch, would become “the prophet he was meant to be.’’ But, again, the story as written provides the reader with no clue for understanding The Misfit as a prophet either gone wrong or yet-to-be. Throughout her fiction, O’Connor’s characters seem only faintly realized as human, as people with individualized souls and personalities meriting the author’s or the reader’s sympathy, compassion, or even revulsion.

O’Connor wrote before Vatican II threw open the windows of reform in Catholicism, and it would be understandable if Catholics, or other readers familiar with some of the new, more pastoral accents created by the Second Vatican Council, had difficulty recognizing O’Connor’s Catholicism. But even in the pre-conciliar church, some critics within the faith were quick to denounce O’Connor’s work. Essayist Robert O. Bowen, reviewing “The Violent Bear It Away” in 1961, was fierce: “Neither its content nor its significance is Catholic,’’ he wrote. “Beyond not being Catholic, the novel is distinctly anti-Catholic in being a thorough, point-by-point dramatic argument against Free Will, Redemption, and Divine Justice, among other aspects of Catholic thought.’’ Yet O’Connor read widely in contemporaneous Catholic thought, and much of her book reviewing, albeit mostly brief notices, concerned Catholic theology and doctrine.

To the contemporary reader, O’Connor’s fiction does, indeed, seem to eschew the notion of free will for her characters; they seem to be playing out preordained roles in a cosmic drama of divine anger and judgment. And while there are sacramental elements in her work—at least one story centers on baptism—they appear mostly as ornament, like the comparison of the sun to an elevated host during the Eucharist in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” In part that may be because O’Connor was concerned that her message and meaning not be transparent. While her Catholicism can be veiled, it can also leave her readers confused. In her nonfiction, O’Connor stressed the role of mystery in Catholic doctrine. “The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula,’’ she wrote in “The Church and the Fiction Writer.’’ Too often, however, the Mystery became mystification for the reader.

Perhaps O’Connor greatest lapse, and the element that makes her fiction more of a footnote in the history of American literature than work of enduring value, is her total exclusion of the civil rights movement and the religious elements—black Protestants especially, but also white mainline Protestants and Catholics—that fueled it and that were so much a part of the texture of everyday Southern life in the period in which she was writing. It seems a curious omission for a writer of O’Connor’s sensibility, who sought to be attuned to the action of “grace through nature’’ and who boasted of being a Southern writer, a regional writer, to ignore that drama of biblical proportions being played out in her own front yard. It was a drama with many of the same elements—violence, lynching, castration, rape—that she rooted her fiction in. The critic Ralph Wood is most probably correct when he says O’Connor was no racist, but he fails to explain away her ambiguous attitudes toward African Americans and her contemptuous dismissal of efforts, especially by Northern sympathizers and others, to heed the call of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to join in the struggle to dismantle segregation, in some instances by giving up their lives.

“The South is traditionally hostile to outsiders, except on her own terms,’’ O’Connor wrote in “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South.’’ “She is traditionally against intruders, foreigners from Chicago or New Jersey, all those who come from afar with moral energy that increases in direct proportion to the distance from home.’’ Apparently O’Connor feared that “moral energy’’ might dilute or undo the racial status quo on which Southern identity depended, believing that only time and history would resolve the race issue. In Wood’s view, racism and segregation were, for O’Connor, “a species belonging to a much deeper and more pernicious genus of evil.’’ If so, it is nowhere evident in her work.

David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on John Updike, Walt Whitman, and American religious poems.

Brad Gooch Extended Interview

Read more of the Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly interview with Brad Gooch, author of FLANNERY: A LIFE OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR (Little Brown, 2009):

One thing that [Flannery O’Connor] always does is seems to cross two wires that don’t usually belong together. There’s a story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” about a character called The Misfit, an escaped con who murders an entire family in the woods in Georgia. But this family is a very funny almost kind of ’50s Disney family, so everyone is laughing through the story. At a certain point two people have now been shot, and The Misfit is spouting nihilist existentialist philosophy, and you start thinking, well, this isn’t funny. I can’t laugh at this. So that kind of queasy moment where you’re not sure, when you have two reactions at once, seems very Flannery O’Connor. She’s done a lot with extreme religious figures and backwoods prophets, and there’s almost an apocalyptic mood and violence to these stories mixed with comedy, and I think that this seems very current, like out of the 24/7 news cycles.

flannery-coverUsually people don’t realize that she’s Catholic. That’s the first reaction. Conan O’Brien wrote his senior essay at Harvard on Flannery O’Connor, and he was being interviewed about it once, and he mentioned that you read these stories and you think they’re by this bitter, drunken old alcoholic guy in Georgia, and then it turns out they’re actually written by this pious woman living with her mother. One way to read these stories is to not get the Catholicism at all. There are only two walk-ons by Catholic priests in these stories. Her real subjects are these kind of Protestant backwoods characters that she saw around her, although she also wanted to then explain that part of her work a lot, so when she started giving lectures and started writing essays, she set out to emphasize or try to frame her own work that way.

I think that she purposefully, almost cannily found a way to make stories that were about God in some way. She started a correspondence with a woman named Betty Hester just because Betty Hester wrote her letters saying these stories were really about God. No one had said that before. But she—unlike, say, a Catholic writer who’s writing about parish life—found a way to make these stories that were entertaining to everyone and yet almost writing on different levels, and if you put it on the stained-glass glasses you could see the whole Catholicism in them.

Her father died of lupus, which she developed later in life herself when she was 15 years old, and there’s one kind of unpublished journal that she kept where you see it’s this teenage Mary Flannery O’Connor writing about the death of her father, and she said that the consciousness of God came upon us like a bullet in the side. It’s very interesting. So she already, as a teenager, made a connection between grace and violence, really, so in a sense, it’s this kind of rattling experience that always brings out the grace in her stories, and I think she had these kind of rattling experiences in being faced with death in her own life that made her connect these two.

Her whole view was almost satiric of modern secular culture, and that basically people weren’t at all tuned in to these issues of grace and the meaning of life, and so she felt that her explanation of these extreme, violent characters was that they would shock people and that you needed to shock people at this point to get their attention.

In some ways O’Connor’s also making fun of herself often. The character Joy-Hulga in the story “Good Country People,” who’s this 30–year-old lady with a PhD or something who’s reading Heidegger on this farm with her mother and has a wooden leg, so in many ways a mirror image of herself, and of course she’s always making fun of that kind of intellectual pretension and the college girl and the over-intellectual woman, and there’s some of O’Connor always in that, so she’s making fun of people and she’s puncturing everyone, but finally you feel, thankfully, that it’s also herself that she’s making fun of.

She grew up in Savannah’s Irish Catholic community, but this was very much a subset of a subset in the South. Especially at a certain point, when they moved to Milledgeville in the middle of Georgia, Catholics were very rare. It was the Protestant South. And so early on she was almost figuring she was an outsider, figuring out how to get over to people, and certainly humor worked for her. She taught a chicken to walk backwards when she was a little girl. She walked chickens dressed in bowties down the streets in Milledgeville on a leash. So early on she was trying to bridge this, in a way, and I think that in her work there she went for very startling and extreme kinds of characters to get across in that way.

flannery-in-libraryIncomprehension was this joke to her. She almost took pleasure in it. In a certain sense she needed to be misunderstood by this culture for all of her arguments and criticisms to make sense. She also said at a certain point that she would give up 100 readers in the present for one reader in 100 years. So this is also someone who is trying to get across to the ages and to posterity, so she had a very weirdly confident sense of her own talent and genius, too.

She used [the word “mystery”] sometimes when talking about her lupus, and I think that this kind of autoimmune disease that would come and rise and fall and no one ever understood exactly what it was, meant that she was living with a kind of mystery about her own mortality. But she also came then to see religion as mystery. Her understanding of God and the world had to do with mystery, and then fiction was a way of delving into mystery. So instead of trying to explain things she would write a story, and so she sort of felt that fiction, because it was capturing this world that she was so good at recording almost by the way that things looked and the comedy of people’s speech patterns, somehow that full view of the world gave people more of a sense of recognition, I think.

The way mystery practically worked out in her stories was that she wrote every morning for three hours, invariably seven days a week, and that she never knew where a story was going. A friend of hers, Robie Macauley, said that she was a demon rewriter, and this was because she kept sort of working through material and then she would hit a dead end and then she would go in another direction or she would reuse something in a novel later. I think that’s a very particular way of working, almost poetic way of working on a story. She even said in “Good Country People” that the reason the reader gets a shock at the end when the Bible salesman steals the wooden leg of Joy-Hulga in the hayloft is because she didn’t know that that was going to happen until about five lines before she wrote it. Because the writer got a shock the reader gets a shock, and I think that becomes part of her way of exploring mystery through the imagination.

