May 5, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Flannery O’Connor wanted to shake her readers awake. Her mother wanted her to write the next Gone with the Wind. Here to tell her story is Jonathan Rogers, author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories.
The show where America is the Star and the American People.
Recorded from the city where the West Begins, Fort Worth, Texas.
Vanrie O'Connor is considered one of America's greatest fiction writers
and one of my favorites their stories. They're peopled with
(00:31):
a sordid caravan of murderers and thieves, and prostitutes and
bigots whose lives are punctuated by horror and sudden violence.
But the most shocking thing about Vanrie O'Connor's fiction is
that it is shaped by her thoroughly Christian vision. If
the world she depicts is dark and terrifying, it is
also a place where grace makes itself known. Here to
(00:55):
tell her story is Jonathan Rodgers, author of The Terrible
Speed of Mercy. The spiritual biography of Flannery O'Connor. Let's
take a listen.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Flannier O'Connor was a twentieth century writer best known for
her short stories. She also wrote a couple of novels.
Her most commonly anthologized short story is A Good Man.
It is hard to find people who've only read one
thing by Flanneer O'Connor tend to have read that story,
and it's a shocking story. It's a story about a
family that has making the trip from Georgia to Florida
(01:29):
and they have a car accident and run into a
serial killer named the Misfit, and that serial killer well
kills everybody. And it's shocking stuff. And that kind of
shocking violence is actually quite common in Flaneer O'Connor's stories.
For that reason, she's often misunderstood. She once said, many
(01:51):
of my ardent admirers will be roundly shocked and disturbed
if they realize that everything I believe is thoroughly moral,
thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give
my work its chief characteristics. She saw herself as writing
to a post Christian audience, for whom baptism, for instance,
didn't really mean anything. And the way she framed her
(02:14):
use of shocking things like say murder in these stories, well,
here's what she said. When you can assume that your
audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax
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
heart of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind,
(02:35):
you draw large and startling figures, And so her stories
that are so shocking are really a way of shouting,
a way of drawing large and startling figures for people
who otherwise can't see what it is that she's trying
to show. She says, the devil is always an appropriate
subject from my kind of comedy because he's always accomplishing
(02:55):
ends other than his own, which is a really helpful
way of understanding what she's up to in her stories.
In another place, says that her stories are about the
workings of grace and territory largely held by the devil,
and so she's famous for the sort of freakish, grotesque
characters in her stories. But you know, a magician gets
(03:18):
your attention with what he's doing with one hand, and
then it's the other hand that's really doing the real work.
That's what she's doing in these stories, insofar as it's
the freaks that gets your attention. But the real action
of these stories is a character who seems pretty respectable,
who thinks he or she already knows how the world works,
thinks he or she understands their place in the world
(03:40):
and their status before God. You know, the self righteous
and the self assured, and those who are wise in
the ways of the world. And then through the freakishness,
through perhaps the violence, God gets their attention and shows
them that they aren't who they think they are. And
so that moment of violence in flanneler' connor's stories is
(04:03):
actually an offer of grace. Now, some of the characters
receive that grace and some don't. So mercy in flanneler
connor's stories chases people down, and it is possibly terrible.
And yet because we're so blind to the workings of
mercy and grace in the world, sometimes we have to
(04:25):
be shocked and to see.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
I feel that the grotesque quality of my own work
is intensified by the fact that I'm both a Southern
and a Catholic writer. It's standing for the Catholic writer
to say that he is not a Catholic writer, but
a writer who.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
Happens to be a Catholic.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
This is a formula that has its uses, but I
often wish that Cardinal Spelman had said it instead of
mister Graham Green, and we would have heard no more
about it. I've always been more attempted to say that
I'm not a Southern writer, but a writer who happens
to be Southern. However, I feel that both of these
are evasions, and that they stop discussions that they ought
(05:07):
to begin. The Southern rita can't escape the image of
the South that has built up a life of its
own in his senses, in more than the Catholic can
escape the indelible knocks that the.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
Sacons put on his soul.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
The Southern of sense of place is usually as unadjustable
as the believe in Catholic sense of right and wrong.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Flanner o connor is very much associated with her region,
and not just her region, really with her state of Georgia.
She was born in nineteen twenty five in Savannah, Georgia,
spent most of her life in Millageville, Georgia, but her
life started there in Lafayette Square in Savannah, Georgia. Just
around the corner was the Catholic hospital where she was
born that had a wing named for John Flannery, her
(05:52):
ancestor for whom she was named. Her real name, by
the way, is Mary Flannery O'Connor. She took the name
Flannery O'Connor. When she left home and became a writer,
she felt like the name Flannery O'Connor was a better
writerly name than Mary Flannery O'Connor. But in your early
life a very Catholic existence. And then she moved to Millersville, Georgia.
(06:14):
Later it was a place where she was exposed to
very different varieties of Christianity. Millersville, by the way, is
a fascinating place. It's where the state hospital for the
Middley Insane was. It's where a reformatory was. Sometimes the
boys would escape from the reformatory. As they were running away,
they might run across part of her property.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
And you've been listening to Jonathan Rodgers tell the story
of one of America's great writers, Flannery O'Connor, And my goodness,
what she said about a sense of place and also
her faith a sense of place is as unreplaceable as
a sense of right and wrong. Her discussing how being
a Southerner and a Catholic we're simply in unreplaced in
(07:01):
her writing, and also what she said about mercy chasing
people down in her stories, which indeed it does, and
sometimes for the good and sometimes not. When we come
back more of the remarkable story of Fanery O'Connor here
on our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of
(07:31):
our American Stories. Every day we set out to tell
the stories of Americans past and present, from small towns
to big cities, and from all walks of life doing
extraordinary things. But we truly can't do this show without you.
Our shows are free to listen to, but they're not
free to make. If you love what you hear, go
to our American Stories dot com and make a donation
(07:52):
to keep the stories coming. That's our American Stories dot com.
And we continue with our American Stories and with the
(08:13):
story of Flannery O'Connor told by Jonathan Rodgers, who's the
author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, a spiritual biography
of Flannery O'Connor. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Mary Flanner was an odd child. She was the same
age almost all her life. She was a grown up.
When she was a child, it became time to become
a teenager. She didn't really want to be a teenager.
She just kind of skipped straight to adulthood. Her father,
Edward came down with lupus when Flanner O'Connor was a teenager,
and this was a time when there was really no
treatment for lupus. Lupus is an autoimmune disorder in Latin
(08:52):
means the wolf. It's almost like you're being devoured from inside.
