ROCK ISLAND, IL It wasn’t in accord with the prescribed methods of preparing myself for the Sacred Mysteries that I arose last Sunday to knock off, in the pre-Auroral hour, the last thirty pages of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch (Little, Brown & Co., 2009).

But I did it anyway.

The Rock Island Argus had yet to slam thunderously against my front door with its must-see photos of the modest Kali, Kori, Kaci, and Taelir in their plunging pastels at the prom—and of L’DeAndre in his standard-issue orange at central booking, so I couldn’t very well check to see with what greased paws the Tigers were clinging to first place in the underwhelming American League Dismal, or discover what brain-shrinking gizmo Worst Buy was hawking at twenty per cent off the original theft. I therefore lit the vigil lamp and the incense–promissory acts, both–and sat down, as ’twere, with Mr. Gooch.

A body likes to get a few things from the book it’s reading, and for my part I did not walk away from this one unfed:

O’Connor called To Kill a Mockingbird a good children’s book.

She said, “I have the original Tin Ear”: “All I can say . . . is that all classical music sounds alike to me and all the rest of it sounds like the Beatles.”

She said of C.S. Lewis, “We both want to locate our characters . . . right on the border of the natural & the supernatural.”

When she met Russell Kirk she regarded him as “Humpty Dumpty (intact) with constant cigar and (outside) pork pie hat”; she said that their “attempts to talk were like the efforts of two midgits [sic] to cut down a California redwood.”

Kirk recommended her work to T.S. Eliot, who said he was “quite horrified” by those stories he managed to get through. “She has certainly an uncanny talent of a high order,” he said, “but my nerves are just not strong enough to take much of a disturbance.” (That’s what happens when you’re only from Missouri.)

But there’s much more to this book than all that. Gooch is credible on O’Connor’s Iowa City and Yaddo years. His conjectures on the influence of Erik Langkjaer on “Good Country People” are both properly muted and properly aired. (Langkjaer was about the closest thing to a beau O’Connor ever had; he kissed her once but, upon hitting only teeth, discovered she was a tad inexperienced in receiving such gestures of affection.)

He (Gooch) is reasonable on the subterranean tension between O’Connor and her mother, Regina, and on the murderous impulses toward parents that some of O’Connor’s characters exhibit. (The impulse seems in real life to have been mutual occasionally.)

He rightly sees O’Connor’s writing career as a kind of spiritual autobiography, and he is properly attuned to the mockery that seems to have been O’Connor’s default mode, a mockery that revealed itself even before the girl turned ten:

A cartoon O’Connor drew when she was nine years old shows a child walking with her father and mother. In a balloon coming from the mother’s mouth are the words: “Hold your head up, Mary Flannery, and you are just as bad, Ed.” To which the girl, dragging along, snidely replies, “I was readin where someone died of holding up their head.”

That’s a snatching of moral authority—and a degree of indirection—that many men never achieve even in their dotage.

But this new biography took me a bit by surprise in corroborating something I’ve tried to work out in a forthcoming essay.* That ‘something’ is O’Connor’s well-developed sense of, and devotion to, place, a devotion I regard as integral to what has long passed as the merely “regional” in O’Connor’s fiction. That is, for some time we have recognized O’Connor as both “southern” and “regional,” and we have meant these epithets to be complimentary, but there hasn’t been much noise about reducing those terms to “local”—again in a salutary sense—analogous to improving and enriching a sauce by “reducing” it, which is to say by thickening it and making it more assertive: by making it more itself, you might say.

After carefully drawing the contours of O’Connor’s sojourns to Iowa and New York, Gooch deftly draws attention to a remark O’Connor made to Cecil Dawkins in a letter from July of 1957: “I stayed away from the time I was 20 until I was 25 with the notion that the life of my writing depended on my staying away. I would certainly have persisted in that delusion had I not got very ill and had to come home. The best of my writing has been done here.” A hundred pages later Gooch revisits this in a discussion of O’Connor’s reading of Teilhard de Chardin, specifically The Divine Milieu: “She drew marginal lines in her copy next to Teilhard’s concept of the Incarnation as ‘a single event . . . developing in the world’; a cosmic presence in local material lay behind her own arguing for regional writing.”

Gooch nearly gets it. The point, I think, is that O’Connor got better as a story-teller not only because she refined her skills and matured and got smarter (which properly expanded rather than contracted her sense of mystery). She got better because she learned to write about what she saw within the limited range of her own physical vision, which was limited even more by the crutches that lupus forced her to use until it eventually claimed her life.

