Chapter 2 
Chapter 2 Near the end of The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), James Boswell offers one of many scenes in which Johnson expresses his fear of death:
Dr. Johnson surprised [Mr. Henderson] not a little, by acknowledging with a look of horrour, that he was much oppressed by the fear of death. The amiable Dr. Adams suggested that God was infinitely good. Johnson: “That he is infinitely good, as far as the perfection of his nature will allow, I certainly believe; but it is necessary for good upon the whole, that individuals should be punished. As to an individual, therefore, he is not infinitely good; and as I cannot be sure that I have fulfilled the conditions on which salvation is granted, I am afraid I may be one of those who shall be damned” (looking dismally). Dr. Adams: “What do you mean by damned?” Johnson (passionately and loudly): “Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly.” Dr. Adams: “I don’t believe that doctrine.” Johnson: “Hold, Sir; do you believe that some will be punished at all?” Dr. Adams: “Being excluded from Heaven will be a punishment; yet there may be no great positive suffering.” Johnson: “Well, Sir; but if you admit any degree of punishment, there is an end of your argument for infinite goodness simply considered; for, infinite goodness would inflict no punishment whatever. There is not infinite goodness physically considered; morally there is.” Boswell: “But may not a man attain to such a degree of hope as not to be uneasy from the fear of death?” Johnson: “A man may have such a degree of hope as to keep him quiet. You see I am not quiet, from the vehemence with which I talk; but I do not despair.” Mrs. Adams: “You seem, Sir, to forget the merits of our Redeemer.” Johnson: “Madam, I do not forget the merits of my Redeemer; but my Redeemer has said that he will set some on his right hand and some on his left.” He was in gloomy agitation, and said, “I’ll have no more on’t.”1
A reader may empathize with the Adamses, trying to console the Great Cham in the final year of his life. But Boswell chooses to emphasize Johnson’s clear thinking about damnation and refusal to entertain what he saw as spiritual sophistry. To Johnson, all who believe in “damnation” know, or should know, exactly what it entails. As O’Connor would note in a 1955 letter, “The Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”2
Like Dr. Adams when asking Johnson about damnation, many reviewers, even after Wise Blood, could not believe O’Connor took the spiritual issues she explored in her work as seriously, as definitively, and as absolutely as she did. But in the ten years between the two editions of Wise Blood, many readers came to recognize that O’Connor did take her subjects—such as sin, grace, and salvation—quite seriously and was as steadfast in her moral reasoning as Johnson was in his. The “satire” of which reviewers spoke when reviewing Wise Blood was replaced with a growing awareness (and, sometimes, unease) that, like Johnson, O’Connor viewed the truth as fixed, absolute, and beyond human equivocation. In his biography of O’Connor, Jonathan Rogers notes, “As shocking as the grotesqueries in her fiction are, none is so shocking as the realization that they are marshaled in the service of a Catholic orthodoxy that the author submits to—or, in any case, wishes to submit to—without the least trace of ironic detachment.”3 As O’Connor cracked when Mary McCarthy described the Eucharist as a “pretty good” symbol of Christ, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”4
As seen in the previous chapter, Peter J. Rabinowitz has cataloged what he calls “rules of notice”: ways in which readers highlight various pieces of data in order to begin making sense of a text. But the author, Rabinowitz argues, also needs to make assumptions about her readers’ understanding of what is significant in a text:
An author has, in most cases, no firm knowledge of the actual readers who will pick up his or her book. Yet he or she cannot begin to fill up a blank page without making assumptions about the readers’ beliefs, knowledge, and familiarity with conventions. As a result, authors are forced to guess; they design their books rhetorically for some more or less hypothetical audience, which I call the authorial audience. Artistic choices are based upon these assumptions—conscious or unconscious—about readers, and to a certain extent, artistic success depends on their shrewdness, on the degree to which actual and authorial audience overlap.5
In other words, the authorial audience is the hypothetical reader to whom a work of fiction is addressed; this reader will often be imagined by writers as one who shares a number of his or her values and assumptions. John Bunyan assumed that he and his authorial audience shared a number of opinions regarding the journey from this world to that which is to come, just as Dashiell Hammett assumed that, to engineer the surprise at the end of The Maltese Falcon, he could exploit his authorial audience’s opinions about the dangerous nature of beautiful women, especially when they appeared in pulp novels. Of course, the actual audience might be different from the authorial one and is not bound in any way to read the work as the author imagined (or didn’t imagine) it would be. One could imagine, for example, a reader breaking from Melville’s authorial audience, wholly unsympathetic to Ahab and regarding him as the villain of Moby-Dick. The authorial audience is as much a creation of the writer’s imagination as the fiction itself, but the actual audience can read and respond however it chooses.
When Rabinowitz states that “artistic success” depends on “the degree to which actual and authorial audience overlap,” he is suggesting that one mark of artistic success is the degree to which an author has managed to provide his or her readers with a vision of the world that complements how they imagine their own and that this vision is built upon at least some shared assumptions between author and reader. For example, those whose opinions of Gary Gilmore resemble Norman Mailer’s will be more likely to label The Executioner’s Song an “artistic success” than those whose opinions of Gilmore are directly opposed to Mailer’s. Of course, one of Mailer’s goals is to change his readers’ assumptions on this subject, but if the reader does not budge in his detestation of Gilmore, it is difficult to imagine him or her applauding Mailer’s work as anything more than biased—however engaging—reportage. Rabinowitz’s work is a heuristic for investigating why certain works are praised and others are not: the degree to which readers’ experiences mirror those of the authorial audience, the collection of “presuppositions upon which a text is built,”6 may suggest the degree to which readers will praise or condemn a writer’s artistic performance.
Applying Rabinowitz’s ideas to a reception study is useful because doing so enables the historian first to discern and describe his or her subject’s authorial audience and then to determine the degree to which readers in the actual audience accepted or resisted reading in an authorially imagined manner. Proceeding this way can allow the critic to write a reception history that accounts for changes in reading habits, rather than one that simply records who-liked-what-when. Creating a sketch of O’Connor’s authorial audience is a particularly useful method for examining the shift in critical opinion that occurred between the first (1952) and second (1962) editions of Wise Blood. An examination of the reception of A Good Man Is Hard to Find and The Violent Bear It Away suggests that critics gradually began reading her work as she imagined members of her authorial audience doing. Once they did, the Catholic themes of her work, previously obscure, became apparent.
