Flannery O’Connor’s Mean Words

2,472 words

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor
New York: Fordham University Press, 2020

It’s old news that Flannery O’Connor, dead since 1964, has taken some flak for writing letters in which she said she didn’t much like black people. The brouhaha peaked around 2020, when we saw tongue-clucking essays in The New Yorker and elsewhere, usually including the piquant passage, written in her last months, that went: “I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them.” (Greg Johnson covered this in depth a few weeks ago.)

Related to that, there had even been a 2019 symposium at Fordham University, “Race & Grace in Flannery O’Connor,” chaired by the author/editor of the small book you see here. Radical Ambivalence, a product of that symposium, does not really answer the question of whether Flannery truly had deep antipathy toward blacks, or whether this virulent pathogen means that most of her fiction is diseased. (I’m going to call her Flannery here, so that we don’t have an “O’Connor” constantly banging up against the exotic married name of Radical Ambivalence’s author, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell.) It’s a “When did you stop beating your wife?” kind of question, indicting and convicting at the same time.

It’s a question that never should have been posed, and Alaimo O’Donnell does not seem to be the person brave or insightful enough to grapple seriously with such matters. Instead of taking Flannery’s side from the beginning, she went ahead and basically wrote the brief that Paul Elie turned into that New Yorker essay, charmingly titled, “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” From the start, Alaimo O’Donnell concedes that Flannery might say things that were “racist” and “bigoted” at times, but she was aware of this, and she struggled against this flaw in her character. And out of that pain and struggle was born the terrible beauty of her art, etc. etc.

A weak cope, and anyway I say, balderdash! The accusation of bigotry is based on out-of-context passages from private correspondence, in which Flannery was usually joking, striking a pose, or speaking in her own characters’ idiom. The simple fact that these notes were private should mark them as privileged, off the record, and not to be cited in any serious critical study.[1] A fiction writer’s private beliefs and personal doodles are not fair game for literary or political criticism. So Alaimo O’Donnell’s special pleading is a cop-out. She pretends to defend Flannery by offering us an apologia-with-reservations. But this just makes the situation worse. She doesn’t seem to understand that, perhaps because she doesn’t understand Flannery’s fiction.

Virtually all of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is black comedy, often verging on the ludicrous and impossibly absurd. In her teens she wanted to be a cartoonist. Specifically she wanted to be the sort of cartoonist then popular in The New Yorker. Flannery would send her own cartoon roughs up to Manhattan, and receive encouraging rejection slips in return. The big cartoonists then included the likes of Charles Addams, George Price, Peter Arno, James Thurber and several others whose imaginative world revolved around the gothic, the grotesque, and the familiar social and ethnic caricatures.[2]

Maybe Flannery wasn’t good enough to make it as a cartoonist, but more likely what happened was that when she went grad school in Iowa for her MFA, they weren’t offering courses in gag cartooning. So she started out by studying journalism, and then, on the advice of a friendly professor, switched to a couple of courses in fiction-writing. And therein she found her true path, specializing in stories that would have the gothic japery of Charles Addams, the redneck-squalor ambience of George Price, and the comical negroes and Southern cod-gentility of Peter Arno (occasional subjects for Arno, when Pete wasn’t drawing his usual chorus girls and El Morocco habitués).

This Flannery controversy is supposedly about “racism” and black people, but that’s not what most of Flannery O’Connor is about, is it? Rural folk and poor white trash are what I mostly associate with her stories. I haven’t done a careful count, but my impression is that black folk do not even figure prominently in most of her stories, and when they do, they’re there usually as background color or objects of wonder.[3] A famous example would be that typically grotesque and marvelously named narrative, “The Artificial Nigger.” The title character is a mere lawn or fence ornament, and it turns up in the story just as a bit of silliness, to break the tension. The real colored people who appear in the tale are “extras,” put there only because a little boy from the country is being taken to the big city by his grandfather, and negroes are just some of the bizarre and comical sights you might see in Atlanta.

Even when Flannery’s fiction seems to be striving for solemnity, it tends to lurch into laughable creepiness and cartoony bathos. Good examples here are the two stories that Alaimo O’Donnell uses to introduce the book. One was written at the beginning of Flannery’s career, the other was written at the end, and they’re basically the same story, extensively reworked. In both, an old man from Georgia has gone to live with his daughter in New York, where everything seems ghastly and noisy and he’s dying of homesickness. In the early, 1946 version, “The Geranium,” the old codger spends most of his days sitting in a chair, looking at a geranium in a sixth-story window right across the street. Finally the thuggish neighbor across the way pushes the flower pot off the windowsill, because he’s sick of seeing the old geezer looking through the window like that. And that’s basically the story, in its minimalistic hilarity; the rest happens in the old man’s head, dreaming of his life in Georgia.

Then we have the late, 1964, revision of the tale, “Judgement Day.” Here the old man also dreams of going back to Georgia, but he stumbles on the apartment building’s steep staircase, has a long tumble, and gets his head wedged between the posts of the stairway banister. Pretty soon he dies there. A couple of negro grotesques have recently moved into the building—an arrogant bully in a blue suit and goatee, and his high-yaller doxy in high-heels and dyed red hair—and they see the old man trapped there, gasping his last. But they mock him in his death throes because he’s just a God-bothering, wool-hat old Georgia peckerwood.

So there you go. Two comical horror stories. Very similar, except in one there’s a geranium that falls and gets smashed, to the old man’s dismay; and in the other, it’s the old man himself who falls, dying horribly in a stairwell.

