How Real Was Flannery O’Connor?: A Closer Look at Why Do the Heathen Rage? A Behind-The-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress

Why Do the Heathen Rage? A Behind-The-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress
Brazos Press, 2024;  $24.99, 192 pp.; ed. Jessica Hooten Wilson

In a recent piece for the Hedgehog Review, Richard Hughes Gibson describes “the messy ethical questions that unfinished fictions pose.” Thinking of Kafka’s The Castle, he asks, “Would—did—the author want others to read the manuscript in its current state?” Only now, almost sixty years after her death, can we ask this question of Flannery O’ Connor’s unfinished fiction despite a steady release of posthumous books, beginning with Everything That Rises Must Converge in 1965 and continuing over the next five decades. In her presentation of the draft of Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?, Jessica Hooten Wilson pieces together substantial fragments of O’Connor’s last, unfinished novel and gives a running commentary on variations in the manuscripts as well as speculations about where this third novel was going.

Should O’Connor’s unfinished fiction have been published? Unlike Kafka, O’Connor did not leave instructions to destroy her manuscripts. O’Connor’s fragments are unmistakably her work. But I remain ambivalent about whether publishing this “Behind-The-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress” is entirely a service to her.

As Wilson describes the unfinished novel, it deals “in its dozen or so episodes . . . with political and social controversies, the civil rights movement, euthanasia, and poverty in ways O’Connor seems not to have attempted in her earlier fiction.” The story itself involves a character like Asbury Fox in “The Enduring Chill,” in this case a character who is (most unusually for O’Connor) Catholic. He is an intellectual and (not unusually for O’Connor) the victim of a chronic illness, perhaps a fatal one, who feels superior to everyone around him and maintains an aggressively idle presence on the family farm—O’Connor’s jibe at her own circumstances at home with her mother Regina.

In the most extensive fragments, the character’s name is Walter Tilman. His father has been felled by a stroke. His managerial mother broods over her useless son (who she sees as a “total loss”) as she runs their farm, Meadow Oaks, named for a semicircle of giant trees that commemorate the authors of the four Gospels. Walter tends a liquor store at night, both because it allows him plenty of time to read and because most of his weekend customers are black, which irritates his family. Unlike any other character I can remember in O’Connor, Walter reads the Church Fathers. His mother (in a gesture like Mrs. Hopewell’s in “Good Country People”) turns over a book and finds, not Heidegger on nothing, but a letter from “a St. Jerome” to “a Heliodorus, scolding him for having left the desert.”

Letters would clearly be a major theme in the novel if O’Connor had carried out this emphasis. Walter’s avocation since childhood has been composing letters to strangers, most recently to a Northern civil rights activist named Oona Gibbs. Walter invites her to visit Meadow Oaks to see the truth of Southern things—the complex realities that he thinks will rout the easy abstractions of her ideology. Suspicious of the authenticity of her motives, he devises a ruse just for Oona: to pretend to be black. “’My hand is black,’” he writes to her with his white hand (“rather pink, naturally florid and speckled palely”). “‘It would burn a hole through your face,’” he boasts, as though she were wholly unprepared for the realities of race as they are present in the South. The climax of the novel would surely involve the arrival of Oona Gibbs, whoever she turns out to be—O’Connor works several variations on her character—to call Walter’s bluff.

As a novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage? exists only in the subjunctive mood. As Wilson writes in her introduction, “O’Connor left us only a handful of odd scenes. As much as we might wish that O’Connor had finished her third novel, we cannot invent what does not exist—a well-crafted, revised, full-length piece of fiction.” In other words, even the pieces that Wilson assembles cannot be confidently imagined as part of a whole because O’Connor herself did not know where the story would go. The reader therefore cannot trust that these fragments have the integrity of the writer’s own imprimatur. If the partial statue in Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” were not already part of a whole “suffused with brilliance from inside,” it would seem “defaced” and “would not, from all the borders of itself, / burst like a star” (to use Stephen Mitchell’s translation). O’Connor’s fragments do not “burst like a star.” They are working drafts somewhat embarrassed by being exposed, like emails sent by accident. Their details would almost certainly have been changed by O’Connor as the shape of the whole book began to emerge more clearly.

Why put them together, then? Wilson’s reasons for publishing these “odd scenes” do not fully emerge until the end of her book—and it is very much her book, not O’Connor’s. In her last chapters, Wilson works to show that it was less the encroachment of O’Connor’s fatal lupus that halted the novel’s progress than O’Connor’s response to the charged climate of social change in the early 1960s: “The story Why Do the Heathen Rage? had been left incomplete, not only because of its author’s sickness and premature death but also because O’Connor could not tell this particular story well at that time. Though a genius storyteller with deep insight into human nature, O’Connor knew her limits—she did not feel capable of entering the minds of Black characters.”