So who comprised O’Connor’s authorial audience? What hypothetical readers did she have in mind as she wrote? To what values and assumptions, for example, did she hope to appeal when deciding that, in “The River,” Harry Ash-field would seek a place where he “counted”? One way to determine O’Connor’s authorial, imagined audience is to examine its opposite: a collection of readers too-clever-by-half who sought to explain away her fiction’s mysteries, many of them spiritual, with “psychoanalytic” readings or a hunt for symbols. One reviewer of The Violent Bear It Away, for example, relied on jargon to help him defeat the mysteries of the plot, diagnosing Mason, Tarwater, and Rayber as “an obsessive psychotic, a paranoiac delinquent, and a fanatical monomaniac.”7 When O’Connor was asked by a professor at Wesleyan about the “significance” of the Misfit’s hat, she replied, “To cover his head.”8 Mason Tarwater rails against his nephew for trying to reduce God to a number; O’Connor had little patience for readers who tried to read in any similarly reductive manner and who viewed fiction as an intellectual parlor game in which the players won by offering the most edgy interpretations. Readers approaching the work “as if it were a problem in algebra,” seeking to “find X [so] when they find X they can dismiss the rest of it,”9 outraged O’Connor’s assumptions about fiction and the life it reflected. Those who concocted outlandish interpretations, such as the reviewer for Commentary who found The Violent Bear It Away a novel about homosexual incest,10 were, to O’Connor, beyond the critical pale: “When you have a generation of students who are being taught to think like that, there’s nothing to do but wait for another generation to come along and hope it won’t be worse.”11 The phrase “think like that” suggests O’Connor’s imagined audience by describing its opposite. O’Connor never saw her works as being enclosed in irony-bestowing quotation marks.
To complicate matters, a writer may have more than one authorial audience in mind as he or she creates a work of fiction. A reader unfamiliar with O’Connor might initially assume that her authorial audience was composed of other Christians and that O’Connor imagined herself writing to them in the spirit of confirming what they already believed. However, O’Connor also imagined a second authorial audience defined by what its members did not believe, rather than what they did. “My audience,” she wrote shortly after the publication of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, “are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.”12 O’Connor understood that her fiction would often be read by “a public with a predisposition to believe the opposite”13 and viewed one of her primary challenges as dramatizing the action of grace and redemption for readers who denied their existence: as she articulated her artistic challenge in a 1955 letter, “How are you going to make such things clear to people who don’t believe in God?”14 O’Connor thought her stories and novels were sometimes met with confusion or scorn because readers had dismissed their themes as archaic: she sympathized with John Hawkes’s task of “speaking to an audience which does not believe in evil”15 and complained to her former teacher, Andrew Lytle, that “The River” would be panned because “baptism is just another idiocy to the general reader.”16 O’Connor imagined her audience as composed not only of others who shared her convictions but also of those who found these convictions ridiculous. “Part of the difficulty of all this,” she explained, “is that you write for an audience who doesn’t know what grace is and who doesn’t recognize it when they see it.”17
For a reader to fully appreciate the degree to which her fiction reflected reality, O’Connor assumed that he or she had to be capable of at least entertaining the ideas of grace and God; such readers might be called the “genuine” authorial audience. But also at hand was this second audience that can be called the “ironic” authorial audience. This matter of rival audiences made all the difference in the building of her literary reputation: for example, the “genuine” authorial readers of The Violent Bear It Away responded to the subject of prophecy in a way almost uniformly opposed to that of the “ironic” authorial audience. As one reviewer noted with regard to that novel, “Those to whom anything less than total commitment is anathema will find this novel a searching study of that engulfing power,” while “The more detached may well find the novel hinges on a doubtful premise.”18 Both of these audiences were present in O’Connor’s mind as she wrote, and both affected the course of O’Connor’s reputation.
While O’Connor lamented of many readers that “the religious sense has been bred out of them in the kind of society we’ve lived in since the 18th century” and that they had lost any “sense of the power of God,”19 she never viewed her art as a means of preaching to the choir. She had as little regard for unskilled Catholic readers, even when they were members of the genuine authorial audience, as she did for secular ones: she once described the “average Catholic reader” as a “Militant Moron.”20 To O’Connor, fiction was not a means to proselytize. In 1957 she told a group of students at Emory University, “The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”21 To O’Connor, the mystery of the world was as much a part of it as its physicality, and the writer’s aim was to make his or her readers contemplate the mystery that she viewed the “modern world” as trying to “eliminate.”22 “I’m always highly irritated,” she explained in the same lecture, “by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.”23 O’Connor believed T. S. Eliot’s claim that “human kind cannot bear very much reality” and explored this in her fiction. Some of her more resistant, ironic readers proved the claim with their reactions to her work.
Lest quotations from O’Connor, such as those above, make her seem only annoyed by or even contemptuous of her readers, three points should be reviewed. First, the ironic audience who “thinks God is dead” was, again, not the only one O’Connor had in mind as she wrote; she obviously imagined readers who would recognize that Mr. Head experiences the gift of divine mercy or that the smooth-talking stranger who speaks to Tarwater is the devil and not, as some ironic readers assumed, a projection of his schizophrenic state. O’Connor did not imagine herself writing only to those who thought God was dead. Second, the existence of an ironic audience was seen by O’Connor as a spur to producing higher-quality work. As she wrote in “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” “The Catholic who does not write for a limited circle of fellow Catholics will in all probability consider that, since this is his vision, he is writing for a hostile audience, and he will be more than ever concerned to have his work stand on its own two feet and be complete and self-sufficient and impregnable in its own right.”24 Finally, O’Connor knew that an author without readers was playing solitaire: “Success means being heard. . . . You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has its end in its audience.”25 The original audiences of A Good Man Is Hard to Find and The Violent Bear It Away responded to these works along fault lines that revealed their approach—genuine or ironic—to O’Connor’s work.
Reviews of O’Connor’s 1955 collection of stories reveal many of the same approaches, observations, and “rules of notice” that surfaced three years earlier with Wise Blood. O’Connor’s age was still worthy of notice, as when James Greene in Commonweal described her as “scarcely thirty years old”26 or when Granville Hicks stated, “If there is a young writer—Miss O’Connor is 30—who has given clearer power of originality and thinking, I cannot think who it is.”27 Likewise, the southern accents of her work were highlighted and, as earlier, made an object of fun: one reviewer described her fiction as “Grand Guignol with hominy grits”28 while others observed, less playfully, “The chance of lower middle-class Southerners reading anything at all between hard covers is pretty slim”29 and that O’Connor was not of “the mint julep circuit,”30 noting a distinction of class as well as geography.
But other reviewers also noted that the South was more than a regionalistic Skinner box and thought that the highest praise to give a southern writer was to say that her work transcended its setting, as in the compliment, “Here in rural miniature are the primary intuitions of man.”31 A reviewer from Harper’s Bazaar stated, “Flannery O’Connor writes of the South, but ‘regional’ is not the word for her writing,”32 and Fred Bornhauser, in Shenandoah, stated that O’Connor’s stories take place in a “terrifyingly familiar” world that is not Georgia as much as “microcosmically The Universe.”33 And in the Savannah Morning News, Ben W. Griffith Jr. stated, “One feels as if the incidents of these stories occurred in any region on earth they would immediately be absorbed into the folklore of that area and be told and retold eternally on front porches and back fences. These stories, in short, have universality and depth in their narrative elements alone. . . . These stories have humor, characterizations, freshness, and universality.”34 O’Connor’s South was still viewed by reviewers as a place “where vision and understanding often extend hardly beyond one’s individual fence rails,”35 but there was a growing consensus that “the Southern locale in no way gives the stories a provincial bias.”36 Critical recognition of O’Connor’s fiction as not confined to the South was important because it developed both her growing reputation as more than a local hero and widened her appeal to her authorial audiences, both genuine and ironic.
