Flannery O’Connor
In the winter of 1949, Flannery O’Connor took her first and last trip to New York City. She was fleeing from an “upset at Yaddo.” Two friends of hers—sweethearts Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick—had enlisted O’Connor in their attempt to oust the colony’s executive director for harboring a communist. There was a sort of petty hearing in Yaddo’s common room headed by Lowell, after which not even the FBI, all puffed up from the Red Scare, remained interested. Instead, O’Connor and the other informants were attacked by friends in the literary community. Lowell and Hardwick felt wounded by the backlash, but O’Connor felt justified, “detachedly judg[ing] the assault to be an evil.” She narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms and wrote to her friend with that wry certainty that inflects every syllable of her fiction: “As to the devil, I not only believe he is but believe he has a family . . . Yaddo has confirmed this for me.” So the Lowells proposed a weekend of solace away from the scandal in their Manhattan apartment—which turned into a week, a month, a season.
Even though O’Connor ultimately hated New York, it was where her life opened in the many permanent directions she would be pulled until her early death fifteen years later. During that first rainy weekend after they arrived, Lowell introduced her to Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, a pair of intense Catholic converts, a literary critic and painter respectively, with a growing brood of children. All evening, O’Connor sat by the big window looking out at the Hudson piers and listening to Lowell bellow on to the Fitzgeralds about the Communists at Yaddo and his fine cross-examination at the hearing, while she maintained the signature stony stare she’d been bringing to parties since she was young, when she had been known to sit with “her face fixed in a look of utter boredom.”
The Fitzgeralds remember seeing in her that first night in their apartment “a shy Georgia girl, her face heart-shaped and pale and glum.” Sally notes in retrospect that this face did not prepare her for the ferocity of the girl’s stories, which she read later, and which left her hair “standing on end.” O’Connor, too, recorded impressions of her new friends: “Mrs. Fitzgerald is 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 92 pounds except when she is pregnant which is most of the time. Her face is extremely angular; in fact, horse-like, though attractive, and she does have the pulled back hair and the bun.” The Fitzgeralds immediately loved this twenty-three-year-old writer, her inscrutable Southern accent and general lack of apology, her unwillingness to please or to smile, her “thirteenth-century” theological outlook. When O’Connor mentioned to the Fitzgeralds that she was trying to finish her novel, they invited her to their house in Connecticut to use the apartment above their garage as a private writer’s retreat.
O’Connor thanked them, took a rain check, and tried to tough it out in New York. The only thing she really enjoyed in the city was the Cloisters, that old monastery crumbling above the West Side Highway in a little spit of forest. She’d walk the halls of Medieval art for hours but was less interested in the stoic tapestries and paintings. Instead she found herself always at “a smaller, four foot high statue of Virgin and Child, with both parties ‘laughing; not smiling, laughing.’” Biographer Brad Gooch notes that the statue embodied “a profound spirituality that could accommodate humor, even outright laughter—a recipe [O’Connor] was working toward in her own novel,” Wise Blood, which she labored over every morning after mass, the tale of a prophet for the Church of Christ Without Christ.
But she was growing desperately lonely. By then, Lowell, her one truly close New York friend, was already beginning to show signs of a psychotic break. He had been showing those signs with the manic energy he’d thrown behind Yaddo’s Red Scare, but no one voiced alarm until he started showing up at Manhattan parties trying to convince his friends and confidantes that Flannery O’Connor should be canonized.
She was the last to hear about it: It was March 2 when he “received the shock of the eternal word”—the revelation of Flannery’s sainthood—and after several years as a lapsed Catholic, Lowell re-baptized himself in the cold waters of his New York bathtub. Then he’d gone out looking for a book about St. Thérèse Lisieux, Flannery’s birthday saint, and ended up buying her a book about a Canadian girl with stigmata. This, too, was a sign. And he thought of his brilliant young friend in her bobby socks and housedress and envisioned her suddenly in sackcloth, like the Medieval monks she identified with, and he knew he had to tell someone else, and eventually, of course, the church.