And he died relatively quickly. He died when Flannier O'Connor
was fifteen years old. She went to college at age seventeen,
finished before she was twenty, and from there she went
at the University of Iowa. Realized she didn't want to
be in the journalism school, so she went to the
(09:12):
office of Paul Ingle, who was running the writer's workshop,
and she said, my name is Flannery O'Connor. I'm not
a journalist. Can I come to the writer's workshop? But
her Georgia accent was so thick that he couldn't understand her,
and he said, what did you say? She said, my
name is Flannery O'Connor, I am not a journalist. Can
I come to the writer's workshop. He finally had to
(09:34):
ask her to write it down because her accent was
so thick, but also in spite of the fact that
she had a very thick Georgia accent. Her prose was
very clear, very beautiful, and he did accept her into
the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and she was kind of a
superstar there. About the time she was finishing the first
(09:55):
draft of Wise Blood, she started feeling some real pain
in her hand, and as it turns out, that was
the first stirrings of lupus, the disease that had killed
her father. And when she came home for Christmas on
the train trip, she came down with a fever that
turned out to be the beginnings of lupus that would
(10:17):
never leave her for the rest of her life. So
she lived the rest of her life with the very
painful disease that would eventually kill her at the age
of thirty nine. She once said, I've never been anywhere
but sick, But illness is a country as instructive as
a trip to Europe in that the suffering that she
(10:38):
lived with for the rest of her life really did
shape her work and her understanding of how grace works
in the world. There were treatments, but they were a
little crude, and at one point she said, the disease
and the treatment are running neck in acgtacy, which one's
going to kill me, and yet she learned to see
that suffering as a blessing. I think one time she said,
(11:00):
with one eye squinted, I can see it as a blessing.
And so she was on crutches for much of her
adult life, probably as a result of the large doses
of prednizones and other quarterco steroids that she took. It
may not have been lupis itself that damaged her hips
and joints so much as the treatment. She spent the
(11:23):
rest of her life in Militale, Georgia, under the care
of her mother. She once said she came kicking and
screaming back to Georgia. But as she settled in and
accepted those limits that God had put on her life,
that's where she really blossomed as a writer. Her sense
of calling was incredibly strong from very early in her career.
(11:46):
Her prayer journals from when she was twenty years old
were published in twenty seventeen, I think it was, and
they make it clear how this very young woman saw
her work as a writer as a calling from God,
just as surely as if she had been called to
be a nun. She lived on a dairy farm and
(12:08):
her mother took care of her, took care of the
dairy farm, and created space for Flannier O'Connor to really
do work that the mother didn't really understand. Her mother
wasn't an especially bookish person. She was a very business
minded woman who didn't really love the story she was writing,
but loved her daughter. But one of many remarkable things
(12:30):
about Flannier connor's life is it was so regular. She
got up at six in the morning and she said
her prayers, and at seven in the morning she had
her mother, got in the car and went to the
Catholic church there in Millyncheville and went to Mass every morning.
And then she would come home from Mass and she
would sit at her desk and write these wild stories
(12:50):
about street preachers and false prophets and moonshiners and mass
murderers and these crazy stories, and then go have lunch
at the tea room. She did not look like the
kind of person who would be writing the kind of
stories she was writing. She was a reader of Thomas Aquinas.
Most nights she read twenty minutes from his summa Theologia.
(13:14):
Maybe it's not obvious from her stories, but she was
a person of great joy a person who saw the
world as ultimately comic rather than tragic. And that may
be something that's not obvious that her vision was a
comic vision, a vision that saw ultimately a broken world
where people hurt one another, but ultimately, yes, it's broken,
(13:36):
and yet it's the only place where Grace does its work.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
In nineteenth century American writing, there was a good deal
grotesque glitchatul which came from the frontier and was supposed
to be funny. But our present grotesque heroes isaya comic,
or at least not primarily so.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
They seemed to carry an invisible burden.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
That's Naticism is a approach not meal in eccentricity. I
think they have figures that come about from the kind
of vision peculiar to the writer who is concerned with
the largest stretch of reality than can be accounted for
by a naturalistic view of the world. You can call
it prophetic vision, because this kind of writer is the
(14:19):
kind of realist the prophet is.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
He's a realist of distances.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Right, this broken world is where Grace intervenes. And so
there are lots of storytellers, especially storytellers in a Southern context,
who are using the language of Christianity. In other words,
Flender Connor spoke of the American South as being not
exactly Christian, but christ haunted. And you certainly get that
(14:45):
in something like somebody like Faulkner, whose characters talk about God,
but that God language is not a reflection of either
their own faith or the faith of the author that
God talked as an aspect of Southern culture, whether that's
cultural Christianity or actual devotion.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a pensiant
for writing about freaks, I say it's because we are
still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize
a freak, you'd have to have some conception of the
whole man, and in the South, the general conception of
man is still theological. Now, that is a big statement,
(15:28):
and it's dangerous to make it. Almost anything you affirm
on the subject of Southern belief can be denied in
the next breath with equal propriety. I'm sure some poll
takers could come along and get up a table to
prove that the South doesn't believe anything at all. But
approaching the subject from the stand part of the writer,
I think it's quite safe to say that while the
(15:51):
South is hardly Christ's sinven, it is most certainly Christ haunted.
The Southerner who isn't convinced of it, is very much
afraid that he may have been formed in the image
and likeness of God. And ghosts can be very fierce
and instructed. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature.
(16:13):
In any case, it's one of the freak can be
sensed as a figure by our essential displacement, and he
attained some vept in literature. All this is changing, of course,
the ghost is being exercised.
Speaker 4 (16:27):
In twenty years, the Southern.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Writer may be writing about men in gray flannel suits,
and they have lost his ability to see that these
gentlemen are even greater freaks.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
And what we're writing about now.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
And you've been listening to Jonathan Rodgers, author of The
Terrible Speed of Mercy, spiritual biography of Flannery O'Connor, and
you've been listening to Flannery O'Connor herself, in my goodness,
what she said about the South. The South is most
certainly Christ's centered, she said, but it is also most
certainly Christ haunted. And so many other remarkable things she
(17:04):
described in her own voice, and we love doing this
here on our American Stories, bringing the great voices from
the grave directly to you in their own words, uncensored
by us, and shaping the stories that you hear. Graduating
at an early age from college her father who had
(17:26):
died from lupus, she discovers soon that she has this
treaded disease as well, but in the end it informs
everything about her life. She accepted the limits God put
on her life. That prayer journal in twenty seventeen, By
the way, that doesn't get much better. She saw her
(17:46):
writing as a calling from God. When we come back
more of this remarkable story. The story of Flannery O'Connor
continues here on our American Stories, and we continue with
(18:09):
our American Stories and with Jonathan Rodgers, author of The
Terrible Speed of Mercy. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
And so it's easy for people to miss there's lots
of God talk in Flanneer O'Connor. It's unavoidable, but I
think sometimes people miss that she meant it. You know,
this was not just her using the language of the
christ taunted South. Let's put it this way, in both wise,
blood and the violent beard away. We have these prophetic figures,
(18:41):
people who are literally street preachers and folk prophets who
are possibly insane, and who, by the way, are very Protestant,
not Catholic. And it's easy to see these possibly insane
people using all this God talk, this Christian language, and
think that she is somehow satirizing or mocking their faith.