A surprising feature of A Good Man Is Hard to Find’s original reviews is that the title story—frequently anthologized and universally viewed as her signature work—was often disparaged, misread, or simply ignored.37 One reviewer stated that the story “has serious artistic defects,”38 while another made a pedestrian stab at interpreting the title by claiming, “The ‘good man’ of the title story” is “an escaped murderer who casually dispatches six people.”39 Critics often described the story as “one of multiple tragedy”40 and pointed out that the Misfit and his men kill all six members of Bailey’s family. Counting the bodies was apparently easier than wrestling with the Misfit’s ideas about whether or not Jesus should have raised the dead. Many reviewers could say nothing more about the story than that it was “tragic and terrible,”41 as if the gunshots, and not the painful and complicated reasons behind them, were at the heart of O’Connor’s thematic concerns. (The repeated use of “tragic” in these reviews shows that critics were responding to the ages and number of the victims, rather than the meaning of their deaths.) The unnamed reviewer for Time simply condensed the plot, noting that the characters “run into three escaped convicts who rob and shoot the lot, the babbling old featherwit last of all.”42 This reviewer saw no significance in the grandmother’s last action and words, nor in the application of the Misfit’s sardonic eulogy for her (“She would have been a good woman if it had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life”43) to every reader of the story. O’Connor was right in her assumptions about some members of her ironic authorial audience and their unwillingness to acknowledge the mystery she thought necessary for fiction; she remarked that this particular review “nearly gave me apoplexy.”44
Many reviewers instead found “The Displaced Person” to be the collection’s strongest work. The New York Herald Tribune Book Review called it “the finest in the book,”45 Today called it “the most successful story,”46 the Virginia Quarterly called it the “most complex story”47 in the collection, and the Sewanee Review called it the “most ambitious story”48 of the lot. Others praised it even more highly: a reviewer for Best Sellers called it “the nearest to a classic tragedy of all the collection of ten,”49 and another called it “a classic-tragedy of a man who disturbed his neighbors by minding his own business.”50 Reviewers’ praise of “The Displaced Person” is the closest thing to a critical consensus of O’Connor’s artistic performance to be found in her early career. That “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is now much more widely anthologized and associated with O’Connor is a fact that modern critics may take for granted, but upon its first release in this collection, the story did not strike many reviewers as superior to its nine companion pieces.
The question remains why so many of the collection’s initial readers viewed “The Displaced Person” as having “greater strength and deeper implications than any of the others.”51 The most obvious reason is that displaced persons were of contemporary concern in 1955, with the 1948 Displaced Persons Act still in readers’ memories. Another possibility is that, unlike the title story, “The Displaced Person” is more neatly allegorical. The links between the title character, Mr. Guizac, and Christ are obvious: O’Connor even has Mrs. McIntyre remark, “Christ was just another D.P.,”52 almost as a means to prompt the reader. Similarly, Guizac’s horrifying death—and Mrs. McIntyre’s complicity in it—smacks more of the story of the Paschal lamb, especially since Guizac had been an advocate of loving one’s neighbor when dealing with the blatantly racist Mrs. McIntyre. The allegory of the sacrificed innocent is not only effective, it is also easily accessible to first-time readers. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” on the other hand, is a story more difficult to categorize. It seems to begin as a social comedy, with the stock character of the irritating, know-it-all grandmother presented as an easy target—but once Bailey’s car flips on its back, the characters and the reader are no longer in the driver’s seat. What began as a recognizable story about a meddling old lady becomes a serious disquisition on Christ, punishment, sin, and grace, and the grandmother becomes not merely an object of social ridicule. The Misfit and O’Connor challenge and unsettle both the delirious grandmother and the unsuspecting reader. In “The Displaced Person,” the reader is flattered into recognizing Guizac’s goodness; in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the reader’s assumptions are dramatically upended in a moment of violence. This technique of luring her reader into making a number of literary and moral assumptions, only to have them violently shaken, was one that O’Connor would use again and again in her best work: one only needs to recall the endings of “Everything That Rises Must Converge” or “Revelation” as later examples. In the Sewanee Review, Louis D. Rubin Jr. noted that while writers like Erskine Caldwell had social aims and axes to grind, “Flannery O’Connor has no such intention, no such simple approach to people.”53 But a simple approach may have been what many reviewers wanted and took, which is why they had more difficulty with the Misfit than with the displaced person.
Still, some readers did argue—in what were becoming longer and more sophisticated evaluations of O’Connor’s work—that the title, as Thomas H. Carter observed, “states quite literally the burden of the book.”54 As with Wise Blood, a reviewer for Shenandoah offered perhaps the most lucid explanation of O’Connor’s technique: Fred Bornhauser claimed that the collection’s title would be perfect even without the eponymous story and that titles such as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” and “Good Country People” help “illuminate in inverse situations the ethos which is the absolute center of gravity”55 in O’Connor’s stories. Yet it was Robert Giroux—not O’Connor—who named the collection after the work that had impressed him most as he readied O’Connor’s stories for publication.56 O’Connor regarded “The Artificial Nigger” as “my favorite and probably the best thing I’ll ever write,”57 but she trusted Giroux and followed his instincts. Of course, one cannot imagine a collection named after O’Connor’s favorite story selling well or without great controversy in 1955 or today. When the collection was published in the United Kingdom two years later under the title The Artificial Nigger, O’Connor was upset about the title change.58 Giroux’s naming of the collection has helped cement the title story as O’Connor’s most representative work and O’Connor as a writer who, in the words of one reviewer, relies on “ironic violence”59 or, in the more colloquial words of Granville Hicks, leaves a “nasty taste in the reader’s mouth.”60
Indeed, the early reviews are marked by general critical unease in responding to the nastiness of O’Connor’s plots. One of the first reviewers warned that O’Connor “is not the kind of writer who caters to people who want what is commonly called escape stuff” and stated, “If you are one of those who ‘read for entertainment,’ skip Miss O’Connor.”61 What the reviewer means by “escape stuff” can be vaguely defined as the material of potboilers—but potboilers feature as many, if not more, criminal characters and scenes of lust, murder, and mayhem as O’Connor’s fiction. A Good Man Is Hard to Find differs from pageturners because O’Connor presents sensationalistic elements as a means to explore complicated theological issues. Orville Prescott warned his readers in the New York Times that “A Good Man Is Hard to Find is not a dish to be set before most readers”62 while another reviewer noted that the collection “is hardly to be recommended for light reading.”63 Critics seemed to define “light reading” and “escape stuff” as fiction in which the killer does his or her business for clear and recognizable aims: money, revenge, or sex. A killer whose acts reflect a spiritual crisis and who undermines the announced motives of his own actions with the remark “It’s no real pleasure in life”64 was more difficult to categorize. Thus the content and themes prompted one reviewer to recommend the book only for “adult readers,”65 and Caroline Gordon noted that “many people profess to find her work hard to understand.”66 O’Connor was as rough on the senses as she was on the soul. As with Wise Blood, many critics pointed out the horrors and violence of O’Connor’s work but fell short of further comment; they saw the “large and startling figures” but did not examine their meaning, as if the strangeness and violence of her stories were gratuitous rather than thematic. “When I see these stories described as horror stories,” O’Connor wrote to Betty Hester, “I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.”67
By this point in her career, O’Connor recognized her reputation as an author whose work was described in ways akin to the films of Quentin Tarantino forty years later. In a letter in which she spoke of a squib in the New Yorker that characterized her work as superficial and characterized by “brutality,”68 O’Connor remarked, “I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder nor less sentimental than Christian realism.”69 O’Connor uses “hard” here to mean “hard” to stomach but also “hard” on one’s easy assumptions about God and man, another part of her reputation that is today taken for granted. For example, in a 2009 PBS interview, Ralph Wood commented on her reputation in unequivocal language: “Flannery O’Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced. Now, that’s an astonishing fact. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Emily Dickinson, Frost, Stevens—not one of them Christian, at least not orthodoxly Christian. 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.”70 However, as with Wise Blood, the original reviewers of A Good Man Is Hard to Find did not, as a whole, emphasize what Wood states as obvious and the current critical community generally believes, as reflected in the amount and focus of scholarly and popular examinations of O’Connor and her work. Some readers immediately noticed what O’Connor and Wood both state about her work, but most did not. The reviewers who immediately recognized the Christian themes of A Good Man Is Hard to Find deserve attention here because their reviews are important mile markers on the road of O’Connor’s reputation, a road that began as a dirt track with small signposts calling Wise Blood an odd, minor, “ingrown”71 book about a specific region and which has become a highway marked by billboards (such as Wood’s remarks) declaring her importance as a Christian writer. When O’Connor’s Complete Stories was published in 1971, seven years after her death, a critic for the National Catholic Reporter could, without pause, call her “the most deeply committed Christian writer of her day,”72 and while one could note that “Christian” is a less-defining term than “Catholic,” such an appreciation of her spiritual themes was not obvious to all who read her work in that day’s first light.