This incapacity is crucial to Wilson’s thesis. Her book is a subtle yet damning defense of O’Connor after Paul Elie’s New Yorker essay in 2020, “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” Elie’s essay represents a major turn away from his somewhat hagiographic treatment of O’Connor in his 2004 book The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage; for Elie and many others in the contemporary climate, the racial attitudes that emerge in O’Connor’s letters are so deeply troubling that they call into question her place in the literary tradition, though he suggests palliative ways of treating her work from multiracial perspectives. This is not an age of subtlety, however. A dormitory at Loyola University Maryland named for O’Connor was renamed within a week of Elie’s piece. It still seems legitimate to fear that O’Connor herself could be irretrievably canceled.

The central question Wilson raises, then, is why O’Connor felt herself incapable of “entering the minds of Black characters.” In her treatment of Walter’s pretended blackness to Gibbs, a section entitled “Epistolary Blackface,” Wilson quotes Dorothy Sayers, who was once queried about how she could write conversations between men in her Peter Wimsey novels, having never been a man herself. Sayers responded that her solution was to make “men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings.” Wilson contrasts Sayers with Jane Austen, who “purportedly would not write a scene with two men in dialogue because she had never been a man alone in a room with another man.” In Wilson’s estimation, “when O’Connor fails to render Black characters except from outside them, she adopts the Austen caution rather than the audacity of Sayers.”

Like Alice Walker, who praised O’Connor for not pretending to be black, Wilson endorses this caution. But here a troubling insistence emerges. Much as she loves O’Connor’s work, Wilson sees O’Connor’s racism as spiritually blinding: “For O’Connor, the civil rights movement was an earthly and political issue, and thus it invited little investigation into its heavenly importance.” As a result, “when it came to race, which in itself was a false construct created by systems of power, O’Connor could not write about it persuasively for all readers.” In a reading of “The Artificial Nigger” that draws on work by Toni Morrison and Walter Brueggemann, Wilson writes that in this story “O’Connor’s prophetic imagination failed to see the connection between royal consciousness—as delineated by Brueggeman [i.e., “the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us”]—and white privilege.”

I find it impossible to believe—Morrison’s argument to the contrary—that O’Connor does not understand the “white privilege” of Mr. Head. What is this story but O’Connor’s acknowledgment (not shared by her characters) that the category “nigger” is an invention, an artifice, crucial to sustain white privilege? Wilson later acknowledges that O’Connor recognizes white privilege in Ruby Turpin, but O’Connor also sees it more subtly in Asbury Fox’s gesture of befriending the black workers at his mother’s dairy and in Julian’s contempt for his mother’s racial condescension in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”

Of course O’Connor sees white privilege. She confronts a culture in which “race” is at once a social construct invented to benefit white people and a description of visible difference that carries within it, for both the oppressors and the oppressed, the history of American slavery and its long aftermath. This doubleness would make race at once unreal as a gauge of the humanity of others and at the same time an absolute ontological reality. If O’Connor cannot “enter the minds of Black characters,” it is because she cannot quite step inside the idea that black people are (in Sayers’ terms) “ordinary human beings.” However close they may be, “they” exist over there, beyond the color line, uncannily similar to “us” in some ways but unreachable in others because of their indelible difference. Ironically, this perspective on race appears to prevail today, whereas the application of Sayers’ assumptions might do us all good. For the artistic and social questions have the same root and the same solution—how should a person see across any line of difference? Is the line really an impassable barrier, or is it a matter of mere surface, capable of blinding none but the careless to the reality of a shared human dignity?

When I was growing up fifty miles from Milledgeville during O’Connor’s productive years as a writer in the 1950s and early 1960s, the whole of Southern white society—certainly including Milledgeville—was grounded on emphasizing difference between white people and black people. White children were taught by everyone—parents, teachers, grandparents, scoutmasters, coaches (as they in turn had been taught as children) —to see themselves as responsible for the burden of Southern history, the legacy of slavery. I grew up in the era of “separate but equal,” with the emphasis on “separate.” Not until high school did I ever encounter a black student in class or know anyone my own age who was black. Racism underlay the whole fabric of Southern life, and the whole of white society sought to maintain and perpetuate it by education. The practices that maintained the category of race should not have existed, but, on the other hand, race absolutely existed as an experience on both sides of the color line, so much so that to ignore race would have been morally evasive.