What she meant by manners was just the way people behave. I mean she spent most of her time observing, so she was extremely quiet. She had lunch every day with her mother in a restaurant in Milledgeville, and her mother would sit out and talk to people. Flannery would say nothing, but she would listen. She would sometimes get her mother to start conversations at the gas station with the attendant, so she had a great ear for the way people spoke. She was also a painter. Everyone doesn’t realize that, and she would spend time painting the farm also as a way to learn to look. So I think in that way she was recording what people do in this kind of manners and etiquette of life, and somehow the more she did these kind of caricatures the more it also points to what’s behind them.

I think she was very true to her material in having these highly functioning eyes and ears, and at the same time always would give a sense of something breaking through, and it always does. This annoying grandmother character who says she wanted to wear a hat and white gloves on the family vacation so if there was an accident and anyone found her on the road they would know that she was a lady, so that’s the ultimate send-up of manners in a way. And yet the grandmother at a certain point, when faced with the rifle, finally sees The Misfit is her own son and sort of breaks through that, so I think that kind of tension is key to O’Connor’s work.

She got in trouble early on at the Iowa writer’s school for the use of the N word in stories, and this has kind of shadowed her career always in a sense. But her point at that time was that she couldn’t change that word because that’s the way those people speak. So partly it’s staying true. In a way, what we would almost call unpolitically correct at the moment is where she would almost put on blinders and just went for what was really there and worried about reaction later.

There’s some “South Park” in Flannery O’Connor, but she made fun of everything. She was an equal-opportunity satirist in that way, but I do think satirists are often utopian in a way, like Waugh and Swift, and she had some of that, that Catholic sensibility of a perfect world and a heaven and things only made the comedy and the violence and the grotesque more obvious.

The-Artificial-coverShe was very aware of Southern issues. In another way she would also say, when people tried to label her as a Southern writer, well, the South is really just an accent, and I think that’s true. She’s obviously a universal writer. You don’t say that Chekhov is only for Russians—and O’Connor has that, but you know it’s definitely set in a place and she was a great proponent of that, the local, the regional, that a writer works from the world that’s around them. Partly, I think, again, it was her making the best of her situation. I mean, she did seem to be planning on a life in the north. She’d gone to Yaddo, she lived a little bit in Manhattan, she was at the Iowa writer’s school. She was really forced home because of her disease, but there she found her material, really, so it was this kind of prodigal daughter story. She found this great gift by coming home, and she certainly became its great hero and proponent from that point on.

My intuition is that she found her material by being forced home, and when she went to live on the dairy farm with her mother in the middle of Georgia, in those first six months she wrote three stories—“The River,” “The Life You Save May be Your Own,” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” that are the three kind of classic, trademark, signature Flannery O’Connor stories, so she obviously looked around her and suddenly found all these people no one was writing about, and that she had a great talent to write about them and realized that, and so that would not have happened, and so the idea of her being another southern writer living in New York City—I don’t know what she would have done, but certainly none of these great stories that we think of as O’Connor would be possible.

Surprisingly, O’Connor was writing about black characters in high school in stories and fiction, which no young southern lady did. She said that she became an integrationist when she was taking the bus to Atlanta to go to the Iowa writer’s school in 1946. She then had a black woman friend in graduate school, and her mother told her that wasn’t appropriate, and she refused to go along for that. She voted for Adlai Stevenson and for John F Kennedy, who in the south then were very much associated with integration. But what happened then in the late ’50s and the early ’60s when the civil rights movement became politically correct in a sense and you had people coming from the north to the south, then she sort of went in reverse and at first she didn’t like the idea of people from the north coming and preaching to the people of the south about what to do. Now obviously these are all excuses—Faulkner said the same thing—to slow things down, in retrospect, but she didn’t like a kind of sanctimony about the movement, and so she started making fun of it, and there are unpublished letters to a friend where she then became a connoisseur of these race jokes which sound horrible when you read them now, and she’s like challenging her own redneck characters sometimes, and you can’t tell like where’s the real Flannery O’Connor, and certainly there’s not great empathy there. But it’s complex.

I think the person who described her as a cultural racist was a Trappist monk who’s still in a monastery in Georgia that she used to visit, and he said there was no doubt that—I mean O’Connor never questioned that all, even black people and all races, had shared the blood of Christ in that way, he said. But she could also channel this southern attitude, half herself, half in making fun of it, and so that’s, I think, what he meant by cultural racism. Robert Giroux, her publisher, said to me that Flannery was too intelligent to be racist, and there is an aspect to that. I mean it wasn’t pure prejudice, but in another way she was a little too finely protective of her material and her culture.

She was a great reader of theology. One of the surprises to me was when I went to Milledgeville and saw her library was vast. It’s probably one of the more important collections of 20th-century theology in America, so she loved reading theology. She used to read Thomas Aquinas for 15 minutes before she went to bed. She ssaid reading theology made her fiction bolder. She also became the reviewer for the Atlanta diocese magazine, and she would review a lot of works of theology. I think it was partly to get free copies of all the books. But she was annoyed that the Protestant theologians were a lot more interesting. She had to go back to Aquinas and she wanted a Catholic theologian. I think part of Teilhard to her—and she said literally he was the new Thomas Aquinas for the 20th century, so she was almost looking for him, and she was attracted to this cosmic vision that he had. She was attracted to his language. It was very poetic and almost an unlikely pairing, because Teilhard was then accused of heresy because there was no place for sin in his work, but O’Connor’s stories are all about sin.

Everything-that-rises-bookSince he was a paleontologist and he worked with discovering the Peking Man in China, basically Darwinian evolution was also spiritual and that the people are moving eventually towards creating the body of Christ through television and media and all of these ways that they are becoming connected, so a very visionary, poetic view, and that had some kind of appeal for her. Finally, of course, all of this became practical in the craft of fiction for O’Connor. She wrote a story, “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” which is a phrase taken out of Teilhard, so there were certain ways in which it comes into her work in that sense, I think.

She’s always trying to say four things in one sentence. When O’Connor went to Iowa City she was actually disturbed at first, she was writing these early stories of “Wise Blood,” the beginning of the novel “Wise Blood,” which opens with Hazel Motes seeing the number for a house of prostitution on the men’s room wall and going off and spending a night with the madam while leaving his tall preacher’s hat on the bed, this kind of comic scene. But she was worried a little how this Catholic girl could be writing such fiction, and she went to see the local priest, and the local priest said to her you don’t need to write for 15-year-old girls. So we can be thankful for that, but then she developed and needed even more of a kind of theological underpinning for this, and she found it in Jacques Maritain, who was doing translations of Thomas Aquinas at the time. These translations were very important for a lot of intellectual conversions at that moment in the late ’40s of people who were friends or acquaintances of hers, Thomas Merton, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Carolyn Gordon. O’Connor herself, though, was a cradle Catholic. Aquinas had this idea that an artist wasn’t a moral function like being a priest, that it was a creative function or a craft function, so for the artist, the way in which they showed devotion was by writing the best possible story, and this kind of freed her up. She said good news, you don’t have to be a good person to be a good writer, and in a way that’s what she’s saying, that she has this gift and that therefore following through on this gift becomes an act of devotion. These kinds of comments get people to laugh and are pretty folksy, but O’Connor has another reverberation going on in her own head, and writing her biography you start getting more aware of those reverberations.

[O’Connor and Merton] knew each other by proxy. They were both published by Robert Giroux. O’Connor was first brought into Giroux’s office by Robert Lowell, and Giroux told me, actually, that he knew right then he wanted to sign her up, and he knew that she would be a great writer. I said, well, did you read anything that she had written? And he said no, I could just tell from her demeanor that she would do whatever it took—interesting publishing intuition, but he just published “The Seven Storey Mountain,” and this was a big bestselling book at the time, so O’Connor asked for a copy of “The Seven Storey Mountain,” and then Giroux would go visit his writers at certain times, and he went first to see Thomas Merton who was in Gethsemani, and then Merton, who was an admirer of O’Connor’s, gave a book to go to her, and then she, I think, sent him a peacock feather at a certain point, so they had that sort of back and forth. They were very interested in each other. When O’Connor died, Merton wrote very high praise about how when you think of O’Connor you don’t think of Faulkner or Katherine Ann Porter, you think of Sophocles. I don’t know how much it was in reverse, with O’Connor’s enthusiasm for Teilhard. She never quite went around recommending Thomas Merton to people. I mentioned that to Robert Giroux ,and he thought that was interesting and hadn’t thought of it, but there is some truth there. Merton was an early kind of political left sort of thinker and definitely ahead of her curve on some of that, although she also at the same time he was starting to translate the desert fathers, she was working on a third novel that is unfinished, which relied a lot on the desert fathers, so she seemed to be like Merton, moving towards a kind of more global Vatican II view of Catholicism.