What distinguished O’Connor’s localism was her combining it with a profound respect for and formidable understanding of the Incarnation, which she regarded as one of the “true laws of the flesh and the physical.” What she meant by “law” I made some attempt to explain in a middling essay that appeared in some out-of-the-way place a few years back.** It’s a law that lurks in the background of the aforementioned forthcoming essay, toward the beginning of which I say:

When Manley Pointer [in “Good Country People”] tells Mrs. Hopewell that he’s “not even from a place, just from near a place” (279), he delivers one of O’Connor’s many good jokes. And there are likewise several good laughs built into Sara Ruth’s outrage at the tattoo of the Byzantine Christ on Parker’s back [in “Parker’s Back”], as when she accuses Parker of idolatry, beats him with a broom until large welts form on the face of Jesus, and then stamps on the broom and shakes it out the window “to get the taint of him off it” (530).

But both jokes speak to conditions conducive to a kind of moral failure about which O’Connor felt very strongly, especially by the time she resumed work on her second novel. Manley Pointer’s placelesness—hardly singular in O’Connor’ fiction and certainly a concern in The Violent Bear it Away—tells us something about the sort of scoundrel who believes in nothing and runs off with other people’s wooden legs and glass eyeballs. Placelessness is not a morally neutral condition for the writer who said “better someplace than no place.”

I go on (and on) to say:

When O’Connor said “better someplace than no place,” she was speaking about writing fiction, not about a central Christian mystery; when she allows Sara Ruth to declare her utter ignorance of the second person of the trinity, she is speaking about a central Christian mystery, not about fiction. And yet both instances suggest that the making of good fiction, like the making of a moral life, is grounded not in the general and the ideal but in the particular and the real, not in the abstract but in the concrete, not in placelessness but in place, not in the idea of God but the person of Jesus, born of Mary. Manley’s placelessness and Sara Ruth’s inability to see the face of God are theological offenses for which there are artistic corollaries. Like Mrs. Hopewell, Sara Ruth is “good Chrustian folk,” but she believes in nothing no less than Manley does. She may as well join Onnie Jay Holy’s Church of Christ without Christ [in Wise Blood] or some other such absurdity to which (as O’Connor said) Protestantism reduces.

There’s a question in all this, and I suppose it has driven much of what I’ve written for the FPR. What is the fate of our understanding of one of the “true laws of the flesh and the physical,” viz., the Incarnation, when we give ourselves easy permission to look beyond all that falls within the range of our limited vision and instead set our sights on all that does not? (Tarwater in The Violent Bear it Away says he wouldn’t give a dollar for an airplane ride.)

I’m just a pore kuntry English teecher, its troo. But I think I’m right in saying that one thing that distinguishes Christianity from other monotheistic religions is the doctrine of the Trinity, a feature of which is God’s experience and willful self-forsakenness in the person of Jesus, who dwelt not anywhere but somewhere and who during the reign of Caesar Augustus considered the lilies of the field.

Wouldst thou know liberty? Remember place and limits. I’m convinced O’Connor would agree. She even said that our “sorry productions” in literature are the result not of the restrictions of dogma but of our failure to impose restrictions on ourselves. Having spent her short life attempting to “render justly” the visible world, she understood well the limits of freedom—and the freedom that comes only by limits.

And, as Gooch reminds us, she did a helluva lot of front-porch sittin’.

My Sunday ended appropriately and proved (1) that there is a God and (2) that She’s vengeful (and probably named “Kapri” or “Mackenzie” or “Bristol”): I was doing the dishes after dinner (pork loin on the grill smoked with apple wood and served in a flowing floodtide of a certain mustard sauce) when neither the quantity nor the quality but rather the variety of the wines caused me to do what every butcher knows not to do: attempt to catch a falling knife. A newly sharpened carving implement sliced my right pinky, from which I bled so profusely that I could not determine the line of the cut. My wife the nurse, who was making up for being absent during the preparations by disappearing during the clean-up, proved at the moment to be of limited usefulness. But lo! An unopened Band-Aid—the very one I’d used that morning as a bookmark and on which I’d scribbled the page numbers of the passages I wished to revisit! With my left hand I made a tourniquet of a nearby rubber band, whereupon the bleeding stopped and I could see in which direction to pull the sundered flesh with a bandage that, absent the intercessions of Saint Flannery herself, would never have been at hand.

But typing sure is hell now.

_______

* “Abstraction and Intimacy in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away” in Susan Srigley, ed., Flannery O’Connor and the Violence of Love: New Essays on The Violent Bear It Away (Notre Dame, forthcoming).

** “Flannery O’Connor on Fiction and a ‘Mood’ for Christian Intellectual Labor,” which is available somewhere here or here: http://www.mobap.edu/images/stories/journals/integrite/Integrite_4.2.pdf

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