In fact, the first notice that firmly and irrevocably contributed to O’Connor’s reputation as a Christian writer was not a scholarly examination in a peer-reviewed journal or an extended appreciation in a literary magazine but a two-paragraph letter to the editor of Commonweal. Dale Francis, who would later found the Texas Catholic Herald and serve as director of the University of Notre Dame Press, responded to James Greene’s review of A Good Man Is Hard to Find in which Greene praised O’Connor’s work for demonstrating the “rustic religiosity” of her characters and for the ways in which she “lifts a ‘comic’ device to complex dimensions.”73 Francis shared Greene’s admiration for O’Connor’s work but argued that Greene was not seeing what informed it:
To the editors: I couldn’t be more in agreement with James Greene in his praise of the talents of Flannery O’Connor (July 22). But I would like to suggest that it is the Catholicism of Miss O’Connor that gives her the viewpoint from which she writes. There is compassion in her writing, there is understanding of reality; she belongs to neither the school of writing about the South that sees only decadence nor to the school that sees only magnolias.
Miss O’Connor—who despite the Irish name is a convert to the Church—is an important addition to the list of American Catholic writers. And make no mistake, although her stories have not touched on Catholic subject matter, she is not just a writer who is a Catholic, but a Catholic writer.74
Francis’s need to “suggest” that O’Connor’s Catholicism was the thematic foundation of her work might strike a modern reader as akin to a critic’s need to “suggest” that Orwell’s political thinking informed 1984. However, the very word “suggest,” used by a reader like Francis who was well versed in contemporary Christian writing, proves that regarding O’Connor as a writer interested in Catholic mysteries was, at this point, a novel idea. Also worth notice here is that even Francis seems not to realize the depth of his own insight: the statement “her stories have not touched on Catholic subject matter” seems difficult, at this point in time, to make. One only needs to examine the collection’s table of contents to see that the stories abound in “Catholic subject matter,” such as baptism (“The River”), redemption (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”), the sacrifice of innocents (“The Displaced Person”), divine mercy (“The Artificial Nigger”), and, most obviously, the Eucharist (“A Temple of the Holy Ghost”). Scholars can now begin their books with sentences such as “Flannery O’Connor’s religious faith engages the interest of nearly every critic or reviewer who considers her fiction,”75 but this interest was not found in the initial reception of those critics who could not see the Catholic forest for the grotesque and southern trees.
Francis’s letter is also worth notice because of an error that reveals how Catholic writers were sometimes received. His claim that O’Connor was “a convert to the Church” was untrue: O’Connor’s parents were prominent Catholics in both Savannah and Milledgeville, and she was raised in that faith. Why Francis described her as a “convert” is unknown, but in a letter to Frances Neel Cheney, written a month after Francis’s piece, O’Connor noted, “I must say Mr. Dale Francis’ communication didn’t rejoice me any. I wrote him a real polite letter though and thanked him for his high opinion and told him I was a born Catholic. I thought maybe after that he would write them and correct it but he didn’t even answer my letter. It doesn’t make any difference except that people do believe that if you have been brought up in the church, you write ads if you write anything.”76 Three years later, O’Connor’s reputation as a convert still surfaced with enough frequency to make O’Connor complain to Cecil Dawkins, “They always insist on calling me a convert” and to blame Francis’s letter to Commonweal for the mistake: “He thought somebody told him so, or some such thing, and ever since anybody that writes anything announces I am a convert.”77
This error illuminates the ways that some critics—even admiring ones, like Francis—regarded writing that explored spiritual themes: presumably only one with all the sound and fury of a convert would want to explore these themes in her work or be unabashed in her enthusiasm for doing so.78 Just as assumptions about the South were epitomized in Mencken’s “The Sahara of the Bozart,” those about the pedestrian qualities of Catholic writing were reflected in an essay by George Orwell composed fifteen years before the publication of A Good Man Is Hard to Find: “The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. How many Roman Catholics have been good novelists? Even the handful one could name have usually been bad Catholics. The novel is practically a Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual.”79 The idea that a free mind cannot coexist with a Catholic soul is one still found in some circles today and was present in O’Connor’s crack about writers of faith being assumed to write only ads. To O’Connor, the danger of being labeled as a Catholic writer was that readers “assumed that you have some religious axe to grind”80 and that “no one thinks you can lift the pen without trying to show somebody redeemed.”81 Spiritual propaganda disguised as fiction was never her aim: as she explained to a priest, “being propaganda for the side of the angels only makes it worse.”82
The second important notice of A Good Man Is Hard to Find that marked O’Connor’s growing reputation as a Catholic writer appeared two months after Francis’s letter. Writing in Today, a Catholic periodical published in Chicago, John A. Lynch used the occasion of A Good Man Is Hard to Find to comment on O’Connor but also on what he viewed as the timid state of Catholic publishers and the readers to which they catered. Baldly stating that O’Connor “is a Catholic writer, or, a Catholic who is a writer, or, a writer who is a Catholic,” Lynch laments that she “remains outside the literary fraternity.”83 Her status as outsider, according to Lynch, was the result of assumptions held by readers such as Orwell, which O’Connor addressed when mentioning that too many readers assumed that Catholics could write only propaganda: “In this enlightened day, Flannery O’Connor, for all her ability, is faced with a formidable congregation of audience and critics who would decide a writer’s merits on his Catholicism, and his Catholicism, in turn, on his expressed piety.”84 “Expressed” is the key word here, for Lynch further complains that O’Connor has been ignored by more mainstream Catholic outlets because “Miss O’Connor’s orthodoxy is not their orthodoxy,” an orthodoxy “co-existent only with sweetness and light.”85 The violence and what Lynch calls the “macabre tightening” of O’Connor’s stories was here viewed as an asset and as crucial to an understanding of her work. Lynch’s review is significant for proclaiming that one could explore Catholic themes in a way directly opposite those found in the Catholic Home Journal, which Lynch notes solicited “snappy love stories with a light Catholic touch.”86 Indeed, Lynch’s assertion that little magazines and other secular sources provided a more welcome forum for O’Connor and her work than Catholic outlets seems well founded: reviews that emphasized the moral and Catholic foundations of O’Connor’s collection were found in the pages of the Kenyon Review,87 the Sewanee Review,88 and the liberal and socialist New Leader, where Granville Hicks noted that O’Connor writes from “an orthodox Christian point of view.”89