She really liked European Catholic writers, like Francois Mauriac or Waugh or James Joyce. She liked Gogol a lot, which you can see, this sort of exaggerated, grotesque characters. I think she was actually much more influenced by Faulkner than she liked to let on. She had a kind of anxiety of influence going on there with him, so she would say, well, her one-cylinder syntax could never have matched Faulkner, or that when the Dixie Limited is roaring down the track you get your little buggy out of the way, with the Dixie Limited being Faulkner. But, actually, in her library you find that she had every book by him and had read them earlier on than she claimed that she had, so I think he is a kind of big influence.

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Francois Mauriac

Actually, one of the few writers that she mentioned was Nathanael West, who wrote “Miss Lonely Hearts,” which is funny, again, offbeat dark humor about an advice columnist who becomes a kind of Christ figure in a certain way. Edgar Allen Poe was a big influence on her, especially early on. She read Edgar Allen Poe when she was 12 and 15 and 17 and you can see later she especially liked the humorous tales of Edgar Allen Poe. There’s one story called “The Man Who Was Used Up,” where a kind of fashionable socialite goes home to his apartment. Someone trails him and looks through the window, and he comes home and sort of takes out his teeth, which are fake, and his eyes, which are fake, and he has a fake arm on and things, and you can see that in “Good Country People” with the unscrewing of the wooden leg, so she liked that kind of grotesque character. More serious later was Nathaniel Hawthorne. She said that she was of the lineage of Nathaniel Hawthorne, you know, the way that he had a kind of dark grotesque that could also have a moral quality to it, so I think “Young Goodman Brown” is an influence on “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” In fact, you can hear Goodman and good man in those titles, and that story about going into the woods and meeting the devil is really what happens in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” going into the woods and meeting The Misfit. So she had those models. At the same time, she didn’t really like to be called gothic or southern gothic, and she didn’t really like labels at all, so in that way if you called her gothic she’d say she was grotesque; if you said she was grotesque then she’d say she’s gothic. But I think that kind of lineage, this dark comic sensibility she really liked. She was interested in not just Poe but the humorous tales of Poe, so when you get those together you get more of O’Connor than you might get elsewhere.

I think Robert Lowell’s influence on O’Connor is huge, and he became the surprise to me in the book, and a secret hero of it. I actually have my own private theory that I presented lightly in the biography that he was the model for Hazel Motes, because Lowell was going through his conversion, he’d been converted to Catholicism, he was lapsed, and now was on his way back into the church. He was kind of canonizing her, so she became Saint Flannery to him, so he was putting those categories onto her, but at the same time you had someone who was struggling like Hazel Motes, an extreme character, between non-belief and belief, so possibly that way. At the time that she was in Yaddo she had trouble with her publishers. She’d gotten a fellowship to write “Wise Blood” while she was at Iowa, and the publisher didn’t like the first draft and was kind of pushing her towards a more conventional novel and a more commercial novel, and Lowell was kind of bolstering her about going for, I think, the high road of art a little bit more, and also he was the one who really saw in her, almost, his interest in her faith, in religion and Catholicism, partly maybe enhanced her own sense of it, and I think he really encouraged that in her, so they both became kind of interested in medieval saints lives and things like that and spent Christmas Eve listening to Gregorian chant and Mass on records that Lowell had. So I think part of that really encouraged her medievalism. At that point at Yaddo she’d told someone she was a 13th-century Catholic. You can see all of that in “Wise Blood.” And also most practically Lowell introduced her to everyone who became important in her future life and career. He introduced her to Robert Giroux, her publisher, he introduced her to Sally Fitzgerald and her husband Robert Fitzgerald, the poet and translator, and she went to live with them for a year-and-a-half. So I think that he had this galvanizing influence on her, and she did say later in a rare moment in a letter that he was one person she really loved. I asked Robert Giroux if she was in love with him, and he said no, I think she was infatuated with him, and that’s a good kind of answer, but she did tend to like certain men who were larger than life and movie-star handsome in the way that her father had been, and I think Lowell had some of that, and Robie Macauley had some of that in Iowa, but I think it was a marriage of true minds between those two, and he was infatuated with that aspect of her.

Besides the Lowell infatuation I think that there was one person, Eric Langkjaer, who’s still alive, who I spoke with in Copenhagen, who was very helpful, sent me all the letters that O’Connor had written to him. He was a college textbook salesman, he had been to Princeton, he was working for Harcourt, and he was in the south and became introduced by a professor at Georgia College because she was a local author. He became, like Lowell, interested in her mind, I think, and they liked to discuss religion and theology, and she definitely, I would say, had this romantic interest in him, and also he got her off the farm. He would take her for rides, like dates that they went on. One culminated in a kiss, so there was definitely a romantic aspect to this, and Langkjaer then went for the summer to Europe, and there are these letters back and forth, one from O’Connor which she wrote at the bottom, if you were here we would talk for hundreds of hours on the porch, which crosses in the mail with one from him saying that he’s engaged to be married. So that was this crunch moment for her, because it was also the moment when she was moving towards first using a cane, and I think it was almost a last opportunity in that sense. But O’Connor being O’Connor, she got a kind of revenge. She wrote the story “Good Country People,” and the main character is this Bible salesman, and actually Eric Langkjaer, they used to joke and call his catalogue for college textbooks “the Bible,” and so the way in which he seduces almost the invulnerable Joy-Hulga and makes off with her wooden leg becomes a tale of vulnerability and intimacy, so she got revenge. She was never a victim. I mean, that’s the great thing about O’Connor. Sometimes writing about someone who died when she was 39 and seemed to have a constricted life might seem that it would be sad, but it wasn’t, because she was so indomitable in that way and because she had this sense of humor and she would just turn everything around. I could write about her being in the hospital at the end of her life, and she was just so funny about the nurses that there’s always something buoyant there.

Good-Man-is-Hard-to-Find-coObviously her illness influenced the writing, and she was very private. She wasn’t comfortable, really, with too much gossip about her. She wasn’t comfortable with photographs of her particularly, but the Flannery O’Connor stories that we know and think of as O’Connor stories she started writing after she returned home to live with her mother, which also meant after she accepted and knew that she had lupus, actually, because for about a year-and-a-half her mother told her that she had rheumatoid arthritis, and she was still thinking about moving back to the north, and she went on a kind of vacation visit with the Fitzgeralds, and Sally Fitzgerald decided to tell her that she didn’t have rheumatoid arthritis, she had lupus, and she said, well, that’s good, I thought I had lupus and I thought I was going crazy. I’d rather be sick than crazy. Classic O’Connor humor at an incredible moment. But she moves home, and Sally Fitzgerald said that she began writing “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” when she herself began to face the other end of a rifle, in a sense. I mean her work becomes not just about the south and these people around her, but also about death, and I think you had to see that that moved her into the zone of writing that she hadn’t been in, and I also think that there’s an aspect there of magical thinking to her writing, that she really somehow felt that writing was keeping her alive. Her father died very quickly of lupus, so her own expectation was that it could be some very quick thing, I mean 6 months. She was actually then one of the early people on cortisone, and that kept her alive for these extra, really, 13 years while also causing her bones to break down, and I think very much that she was staying alive through writing, and you see it at the end of her life, where it becomes a real race with death, and she’s trying to finish this second collection of stories. She’s working on stories she keeps under her pillow in the hospital so the doctor won’t take them away from her. She’s editing one story after she’s had last rites, so all of this seems to me a very clear kind of sense that this is what’s keeping her alive, or why she’s alive. I mean she was definitely a woman on a mission in that sense. There’s a sense of mission behind her work, even if it’s not preachy and moralistic in that way, and I think that that’s all connected with lupus and death.