When O’Connor finally heard about Lowell’s brief campaign to canonize her, he was already interred in an institution in Massachusetts. It was spring, and their mutual friends were tittering: Saint Flannery, Saint Flannery.
Shame on you, she’d said, for making fun of this friend whom she loved dearly, who had been just “three steps away from the asylum” when he was saying all of that. Absurd. All of it.
And yet right now, sixty years later, there is a wish among some Catholics to make O’Connor not only a saint, but a Doctor of the Church—a station of sainthood occupied by the likes of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Teresa de Ávila, who get this distinction not only through the right number of miracles occurring in their name, but by being great teachers for the church, and for their profound theological witness. O’Connor would probably be horrified if she knew.
I first read Flannery O’Connor when I was a teenager, maybe sixteen. A selection of her stories appeared in one of those ubiquitous anthologies of female Southern writers, with a folksy black-and-white cover photo of kids playing on a farm, poking sticks into a mud hole. I sat on the heater vent in my parents’ kitchen reading “Good Country People” while delicious, scalding heat forced its way up from the basement furnace below me.
My mother walked by, holding reading glasses and a folder of Independent Education Plans for her special-ed students, right as I reached the final scene.
“Woah,” I said, looking up, “she’s crazy,” as the Bible salesman made off with Hulga’s wooden leg.
My mother nodded. “Grandma’s a big fan of hers.”
The next time we visited Grandma Gale in Seattle, I sat in my usual spot on the burgundy sofa beside her reading chair, both of which faced the big picture window overlooking the street. We had been in the habit of exchanging book recommendations for my entire life; even when I was younger and only had YA novels to offer, she still read everything, took fastidious notes, and administered opinions through our regular letters and phone calls. So when I told her about reading O’Connor for the first time, she looked at me, nonplussed. “Well, shit,” she said, and gave me her copy of O’Connor’s collected stories—a big ragged clothbound tome in a paper sleeve printed with a peacock—which I read in one sitting a dozen times over the next decade. Sinister Bible salesmen, prophetic children, gossiping moralizers, blank-eyed psychopaths, self-righteous PhDs, racist sharecroppers, bitter women, monstrous men—all of whom meet some violent spiritual awakening that, if they survive it, alters them so profoundly they may never be able to live in polite society again. That this writer could be famous for both her piety and her mercilessness was thrilling to me.
Years later, in college, I walked into my first day of Critic Practitioners, a small tutorial that focused on the reading and writing of literary criticism about one writer’s body of work—whoever you wanted, for the whole semester. I was the only registered student. Professor Ben Lytal sat lithe and alert at his desk, helming an empty room, flanked by neatly organized reading packets, and we stared at each other from our single desks, and he said, “Well, let’s see what we can do—”
We worked our way through a bunch of different takes on John Updike, who had just died, written over the last forty years, and decided that if we could enlist one more student before the end of the week, we would continue.
At Mike’s Diner the next day, I sat with a few friends over breakfast, watching Amber debate furiously with someone else about the red-herring quality of the fight for gay marriage, an issue that she feared absorbed all the other issues for queer people: job security, healthcare, economic justice, suicide. I didn’t know Amber very well yet—I knew she was a queer poet in exile from Tennessee who had almost gone to music school. I watched her refusal to relent in this argument, her laughter when her rhetoric got critiqued, the way she pulled her long blond hair into an elastic only to launch into her next argument long after her opponent thought he’d already said the last word. I knew that she volunteered for Radical Women, a New York feminist organization started in the 1970s, and spent her Sundays defending the entrance of an abortion clinic in the South Bronx. I thought, If there’s anyone I’d like to be a in a two-person class with, it’s her.
So how did I ask? “Do you want to enroll in this class I’m taking about writing literary criticism, with just this one guy and me?” She said yes, basically without blinking, and we remained the only two students for those four months, in a giant classroom, poring over books. It was riveting. We collaborated on reading sequences, workshopped our writing, sparred, fought, and laughed, and Ben Lytal ended up designing the class entirely around our tastes. Eventually this meant we were learning exclusively how to write criticism about Flannery O’Connor.