(19:06):
There's a character named Old tar Water. He semi kidnaps
a couple of his relatives and baptizes them without their parents' consent,
just nutty behavior. On the other hand, there are very
sensible modern school teacher types, and flander Connor at one
point says the reader will probably associate with the school teacher.
(19:30):
She said, but Old tar Water speaks for me. The
funny thing about Flander O'Connor, it's not just that everybody
misunderstood hers, that they misunderstood her in their own way.
She got a letter from a woman in Boston who said,
I'm a Catholic and I don't see how anybody can
even have such thoughts, and it was just shocked by
what she was seeing in there. And flander Connor said
(19:50):
she wrote her a letter back that could have been
signed off on by the bishop. It was so orthodox
and so that they were big friends. Now, on the
other hand, the little let's say, misunderstood her because they
really loved what she was writing, but they thought she
was such a harsh critic of the religious.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
I found that most universities a storyteller is tolerated as
long as some abstract statement can be wrung out of him.
He's apt to find himself reduced to making comments about
his own stories of other people's, and the process leaves
him very much like the handsome hero Poll's story, the
(20:31):
one who, before he went to bed at night, removes
his wooden arm and his wooden leg, and his teeth,
and his boss box and his leg and his glass eye.
Speaker 4 (20:43):
What was left of him was not impressive.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
And the truth is she was a critic of American Christianity,
both Catholic and Protestant. But she was as critical as
she was because she really loved the faith, even though
she was an about Catholic. It was surprising how how
open she was and how generous she was in some
ways to varieties of Christianity that she just couldn't buy.
(21:08):
And so some of the more idiosyncratic forms of Protestantism
the phrase wise blood that is the title of her
first novel. The whole idea of wise Blood is there
are people whose religious practice is completely confused. In her view,
many Protestants were completely confused in their religious practice and
(21:30):
in their theology, and yet their heart pumped a wise
blood that was wiser than their religious practice was. And
the main character of Wise Blood Fella named Hazel Motes,
was always trying to get away from Jesus, who haunted him,
swinging from tree to tree like a monkey, chasing him
through the jungle. And he tried to find every way
(21:51):
he could to escape Jesus, from sin to not sinning.
In other words, sometimes he would behave himself, hoping that
he then wouldn't need Jesus, and sometimes he would sin
in order to get away from Jesus. But what he
couldn't do was ever get away from Jesus because he
had wise blood. And something interesting she said about hazel
(22:11):
Motes was that her non believing readers, many of them
thought his integrity lay in his trying to escape from Jesus,
And she says, to me, his integrity was the fact
that he was unable to escape from Jesus. Flanneer Connor's
relationship to that misinterpretation was sort of odd, like she
(22:36):
didn't spend much time explaining herself. Sometimes she did. In
her letter, she makes it clear that she gets frustrated
by the ways that she's misinterpreted, but strangely enough, what
she didn't do was right in such a way that
she wouldn't be misunderstood next time. She believed that the
(22:57):
confusion that her stories generated was part of the point.
And I think a decent comparison would be Jesus Parables.
Jesus could have made those parables clearer if he had
wanted to. He could have made them less offensive, but
he chose to make them offensive. He chose to put
(23:17):
the reader in a position to say, either I'm wrong
about this or God's wrong about this. We've heard the
parables so much that we know what to think about them.
But could you imagine being the people who first experienced
those The original audience for those would have a really
hard time making sense of why it is that the
older brother is the bad guy In the story of
(23:40):
the Prodigal Son, the older brother worked really hard to
keep his nose clean. He worked really hard to stay
out of trouble. And yet it's the wild child who
receives grace in that story. And I hope the older
brother eventually received grace, but he wasn't any position to
(24:02):
receive it in that parable. The good Samaritan Jesus could
have had anybody he wanted to be the good guy
in that story, and he chose to make it the
person who was the most reviled by his audience. And
so Jesus wasn't accidentally making us uncomfortable. That was on purpose.
(24:23):
That's why Flander O'Connor was willing to be misunderstood and
was not willing to write stories that were more easily digestible, A.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Good many people believe because the Southern writing tends to
the grotesque, not because we are still able to recognize freaks,
but because in the South there's so many little freaks
to recognize. I just don't take that up. Still, others
seem to have decided that if you write about freaks,
you do so on account of your great compassion. It's
(24:55):
considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion.
Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody's mouth,
and which no book jacket can do without. It's a
quality that no one can put his finger on in
any exact critical sense, and so the word is always
safe for anybody to use. Thomas Mann has said that
(25:17):
the grotesque is a true Auntie bush Was style. But
I think that the kind of hazy compassion demanded of
the writer now makes it difficult for him to be
Auntie anything. Certainly, when the grotesque has a legitimate reasons
for being, it will be used in a way that
gives to the intellectual and moral judgments implicit in it
(25:39):
the ascendency over feeling.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
And you've been listening to Jonathan Rodgers. He's the author
of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, the spiritual biography of
Flannery O'Connor, And remarkably, we're listening to Flannery O'Connor herself,
and her talking about the misconceptions many had about her,
and in the end the fact that she didn't really
give it much thought, because in the end, as she
(26:05):
so deeply understood, much of Jesus's efforts were not understood,
and not understood even by people themselves who heard the stories.
I think of the good Samaritan, and think, my goodness,
the person that's the good guy is the bad guy?
And why did Jesus give this good Samaritan this special
(26:26):
place in this story when it was a person reviled
by the people of their day. And why was the
kid who ran off and spent all the money was
sought after and chased by the father, while the son
who stayed behind and did all the hard work and
kept the line and was the good son ended up
(26:46):
not receiving the grace of the father, the mercy of
the Father, and their hard stories to grapple with the
great parables of Jesus. He made no fuss about it.