O’Connor often has these caricatures of her mother in her stories. In “Greenleaf” Mrs. May is probably the closest to Regina, and she’s gored by a bull in the end of that story. So these mothers who look like Regina often don’t come to happy ends. One of them is shot in the comforts of home. A friend of hers said, “You should be brought up on charges of matricide. What does she think when she reads them?” And O’Connor said, “Oh, she don’t read none of them,” so obviously a testy relationship, and I mean Regina O’Connor was tough. She was running a business on her own. There was something indomitable about her, but what can sometimes be missed is that first of all she was very caring and loving towards her only daughter and was really making this whole environment of this dairy farm possible for her, and they moved there really when O’Connor moved back home so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs, and soon after O’Connor’s death her mother moved back into town. So she basically got a whole dairy farm in operation, providing her daughter with material. I don’t know if she’s thinking of that. Robie Macauley, who was a novelist who knew O’Connor in Iowa, said the sense was that Regina was a tyrant, but a beloved tyrant, so I think you get both in O’Connor, the humor about Regina. At one point [O’Connor] said to Sally Fitzgerald, on a trip to Lourdes, her only trip outside the country she took with her mother, they were riding on a train and she said, “I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to my mother,” so there’s a sense in which she also was dependent on her. They came to some détente. Flannery had her writing time, and that was sacrosanct, at her desk, and the rest of the time she was willing to compromise.

I actually thought of [O’Connor] as reclusive and Emily Dickinson-like. Actually, she turned out to be having this very full life. She wrote letters every day, 3 or 4 letters. If anyone, if a reader wrote to her she would always answer them. During the afternoons, after writing in the mornings, she would have guests come on her back porch and talk to them, and she’d become somewhat of a cult figure, so driving up could be the poet James Dickey or Faulkner’s translator. She also had this, really, madness to explain her work and gave over 60 talks and lectures across America, often on crutches, going to Notre Dame or the University of Chicago or Smith. So all that is pretty active, but interestingly, the work, too, had a lot of life in it. I wrote one other biography, of the poet Frank O’Hara. He described his work as deep gossip, and everyone kind of got that. His poems were about his friends, about art openings, and kind of busy New York cosmopolitan life, but [O’Connor] had a lot of deep gossip in her work also. She would take names from the Milledgeville phonebook, like Tom T. Shiflet. The story “The Displaced Person”—the Guizac family was a displaced Polish family who had come to work on a farm, the Matysiak family who came to work on their farm, and I talked to Al Matysiak, the son, who is still alive and living in Milledgeville and has never read the story. So on the farm that all these stories take place on is a kind of photograph of Andalusia, and besides these inside jokes about her mother and her friends who would show up sometimes as characters in these stories she was also, again, taking on issues of the time, topical issues. She wrote “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” which is this kind of interracial ballet taking place on a newly integrated bus in the south. The year that Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech, which was televised, she wrote “Revelation,” which has its own kind of trip to the mountaintop visionary ending, although her mountain is purgatory, so she also corrects in a certain way MLK. And religion, big time, she takes on in her work, and the changing south. I mean, she was a writer of the south, but Faulkner was a writer of the Old South. She was maybe the first writer of the New South, which is the Atlanta New South and the south of cars and people actually being displaced from the farms, I think, to the cities, in the way we see Hazel Motes kind of wandering around through half-empty southern towns and abandoned farms.

The letters are interesting. First of all, you get the gossip of daily life. You have thoughts about art, theology, literature. You don’t get confessional presence necessarily, and you don’t ever hear a complaint, and when you then realize what’s going on with her life, medically especially, it’s slightly amazing what she can turn into a joke. She wrote in one of those letters there won’t be any biographies of me for the simple reason that life lived between the house and the chicken yard here doesn’t make exciting copy. But she’s keeping carbon copies of every letter that she’s sent, and when she did go abroad on a trip to Lourdes she wrote up a will and put Robert Fitzgerald in charge of these letters if something were to happen, so I do think that she did see them and was aware somehow that she was putting in these letters also thoughts about art, theology, and things that people would like to read. In fact, her early letters to the woman who is called “A” in that collection we later found out was Betty Hester. Although one woman was living in Atlanta and the other in Milledgeville, 90 miles apart, they didn’t meet, and in a way those letters are almost the most interesting. They’re like the letters to a young poet. O’Connor is using this occasion to explain to this sympathetic reader how she sees literature and theology, and she’s also trying to convert her. At a certain point Betty Hester then becomes Catholic, so it’s a kind of theological version of these letters to a young Catholic a little bit in them. I think [O’Connor] is one of the great apologists for Roman Catholicism in the 20th century, and this is probably because she’s trying to get Betty Hester to see what she sees in Catholicism in those letters.

I went into the project pretty clear-eyed, which was expecting this prickly personality, and I didn’t entirely agree with all of her politics and things, so I didn’t have that biographer’s being in love with your subject and then being let down or disillusioned, and indeed it worked a bit in reverse, so that by the time I finished the biography, especially in writing about those last months of O’Connor’s life, where she’s kind of in a race with death to finish these stories, you just can’t help but so much admire her discipline and courage, that in a way she became a more profound character than I expected, and I became a more sympathetic and empathetic with her life.

If she’s a saint she’s definitely a medieval saint, not a 19th-century saint, because she’s an extreme character and cranky and has a kind of W.C. Fields sensibility about those kinds of things, but one who can speak to us because she’s not saccharine, she’s not moralistic, but she has this kind of consciousness that goes with it that makes her, if anything, a postmodern saint.

O’Connor’s absolutely a great American writer and especially a great American short story writer. Robert Giroux told me that when he got “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in the mail from her, the first draft, and he took it home with his papers from work and read it that night, he thought this is as great as “Bartleby the Scrivener,” I mean a classic American story. When you read an O’Connor story, it continues to have some powerful effect. It has this kind of tug on your heart. I mean there’s something very grounding about those stories and disturbing about them, so they have powerful effects. I think part of why we’re drawn to them is no one can exactly, finally label what that effect is or solve the riddle of those stories, and her personality—I think that’s why we keep coming back to her. I think people have an expectation sometimes that I’m supposed to explain this story forever, or I’m supposed to explain O’Connor with one kind of psychological key, but she retains mystery herself and retains paradox. But that’s her fascination and the fascination of those stories.

Surprisingly, she never wrote about her Lourdes experience. She was forced into going to Lourdes by her cousin, Katie Seemes, a kind of wealthy older woman who had lived next to the family in Savannah and had decided to put up the money for this trip. Remember O’Connor was now on crutches and had lupus, so there was a cure kind of motivation there, I think. So she went with her mother, and she was resisting it. At the same time there was an obvious kind of fascination that she had. She talked about it with Katherine Ann Porter, and there she was very positive about doing this. Having written this biography, one thing that’s had a big influence on me is this “what would O’Connor think of this?” is constantly with me. You know, I’m like, on unlikely occasions, “what would O’Connor think of Madmen?” In Lourdes she said that she was someone who would rather die for her religion than take a bath for it, which means that she didn’t really want to go into the waters. She did finally and said that she didn’t pray for her bones, she prayed for her novel. She had her own take on this. It is interesting that she didn’t write about it, and it points to that she had a very strong sense of her material and she would write about that, that in a way when she tried to write about other kinds of material, it didn’t really work. People were meant to write about what they were meant to write about, and the Lourdes experience—she wasn’t a memoirist or a particularly confessional writer in that way, but she did come back from that trip and get to work on “The Violent Bear It Away” and had a kind of gust of energy for that, and that’s a novel in which, it just occurred to me now, where there’s this kind of baptism that involves a drowning and things, so the whole fear of getting in the water in that way might have reverberated in that book.

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Robert Lowell

I’m very drawn to the novelistic biography, where you really, like in a 19th century novel, get a sense of someone from birth till death. You keep their pulse alive on every page as much as possible, and you have mixed with this all these facts and all this information that we love. And so in a certain way that allows room for a more complex and mysterious person, and I think that people’s lives are more complex than fiction, so biography is great in trying to reconcile all this. I open with a prologue called “Walking Backward,” and it’s a story, first, of O’Connor at five or six years old trying to teach her chicken to walk backwards and this being filmed by Pathe newsreel company who comes to Savannah to film this. The archive still exists. O’Connor, in a rare essay, “King of the Birds,” wrote about this. It was a rare example of confession and memoir and meditation on herself, and why she’d been so, she called it, marked for life by this experience, partly a joke on her own fame, in a sense. But she did talk about it often. She liked to tell the story of the chicken walking backwards to Robert Lowell and people later on, and I do think, though ,that if I had to pick one kind of trait, the contrariness of O’Connor explains a lot, so in a sense while I was leaving it open to hopefully capture the mystery and complexity of her life, I also started by pointing out contrariness. She was working counter-clockwise to the culture, writing stories with religious messages in a kind of secular culture. The way she lived her life, it was all contrary. When I mentioned race before, that she almost developed backwards, that she was in favor of integration when it was shocking to everyone in town in 1948, and when it became more popular in the early ’60s then she was suddenly against it. So in that way I did have certain interpretations of her that go through, like leitmotifs.