The third significant notice that marks O’Connor’s growing reputation as a Catholic writer is so short that its insight seems all the more surprising. Less a review than a squib, this unsigned notice in Commonweal of the 1957 paperback edition of A Good Man Is Hard to Find encapsulates two years’ worth of critical evolution in fewer than fifty words: “Astonishingly adult and profound short stories by one of the most seriously theological and competent of women novelists. These earthy stories of the South are by a talent who bids fair to be a Catholic Turgenev. (Recently reissued as a paperback.)”90 All the early history of critical engagement with O’Connor’s collection surfaces in this unsigned notice. “Astonishingly adult” recalls the reviews that emphasized the stories’ violence and nastiness. “Profound” recalls the increased attention to ways that this violence suggests deeper, spiritual themes. “Women novelists” and “stories of the South” are predictable in their appearance, but they are used here as means of praise: O’Connor is “seriously theological and competent,” and her South is “earthy” or realistic. And O’Connor is again compared to another author, but now the comparison is not to an American author but to a Russian writer in the most complimentary way and on grounds of form rather than subject matter. That a number of assumptions about O’Connor could all be compressed into such a short space suggests the degree to which, in only two years after the initial publication of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, they had become established in a general critical consciousness. A “genuine” authorial audience, it now seemed, was forging O’Connor’s reputation, although these readers would soon be challenged by a different kind of opposition upon the release of her next work.
In 1960, five years after the publication of A Good Man Is Hard to Find and only four years before O’Connor’s death, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy published The Violent Bear It Away, O’Connor’s second novel and the last of her fiction to be published during her lifetime. Granted, eight years after Wise Blood, some reviewers were still amazed by O’Connor’s gender and prone to left-handed compliments such as, “There is strength and a gustiness in her which is rare in any woman writer.”91 O’Connor’s southern sensibilities were still a part of many reviews and almost as much of her reputation as the work itself: Faulkner still occasionally cast his shadow, as when one reviewer noted that the book “smelled of Faulkner.”92 But O’Connor was now regarded as different from other southern writers because of what critics had come to recognize about her spiritual themes: writing in the Arizona Quarterly, for example, Donald C. Emerson stated that O’Connor was often called a “Southern Writer” but noted that O’Connor could not be so easily labeled, since “Her values are Christian, and the horrors with which she deals have meaning where the witless violence of Caldwell’s Tobacco Road does not.”93 Emerson’s remark recalls the earlier point made about the level and meaning of violence in A Good Man Is Hard to Find compared to that found in pulp fiction. As with A Good Man Is Hard to Find, other critics discovered O’Connor’s South as a potential staging ground for fiction exploring transcendent themes. One of the novel’s early and enthusiastic reviewers stated, “Tarwater is one of the most challenging symbols of modern man who tries to see only the part of reality that he wants to see,”94 while another noted that O’Connor’s works “are not regional, but are of the people whose special conflicts with life could happen anywhere.”95 Such praise marks how far responses to O’Connor had come from remarks claiming that Wise Blood was strictly “about the South” and “southern religionists.”96 The Times Literary Supplement recognized The Violent Bear It Away as a novel that transcended even the category of American fiction and explored mankind on a “universal scale.”97 O’Connor’s reputation had come a long way from the days of Wise Blood when she was viewed as a southern oddity: her work was now regarded as possessing “a note of universalism,”98 and although she would still be labeled a “southern girl,” the same critic could describe O’Connor as “universal in her work.”99 Orwell did not have the final word on orthodox authors, nor was the Sahara of the Bozart now as dry as some had once assumed.
Reviewers were quick to point out the difficulty of The Violent Bear It Away, remarking, “many readers will prefer the pabulum of slick best sellers”100 and noting that “all but the most careful readers are likely to be misled.”101 These warnings to potential readers about the horrors of O’Connor’s plots became more frequent: one reviewer stated that the novel’s “strong flavor will be too much for the taste of most fiction readers,”102 while another noted that the book would “not appeal to the average reader; nor can it be recommended for teenagers or the immature.”103 Not surprisingly, “grotesque” remained a watchword, appearing in almost every review of the novel and more strongly tied to O’Connor’s reputation than ever before.104 But by now the term, despite its usefulness, was starting to show its age and limitations: writing in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Louis Dollarhide denied the power and accuracy of the term by arguing, “Here is characterization as incisive and clean-cut as stone images, yet of characters, not mere grotesques, who live and breathe.”105 A critic for the Catholic World similarly found “grotesque” and its usual companions inadequate: writing of Tarwater’s simultaneous drowning and baptism of his cousin, Bishop, the reviewer cast aside two specific (and important) critical voices and all those who followed their lead: “This time it is doubtful if any reviewer will refer to Tarwater’s action as a ‘garish climax,’ as the Saturday Review once did to the climax of her story ‘Greenleaf’; or as an act of ‘sardonic brutality,’ as Time did the action of ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’ It is now obvious that there is nothing ‘garish,’ ‘gratuitous,’ or ‘grotesque’ about this novel, or about any of her other works for that matter.”106 The words “It is now obvious” remind us of the degree to which literary reputations evolve over time. One way to gage a watchword’s power is to note when voices rise against it and complain of its inadequacy.