In fact, he was clear about how hard these stories
would be for man to grapple with. And my goodness,
the stories of Flannery O'Connor, well, they're not simple, and
(27:08):
the complexity in them and how grace works in them
is confounding to readers many still today. When we come
back more of this remarkable story of one of America's
great writers, Flannery O'Connor. Here on our American stories, and
(27:36):
we return to our American stories, and the story of
Flannery O'Connor is told by Jonathan Rodgers. Let's pick up
where we last left.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Off for O'Connor, the big Sins. I've put that in
quotation marks. Maybe the seven deadly sins were symptoms of
a deeper sin that goes bone deep. Greed and lust
and racism and gluttony. All those sins make an appearance
(28:12):
in O'Connor's work. And yet the greatest threat to the
human soul is a self sufficiency and a self righteousness
that takes many, many forms. And on the one hand,
there is religious self righteousness that's dangerous insofar as it
(28:35):
keeps us from receiving the grace that's offered to us,
a rescue that has to come from outside us and
not from within us. And so any kind of orthodoxy
that gives a person confidence in their own ability to
justify themselves religious orthodoxy or progressive social justice orthodoxy as
(29:00):
very dangerous, and she saw it as dangerous for other
people and dangerous for herself.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
I've discovered that any fiction that comes out of the
South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader,
unless it is grotesque, in which case it's going to
be called realistic. When my fiction first began to receive
some attention, it was generally considered to have come out
of that mythical entity, the School of Southern the generous.
(29:29):
Every time I heard about the School of Southern Degeneracy,
I felt.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
Like brun rabbit stuck on the tab baided. I think the.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
Social sciences have cast a dreary bite on the public
approach to fiction. If you write about people who don't
always wear shoes, someone.
Speaker 4 (29:46):
Is bound to think that you consider shoes in part.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Anyway, if you have once got rid of a label
like the School Southern Degeneracy, you accept the label grotesque
with better grace. Essentially, any right who produces stories that
can be called grotesque does so because he has that
kind of a town. But I believe that in addition,
there are reasons that intensify the grotesque quality of some
(30:12):
writing in these times.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
She spoke of racial bigotry as one of the most
haunting problems of the American South, and yet she didn't
see it as the deepest problem, because there are deeper
sins of which racism is only the manifestation, and those
deeper sins are not specifically Southern. It's sins that we
(30:38):
all deal with as human beings, and that's what she's
always drawing us back to in her stories, we've got
deep problems, racism among them, but there are deeper problems
in that and we have no hope of working those
problems out on our own without the action of grace
in the world. And that grace may have to come
(30:59):
to us in very brutal ways, because we don't have
eyes to see, and we don't have ears to hear.
To the heart of hearing, you shout to the almost blind,
you draw large and startling figures. And so maybe we
need stories like Flanner Connor's to wake us up to
a reality that, on the one hand, is devastating to
(31:22):
realize that we aren't who we thought we were, and
on the other hand, is hopeful because we don't have
to be who we thought we were, because God is
at work, because God offers us the terrible speed of mercy.
People often ask me where to start reading Flandeerer Connor,
and I think a really great place to start reading
her is the story called Revelation. So in Revelation we
(31:45):
have a woman named Ruby Turpin, who is outlandishly self righteous,
outlandishly smug, who spends her idle minutes making hierarchy of
where people belong judging them by what kind of shoes
they wear, for instance. But however she judges them, she
(32:07):
always ends up at the top of the of the ladder.
And so she's very thankful that she is not black,
for instance. She's very thankful that she's not white trash.
She's very thankful that she's got just enough and knows
what to do with it and is respectable without being
(32:29):
too rich. Because this year's even when she puts the
people on a social scale, she's still glad that she's
not higher on the social scale, because then she would
be too something. And she's in a doctor's office silently
judging everybody around her and making small talk with one
(32:50):
or two of the other people, when a girl across
the way throws a textbook at her and hits her
in the head and then chokes her and says, go
back to where you came from, your ward hog. So
that's her moment of violence. That's her shocking moment. It's
something that wakes her up somehow. She understands that that
(33:13):
strange girl, that freakish girl in the doctor's office, is
speaking for God, and so Ruby Turpin goes home and
she begins to question God out loud, and you get
the impression maybe this is the first time she's ever
been perfectly honest with God, even though she thinks of
herself as a religious person, And she says, why do
(33:36):
you talk to me that way? How can I be
a hog and me both? If I'm not good enough
I'm paraphrasing, but if I'm not good enough, if what
you want is white trash, why don't you go get
yourself some white trash then, And instead of being punished
for that kind of honesty and that kind of question
for God, she's rewarded with a vision at the end
(34:00):
of the story, And as she looks into the sunset
over her hog farm, the clouds of the sunset begin
to look like a bridge from Earth to heaven, and
she sees all the people that she has judged as
inferior to herself walking across that bridge into heaven, and
she sees the white trash clean for the first time,
(34:22):
and she sees black people that she's looked down on
walking joyfully into heaven. And she sees I'm quoting here,
battalions of freaks and lunatic shouting and clapping and leaping
like frogs. And then at the end of the procession,
she sees people like her. Bringing up the end of
the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized
(34:44):
at once, at those who, like herself and Claude her husband,
had always had a little of everything and the God
given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to
observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with
great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good
order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were
on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and
(35:06):
altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away away.
It was in that vision that she saw that the
people that she had put down had to place in
the Kingdom of God too, and that she also had
a place in the Kingdom of God. But it wasn't
going to be that the head of the troop. It
was going to be the end, and it wasn't going
(35:28):
to be her virtues that got her in. Those had
to be burned away too. That's how all of Flannery
O'Connor's stories work.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to
Jonathan Rogers, author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, the
spiritual biography of Flannery O'Connor, and those audio clips from
Flannery O'Connor reveal so much about this misunders author and
(36:01):
deeply loved author. At the very same time hearing her
words about herself, about the world, about being southern, and
so many other things. I've never been anywhere but sick,
Flannery O'Connor said about her bouts with lupus and growing
up with a father who had lupis and died when
she was just fifteen. She lost her father to the
(36:24):
same disease. It would take her life at the early
age of thirty nine, but it informed her life in
the end, that sickness, and it actually made her in
merry many ways the writer she would become. I love
what Rogers had to say about sin and the symptoms
and that racism was a symptom of a deeper sin.
(36:46):
And Flannery wrote about racism my goodness in the Geranium,
it's just perfect. And even in Revelation, the story that
Rogers was telling folks about in which the protagonist Ruby
Turpin finds out the hard way who God is in
that doctor's office, and it jolts her into a sense
of her own self righteousness. For the first time she
(37:09):
senses who she really is in God's kingdom and where
she falls, and it jolters her, and in the end
it conjult all of us what she really had an
intolerance for, with the self sufficient and the self righteous,
the self sufficient progressives, the modern progressives trying to fix
and solve the problems of mankind, and the self righteous well,
(37:33):
characters like Ruby Turpin, characters like any Christians who can
judge others and somehow put themselves always above the fray,
is somehow better and more spiritually right and more spiritually
ordered than the rest of the freaks around us. Is
if we don't have problems ourselves, and always at the
center of everything is God's mercy, always offered, as Jonathan
(37:59):
Rodgers put it, at the terrible speed of mercy. The
story of Flowery O'Connor here on our American stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories.