New York, needless to say, fell apart for O’Connor quickly. Oddly, her only stories to have ever taken place there were her first and her last. “The Geranium”—a revision of which, called “Judgement Day,” she would be finishing on her deathbed—is about an old Tennessee man in ill health who has been moved to his daughter’s Manhattan apartment, bemoaning God’s will at the end of his own grim life, and New York is dreary, inhumane, rendering its inhabitants anonymous and gray and hopeless. The story ends as the old man witnesses the destruction of his one last pleasure, a pot of geraniums on a windowsill across the airshaft, when it falls and smashes “at the bottom of the alley with its roots in the air.”
By spring, O’Connor had gotten her fill, and with her novel-in-progress in tow, she finally left the city to shack up with the Fitzgeralds in Redding, Connecticut. There she “spent her days writing and her nights relaxing with Sally and Robert, discussing movies and literature while sipping on martinis” and joining them in elaborate Latin prayers before dinner. During the afternoons, she and Sally took walks to the mailbox and tended the growing number of Fitzgerald children. At night, the “master of the house” retired to his study, in a move that is so timeless it makes me want to vomit, and Flannery and Sally split the dinner dishes. But it was OK: They talked about the nature of original sin, the consequences of grace, the language of the Nicene Creed, her stories, and Sally’s paintings, which were all the kinds of things Flannery discussed in letters to other female friends over the next decade, developing together an understanding of theology that would become the foundation for her stories.
It’s not as though she and her friends were reinventing or subverting religion—she was bearing continual, rigorous witness, through her letters, stories, and conversations, with the mastery of a theologian. O’Connor’s Catholicism remained orthodox, in that she honored the papacy, received hermeneutical instruction from her priest, observed saint’s days and drank the literal blood of Christ at every communion. Contrition was to be embodied, spoken in confessionals; messages between man and God were mediated by saints; the spiritual world had rank and order. And yet, literacy begets subversion—it must. The more religiously literate she becomes, the more desperate and deranged her characters. And how could her orthodoxy not have been affected by the charismatic Christianity of poor Southerners? Growing up, she was outnumbered by congregations that, belting cheerful spirituals, raised their arms to the sky, clapped her on the shoulder to say “Jesus loves you,” and might, at any moment, have let some babbling vagrant waltz in off the street to enjoy the holy supper with them.
In addition to finishing Wise Blood in Redding, O’Connor wrote her first three stories after graduate school: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” The protagonists are an old woman embittered by the changing South, an obsolete confederate soldier, and a snaky farm wife who gets outsmarted by a drifter, respectively—all angry characters, believing they were owed something they did not get for their goodness, their sacrifice, and above all their hard work, leveling a critique that makes O’Connor, when I think of her now, sound kind of like a commie.
That first summer we knew each other, Amber and I went to an opera, or maybe it was an aria, in Greenwich Village that dramatized the trial of Matthew Shepard’s murder. Our friend had composed it, drawing from the transcript language of Shepard’s bereaved parents, and as we watched, I remembered news images of the “angels” who wore wings of white muslin to block out the Westboro Baptist Church protesters at his funeral. Afterward, we wandered around Lower Manhattan, talking. Is friendship, philia, the most communist of all the loves? Unlike marriage and family, it offers no structured economic gain, not directly. I use “loves” in the way that C. S. Lewis uses it in The Four Loves, which I was reading at the time: “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art . . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” We talked about Lewis and we talked about Marx.
Amber’s grandmother had just been diagnosed with terminal leukemia, and in the gloaming, we walked to an Episcopal church on whose steps we sat and talked, about her grandmother, our families, baptism. She’d grown up gay in a family of Baptists and the Church of Christ, and she had all but left the church by that point. We drifted to a bar and ordered Coronas. I told her that I couldn’t explain my conversion, or even whether or not what I’d done was convert, to most of my friends or my parents, and how I didn’t want to get baptized until I could. I think the real impediment was that I couldn’t explain it to myself. What had changed in me? How can people change? She laughed, this wonderful, devil-may-care sound, her eyes in a squint, and sort of waved her hand and compared it to the coming-out process: “You have to give them as long to accept it as it took you to realize you were gay—er, you know what I mean.”