Reviewers also noted O’Connor’s humor but did not regard it as “satirical” as so many did when they first encountered Wise Blood. Perhaps the most representative example of the ways many readers regarded O’Connor’s humor at this point in her career is found in a review for the Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books, where Fanny Butcher (a critic whose very name might have been created by O’Connor) noted that her work was “shot through with humor, but of a menacing kind” and compared O’Connor’s comic sense to “a poke in the ribs made with a poison barb.”107 Descriptions of the humor in The Violent Bear It Away followed suit: critics called the novel’s humor “rueful,”108 “merciless,”109 “mirthless,”110 and, of course, “grotesque,”111 but they also noted that O’Connor’s humor was a means by which she illuminated human nature—something that she always did but which was now noticed by her readers as part of her complex art. Thus Tarwater’s struggle was described by Paul Engle as “hilarious and touching,”112 and Thomas F. Gossett stated that O’Connor possessed “a mordant humor which is extremely perceptive.”113 Not surprisingly, Brainard Cheney—as much a member of her genuine authorial audience as O’Connor could wish—noted that O’Connor’s humor was not simply sarcastic or dark but philosophical and, ultimately, affirming:
Her original achievement, her genius, is that she has restored to humor the religious point of view. That is, man looking at himself not in the presence of time and space, however great, and certainly not this humanly-conceived time and space looking at man. But man, looking at himself, in the Presence of Infinity—Infinity for Whom there is no unknown, no unknowable, from Whom there are no secrets. But an Infinity of Love and Compassion as well as Awfulness.114
Cheney’s opinions apply to Wise Blood and A Good Man Is Hard to Find as much as they do to The Violent Bear It Away, but they took eight years to make their way into print. The history of how critics characterized O’Connor’s humor—which remained unchanged in tone and style throughout her career—demonstrates the ways in which they struggled to describe a humor they found unsettling. Should a reader laugh with or at these characters? Eventually, her combination of ethical issues and dark humor would become another part of O’Connor’s reputation that was taken for granted, as in Walter Clemons’s 1971 Newsweek review of The Complete Stories: “To read The Complete Stories is to see, better than before, the development of her profound moral vision. This doesn’t change the fact that Flannery O’Connor is one of the funniest American writers.”115 When Clemons subsequently notes, “It takes some readers (I was one) a while to understand that it’s more than a superb Punch-and-Judy show,”116 he could be speaking for his critical colleagues.
The most notable and complex issue that arises from an examination of The Violent Bear It Away’s initial reception is the way in which critics responded to the prophet Mason Tarwater in particular and to the possibility of prophecy in general. Part of the novel’s tension arises from two strong, opposing characters vying for the loyalty of the fourteen-year-old protagonist. Old Mason Tarwater, Francis’s great-uncle, regards prophecy as a trial and a burden but knows that he must follow his calling and raise his great-nephew to assume the prophet’s mantle; Rayber, Francis’s uncle, regards prophecy as a psychological aberration and seeks to save his nephew from what he views as the insane manipulations of the old man. Tarwater’s struggle between these two conflicting accounts of “prophecy” drives the plot of the novel and brings Tarwater to a revelation, the acceptance of his vocation, and his march to the hellish city, where “the children of God lay sleeping.”117 His role will not be an easy one, but his charge to awaken the sleeping souls is one that he cannot deny. A first-time reader’s questioning Tarwater’s vocation is expected and even, at times, courted by O’Connor as a means of drawing the reader into Tarwater’s own struggle. But in the final analysis, the implications of O’Connor’s form, content, and title work to confirm the reality of Tarwater’s vision. Like Hazel Motes, Tarwater ends the novel in surrender to a force that O’Connor identifies and depicts forcefully and without humor. Prophecy is a deadly serious business.
O’Connor’s letters repeatedly reflect her concern about this topic but also her unwillingness to compromise her own vision of prophecy. She knew that her treatment of the subject would generate misunderstanding, even attacks, from a large segment of the critical community. Before the novel’s publication, she wrote to Maryat Lee, “There is nothing like being pleased with your own work—and this is the best stage—before it is published and begins to be misunderstood.”118 Days later, she wrote to Cecil Dawkins, “I dread all the reviews, all the misunderstanding of my intentions, etc. etc. Sometimes the most you can ask is to be ignored.”119 To Ted Spivey, she stated, “A lot of arty people will read it and be revolted, I trust”120; to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, she joked, “I await the critical reception with distaste and unanticipation.”121 O’Connor knew that many readers would attack her just as the sleeping children of God, mentioned in the novel’s final sentence, will attack Tarwater. “I am resigned to the fact that I am going to be the book’s greatest admirer,”122 she remarked and steeled herself against what she assumed would be a wave of “nothing but disappointed reviews.”123
The initial critical reception proved O’Connor half-right. There were a number of vehement attacks featuring what she would label as misreadings of both the novel and her artistic intentions in writing it, but there were also enthusiastic reviews that praised the novel as O’Connor’s best work to date. The critical split occurred along the fault line of her ironic and genuine authorial audiences. With some important exceptions I will examine later, the genuine authorial audience—many writing in Catholic outlets—assumed the reality of Mason’s prophecies and Tarwater’s vocation; the ironic authorial audience assumed Mason to be a lunatic and Tarwater a victim of brainwashing. However, the audience from which a critic approached the novel was not always a guarantee of how he or she would respond: there were members of the genuine authorial audience who accepted the possibility of Mason’s vocation but panned the novel and members of the ironic authorial audience who mocked the idea of prophecy yet praised O’Connor’s work.
Most of the novel’s original reviewers, however, split along these “lines of audience,” and that split affected how readers regarded O’Connor’s thematic concerns. A reviewer could assume the novel was, to those in the genuine authorial audience, an examination of what O’Connor called “the nobility of unnaturalness”124; to those in the ironic authorial audience, it was a chilling portrayal of the manipulation of a vulnerable youth. Mason Tarwater would surely endorse the first theme, while Rayber might affirm the second, although even this assertion about Rayber is problematic, since he physically and mentally collapses after realizing that he has sacrificed his humanity for the sake of a spiteful philosophical stance. O’Connor anticipated this response as well: to Betty Hester, she wrote, “Many will think that the author shares Rayber’s point of view and praise the book on account of it,”125 and to John Hawkes she declared, “The modern reader will identify himself with the schoolteacher [Rayber], but it is the old man who speaks for me.”126
Those in the genuine authorial audience, often writing in Catholic periodicals, took Mason and O’Connor at their word. For example, an unnamed reviewer for the Catholic weekly journal America stated that the novel depicts the ways in which “contemporary man gropes toward God through a miasma of self-deception that can be enlightened only per Christum Dominum nostrum.”127 In Today, another Catholic periodical, Sister Bede Sullivan stated (at the end of her opening paragraph) that O’Connor “sees more clearly than her fellow mortals do, and proclaims more surely the Kingdom of God,”128 implying that O’Connor was prophetic in her own way, an idea Sullivan emphasized in the Catholic Library World, where she ended her praise of the novel with the Catholic antiphon, “O wisdom who proceeded from the mouth of the Most High.”129 Less effusive praise in Catholic quarters came from Bud Johnson in the Catholic Messenger, who stated that O’Connor had “written about the great struggle that has engulfed the world since the Fall of Man,”130 and from Eileen Hall, who, in the Archdiocese of Atlanta’s Bulletin, referred to Tarwater’s prophetic visions as his “gift” and argued that the novel’s conclusion “demonstrates that God will not be denied nor, in lesser degree, even dictated to.”131 In the Catholic magazine Jubilee, Paul Levine described the novel as a portrait of “those who seek to be their own Salvation, only to lose it, and those who grapple with their Redemption, only to accept it.”132
In one of the longest reviews of the novel, P. Albert Duhamel, writing in Catholic World, praised O’Connor’s ability to “see things as they really are,”133 which to him meant through a Christian lens. Duhamel’s examination, however, is much more than a glowing review; it is a watershed moment in the story of O’Connor’s reputation, for Duhamel notes the ways in which O’Connor had been regarded and how, from this moment onward, he imagined she would be:
Until [1959], critics had disguised their uncertainty over just what she could be up to by falling back on the condescending categories of the over-worked reviewer and labeling her “an interesting Southern stylist,” or “promising young woman writer.” With the publication of her third book there is now the very real possibility that they will go to the opposite extreme and disregard her art and concentrate excessively on her ideas.134
Duhamel reminds his readers of the power of watchwords, the allure of easy phrases for reviewers faced with deadlines, and how the pendulum of an author’s reputation can swing in new directions.