The show where America is the Star and the American People.
Recorded from the city where the West Begins, Fort Worth, Texas.
Vanrie O'Connor is considered one of America's greatest fiction writers
and one of my favorites their stories. They're peopled with
(00:31):
a sordid caravan of murderers and thieves, and prostitutes and
bigots whose lives are punctuated by horror and sudden violence.
But the most shocking thing about Vanrie O'Connor's fiction is
that it is shaped by her thoroughly Christian vision. If
the world she depicts is dark and terrifying, it is
also a place where grace makes itself known. Here to
(00:55):
tell her story is Jonathan Rodgers, author of The Terrible
Speed of Mercy. The spiritual biography of Flannery O'Connor. Let's
take a listen.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Flannier O'Connor was a twentieth century writer best known for
her short stories. She also wrote a couple of novels.
Her most commonly anthologized short story is A Good Man.
It is hard to find people who've only read one
thing by Flanneer O'Connor tend to have read that story,
and it's a shocking story. It's a story about a
family that has making the trip from Georgia to Florida
(01:29):
and they have a car accident and run into a
serial killer named the Misfit, and that serial killer well
kills everybody. And it's shocking stuff. And that kind of
shocking violence is actually quite common in Flaneer O'Connor's stories.
For that reason, she's often misunderstood. She once said, many
(01:51):
of my ardent admirers will be roundly shocked and disturbed
if they realize that everything I believe is thoroughly moral,
thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give
my work its chief characteristics. She saw herself as writing
to a post Christian audience, for whom baptism, for instance,
didn't really mean anything. And the way she framed her
(02:14):
use of shocking things like say murder in these stories, well,
here's what she said. When you can assume that your
audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax
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
heart of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind,
(02:35):
you draw large and startling figures, And so her stories
that are so shocking are really a way of shouting,
a way of drawing large and startling figures for people
who otherwise can't see what it is that she's trying
to show. She says, the devil is always an appropriate
subject from my kind of comedy because he's always accomplishing
(02:55):
ends other than his own, which is a really helpful
way of understanding what she's up to in her stories.
In another place, says that her stories are about the
workings of grace and territory largely held by the devil,
and so she's famous for the sort of freakish, grotesque
characters in her stories. But you know, a magician gets
(03:18):
your attention with what he's doing with one hand, and
then it's the other hand that's really doing the real work.
That's what she's doing in these stories, insofar as it's
the freaks that gets your attention. But the real action
of these stories is a character who seems pretty respectable,
who thinks he or she already knows how the world works,
thinks he or she understands their place in the world
(03:40):
and their status before God. You know, the self righteous
and the self assured, and those who are wise in
the ways of the world. And then through the freakishness,
through perhaps the violence, God gets their attention and shows
them that they aren't who they think they are. And
so that moment of violence in flanneler' connor's stories is
(04:03):
actually an offer of grace. Now, some of the characters
receive that grace and some don't. So mercy in flanneler
connor's stories chases people down, and it is possibly terrible.
And yet because we're so blind to the workings of
mercy and grace in the world, sometimes we have to
(04:25):
be shocked and to see.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
I feel that the grotesque quality of my own work
is intensified by the fact that I'm both a Southern
and a Catholic writer. It's standing for the Catholic writer
to say that he is not a Catholic writer, but
a writer who.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
Happens to be a Catholic.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
This is a formula that has its uses, but I
often wish that Cardinal Spelman had said it instead of
mister Graham Green, and we would have heard no more
about it. I've always been more attempted to say that
I'm not a Southern writer, but a writer who happens
to be Southern. However, I feel that both of these
are evasions, and that they stop discussions that they ought
(05:07):
to begin. The Southern rita can't escape the image of
the South that has built up a life of its
own in his senses, in more than the Catholic can
escape the indelible knocks that the.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
Sacons put on his soul.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
The Southern of sense of place is usually as unadjustable
as the believe in Catholic sense of right and wrong.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Flanner o connor is very much associated with her region,
and not just her region, really with her state of Georgia.
She was born in nineteen twenty five in Savannah, Georgia,
spent most of her life in Millageville, Georgia, but her
life started there in Lafayette Square in Savannah, Georgia. Just
around the corner was the Catholic hospital where she was
born that had a wing named for John Flannery, her
(05:52):
ancestor for whom she was named. Her real name, by
the way, is Mary Flannery O'Connor. She took the name
Flannery O'Connor. When she left home and became a writer,
she felt like the name Flannery O'Connor was a better
writerly name than Mary Flannery O'Connor. But in your early
life a very Catholic existence. And then she moved to Millersville, Georgia.
(06:14):
Later it was a place where she was exposed to
very different varieties of Christianity. Millersville, by the way, is
a fascinating place. It's where the state hospital for the
Middley Insane was. It's where a reformatory was. Sometimes the
boys would escape from the reformatory. As they were running away,
they might run across part of her property.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
And you've been listening to Jonathan Rodgers tell the story
of one of America's great writers, Flannery O'Connor, And my goodness,
what she said about a sense of place and also
her faith a sense of place is as unreplaceable as
a sense of right and wrong. Her discussing how being
a Southerner and a Catholic we're simply in unreplaced in
(07:01):
her writing, and also what she said about mercy chasing
people down in her stories, which indeed it does, and
sometimes for the good and sometimes not. When we come
back more of the remarkable story of Fanery O'Connor here
on our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of
(07:31):
our American Stories. Every day we set out to tell
the stories of Americans past and present, from small towns
to big cities, and from all walks of life doing
extraordinary things. But we truly can't do this show without you.
Our shows are free to listen to, but they're not
free to make. If you love what you hear, go
to our American Stories dot com and make a donation
(07:52):
to keep the stories coming. That's our American Stories dot com.
And we continue with our American Stories and with the
(08:13):
story of Flannery O'Connor told by Jonathan Rodgers, who's the
author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, a spiritual biography
of Flannery O'Connor. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Mary Flanner was an odd child. She was the same
age almost all her life. She was a grown up.
When she was a child, it became time to become
a teenager. She didn't really want to be a teenager.
She just kind of skipped straight to adulthood. Her father,
Edward came down with lupus when Flanner O'Connor was a teenager,
and this was a time when there was really no
treatment for lupus. Lupus is an autoimmune disorder in Latin
(08:52):
means the wolf. It's almost like you're being devoured from inside.