Then we read lines to each other from Mystery & Manners, or was it The Habit of Being, that near-religious book of O’Connor’s letters that Sally arranged and published posthumously? O’Connor writes to someone—a teacher’s college in Georgia, her best-friend pen pal—that she had always wanted to write a novel about a Simone Weil–like character, saying about the idea, “What is more comic and terrible than the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth?” We laughed and laughed at this—it is funny!—and we were the only people we knew who’d find this comic. Then we walked east, caught a train back to my apartment, and sat on my living room floor and talked until dawn, and just never stopped talking. When my roommate woke up in the morning to find us splayed out and still awake on the knotty rug, he squinted at us and yawned. “What are you on?” he asked. When we admitted that we were on nothing, we looked at each other and laughed harder than we had all night.
Sometime after that Amber came to a service at my church in Williamsburg. We sang “Amazing Grace.” We sang “Joy Is a Fruit.” We listened to the parable about the laborers in the vineyard. In the parable, the master of the house goes out and hires laborers early in the morning. They toil away all day, and right before sunset the master finds another set of laborers who’ve been idle until then, and he sends them into the vineyard, too. At dusk, he lines up his hires and doles out an equal day’s pay to everyone, even to the ones who came late. So the ones who’ve been there since sunup begin to grumble about fairness, but the master says, “‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a [day’s wage]? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?’ So the last will be first, and the first last.”
A little tremor went through our pew when the minister uttered “So the last will be first, and the first last.” And Amber remembered this parable from her childhood days of the hateful Baptists—and she realized this story was why she’d become a Marxist.
But then, in an attempt to illustrate the parable’s meaning, the minister made a disheartening analogy and the magic was lost. He knew a college professor once, whose students had done poorly, so he gave them extensions on their final papers. They complained about their grades, and so he threatened to fail all of them—“Or do you begrudge my generosity?”
We went back to Amber’s apartment and poured whiskey into dirty glasses and agreed on one thing: The parable’s charge is to take what God has given you and be glad, not to take what God gives you or else.
In late May 1952, after a long respite from her homeland, O’Connor was forced, due to a slipped kidney, to return to the South. She left some belongings at the Fitzgeralds’ home, expecting to come back soon for a visit, and boarded a train to Georgia for the winter. At the farm in Milledgeville, her mother had just finished sewing a set of brown gingham curtains for the guest house as she gleefully awaited her daughter, as well as the arrival of a displaced family from the Soviet bloc.
A year later, O’Connor published a story in which Mr. Shortley, a live-in field hand, is replaced by refugee laborers. His outraged wife demands that their family flee their disgraced position, and then she drops dead from a stroke on their way out of town. The widowed husband returns to the farm and runs a tractor over the displaced person’s spine while the man is crouched at work in the horse stables. The farm proprietress looks on at the attack but doesn’t step in, “freezing them in collusion forever.” The United States was late to accept displaced persons after the war ended, but by the time O’Connor arrived at her mother’s estate, more than six hundred thousand had been deposited around the country.
O’Connor was not thrilled to be homebound in this way; she was still very young, not ready to give her life away so quickly to illness. The doctors pumped her full of cortisone, still not sure what exactly was wrong with her, and then she returned as quickly as she could to a strict writing schedule, even in her weakened state. When she wasn’t writing, she hosted visiting friends or maintained deep exchanges of correspondence that lasted the rest of her life.
After a two-year convalescence that was supposed to last only a couple of months, doctors finally determined that O’Connor had lupus, the disease her father died from, and only then did she send for her suitcases and books in Redding, order a pair of peafowl, and begin “getting home in earnest.”