However, reading as a member of the genuine authorial audience did not guarantee praise: some critics accepted the reality of O’Connor’s themes but faulted her handling of them. For example, one early reviewer called the novel a “dark allegory touched by the clear light of Christian theology” yet found it “weighted, sometimes too heavily, with symbolism.”135 Walter Sullivan, writing in the Nashville Tennessean, flatly stated that O’Connor explored the “sense of paradox” that lies “at the heart of the Christian faith” but complained that the novel “thins out at the end, and the pace is perhaps too slow there.”136 Similarly, Paul Pickrel, writing for Harper’s Magazine, accepted the genuine authorial assumptions, describing Tarwater as a young man who “assumes the mantle of prophecy” but also calling O’Connor’s novel “too schematic,” since “every incident neatly advances the scheme, every character illustrates it, and every symbol is exactly in place.”137 Even a member of the genuine authorial audience writing in a Catholic periodical was not a guarantee of praise: a reviewer for Ave Maria—a major Catholic magazine published for over one hundred years—stated that O’Connor wrote “lovely prose” but that The Violent Bear It Away would “not appeal to the average reader” because of O’Connor’s “habit of jumping from present to past and back again in a manner readers may find tedious and annoying.” This same reviewer also found Tarwater’s defilement by the man in the lavender-colored car near the end of the novel to be “unfortunate and unnecessary to the story.”138 O’Connor’s friend and fellow Catholic, Thomas F. Gossett, noted, “The trouble is that the religious insight of the great-uncle is so explosive that it often comes through as mere bigotry and does not seem an adequate foil for the smug scientism of Rayber.”139
While such reviews may have done little to boost O’Connor’s sales, their authors did demonstrate that members of the genuine authorial audience—even when they disparaged the novel—were the most ready to judge it by aesthetic criteria, rather than simply react (as Duhamel feared) to her “ideas.” Her thematic concerns, these readers argued, were worthwhile but suffered because of her artistic performance. O’Connor herself might not have objected to such a manner of reading: her letters sometimes reveal her own doubts about her artistic handling of the theme she had chosen, as when she wrote to John Hawkes, “Rayber, of course, was always the stumbling block,”140 to the Fitzgeralds, “Rayber has been the trouble all along,”141 or to her editor, Catherine Carver, “Rayber has been the difficulty all along. I’ll never manage to get him [as] alive as Tarwater and the old man.”142 At least the members of the genuine authorial audience who faulted the novel on aesthetic grounds were not reacting to O’Connor’s “ideas” but to her skills as a writer. O’Connor may have found such an approach justified, even if she was not pleased with the critical verdicts.
O’Connor had in mind members of the ironic audience as she wrote, but those readers rarely spoke of The Violent Bear It Away as an aesthetic object. They instead reacted, almost reflexively and as Duhamel had predicted, to O’Connor’s “ideas” of prophecy. O’Connor herself jokingly prophesied the critical reaction to be almost uniformly negative but did not foresee how similar so many of the negative reviews were in focus of attack: old Mason’s status as a prophet. The very first published review of the novel mentions “the old man’s fanaticism,”143 and this label appears throughout the reviews, used as casually as if it were an obvious fact instead of pejorative opinion. Dozens of critics repeatedly referred to Mason as “fanatically fundamentalist,”144 a man “warped by fanaticism,”145 a “Baptist fanatic,”146 and, over and over, a “religious fanatic.”147 Close behind “fanatic” in the watchword race were terms suggesting that Mason’s prophetic gifts were signs of insanity: in a review entitled “Mad Tennessee Prophet Casts Backwoods Shadow,” a reviewer for the Chattanooga Times described Mason as “twice as mad as the proverbial March hare,”148 and many other critics argued the same. Mason’s status as a prophet was also routinely undermined by the use of irony-bestowing quotation marks, as in a Massachusetts reviewer’s remark that “The old man was a ‘prophet’ who believed he was appointed by the lord.”149 Emily Dickinson’s coupling of madness and divinest sense was not a notion informing the ironic audience’s opinion of Mason Tarwater. The many unquestioned references to Mason’s “madness” suggest this audience’s fundamental split with its genuine authorial counterpart.
These same members of the ironic audience who assumed Mason’s insanity also assumed O’Connor’s great theme to be what Granville Hicks described as Tarwater’s attempt to break “out of the darkness of superstition into the light of reason.”150 One review can stand as a representative example of many: writing in the Boston Herald, Ruth Wolfe Fuller praised the novel as “very moving” and “superbly written”—but praised it according to a set of values that the novel repeatedly questions and ultimately attacks:
The pitiful and true theme of the book lies in the inhumanity to a child, the little boy Tarwater who has been brought up, if it can be called bringing up, in his dreadful old shack in the woods.
It would spoil the story to tell how the boy’s courage and initiative finally provide his escape. Yet the escape is only temporary, for the tragedy lies in the hurt and harm, so long inflicted.151
Her calling Tarwater a “child” and “little boy” despite his age (fourteen) and temperament (sarcastic, spiteful) is an attempt to portray him as a victim; her emphasis on his social condition instead of his spiritual one brings to mind O’Connor’s jibe that southern readers “still believe that man has fallen and that he is only perfectible by God’s grace” while those north of the Mason-Dixon line view spiritual crises as “a problem of better housing, sanitation, health, etc.”152 Fuller’s speaking of O’Connor’s “true theme” reflects her inability to imagine—like Dr. Adams when trying to console Dr. Johnson—that her subject takes these ideas seriously. Further, Fuller’s characterization of Tarwater’s profound struggle recalls similar reviews of Wise Blood in which Motes is viewed as heroic for attempting to break free from the Christ-haunted South; her calling the novel a “tragedy” of “hurt and harm” seems like something that might be said by Bernice Bishop, the “welfare woman” who marries Rayber and who, like him, assumes that spiritual struggles are rooted in social inequities. As a reviewer for the Springfield (Mass.) Republican soberly instructed, “She seems to be giving us an indirect but worthwhile reminder that we are all shaped by our environments”153; while another reviewer fumed, “Young Tarwater deserved better of life.”154 Fuller never mentions—despite her apparent concern over “the inhumanity to a child”—Rayber’s attempt to drown his own mentally retarded son as a means to prove his own superiority over the emotional commitment that the child demanded.