There’s a lot of significance to the peacocks, and it’s become her logo. It’s on the cover of my book. It’s often associated with O’Connor. I do think the key to the peacock is a little bit of the chicken walking backwards. She said it herself: whatever that was all about, actually it led to my peacocks. In her life, when she returned to the south and comes to live with her mother on the dairy farm, two things happen. She starts writing these great stories, and she orders her first peacock, and she’d never actually seen a peacock. By the end of her life she had 39 peacocks, which would, at least twice in the correspondence, they would all open their tails simultaneously, she said. These tails were a map of the universe, so there’s great beauty, and so she was obviously a great pattern-maker in her fiction. The last story that she wrote, “Judgment Day,” was a retelling of the first story, “The Geranium,” that she had published in Iowa. But also in her life she was sending messages and living by design, and so the peacock becomes her self-chosen kind of a symbol, and I think she liked it because it was a comic and gawky bird, like herself. It ate her mother’s flowers and kept everyone awake all night, and then at a certain transfigurative moment tails would open, and here’s all this beauty, which she saw as a symbol of the way her fiction worked, and also in the Middle Ages the peacock was a symbol of Christ in the church, so it all lined up for her in the peacocks.

Ralph Wood Extended Interview

Read more of the interview with Baylor University theology and literature professor Ralph C. Wood, author of FLANNERY O’CONNOR AND THE CHRIST-HAUNTED SOUTH (Eerdmans, 2004):

I had the great good fortune of going to a small Texas university called East Texas State College, and there I had the extraordinarily great gift of having had a Roman Catholic major professor in English, and he taught us all the great literary texts of both the American and English traditions. But during my senior year of 1962-1963, he brought Flannery O’Connor to our campus, her only Texas visit—1962. She would die two years later in 1964 of lupus at the age of 39. And in those days every single undergraduate at this little college was required to read A Good Man is Hard to Find, that collection of her first short stories from 1955, and I was just overwhelmed. I was struck by something really strange, something really odd, something also very hilariously funny, and something that took my own world of rural east Texas, small-town east Texas, not sophisticated, not cultured, but turned it into art of the greatest, highest kind. But it was also very deeply Christian, comic-Christian and southern in ways that in some sense defined me, and I said to myself, if I can spend the rest of my life trying to fathom a writer like Flannery O’Connor and other writers like her, I’d have my calling, and that’s how it’s turned out to be, thanks to this one professor at this one small state school.

bookcover[Her work] can be appreciated, it can be read as a kind of document of its times, it can be read as an illustration of what a southern kind of literature of the 1950s would have looked like, but it can’t be really comprehended in the sense of grasped in all of its fullness apart from her Catholic Christianity. She said if I did not see through the lenses of my faith I’d have nothing to see. I’d have nothing to say. So quite literally there would be no Flannery O’Connor without her profound, life-centering faith in the Catholic Church and the Catholic tradition and the Gospel. You don’t have to have Christianity to understand Shakespeare, although it would help you understand a great deal of Shakespeare, but if you don’t understand O’Connor in the light of her faith, you really don’t understand her. You misunderstand her.

There can be a kind of reductionism and too quick reading of her in Christian terms. She, by the way, did not want to be known as a Catholic writer; she wanted to be known as a writer, that is to say as a woman whose work had its own excellence, that could stand on its own legs, that did not have to be propped up with the crutches of her faith as if it would crumble without it, so in that sense she is not a Catholic writer, and those that say there’s more to her than simply finding Christ figures—there really are almost none, or of tracing down Christian themes—is to misread her, I think they have a point, and she would agree to that point insofar as she said this: remember that reading literature is not like algebra, it is not a matter of finding x, that is to say the kind of extractable meaning that you can lift out of the text—that’s an Enlightenment notion by the way. Instead, she said once you find x you can forget it. A literary text is the embodiment of a whole way of experiencing the world, and therefore it’s going to have depth after depth, layer after layer, but for O’Connor there is nothing larger than the Gospel, nothing larger than the faith, so that those who say you must not reduce her to her faith are engaged in a fundamental category mistake. When you’ve got, as the Book of Colossians says, Christ present in the presence of the cosmos, then in a real sense the Gospel is larger than the universe, so there’s nothing outside it, grander than it, larger than it, and therefore she could encompass all that counts against it. There’s nihilism running rife through her stories. If you don’t pick up that nihilism, you’ve missed it. If you make a kind of sweet, easy Christian reading of her, you’ve missed it. But you can’t get to the core of her apart from her Christianity.

She wrote two novels, two collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and of course her very important collected letters called The Habit of Being, but out of that small body of work grew a kind of presence that simply cannot be exorcised. You cannot get rid of her, because when you read her you know that no one else could have written that work. In fact, Evelyn Waugh, not knowing that Flannery was a woman, said of her what he thought was something very complimentary but was in a certain way an insult, he said no woman could have written this work. Now Waugh of course got it really wrong, but his point was there’s something strange, spare, odd, alarming, troubling, but above all unforgettable about her. You cannot walk away from these stories saying, well, I’ve got O’Connor down, I’ll move on to something else, and so people keep returning to her. There are more than 50 books written on O’Connor now. She was the second writer in the Library of America series from the 20th century to be included. Faulkner was the first. That’s remarkable, that the second writer in that whole important series from the 20th century was Flannery O’Connor. So there’s something that’s perduring, lasting about her that’s just not going to go away.

The assumption made by most of her readers in the early ’50s when she came into print was that here we have another H.L. Mencken, here we have another Sinclair Lewis, here we have a sophisticate, and above all a Catholic sophisticate, making fun of these dumb, backwoods, benighted, backward fundamentalists who are screaming “Jesus saves,” who are doing wild and hairy things like handling snakes and so forth, so she must be mocking, she must be having fun with them, she must be satirizing them in the fashion of Mencken or Sinclair Lewis. Of course, Mencken called the Bible the nastiest name he could think of, you know—not the Cotton Belt, not the Tobacco Belt, but the ugly word, the Bible Belt. And for O’Connor that was the glory of her region, these people, backwoods—not our contemporary fundamentalists, not those that have moved into political power. These were the emarginated people in the sidelines of southern life in small, out of the way places, never making it into the news, never wanting to get into the news, never trying to push political candidates forward, never using the Gospel for some so-called larger political end. They were, instead, obsessed with God’s own self-identification in the Jews and in Jesus and in the book that is that story of self-identification, and so she saw—look, these are my brothers and sisters, they are as unlike me as they can be when it comes to the church and its sacraments, but they are a whole of a kind of sweated Gospel, a Gospel that takes God and God’s world with the utmost seriousness, and therefore I’ve got to attend to them, I cannot dismiss them, and so she winds up saying these are people after my own heart, and I want to write about them sympathetically, and of course that just stunned her secular audience, as they couldn’t understand at all what she was trying to do, when she was saying I think, in fact, what St. Thomas says. She says most sins are committed by acts of immoderation, of excess. There’s one and one only quality that can never be sufficiently immoderate, and that’s the love of God.  And in fact Thomas says you cannot love God moderately, you cannot love God in a kind of lukewarm fashion. We love God either absolutely or not at all. And she saw in these backwoods, southern, I call them folk Christians more than fundamentalists, that kind of completely radical love of God in their own way.

Now she sometimes criticizes them. Criticism and mockery, of course, are two different things. Mockery is to stand outside of and above and look down upon in a kind of scorn and disdain for that which you think is less than you are. Criticism is from the inside, trying to say, look, here’s something really important but that needs qualification, modification, and so there are stories in which she comes down on the anti-sacramental character of southern folk Christianity, the most powerful of which is called “Parker’s Back,” that story about a man who has—long before tattoos were de rigueur and fashionable—who has the figure of Jesus Christ tattooed on his back, and it is for that reason his wife rejects him. She cannot stand the idea of Jesus being figured image in any kind of incarnational way, certainly not in her church, and least of all on her husband’s back. So [O’Connor’s] critical of the anti-sacramental quality of that kind of southern folk Christianity, but she is not dismissive, never dismissive.

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Prof. Ralph Wood

When these people have profound encounters with a living God into whose hands it is a fearful thing to fall, since the Book of Hebrews, they don’t know what to do with it. They say there are no structures, there are no forms, there are no disciplines, there are no sufficient habits in which to place these radical encounters with God, and so they go off and do nutty things. For example, when I was teaching in the south, a fellow up in Boone, North Carolina, decided that since we hear our Lord say if your hand offends you, cut it off, went to the shop at Appalachian State University, got a saw out, and cut his hand off. Well, again, O’Connor would not make fun of that. She would criticize that and say, again, his Christian world did not give him the forms in which to put a radical kind of Christianity, and so she’s critical of that lack of form, but not the lack of substance. Those are two very different things. She admires him for having very great substance. She said those who were such drastic Christians, if they had been in the Catholic world would have wound up in a monastery where they could have had their lives given a certain kind of shape, as they couldn’t in do-it-yourself religion.