That first December, several months into her “short trip” home, she received a prayer card in the mail. It was included with her Christmas gift, a Catholic Worker subscription, which had been given to her by the only man she’d ever kissed, an ardent admirer of Dorothy Day (Flannery admitted a fondness for her later, too). The prayer card was “A Prayer to Saint Raphael,” beginning, “O Raphael, lead us toward those we are looking for.” Raphael was often thought to be the saint of friendship and marriage, and Gooch records in his biography that “Flannery would recite [the card’s] invocation daily for the rest of her life,” and that she was known to have said to friends that Raphael “leads you to the people you are supposed to meet.”
Redding is a small village near the weird, woodsy heart of Connecticut. Its ribbon-like roads cut through forested neighborhoods where big Colonials have been rutted into the rocky landscape. During college, I used to take the Metro-North to Redding where Chanelle had moved, somewhat miserably, back to her parents’ house, and one time I arrived in the throes of a nervous breakdown. On the train, I couldn’t stop reading Last Exit to Brooklyn, which was horrifying, and though it hadn’t happened yet, I knew I was breaking up with Sweeney, who was at that moment on a reactionary religious quest I had been closed out of.
I was crying by a tiny creek next to the train depot when Chanelle emerged from the trees on her bicycle, her blond hair and woven bracelets and linen scarves fluttering behind her. With a canteen of white wine in tow, we walked through the woods. As we passed a beetle rolled onto its back, she plucked it up, turned it over, and said, “It’s things like this that make me believe in God.” Then we lay down on the blacktop of a conservatory nestled just beyond the trail and listened to the breeze.
Chanelle and I first met years back through Sweeney, when, one night, the three of us made a drunken pact to drive to Savannah—and then did so the following week. I was nineteen, fresh to college, and I barely knew either of them yet. We drove through the night, stopping only to eat meals at IHOP and camp out in the sand dunes of the Outer Banks. We bought a carton of Basics, brown and red packaging, for $25, and by the end of the trip, they were gone. We listened to Elton John from a dying laptop because the car radio had been ripped out by thieves and we still had flip phones and no iPods. Chanelle sat in the back with a little notebook, scribbling, and Sweeney and I sat in the front, and sometimes the three of us would talk and tell stories of our lives, what seemed like every last one, which is what you do when you’re on an endless car ride with two people you barely know, and then sometimes we’d fall silent.
One night we pitched a tent on a beach in North Carolina, then sat around the fire drinking Magic Hat we’d bought at a drive-through liquor store that looked like a barn. Then, later, the three of us were all snug in the tent, Sweeney and I whispering, zipped into a single sleeping bag, still getting to know each other. And on that night I got mad—mad enough to jump out of the bag, out of the tent, onto the sand. What was I mad about? I remember stepping out by the fire in my underwear and Sweeney following after me apologetically. It must have started innocently (“All our friends, everyone we grew up with, are, like, post-post-anarcho-liberals,” we agreed, “committed to FREEDOM, but what the fuck does that mean?”). And then he must have told me that I was like that, too, didn’t know what I wanted, “all over the place,” no sense of loyalty, no commitment. I liked him, but I was sleeping with other people. I really did like him, but I wanted to be free. (From what?) And the fight seemed so serious for a second, the waves crashing, our arms waving by the dying fire, until Chanelle yelled, muffled from inside the tent, “SHUT UP shut up at least you can TALK to each other. At least you can talk! GOD.”
The next afternoon, as we were getting off a commuter ferry to South Carolina, we each popped an Adderall and, still working through that carton of Basics, sped through marshland at sunset and were suddenly really high. We were interpreting passages about troubadours and romantic love from philosopher Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul or C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which I’d found in the dumpster outside of our apartment the week before. I kept shrieking, “I get it, I get it!” Somehow Sweeney was driving and reading simultaneously, and I was holding this little diagram he’d just sketched out of the way Ancient Greece had arranged its cities, with the temple literally highest above ground, visible from all parts of the city, a symbol of unity. For some reason this was astounding to me.