And he died relatively quickly. He died when Flannier O'Connor
was fifteen years old. She went to college at age seventeen,
finished before she was twenty, and from there she went
at the University of Iowa. Realized she didn't want to
be in the journalism school, so she went to the
(09:12):
office of Paul Ingle, who was running the writer's workshop,
and she said, my name is Flannery O'Connor. I'm not
a journalist. Can I come to the writer's workshop? But
her Georgia accent was so thick that he couldn't understand her,
and he said, what did you say? She said, my
name is Flannery O'Connor, I am not a journalist. Can
I come to the writer's workshop. He finally had to
(09:34):
ask her to write it down because her accent was
so thick, but also in spite of the fact that
she had a very thick Georgia accent. Her prose was
very clear, very beautiful, and he did accept her into
the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and she was kind of a
superstar there. About the time she was finishing the first
(09:55):
draft of Wise Blood, she started feeling some real pain
in her hand, and as it turns out, that was
the first stirrings of lupus, the disease that had killed
her father. And when she came home for Christmas on
the train trip, she came down with a fever that
turned out to be the beginnings of lupus that would
(10:17):
never leave her for the rest of her life. So
she lived the rest of her life with the very
painful disease that would eventually kill her at the age
of thirty nine. She once said, I've never been anywhere
but sick, But illness is a country as instructive as
a trip to Europe in that the suffering that she
(10:38):
lived with for the rest of her life really did
shape her work and her understanding of how grace works
in the world. There were treatments, but they were a
little crude, and at one point she said, the disease
and the treatment are running neck in acgtacy, which one's
going to kill me, and yet she learned to see
that suffering as a blessing. I think one time she said,
(11:00):
with one eye squinted, I can see it as a blessing.
And so she was on crutches for much of her
adult life, probably as a result of the large doses
of prednizones and other quarterco steroids that she took. It
may not have been lupis itself that damaged her hips
and joints so much as the treatment. She spent the
(11:23):
rest of her life in Militale, Georgia, under the care
of her mother. She once said she came kicking and
screaming back to Georgia. But as she settled in and
accepted those limits that God had put on her life,
that's where she really blossomed as a writer. Her sense
of calling was incredibly strong from very early in her career.
(11:46):
Her prayer journals from when she was twenty years old
were published in twenty seventeen, I think it was, and
they make it clear how this very young woman saw
her work as a writer as a calling from God,
just as surely as if she had been called to
be a nun. She lived on a dairy farm and
(12:08):
her mother took care of her, took care of the
dairy farm, and created space for Flannier O'Connor to really
do work that the mother didn't really understand. Her mother
wasn't an especially bookish person. She was a very business
minded woman who didn't really love the story she was writing,
but loved her daughter. But one of many remarkable things
(12:30):
about Flannier connor's life is it was so regular. She
got up at six in the morning and she said
her prayers, and at seven in the morning she had
her mother, got in the car and went to the
Catholic church there in Millyncheville and went to Mass every morning.
And then she would come home from Mass and she
would sit at her desk and write these wild stories
(12:50):
about street preachers and false prophets and moonshiners and mass
murderers and these crazy stories, and then go have lunch
at the tea room. She did not look like the
kind of person who would be writing the kind of
stories she was writing. She was a reader of Thomas Aquinas.
Most nights she read twenty minutes from his summa Theologia.
(13:14):
Maybe it's not obvious from her stories, but she was
a person of great joy a person who saw the
world as ultimately comic rather than tragic. And that may
be something that's not obvious that her vision was a
comic vision, a vision that saw ultimately a broken world
where people hurt one another, but ultimately, yes, it's broken,
(13:36):
and yet it's the only place where Grace does its work.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
In nineteenth century American writing, there was a good deal
grotesque glitchatul which came from the frontier and was supposed
to be funny. But our present grotesque heroes isaya comic,
or at least not primarily so.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
They seemed to carry an invisible burden.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
That's Naticism is a approach not meal in eccentricity. I
think they have figures that come about from the kind
of vision peculiar to the writer who is concerned with
the largest stretch of reality than can be accounted for
by a naturalistic view of the world. You can call
it prophetic vision, because this kind of writer is the
(14:19):
kind of realist the prophet is.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
He's a realist of distances.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Right, this broken world is where Grace intervenes. And so
there are lots of storytellers, especially storytellers in a Southern context,
who are using the language of Christianity. In other words,
Flender Connor spoke of the American South as being not
exactly Christian, but christ haunted. And you certainly get that
(14:45):
in something like somebody like Faulkner, whose characters talk about God,
but that God language is not a reflection of either
their own faith or the faith of the author that
God talked as an aspect of Southern culture, whether that's
cultural Christianity or actual devotion.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a pensiant
for writing about freaks, I say it's because we are
still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize
a freak, you'd have to have some conception of the
whole man, and in the South, the general conception of
man is still theological. Now, that is a big statement,
(15:28):
and it's dangerous to make it. Almost anything you affirm
on the subject of Southern belief can be denied in
the next breath with equal propriety. I'm sure some poll
takers could come along and get up a table to
prove that the South doesn't believe anything at all. But
approaching the subject from the stand part of the writer,
I think it's quite safe to say that while the
(15:51):
South is hardly Christ's sinven, it is most certainly Christ haunted.
The Southerner who isn't convinced of it, is very much
afraid that he may have been formed in the image
and likeness of God. And ghosts can be very fierce
and instructed. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature.
(16:13):
In any case, it's one of the freak can be
sensed as a figure by our essential displacement, and he
attained some vept in literature. All this is changing, of course,
the ghost is being exercised.
Speaker 4 (16:27):
In twenty years, the Southern.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Writer may be writing about men in gray flannel suits,
and they have lost his ability to see that these
gentlemen are even greater freaks.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
And what we're writing about now.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
And you've been listening to Jonathan Rodgers, author of The
Terrible Speed of Mercy, spiritual biography of Flannery O'Connor, and
you've been listening to Flannery O'Connor herself, in my goodness,
what she said about the South. The South is most
certainly Christ's centered, she said, but it is also most
certainly Christ haunted. And so many other remarkable things she
(17:04):
described in her own voice, and we love doing this
here on our American Stories, bringing the great voices from
the grave directly to you in their own words, uncensored
by us, and shaping the stories that you hear. Graduating
at an early age from college her father who had
(17:26):
died from lupus, she discovers soon that she has this
treaded disease as well, but in the end it informs
everything about her life. She accepted the limits God put
on her life. That prayer journal in twenty seventeen, By
the way, that doesn't get much better. She saw her
(17:46):
writing as a calling from God. When we come back
more of this remarkable story. The story of Flannery O'Connor
continues here on our American Stories, and we continue with
(18:09):
our American Stories and with Jonathan Rodgers, author of The
Terrible Speed of Mercy. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
And so it's easy for people to miss there's lots
of God talk in Flanneer O'Connor. It's unavoidable, but I
think sometimes people miss that she meant it. You know,
this was not just her using the language of the
christ taunted South. Let's put it this way, in both wise,
blood and the violent beard away. We have these prophetic figures,
(18:41):
people who are literally street preachers and folk prophets who
are possibly insane, and who, by the way, are very Protestant,
not Catholic. And it's easy to see these possibly insane
people using all this God talk, this Christian language, and
think that she is somehow satirizing or mocking their faith.