Thomas Merton, in a famous phrase, says that the command “love God” has now the force, roughly, of “eat Wheaties.” It’s just another empty phrase. But for O’Connor, “grace” and “mystery” are not empty phrases. They are something than which there is no greater. The grace of God, for O’Connor, she said, must wound before it could heal. What we would want is the kind of grace that comforts, cheers, that always lifts up but never casts down. She says we want a Christianity that’s like a warm blanket, when in fact the Gospel is a cross. Of course, she’s absolutely right about that, so for her grace means the cross entering the world in such a fashion as to bring radical judgment, that is to say wounding, but of course far greater and deeper healing, that is to say, gracious redemption. Likewise with the word mystery: mystery does not mean for her a kind of a fuzzy, foggy, gooey something or other. It’s a very specific term for her.  For her the word mystery means that which is inexhaustible in our knowledge of God, that the deeper we go in understanding who the self-declared, self-revealed God is, the more there is yet to understand, so that the greater our knowledge of God, also the greater our ignorance of God, so that we know only a thumbnail of who God is. So mystery for her is, therefore, an inviting term. It is not a kind of term that stops conversation. It’s not that which is just a puzzle, an enigma to which you throw up your hands and say, well, that’s a mystery. On the contrary. Another translation of the word mysterion in Greek is not only mystery but sacrament, so for her the sacraments invite ever deeper, inexhaustible exploration, knowledge, truth, wisdom, and of course humility, because the more you understand the less you know you really understand.

The violence puts off many readers. A lot of folks encounter it and say I want no more of that. There’s enough violence in the world around us, why go read a writer where in her most famous story five people get killed? Where the protagonists of both of her novels turn out to be murderers, where almost every story ends in death. In fact, she said, I can’t imagine many good stories that don’t end in death, because she says death has always been like a brother to my imagination, and what she meant by that, of course, was that in the moment or the fact of death we bring our lives to the point of culmination, either of course in fullness, giving back to God, like in the parable of the talents, or squandered with nothing to return. So death is for her a moment of immense focus, clarity, and sharpened culmination, and therefore for her death was a thing that Christians are meant to live toward. I point out to my students, we celebrate the saints on their death days, not usually on their birthdays, so that violent death, as it were, is a way of speeding up that process, of making what would often be a long and slow and unprepared-for moment supremely well prepared for, either by suffering a violent death, or alas by committing a violent act of crime, murder, that makes you refocus. But those deaths are never gratuitous in O’Connor. In fact, she had a witticism I often repeat to help students. She said now remember, a lot of people get killed in my stories, but nobody gets hurt. And what she meant by that was that nobody’s tortured. Almost everyone goes to their deaths graciously. Think of that story where even the mother whose child is about to be murdered goes off to her death in a kind of accepting way, so that deaths are never there for their own sakes so that she can make our skin crawl. No one’s fingernails are plucked out, as they are in Dostoevsky, for example, no one made to squirm before being killed, but instead brought to moments of immense clarity about who they are in final, ultimate, metaphysical, theological terms. Now, that also happens to echo the fact that ours is the most violent world in the history of the human species. O’Connor knew well, though she did not live to witness the pronouncement of Pope John Paul II when he called ours the culture of death. She knew ours was the culture of death, that more people were killed by violent means in the 20th century than in all the preceding centuries combined. One of my students calls it the age of ashes, the century of blood, and that there is built into our existence a fundamental violence, an antagonism that causes people to kill each other in mass numbers, usually nation-states and their omnicompetent governments killing their own citizens, but also simply a widespread kind of seething fury that underlies everything, because of course that’s the real mark of God’s absence from our world. That’s the nihilism she thought characterizes our world. So she wanted to confront that nihilism, but not with stories that are nice, that are sweet, that are saccharine, that say don’t be violent, be good.  No, she meets violence with violence, but the violence she meets it with is redemptive violence, it’s the violence where people come to see themselves before God, and always when they see themselves in that form, maybe one exception, they come to the moment of repentance, to a moment of grace, so that a kind of horrifically destructive violence is answered by a wondrously redemptive, constructive violence. After all, the cross is the ultimately violent act, where we killed God himself, so you can’t have a Christianity that isn’t in some sense spiritually violent, in that if we were doing real warfare with all that counts against God, there’s going to be something internally violent, so most of her characters undergo an internal warfare more than an external kind of violence.

The-Violent-Bear-It-AwayMayhem, murder, a woman being gored by a bull that gets loose, a grandmother being shot 3 times in the chest by a mass murderer, a little boy drowning himself to be really baptized, on and on and on—those stories are also hilariously comic for two reasons. The most obvious reason, that O’Connor simply understands what is really comic about ordinary southern, country, untutored life. Southerners tell stories, southerners make jokes, southerners are just funny, and a lot of her funniest lines are from these characters. For example, at the end of The Violent Bear It Away, where the protagonist is, to his great surprise, confessing that he has in fact drowned a boy, tells this to a truck driver he’s hitched a ride with: “Hey man I just drowned a boy,” And the truck driver says, “Only one?” Well, you see, that’s not a sophisticated humor. O’Connor really liked Mark Twain, a kind of slapdash bang ’em up humor, and it’s usually out of anecdotes like that that things are funny. For example, in her story with the famously ugly title, “The Artificial Nigger,” a grandfather decides to take his son into the city to show him what a wonderfully common and safe world they live in out there in the rural countryside, whereas the city’s going to be really forbidding, and the boy will never want to go there again. He says I’m going to teach you how you never will get lost out here, and the boy says, “Out here there ain’t nowhere to get lost.” So it’s one-liners like that that are very funny. But of course O’Connor, as a deeply Christian writer, knows that comedy is the ultimately Christian category. When Dante writes his great book, he calls it the Commedia, the Comedy, because comedy is a literary form that always issues in life. It usually ends with a marriage. Of course, the New Testament ends with the great marriage feast of the lamb, with life coming into the world, with new birth, with resurrection. Tragedy, though a very great, noble art form, ends in death, and in some sense in defeat, usually in ennobling death, but still in a sense that finally things are to be despaired over. So it’s comic in that ultimate sense, that you can laugh not at O’Connor’s characters so much as with them, because you see—that we’re like them and that we need to undergo the same radical renovation they undergo.