My reasons for arguing with Wilson, whose book I respect, are complicated and personal. O’Connor was brought up in the segregated, racist South just as I was. She could see how difficult it would be to purge from herself this racist way of seeing others. At the same time, however, she could penetrate the pretenses of Southern-born “intellectuals” (or “innerleckshuls”) who claimed to have broken free from racism. I needed her satire, being something of an innerleckshul myself. I self-righteously rejected the racism of my town and scorned the prejudice of those who had brought me up by their best lights, people whom I had every reason to love. O’Connor showed me Asbury and Julian in the mirror. With O’Connor’s guidance, beginning in freshman year in a class with Marion Montgomery, I began to see that having been brought up in a racist society was going to mean a lifelong, always-conscious endeavor to overcome attitudes embedded deep in my Christ-haunted psyche. The problem went deeper than racial prejudice or its self-congratulatory rejection all the way down into an even more primordial pride. Earlier and more powerfully than any other single influence, Flannery O’Connor was the voice of my own conversion to Catholicism.

It strikes me as perfectly sensible that O’Connor would see the civil rights movement as, at least in part, “an earthly and political issue.” No one saw better than O’Connor the modes of self-congratulation and righteousness that characterize the “royal consciousness.” Perhaps O’Connor did not believe in the “heavenly importance” of the civil rights movement because she doubted the spiritual efficacy of social movements. O’Connor had already anticipated the royal consciousness’s rewards (not unlike Asbury’s and Julian’s—or the incomparable Hulga’s) by satirizing activists like Oona Gibbs, a satire that Wilson finds reprehensible. From what honest perspective can we congratulate ourselves for our virtue at the expense of Flannery O’Connor?

Nevertheless, Wilson convinces me that O’Connor would not (rather than could not) write from the perspective of a black person. I regret the fact, because it feels like scrupulosity, almost a willful meanness. I think of Keats, who sees a sparrow outside his window and, having no fixed identity of his own, “pecks about in the gravel.” Shakespeare sheds his own identity when he becomes Macbeth or Dogberry, Miranda or Iago or Othello, speaking from within each character in ways that deeply convince us and move us. I think of Faulkner and the whole range of his characters, black and white—and then I consider both the genius and the quite narrow range of Flannery O’Connor. What she did within her circumstances was astonishing, but to concede that her imagination could not enter the lives of black people feels tragic, if not absurd. It would be different if she were trying to imagine Tolstoyan scenes among the Russian aristocracy or fox hunts in rural England. But she was around black people all her life. They were right there, right in front of her on a daily basis, obviously observable and therefore surely imaginable. To think that they were not knowable from within as human beings would be to concede that poetry itself can never offer the liberation from our “mind-forged manacles” that we ask of it. It would be to agree that our great artists have no special calling, that what they write is always merely a construct to be dismantled.

The great promise of literature is that it can give us experiences and sympathies otherwise beyond our range. It can break the tyranny of the particular cave in which we learned to name the shadows. We should thank God for poets. Yet our cultural moment seems to be most engaged in chiding the poet for “stepping out of his lane,” as Zadie Smith has put it, telling poetry what it cannot do. Instead of emphasizing the common humanity that unites us in the body of Christ, instead of living Martin Luther King’s claim that we should be judged on the content of our character and not the color of our skin, we lose a moment of potential self-transcendence when Flannery O’Connor decides to stay in her lane. My great fear is not so much that Flannery O’Connor was racist or that she failed to get beyond her “white supremacist” upbringing (I think she did get beyond it). Rather, I fear she knew she had faltered at her calling. O’Connor was a genius at comic reversals and recognitions that have the spiritual gravity of tragedy, and Wilson has shown us a reversal that O’Connor could not make.

Wilson’s book rightly and helpfully shows the difficulty O’Connor faced in writing about her native South in an era of great change; Wilson shows us where on the spectrum of that historically fraught process O’Connor was when her lupus killed her at the age of thirty-nine and lets us see why and how O’Connor might have adapted her views, given time. The fragments of Why Do the Heathen Rage? provide glimpses into O’Connor’s imagination and, in this regard, my ambivalence gives way to gratitude for the publication. Still, what comes across perhaps a little too powerfully is Wilson’s embarrassment about the attitudes of this thorny Southern Catholic genius she loves. For example, why did O’Connor not develop a scene showing a KKK cross burning that actually happened in Milledgeville and that makes a brief appearance in Why Do the Heathen Rage? Perhaps she was too keenly aware that, like lynching, the act of burning crosses in white hoods already reflected the culture’s prevailing image of white Southerners. The realities of race and love and the movement of the Holy Spirit were much more difficult to apprehend. In the given text, Wilson seems to want an upgraded set of opinions that would have made her beloved model more comfortably contemporary, but as a result we are left not just with an incomplete novel, but with an unfinished O’Connor.

Wilson’s book only partially deflects threats to the reputation of one of the great figures of American literature and American Catholicism. We are left with the picture of a woman whose death left behind a failure, once hidden but now visible to all. In this regard, the book feels like less of a service to O’Connor than a glimpse into her limitations and a testament to the royal consciousness of the present moment.