(19:06):
There's a character named Old tar Water. He semi kidnaps
a couple of his relatives and baptizes them without their parents' consent,
just nutty behavior. On the other hand, there are very
sensible modern school teacher types, and flander Connor at one
point says the reader will probably associate with the school teacher.
(19:30):
She said, but Old tar Water speaks for me. The
funny thing about Flander O'Connor, it's not just that everybody
misunderstood hers, that they misunderstood her in their own way.
She got a letter from a woman in Boston who said,
I'm a Catholic and I don't see how anybody can
even have such thoughts, and it was just shocked by
what she was seeing in there. And flander Connor said
(19:50):
she wrote her a letter back that could have been
signed off on by the bishop. It was so orthodox
and so that they were big friends. Now, on the
other hand, the little let's say, misunderstood her because they
really loved what she was writing, but they thought she
was such a harsh critic of the religious.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
I found that most universities a storyteller is tolerated as
long as some abstract statement can be wrung out of him.
He's apt to find himself reduced to making comments about
his own stories of other people's, and the process leaves
him very much like the handsome hero Poll's story, the
(20:31):
one who, before he went to bed at night, removes
his wooden arm and his wooden leg, and his teeth,
and his boss box and his leg and his glass eye.
Speaker 4 (20:43):
What was left of him was not impressive.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
And the truth is she was a critic of American Christianity,
both Catholic and Protestant. But she was as critical as
she was because she really loved the faith, even though
she was an about Catholic. It was surprising how how
open she was and how generous she was in some
ways to varieties of Christianity that she just couldn't buy.
(21:08):
And so some of the more idiosyncratic forms of Protestantism
the phrase wise blood that is the title of her
first novel. The whole idea of wise Blood is there
are people whose religious practice is completely confused. In her view,
many Protestants were completely confused in their religious practice and
(21:30):
in their theology, and yet their heart pumped a wise
blood that was wiser than their religious practice was. And
the main character of Wise Blood Fella named Hazel Motes,
was always trying to get away from Jesus, who haunted him,
swinging from tree to tree like a monkey, chasing him
through the jungle. And he tried to find every way
(21:51):
he could to escape Jesus, from sin to not sinning.
In other words, sometimes he would behave himself, hoping that
he then wouldn't need Jesus, and sometimes he would sin
in order to get away from Jesus. But what he
couldn't do was ever get away from Jesus because he
had wise blood. And something interesting she said about hazel
(22:11):
Motes was that her non believing readers, many of them
thought his integrity lay in his trying to escape from Jesus,
And she says, to me, his integrity was the fact
that he was unable to escape from Jesus. Flanneer Connor's
relationship to that misinterpretation was sort of odd, like she
(22:36):
didn't spend much time explaining herself. Sometimes she did. In
her letter, she makes it clear that she gets frustrated
by the ways that she's misinterpreted, but strangely enough, what
she didn't do was right in such a way that
she wouldn't be misunderstood next time. She believed that the
(22:57):
confusion that her stories generated was part of the point.
And I think a decent comparison would be Jesus Parables.
Jesus could have made those parables clearer if he had
wanted to. He could have made them less offensive, but
he chose to make them offensive. He chose to put
(23:17):
the reader in a position to say, either I'm wrong
about this or God's wrong about this. We've heard the
parables so much that we know what to think about them.
But could you imagine being the people who first experienced
those The original audience for those would have a really
hard time making sense of why it is that the
older brother is the bad guy In the story of
(23:40):
the Prodigal Son, the older brother worked really hard to
keep his nose clean. He worked really hard to stay
out of trouble. And yet it's the wild child who
receives grace in that story. And I hope the older
brother eventually received grace, but he wasn't any position to
(24:02):
receive it in that parable. The good Samaritan Jesus could
have had anybody he wanted to be the good guy
in that story, and he chose to make it the
person who was the most reviled by his audience. And
so Jesus wasn't accidentally making us uncomfortable. That was on purpose.
(24:23):
That's why Flander O'Connor was willing to be misunderstood and
was not willing to write stories that were more easily digestible, A.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Good many people believe because the Southern writing tends to
the grotesque, not because we are still able to recognize freaks,
but because in the South there's so many little freaks
to recognize. I just don't take that up. Still, others
seem to have decided that if you write about freaks,
you do so on account of your great compassion. It's
(24:55):
considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion.
Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody's mouth,
and which no book jacket can do without. It's a
quality that no one can put his finger on in
any exact critical sense, and so the word is always
safe for anybody to use. Thomas Mann has said that
(25:17):
the grotesque is a true Auntie bush Was style. But
I think that the kind of hazy compassion demanded of
the writer now makes it difficult for him to be
Auntie anything. Certainly, when the grotesque has a legitimate reasons
for being, it will be used in a way that
gives to the intellectual and moral judgments implicit in it
(25:39):
the ascendency over feeling.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
And you've been listening to Jonathan Rodgers. He's the author
of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, the spiritual biography of
Flannery O'Connor, And remarkably, we're listening to Flannery O'Connor herself,
and her talking about the misconceptions many had about her,
and in the end the fact that she didn't really
give it much thought, because in the end, as she
(26:05):
so deeply understood, much of Jesus's efforts were not understood,
and not understood even by people themselves who heard the stories.
I think of the good Samaritan, and think, my goodness,
the person that's the good guy is the bad guy?
And why did Jesus give this good Samaritan this special
(26:26):
place in this story when it was a person reviled
by the people of their day. And why was the
kid who ran off and spent all the money was
sought after and chased by the father, while the son
who stayed behind and did all the hard work and
kept the line and was the good son ended up
(26:46):
not receiving the grace of the father, the mercy of
the Father, and their hard stories to grapple with the
great parables of Jesus. He made no fuss about it.