Other readers spoke of Rayber in similar terms: Orville Prescott referred to Rayber as a “kindly and well-intentioned schoolteacher,”155 while a reviewer for the Houston Chronicle called him “well-meaning” and “placed in juxtaposition to the irrational youth.”156 Tarwater was often characterized by ironic reviewers as an “impressionable young boy”157 or a “corrupted child”158; they never considered that the novel explores Tarwater’s delivery from the corruption of Rayber, nor, as with Fuller, did they mention Rayber’s attempted murder of his own son. That Mason is a fanatic is never questioned; that Rayber might be one is never considered. Rather, he was seen by these critics as the novel’s hero, “bent on saving the boy from the seeds of destruction he knows the old man has planted”159 in Tarwater and as a rational figure attempting to undo “the fanatic’s brainwashing”160 from which he has freed himself and which he seeks to reverse in his nephew. The ironic audience’s siding with Rayber suggests G. K. Chesterton’s argument about the modern cult of “logic” and his remark that an excess of reason—not spirituality—breeds insanity: “Poets do not go mad,” he wrote, “but chess-players do.”161 While these critics are surely not mad, their categorical dismissal of Mason reflects their refusal to take the novel on its own terms.
Certain members of the genuine authorial audience accepted O’Connor’s themes but faulted her artistic performance; conversely, members of the ironic audience, like Fuller, categorically denied the reality of O’Connor’s overarching theme of prophecy yet still praised the novel, viewing her artistic performance as supporting their argument for Mason’s insanity. They assumed that O’Connor, despite what later readers might see as the pronounced Catholic themes of Wise Blood and A Good Man Is Hard to Find, was mocking the old man in her novel just as they were in their reviews. They had viewed Wise Blood as a bitter “satire” of religion rather than an examination of a man’s deathly serious struggle with Christ; they now viewed The Violent Bear It Away as “a bitter denunciation of faith based solely on emotion.”162 For example, a writer for the Omaha World-Herald stated, “That the old man is insane is obvious” but praised the “character drawing” as “magnificent” and declared, “If there were more books like this one, television would have fewer viewers.”163 Many members of the ironic audience praised the novel not as one depicting Tarwater’s struggle against the fate chosen for him by God, but against what one reader called the “chains of fanaticism”164 forged by his great-uncle. Again, reading as a member of the genuine authorial audience did not guarantee praise, nor did reading as a member of the ironic audience guarantee condemnation. The original reviews of The Violent Bear It Away recall the novel’s portrayal of the “perfidy” Rayber works upon Mason: many reviews from the ironic audience read as if they were written by Rayber himself, who, of course, does write a long analysis of his uncle’s “mania” for a magazine, noting, “He needed the assurance of a call, and so he called himself.”165 Rarely has the critical reaction to a novel so perfectly mirrored one of the novel’s own themes.
Reviews that may surprise a modern reader are those that came relatively late in the novel’s reception and questioned the single most prominent aspect of her reputation that readers note today: her Catholicism. The novelist Robert O. Bowen, one of O’Connor’s contemporaries and a professor of literature at Cornell, offered the single greatest attack in print thus far and serves as an indicator of how much O’Connor’s reputation as a Catholic writer had developed. His 1961 review, “Hope vs. Despair in the Gothic Novel,” appeared in Renascence, a journal of Marquette University that, according to its website, acts as “a Christian witness to literature for promoting the study of values” and “includes essays which incorporate Christian perspectives as a way of looking at literature.”166 In his examination of The Violent Bear It Away for Renascence, Bowen complains that contemporary critics accept literary reputations prima facie and, in the case of O’Connor, assume that her work is laden with “religious profundity.”167 Yet Bowen asks, “Must we accept her work as ‘Catholic’ because she is Catholic?” This is a fair enough question, and Bowen answers it in his long review by arguing that the novel reflects the “relentlessly deterministic pattern” of contemporary works. Ultimately, Bowen finds the novel flawed on both aesthetic and Catholic grounds. While Tarwater’s vocation is, to Bowen, “a true one,” O’Connor’s artistic performance in presenting him as unable to engage in any choice—his lack of what modern theorists might call “agency”—makes him O’Connor’s puppet rather than a recognizable person. To Bowen, O’Connor’s inescapable and pessimistic determinism belies her Catholicism:
Since this novel has been widely spoken of as “Catholic,” it seems imperative that one point out that like so much current negative writing, this book is not Catholic at all in any doctrinal sense. Neither its content nor its significance is Catholic. 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, along with other aspects of Catholic thought.168
O’Connor was previously compared to Faulkner and McCullers because of their common regions, but Bowen compares her to Bellow, Nabokov, and Salinger as writers who “can tear down but not build up, who will not tolerate faith or hope.”169 Such alleged intolerances on O’Connor’s part result in Bowen’s final judgment of her as “an enemy of literature and of life.”170 This objection to O’Connor’s alleged anti-Catholic determinism is also found in a review by Frederick S. Kiley, who complained that O’Connor offered only extremes of rationalism and fanaticism and that her characters, in deterministic dazes, “go places and do things without ever quite realizing why or how.”171
Two years after Bowen’s attack, Thomas F. Smith reevaluated the novel for the Pittsburg Catholic newspaper and directly addressed the subject of O’Connor’s reputation as a Catholic author: “I’m pleased as anyone that she’s a member of the Church, but it is regrettable that her Catholicity has complicated discussion of her literary merits in some quarters.”172 In these responses we see that the once invisible had now become too pronounced and even subject to attack. Only a few years earlier, critics were informing their readers of O’Connor’s Christian and Catholic themes as if they had made an important discovery; now, some reviewers were pushing back against her Catholic reputation, arguing that a label such as “Catholic novelist” needed to be evaluated as much as the work itself. Smith’s review is a moment in the development of O’Connor’s reputation where her status as a Catholic author had trumped her status as a female or even southern and was accepted widely enough to warrant attention and require correction.
In 1960, four years before O’Connor’s death, Eileen Hall looked back at the initial reception of Wise Blood and predicted the ways in which The Violent Bear It Away would complicate O’Connor’s reputation:
It is an interesting aspect of Miss O’Connor’s career that when her first work was being published in the early fifties she was gleefully identified by many as her own antithesis. At a great distance, grappling antagonists often have a confusing way of looking like lovers. . . . Now that the sixties are here and the author has published her third book, she is not misunderstood. This does not mean, however, that she is yet properly appreciated. On the contrary, now that many of her erstwhile admirers have learned that she means precisely the opposite of their original assumption, she may, in some corners at least, be even less appreciated.173
Hall’s remarks characterize the early reviewers of Wise Blood who claimed the novel was satirical and that O’Connor was “gleefully” presenting Motes as a paranoid schizophrenic, as well as those original reviewers of The Violent Bear It Away who dismissed Mason as a fanatic or objected to the very label of “Catholic author” when used to describe O’Connor. However, her claim that O’Connor was finally “not misunderstood” is, to again invoke Samuel Johnson, the triumph of hope over experience. The decades following the publication of The Violent Bear it Away would see many more examples of O’Connor being misunderstood as her reputation gathered momentum.