We arrived in Savannah just before dawn, in that post-speed metallic scraped-out lull, very tired and very still, and were more moved than we’d ever been by a place. It was sparkling. It was saturated, beautiful. We stood within the thick, sky blue walls of a cathedral. It was Palm Sunday and a homeless man from Serbia was folding fronds into roses, and we bought one. The air was dewy and warm, having come from the still-freezing north. Sweeney and I lay under a live oak in a graveyard and kissed and he said, “Did we just drive a thousand miles to make out under a tree?”
The next day we walked by Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home, though I didn’t realize it until years later: For my twenty-fifth birthday, Chanelle mailed me a volume of O’Connor’s linoleum-block comic strips that she’d published in her college newspaper in the late ’40s, and the book opened with a photo of that antebellum building, her childhood home. I couldn’t believe it. We’d been so close and missed it! When we found out that she’d been in Redding, too, it began to feel like she’d been with us all along.
In 1955, at the onset of the worst years of her lupus, O’Connor was speaking at a women’s college in Lansing, Michigan, when the peacocks back in Milledgeville got into the strawberry plants: “Mother took a dark view of them and I have to reestablish relations—as next year I plan to have twice as many birds as last.” By now, she knew she’d never be able to permanently leave her mother’s care in Georgia, and she’d garnered a menagerie of birds to keep her occupied.
In preparation for the Michigan talk, O’Connor had asked the woman who’d invited her about the audience there:
I have made a good many talks in the past year, but all in the South, which is like talking to a large gathering of your aunts and cousins—I know exactly what they don’t know—but talking to Northern ladies is a different thing. I can’t imagine that there’s anything they don’t know. Maybe you could enlighten me a little on this.
Her problem was as follows: Are Northern girls unimpressed by blunt theological inquiry? Because, you know, she’d visited the Mademoiselle offices once while she was living in New York, “full of girls in peasant skirts and horn-rimmed spectacles and ballet shoes.” Despite her feeling of cultural separation, and despite her increased reliance on double-crutches clipped to her wrists, she began to give these kinds of addresses more and more, speaking about theology and fiction, art and God.
O’Connor spent some of her career shuffling up and down the Eastern Seaboard but the majority of it holed up on her mother’s farm. She was a writer entirely “within and without” the rest of the country, her stories constructed from the raw materials of her homeland but with the unforgiving eye of an alien. Whether the stories take place in New York or Georgia, a grotesque character manifests, someone who has been supremely, at times cartoonishly distorted by their brokenness, their sin. O’Connor calls them freaks: “It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in our literature.” And by displacement, she means the one from Eden.
In another address, “The Fiction Writer & His Country,” O’Connor writes, “I have heard it said that a belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes the way he sees the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.” As she gets sicker, her fiction sharpens, though her characters continue to have the same kind of realizations and violent ends. The mysteries get stranger, more subtle and more gruesome, and her final collection, Everything that Rises Must Converge, is the apex of this.
In the story “Revelation,” Mrs. Turpin sits in the lobby of a doctor’s office all afternoon, mentally and verbally judging the other patients: a woman and her daughter visiting from college, a white woman from a trailer park, and a young black mother. Unable to stop talking, Mrs. Turpin is finally attacked tooth and nail by a teenage girl who’s been glaring at her for the duration of their wait. Mr. and Mrs. Turpin leave the office in a daze and go back to their farm, where, for the rest of the afternoon, Mrs. Turpin anxiously returns to her attacker’s—the girl’s—condemnation right as she’d launched herself across the room: “Go back to hell, you old warthog.” She discusses this with her black farmhands, looking for someone’s witness to her being “a good, respectable woman” of the South. Of course, it is her feeling of supremacy over the workers that prevents her from feeling consoled. She walks and rants and fumes. Finally, night falls and she goes out to feed her pigs. In the pen, Mrs. Turpin has a vision of a procession of people making their way toward Heaven: white trash, black people, “and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs” in line on the bridge to God. It is not until the very end of the procession that she sees people she identifies with:
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 altered faces even their virtues were being burned away.
The first shall go last, and the last first. This troubling of order and rank and class intensifies in the American 1960s, as O’Connor got closer to death. “You shall know the truth, and it will make you strange,” she said—and it did begin to make her stranger.