“The Artificial Nigger” has caused a great deal of consternation among her readers. It means that her work is often not taught in high places in American academe, because that word is so offensive, and I confess it is offensive, it should be offensive, but it’s absolutely appropriate to the story and to the characters who use it, just as in Huckleberry Finn the word appears in an absolutely appropriate way by Mark Twain. For Flannery O’Connor, race was indeed the curse of the South in the sense that it was the single most important test which we as white Christians failed. Walker Percy of course says the same thing. She approaches the race question, however, not in the fashion that most people would expect, that is to say I can’t remember many, if any, places in her letters, which were voluminous, her using the phrase “civil rights,” because as Alasdair MacIntyre points out, rights are an invention of the 17th and 18th centuries.  For O’Connor, the mistreatment of black people is a violation of their being creatures made in the image of God. Therefore racial injustice is a horror to God, first of all, and of course to blacks, and therefore to be corrected. She supported, and I think especially in a late letter she supports Martin Luther King, because King is dealing with that question from within the church. King is appealing fundamentally to the Gospel saying, look, this is not how Christians treat their fellow Christians, and I think that was more or less O’Connor’s own approach. She did not like topical art. She says that “topical” is poison, and she meant by that if you set out to make a point in a story, it’s no longer a story. She says I always begin a story with some complex situation, and I ask, how in the world do people get into that jam, and how in the world might they get out? So she deals with the race question, the race problem in her stories in two ways. One, this is what is surprising, by showing the way in which racial injustice is a symptom of a larger disease. That’s a crucial distinction for her. The larger disease is a pandemic sinfulness of the human race in our fallenness, and that means for her everybody is sick. That means that black people who are sinned against are still sinful. That means that civil rights workers who are there seeking to overcome racial injustice are still sinners, no less than their white persecutors, and so she writes about the sinfulness, not so much in blacks, although she has some as they’d say “sorry blacks” in her stories, but she writes about self-righteous racial reformers who can go off and “do good,” so called, away from home, but who cannot attend to the people who are right at their feet. That is to say they cannot deal with their own mothers or fathers or brothers or sisters in such a way as to be redemptive and reconciled. So she’s concerned about the way in which, unless we’re very careful, we divide the world up into what someone said is the easiest moral question of the world, you know. Percy said if blacks are being mistreated, stop mistreating them. That’s pretty simple. But the complex matter is this matter of sinfulness that infects all of us, including, as I’ve said, those who are victimized and those who are trying to liberate them, the blacks, from their injustice. But the other way she treats the racial question, and far more deeply in my view, is to show the way in which black people have often been the means of redemption to white people because of the way in which blacks have born their suffering. In the South, almost all blacks are Christians, and therefore they have acquired something from the Gospel that has enabled them not to strike back, not return evil with evil, not to say “the fire next time.” O’Connor knows that justice delayed is in a real sense justice denied. But she also knows that justice too quickly corrected can mean new injustice created. You can drive out one devil by welcoming in seven devils through the back door. So in these other kinds of stories what she does is show moments of a strange kind of racial redemption, and she was moving into new territory at the very end of her life. The story that was left on her desk unfinished was called “Judgment Day,” in which a black man and a white man are living together, something really radical and strange in O’Connor. But far more importantly to me than that story is the one with the offensive title, “The Artificial Nigger,” where in very subtle ways most of my students don’t get, because it is so subtle, we confront a black Madonna by way of a large black woman standing in a door in the ghetto, and this young boy named Nelson, who’s never been in a church where there’s a figure of Mary, never seen a Madonna, has an instinctive sense that this must be what the mother of God would be like. He doesn’t use any kind of language in this story, but he has an instinctive sense that there’s some kind of accepting, embracing love of God that has this maternal quality that he’s never known. But more importantly, the story ends with a terrific sense in which this grandfather named Mr. Head and this grandson named Nelson have sinned against each other in that most diseased sort of way, the most fundamental way, violating each other, but they’re brought to their reconciliation before a broken Sambo. Now, for a northern audience that will have to be explained, that in the South, less and less now, thank goodness, many whites had black Sambos on their lawn, usually at the gate. They took two forms. Usually one would be a black jockey, holding a lantern, and was thus serving as the light post for entering the driveway. The other and far more degrading is the kind they encounter, and that’s of a black eating watermelon, which of course was a very demeaning way of ridiculing blacks as unworthy to do anything but eat watermelon and spit the seeds. But in this case, the black Sambo has not been attended to well. The watermelon has turned brown, so it’s barely discernable as watermelon. One eye has been chipped out so that you can’t really see that this is an ordinary face, and the back of the statue has come loose from its attachment, and so it’s leaning over, its mouth turned down, its eye chipped out. It becomes a crucifix before which these two terrible sinners against each other are reconciled, and there can be no other crucifix for this white man and this white boy than that figure by a black Sambo. I think that’s why it was her favorite story. It’s her largest embodiment of the Gospel in fiction, in ways that are not at all preachy or sermonic or point-making.

For O’Connor the term sacramental is not a loose and baggy term that applies to any sense of something slightly holy anywhere. It means instead something in the world that has discernable analogies with what lies beyond the world, so you can see visible signs of God’s invisible grace if you have the lenses for seeing them. Those occur in a lot of places in O’Connor’s fiction, for example, very often in a tree line, which in southern Georgia and Florida you often have, that stretches on and on to infinity. That becomes for her a moment of discerning what lies beyond us. The trilling of a bird in a lonely woods makes you pause: Why four notes rather than three? Why that noise and that alone? Again, it calls into mind a world beyond this one. But above all just silence.

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St. Thomas Aquinas

Silence was, for her—as St. Thomas said, silence honors God, and so many times her protagonists and characters come to their moment of awareness of who they are in silence, all of those things having the sacramental quality. Now, on the other hand, the word sacrament means something very different. It’s not an adjective but a noun, and of course as a Catholic, for her there are seven sacraments, and that means therefore that sacrament is an act in which something happens, in which what was not present is made present, and the most famous incident about that business is a famous New York dinner party hosted by Robert Lowell and his wife, and a lot of the literati of New York were present, one of whom was Mary McCarthy, the kind of literary doyenne of New York society in the ’50s, and McCarthy had just written a book called Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, the basic thesis of which is how I outgrew the Catholic Church, how it became too small for me, how I transcended my narrow Irish Catholicism. Flannery O’Connor rarely spoke unless spoken to. She was shy. She was not a hail woman well met. She never said a word until Mary McCarthy said, well, you know, I’m not a Catholic, don’t believe any of that hocus pocus. I nonetheless find Eucharistic symbolism useful in my art. There is after all a kind of cultural resonance to bread and wine that people will kind of pick up on it and know that something significant is going on because you’re putting it to symbolic use. Well, Flannery O’Connor, who had not said a word the whole evening, rose to the edge of her chair and said in her best Georgia drawl, which I can’t imitate, “If the Eucharist is only a symbol then I say to hell with it.” In other words, for her this is the real presence of our Lord, and not just for her as a Catholic, but surely for us who are Protestant.  In the 14th chapter of John we read, if you eat of my meat and if you drink of my blood, you have life in you, and if you don’t, you don’t have life in you, and Paul says if you drink of this cup unworthily you risk your own damnation. Well, something is happening, and that’s not just something. It is God’s own real presence, where Christians are meant to feed and find their very sustenance without which we cannot do. So Flannery O’Connor’s life was sacramental to the core. She went to Mass every day when possible, trudging through the deep snows of Iowa when she was a graduate student there, getting out of the YWCA in New York, trudging down to the local Catholic church, because the Eucharist, the Supper, the Communion is the place where we receive into us that which we cannot possibly give ourselves, and whereby the church of course is made into the mystical body of Christ, where we’re transubstantiated no less than of course the bread and the wine. And so that works itself out in her fiction over and over again, though not overtly; usually covertly, because again she doesn’t want the kind of trundle in Catholic sacraments that let the reader know, okay, here’s a Catholic, she’s going to show you something. It’s always sly, indirect, at a kind of acute angle, as in for example the story called “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” where this little girl who’s been eaten up with her own Catholic pride, she’s so proud of being a Catholic as over against these dumb Church of God boys. To one of them she says “you dumb ox, you dumb Church of God boy,” and of course that’s exactly the name for Thomas Aquinas, the dumb ox. He was big, he was slow to speak, and he was often taken advantage of with jokes and the like. But at the end she sees that consecrated host at the service of benediction, not the Eucharist but there on the altar, like a huge sun, and sees there’s life, and in so seeing undergoes her own radical humiliation that becomes her humility.

One can read her as a nihilist. I’ve had students tell me that they read her in high school, they read her as a nihilist because a lot of people get killed. In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” you’ve got the serial killer who finally decides there’s nothing to do but plug her, kills her, walks off. Nihilism. And O’Connor said nihilism is the gas we all breath, and then she added what is a very frightening footnote. She said whether inside or outside the church it’s the gas we breathe. So there’s nihilism in the church.  The church can become the place where we enact the nothingness of our world, where in a horrifically not just anti-sacramental but sacrilegious way we deny God. So nihilism is never anything she dismisses. She admired Nietzsche for that reason. He named our illness. He had no cure, but he named our illness. In fact, she said, “I read recently about a new technique where we can breed the wings off chickens so they will have these big, fat, luscious chicken breasts that we can eat.” She said, “We are an age of wingless chickens, which is what I think Nietzsche must have meant when he says God is dead.” She never dismisses nihilism. It’s there. However, she read St. Thomas every night 20 minutes before bed. Well, that’s not bedtime reading, if you’ve read Thomas. Thomas is tough. He’s a knotty, dense, complex, rich, meaty thinker who was the great, formative influence on her thinking, but again in a background sort of way, not in a foregrounded sort of way. And she made jokes about this. She said I can envision the day when my momma walks into my room and says turn off the lights, and I say sed contra, on the contrary, light being eternal cannot be shut off, and she added “or some such nonsense like that.” So she made fun of her own Thomism, but she got her Thomism largely through Jacques Maritain, who taught her in his book Art and Scholasticism that art is a virtue of the practical intellect, by which he meant that art achieves its purpose and in that sense gives glory to God by being what it is and not another thing, by being really good art. Not by preaching, not by being nice, not by being cheerful, but by being whole. People kept saying why don’t you write a fiction that’s wholesome? She said I do. I write fiction that’s whole, because there’s nothing extraneous, there’s nothing disingenuous, it all has to be there, and so she felt that her first calling was to practice the habit of good art making, as St. Thomas had taught her, without any necessary regard for how good a person she may have been. She knew she was not a good person, as none of us truly is. Jacques Maritain in fact quotes Oscar Wilde, who says that a man is a poisoner is nothing against his prose, and Chesterton says a man may be able to hit his grandmother at 100 yards. That means he’s a good shot but not necessarily a good person.  So O’Connor wanted to be a good shot. She wanted to create really good art, in the deepest sense, that’s whole, that grasps the fullness of any scene or situation in all of its dimensions, from the depths of the demonic to the heights of the transcendent, and thereby she would glorify God, and she got that from Thomas, especially through Maritain.

