In 1972 Flannery O’Connor was posthumously honored with the National Book Award for her Complete Stories. As her publisher, Robert Giroux, was readying himself to receive this highest of American literary prizes, he was caught short when an eminent author asked, “Do you really think Flannery O’Connor was a great writer? She’s such a Roman Catholic.” Brad Gooch might well have begun his much-anticipated biography — Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (Little, Brown, 416 pp., $30) — with this remarkable charge. Instead, he places it on the penultimate page. This decision is regrettable, for it leaves us still needing the book that hasn’t been written during the 45 years since O’Connor’s death in 1964: a critical biography showing that her life and work are quite incomprehensible apart from her being “such a Roman Catholic.”
The problem is not merely that O’Connor fell prey to the anti-Catholicism that remains the only acceptable bigotry among some American intellectuals. She did, of course, endure the condescension of such ex-Catholics as Mary McCarthy, who said: “Considering how intelligent she was, [O’Connor] was more pious than any other Catholic I’ve ever known.” The deeper problem is far more perplexing: Why, prior to Flannery O’Connor, had this country — the only Western nation “with the soul of a church,” as G. K. Chesterton famously said — failed to produce a single major writer whose work is Christian in both form and substance? Why would a triple outsider to the American project — a self-declared advocate of 13th-century Catholicism, a southerner who refused to apologize for the evils of her region, a sympathizer with backwoods Protestant fundamentalists — become this country’s first thoroughly Christian writer of fiction? Why are nearly all of our eminent writers — Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Frost, Faulkner — heterodox at best, atheist or even nihilist at worst? Why was Flannery O’Connor the first distinguished American writer to have her imagination shaped by the scandalous claims of the Gospel? Why, above all, does her greatness lie precisely in her being “such a Roman Catholic,” a Christian convinced that the triune God has uniquely and definitively identified Himself and His will for the world in the Jews and Jesus and the Church?
Comments