The very last story Flannery O’Connor published was a revision of her first. “The Geranium” was that story about the old man in his daughter’s apartment, bemoaning the end of his grim life, and it was the title piece in her 1946 Iowa graduate thesis. Its revision, “Judgment Day,” she was still editing on her deathbed in 1964. In both versions, the old man stumbles in the hallway of his daughter’s decrepit New York apartment building and runs into a young black man who attempts to help him from falling, to which this elderly white man slurs and complains. In “The Geranium,” he then returns to his spot by the window to wait for his neighbors across the way to put the flower out on their windowsill, but at the end of “Judgment Day,” he does not return to his window—in fact, the geranium is entirely removed from the story. He simply sits down and dies.
It appears that O’Connor used the geranium to write her way into this world—the world of religious irony, of dark comedy—and, upon arrival, no longer needed its assistance. In 1964, weak from lupus, a typewriter on her lap, maybe she was saying, “No more lengthy metaphors—this is about hubris and death. Always was.”
But she wasn’t done with symbols. Symbols were her greatest gift, those things, she said, which “are details that, while having their essential place in the literal level of the story, operate in depth as well as on the surface, increasing the story in every direction.” While she was more famously quoted for saying, “If it’s a symbol, to hell with it,” the only thing she was referring to was the Eucharist.
One of my favorite biblical “moments” is when God visits Abraham and Sarah in the form of three men. It reads like a chapter that Flannery O’Connor would have written if she’d been around in the days of scrolls. As usual, God must arrive in a weird disguise so that the humans’ heads won’t explode. Anxious Abraham rushes to greet Him/them, tripping over his feet, fetching food and cattle and water—it’s God! (Or is it three men?) Moments before, Abe had just been picking his teeth outside the tent in the horrible heat, feeling weird about the whole thing with Hagar and Ishmael. (Hagar is offstage pounding roots into flour, shaking her head.)
God accepts the drink of water, the bit of bread, and squints at Abe’s shabby digs. “Where is your wife, Sarah?”
Abraham says, “Sarah? Oh, well, she’s in the tent.”
And then God/the three men just come out with it: He’s going to come back one year from now, and Sarah will have a son.
From behind the tent door, Sarah bursts out laughing and says, “Me? A ninety-year-old woman? Are you out of your fucking mind?” then slaps her hand over her mouth. Shit shit shit.
Then the LORD said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Will I really have a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too hard for the LORD? I will return to you at the appointed time next year, and Sarah will have a son.”
Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, “I did not laugh.”
But he said, “Yes, you did laugh.” (Gen. 18: 13–15)
What are you going to do, argue with God? Yes, actually, yes, because it is the only thing to do. O’Connor’s characters are always picking these impossible fights, making the wrong choice (because, again, it is maybe the only choice) and O’Connor laughs—at them, with them—as she wastes away at thirty-nine years old. She sits in the kitchen with Sally, writes letters, makes jokes at the expense of God until God says, Why did you laugh? And O’Connor clams up: I did not laugh.
Yes, you did laugh.
Most of what I know about theology, or ways of approaching theology, I have learned from talking with friends, mostly women. The theology makes way for all kinds of the most beautiful things, but the culture that forms around the theology is broken. Dorothy Day knew this, and even though a young Flannery O’Connor once got swept up in the Red Scare, she eventually knew this, too. Jesus had a lot more in common with Marx and Dorothy Day than with the people Amber fought off outside of that abortion clinic in the South Bronx. So why keep caring? Because we haven’t gotten to the punchline yet?
I’ve been to the Cloisters, too, though just once. I went looking for the laughing Mary and Jesus that had captured Flannery’s attention during her lonely season in New York. And I’ve seen it—at least I think I have. Looking into one of the main halls, I could see a large Catalan statue of a healthy, plump-faced Virgin and child, both with open smiling mouths. But when I walked in and looked around, I realized that there were three other statues of the Virgin and the Child, and they were all laughing.