She welcomed the Second Vatican Council. It ends in 1965, she dies a year before. She especially welcomed the council’s new emphasis upon scripture. It wasn’t entirely new, it had begun with the institutes in Jerusalem and the Medieval Institute in Toronto. She felt that the church was really digging into its deepest resources, which are scripture and tradition, and that could be only for the good. She was scandalized, to be honest, by a number of Catholics who did not know the Bible. The old Protestant canard that Catholics don’t know scripture was to her all too true. She made it, by the way, her point, not for that ever to be said of her. She knew scripture inside and out. So this new refreshment of the church, this opening of the church’s windows to the world of scripture and tradition was really refreshing. She also wanted the church to really engage modern thought. She did not want the church to be medievalizing in the bad sense of trying to be nostalgic, recovering a lost age. For example, for a while she was an enthusiast for the work of Teilhard de Chardin because she thought Teilhard was offering a new synthesis of classic, Catholic, orthodox theology with Darwinian evolutionary science, that he had brought those together into a new configuration of wholeness. She had lived to see that that was wrong. She lived to be critical to him. In fact, I think she’s making fun of his famous phrase, “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” in her story with that title because what happens there is you’ve got these two rising forces they don’t converge, they clash. So she welcomed the new stress on scripture, she welcomed the new opening to the world of modern thought. However, I don’t think she would have welcomed the radical alterations of the liturgy. She was no classicist, she did not read Latin, she read Thomas in translation, but she felt that even uneducated Catholics could follow the Mass in Latin and that therefore I expect she would have seen no great need to have said it in the vernacular. That’s my suspicion, and I am quite sure she would have protested against the denudation of the churches of its sacred images, at least the radical stripping of so many Catholic churches. Now she didn’t like frivolous decorations. For example, when her Irish Catholic priest in Milledgeville festooned the church in green for St Patrick’s Day she was horrified, because she wanted to make sure being Catholic did not mean being Irish, although she had an Irish name. Being Catholic meant being a member of the church universal and complete. But I don’t think, therefore, she would have liked the way in which so many Catholic churches ceased looking like Catholic churches. Not that you have to have fancy decor  She said for me mass involved the same act if it’s said out of a suitcase in a boiler room as it is said at St. Peter’s in Rome. So it’s not it all has to be in a perfectly aesthetically pleasing context or setting. But I think at the same time she would not have wanted to be folksy and so devoid of reverence. Remember those balloon Masses of the late 1960s? I’m horrified to think what O’Connor might have said about those. One of my friends at Notre Dame, John O’Callaghan, said there are some of those Masses that made you want to go say confession after you had attended them, not before. I think she might have had that same regard.

k1232_mertonThomas Merton compared her to Sophocles. That’s a stunning statement, to say the least, by Merton, because Sophocles certainly is the greatest of the Greek tragedians and a figure that kind of gives us the main texts in some ways of the Western world, the Oedipus trilogy, but I think that’s a bit extravagant, frankly. I think O’Connor would be not too well pleased to be put on that kind of not just pedestal but pinnacle. I would call her a major minor writer. By that I mean someone very important, but not a person of the very—I wouldn’t put her with Dante or Shakespeare or with Sophocles. I’d put her with people like, for example, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great Jesuit poet of the 19th century, Evelyn Waugh, the great Catholic novelist of the 20th, Claudel, Bernanos, the great French writers. But I would add to that something that can’t be said of any English Catholic or any French Catholic, and that is Flannery O’Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced. That’s an astonishing fact, when as Chesterton said this is the nation that has the soul of a church, the nation that has more churchgoing people than any other industrialized advancement, and yet name our major writers, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Emily Dickinson, Frost, Stevens—not one of them Christian, at least not orthodoxly Christian. There are points in which their work certainly has Christian quality, especially in Emily Dickinson, but you would not call any of them a Christian writer. So you have this one figure, and again on the edges of American culture. She’s a southerner and a Catholic, she’s not at the center of American culture, and yet she is our only great Christian writer. That’s a claim large enough, it seems to me.

I think the sacramental barrenness of so much American Christianity has failed to enliven the imagination of its products. I mean, for example, the Hispanic maid in my building at Baylor is a woman who is not literate, yet she knows the whole Christian story because she has seen it figured in images in her Catholic church. She’s greatly impressed that I’m named after the archangel Raphael, so she’s picked up by osmosis, just by breathing in the sacramental, imagistic world of her Catholicism, a kind of richly imaginative way of construing the world. But the church in America has been too often a reflection of America. It has not been sufficiently countercultural. It was not at the places where it should have stood over against the culture with a kind of prophetic witness that would make writers of the caliber of the ones I mentioned pay attention. I mean, Mark Twain was horrified by slavery and Mark Twain’s a southerner. What were southern churches saying about slavery? Not much. Emerson, you know, winds up with a kind of Unitarianism that is so devoid of thick Gospel content that he can’t produce any kind of art that would be, again, profoundly Christian. So at both the political and the intellectual level I think the church has failed to provide an alternative that would really, again, arrest the attention of our brightest, ablest, most imaginative thinkers. That’s why Hawthorne is drawn to the Puritans. The Puritans at least tried; they may have gotten it wrong, but he takes them way more seriously than he does the experiment at Brook Farm, where everybody went around saying “how’s your Over-Soul?” and things like that.

Thomas Merton’s influence is more directly political. He was a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War. He, together with Dorothy Day, who also exercised an equally important influence on American culture, it seems to me, if not more important, because her work survived through the Catholic Worker Movement. In fact, the joke was that after Merton’s death a lot of Cistercian monasteries said hurray, at last we don’t have all these people thinking they are called to be Cistercians because they’ve read Thomas Merton, so in some ways it’s as if his work had a kind of counterproductive effect. Merton’s influence, it seems to me, is scattered. It has political effect. He’s very good about retrieving Cistercian mystical thought, hugely. His book New Seeds of Contemplation is, to me, one of the great books of mystical literature in our time. He writes very good poetry, but not poetry of the highest order. His essays, I think, are the essence of his work. In that regard he’d be more like Wendell Berry. I’d compare Merton to Berry. Berry is our best Protestant and Baptist essayist. I think Merton was probably our best Catholic essayist, but O’Connor moves in a different realm. She moves in a different realm, and that is a realm that’s not simply prose fiction on the one hand, nor kind of elevated insight on the other hand through essays, but the reconfiguration of everything through the lenses of the Christian faith. She liked to quote Conrad. Conrad said the function of a writer is to make the audience see. To make the audience see, and by “see” O’Connor interpreted that to mean not simply figure out that’s an oak and that’s not a hickory, not simply some kind of realism, but to have vision. Sight is one thing. Sight is simply to use the eye as a kind of ocular organ for perceiving furniture, lamps, and the like. But the eye when seeing through, seeing something behind it informed by the Christian faith, and it becomes a lens for beholding what she calls “distances” that are far off close up. Then you’ve accomplished something. That’s what she does. She’s prophetic in that sense. She says I’m a realist of distances, not a realist of surfaces or a realist of appearances, but a realist of distances—trying to bring that which is far off close up. It was far off, of course, as the transcendence of God, the otherness of God, the sinfulness of human nature that goes unrecognized and so forth. I don’t think Merton ever accomplishes anything that great, and that’s why I think she will last in a way he won’t.

Already we’ve seen downturns and upturns in O’Connor’s reputation. There was a while where her work was held in a good deal not just of suspicion but disdain, because of the way in which her characters do, when appropriate, and only when appropriate, use the N word, in the way in which she was dismissed, I’m afraid, about people in high places, as a Catholic, and therefore in her own way a fundamentalist. I know people who call O’Connor a fundamentalist, which means she believes in the basic doctrines of the church, so that there have already been ups and downs, but what we’re in now in the midst of is a new kind of resurgence that I think will continue. It will have its low points, I don’t doubt that it will, but she said even if it takes 200 years for my work to be appreciated that’s okay. My Catholic friends said remember for us a thousand years isn’t a very long time. And so if there is a thousand years, I think O’Connor will be appreciated a millennium from now.