In fact, he was clear about how hard these stories
would be for man to grapple with. And my goodness,
the stories of Flannery O'Connor, well, they're not simple, and
(27:08):
the complexity in them and how grace works in them
is confounding to readers many still today. When we come
back more of this remarkable story of one of America's
great writers, Flannery O'Connor. Here on our American stories, and
(27:36):
we return to our American stories, and the story of
Flannery O'Connor is told by Jonathan Rodgers. Let's pick up
where we last left.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Off for O'Connor, the big Sins. I've put that in
quotation marks. Maybe the seven deadly sins were symptoms of
a deeper sin that goes bone deep. Greed and lust
and racism and gluttony. All those sins make an appearance
(28:12):
in O'Connor's work. And yet the greatest threat to the
human soul is a self sufficiency and a self righteousness
that takes many, many forms. And on the one hand,
there is religious self righteousness that's dangerous insofar as it
(28:35):
keeps us from receiving the grace that's offered to us,
a rescue that has to come from outside us and
not from within us. And so any kind of orthodoxy
that gives a person confidence in their own ability to
justify themselves religious orthodoxy or progressive social justice orthodoxy as
(29:00):
very dangerous, and she saw it as dangerous for other
people and dangerous for herself.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
I've discovered that any fiction that comes out of the
South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader,
unless it is grotesque, in which case it's going to
be called realistic. When my fiction first began to receive
some attention, it was generally considered to have come out
of that mythical entity, the School of Southern the generous.
(29:29):
Every time I heard about the School of Southern Degeneracy,
I felt.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
Like brun rabbit stuck on the tab baided. I think the.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
Social sciences have cast a dreary bite on the public
approach to fiction. If you write about people who don't
always wear shoes, someone.
Speaker 4 (29:46):
Is bound to think that you consider shoes in part.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Anyway, if you have once got rid of a label
like the School Southern Degeneracy, you accept the label grotesque
with better grace. Essentially, any right who produces stories that
can be called grotesque does so because he has that
kind of a town. But I believe that in addition,
there are reasons that intensify the grotesque quality of some
(30:12):
writing in these times.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
She spoke of racial bigotry as one of the most
haunting problems of the American South, and yet she didn't
see it as the deepest problem, because there are deeper
sins of which racism is only the manifestation, and those
deeper sins are not specifically Southern. It's sins that we
(30:38):
all deal with as human beings, and that's what she's
always drawing us back to in her stories, we've got
deep problems, racism among them, but there are deeper problems
in that and we have no hope of working those
problems out on our own without the action of grace
in the world. And that grace may have to come
(30:59):
to us in very brutal ways, because we don't have
eyes to see, and we don't have ears to hear.
To the heart of hearing, you shout to the almost blind,
you draw large and startling figures. And so maybe we
need stories like Flanner Connor's to wake us up to
a reality that, on the one hand, is devastating to
(31:22):
realize that we aren't who we thought we were, and
on the other hand, is hopeful because we don't have
to be who we thought we were, because God is
at work, because God offers us the terrible speed of mercy.
People often ask me where to start reading Flandeerer Connor,
and I think a really great place to start reading
her is the story called Revelation. So in Revelation we
(31:45):
have a woman named Ruby Turpin, who is outlandishly self righteous,
outlandishly smug, who spends her idle minutes making hierarchy of
where people belong judging them by what kind of shoes
they wear, for instance. But however she judges them, she
(32:07):
always ends up at the top of the of the ladder.
And so she's very thankful that she is not black,
for instance. She's very thankful that she's not white trash.
She's very thankful that she's got just enough and knows
what to do with it and is respectable without being
(32:29):
too rich. Because this year's even when she puts the
people on a social scale, she's still glad that she's
not higher on the social scale, because then she would
be too something. And she's in a doctor's office silently
judging everybody around her and making small talk with one
(32:50):
or two of the other people, when a girl across
the way throws a textbook at her and hits her
in the head and then chokes her and says, go
back to where you came from, your ward hog. So
that's her moment of violence. That's her shocking moment. It's
something that wakes her up somehow. She understands that that
(33:13):
strange girl, that freakish girl in the doctor's office, is
speaking for God, and so Ruby Turpin goes home and
she begins to question God out loud, and you get
the impression maybe this is the first time she's ever
been perfectly honest with God, even though she thinks of
herself as a religious person, And she says, why do
(33:36):
you talk to me that way? How can I be
a hog and me both? If I'm not good enough
I'm paraphrasing, but if I'm not good enough, if what
you want is white trash, why don't you go get
yourself some white trash then, And instead of being punished
for that kind of honesty and that kind of question
for God, she's rewarded with a vision at the end
(34:00):
of the story, And as she looks into the sunset
over her hog farm, the clouds of the sunset begin
to look like a bridge from Earth to heaven, and
she sees all the people that she has judged as
inferior to herself walking across that bridge into heaven, and
she sees the white trash clean for the first time,
(34:22):
and she sees black people that she's looked down on
walking joyfully into heaven. And she sees I'm quoting here,
battalions of freaks and lunatic shouting and clapping and leaping
like frogs. And then at the end of the procession,
she sees people like her. Bringing up the end of
the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized
(34:44):
at once, at those who, like herself and Claude her husband,
had always had a little of everything and the God
given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to
observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with
great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good
order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were
on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and
(35:06):
altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away away.
It was in that vision that she saw that the
people that she had put down had to place in
the Kingdom of God too, and that she also had
a place in the Kingdom of God. But it wasn't
going to be that the head of the troop. It
was going to be the end, and it wasn't going
(35:28):
to be her virtues that got her in. Those had
to be burned away too. That's how all of Flannery
O'Connor's stories work.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to
Jonathan Rogers, author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, the
spiritual biography of Flannery O'Connor, and those audio clips from
Flannery O'Connor reveal so much about this misunders author and
(36:01):
deeply loved author. At the very same time hearing her
words about herself, about the world, about being southern, and
so many other things. I've never been anywhere but sick,
Flannery O'Connor said about her bouts with lupus and growing
up with a father who had lupis and died when
she was just fifteen. She lost her father to the
(36:24):
same disease. It would take her life at the early
age of thirty nine, but it informed her life in
the end, that sickness, and it actually made her in
merry many ways the writer she would become. I love
what Rogers had to say about sin and the symptoms
and that racism was a symptom of a deeper sin.
(36:46):
And Flannery wrote about racism my goodness in the Geranium,
it's just perfect. And even in Revelation, the story that
Rogers was telling folks about in which the protagonist Ruby
Turpin finds out the hard way who God is in
that doctor's office, and it jolts her into a sense
of her own self righteousness. For the first time she
(37:09):
senses who she really is in God's kingdom and where
she falls, and it jolters her, and in the end
it conjult all of us what she really had an
intolerance for, with the self sufficient and the self righteous,
the self sufficient progressives, the modern progressives trying to fix
and solve the problems of mankind, and the self righteous well,
(37:33):
characters like Ruby Turpin, characters like any Christians who can
judge others and somehow put themselves always above the fray,
is somehow better and more spiritually right and more spiritually
ordered than the rest of the freaks around us. Is
if we don't have problems ourselves, and always at the
center of everything is God's mercy, always offered, as Jonathan
(37:59):
Rodgers put it, at the terrible speed of mercy. The
story of Flowery O'Connor here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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