Alaimo O’Donnell introduces her book with these “bookend” stories from the start and finish of Flannery’s career, and she keeps circling back to them, yet she never really tells the stories well. You wouldn’t know from her descriptions that they are black comedies full of neighborly cruelty. Or that they’re supposed to be funny, like a Punch and Judy show when they have to get rid of the baby and toss it way out to the audience. For Alaimo O’Donnell, it’s not funny, and there’s nothing to laugh at. She thinks heart of the stories really lives in the old men’s daydreams, their memories of being back in Georgia when they were hunting and fishing or running a sawmill, and maybe a still; and interacting with the chuckleheaded negro retainer-types they knew. She sees these stories as a “teaching opportunity,” where we get some sort of moral lesson about these sad old men’s behavior. About how they were friendly and tolerant toward the darkies they knew, but the darkies had to know their place. This was the moral code they lived under, and that was all the old men knew, and that was their tragedy. Because, you know, there’s supposed to be something bad about that.

For me, this not only misses the point of what actually happens in the stories, and what the writer intentionally put there; it’s a futile attempt to locate an impossibly obscure, gossamer theme in the narrative, all in aid of illustrating some thesis that is not worth spending time on in the first place.

Alaimo O’Donnell does this in several other areas, possibly in order to pad out her little symposium souvenir-book. She puts in a lot of vague, unnecessary commentary from a couple of famous Black Lady Writers. Here is Alice Walker, and there is Toni Morrison. But why them? Why just them? Why not maybe Joyce Carol Oates or Margaret Atwood? Or even Gillian Flynn? Well, the Black Ladies are here, obviously, to provide a Black Writer’s Blessing. An imprimatur, you know; a warranty that it’s still okay to read critical commentary about that famous White Racist Author, Miss Flannery O’Connor. Because the Black Ladies gave us permission. Alaimo O’Donnell was worried that the whole idea of having a symposium and book about Flannery O’Connor and race might be dangerous. Dreadfully transgressive at the very least. So she took out insurance.

Even more hopelessly, Alaimo O’Donnell tries to shoehorn-in some discussion of Catholicism, with the idea that this will frame some conflict with Flannery’s pro-segregation leanings. But of course it doesn’t. The symposium lady evidently has Catholicism mixed up with some kind of Protestant Sunday School Jesus, reciting cherry-picked “Love Thy Neighbor” lines from the Sermon on the Mount, while the assistant-pastor-lady, dressed in her lavender chasuble and gold peace medallion, explains that the Lord really meant something more than ordinary love.

Now, some kind of Catholic angle was unavoidable. Alaimo O’Donnell has edited and published a series of Catholic-author studies and these were funded by the O’Connor Estate. We also know Flannery was quite devout for most of her life, could hold her own on abstruse theological matters, and had a great interest in the writings of Thomas Merton and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. However, almost none of this makes its way into her short stories or novels. She was writing fiction, not theology, and would not have larded her stories with doctrinal details. Your average reader is a theological ignoramus who thinks the Immaculate Conception is all about the procreation of Jesus rather than Mary. Therefore your best solution is to leave it alone, and not bore the reader to tears.

But such sensible avoidance is completely lost on Alaimo O’Donnell, who keeps pushing on her little string, insisting that there must be something in Christian doctrine that forbids racial segregation or promotes amalgamation, or something like that. But there is no such doctrine or belief, any more than Canon Law forbids the consumption of strawberry cheesecake.[4] In fact, doctrinal teaching about hominid species and subspecies is a matter best left unexamined by Alaimo O’Donnell and similar special pleaders. They may discover something they don’t like. Once upon a time, say five hundred years ago, a pope[5] tried to ban enslavement of Caribbean savages by issuing a bull declaring Caribs to be human beings with souls: they were therefore not enslavable. This may have led somehow to the substitution of black African slaves, as there was no bull forbidding those. But regardless, the papal bull was later retracted. And thus—if you really want to get technical about it—the soulful humanity of New World and sub-Saharan savages remains an open question, doctrinally speaking. Theology, politics and literary criticism can make for a very unstable mixture.

Alaimo O’Donnell’s desperate argument for Flannery as a good, albeit flawed, soul is a confused and hopeless effort. But she is deserving of some sympathy. Following her Flannery O’Connor symposium, and the publication of Radical Ambivalence, Paul Elie wrote that piece in The New Yorker, indicting Flannery for being “Racist.” (This, you will recall, is where we came in.) Shortly after that, during the summer vacation of the COVID year 2020, the administrators of Loyola University Maryland removed Flannery O’Connor’s name from a residence hall. They did this without warning or public deliberation. Alaimo O’Donnell, who spent 18 years as a professor and administrator at Loyola Maryland, believes this was a direct result of the provocative essay in The New Yorker.

But if you can follow that time scheme, you see that Alaimo O’Donnell’s symposium and the publication of Radical Ambivalence happened before that Paul Elie essay, not after it. Therefore this book is not a response to it, or an attempt to defend Flannery O’Connor after her name was removed from the university building in Maryland. Rather it’s what incited the New Yorker piece and the Loyola de-naming in the first place!

So this little book was the prime mover of the whole big problem. If Alaimo O’Donnell had steadfastly rejected the notion that Flannery O’Connor was an outrageous bigot—instead of cravenly agreeing that ol’ Flannery said some mean things about colored people, things we should now feel bad about—all this other nonsense would probably never have happened.

Notes

[1] Using private, bantering correspondence to make a seamy accusation against a dead writer, seems completely beyond the pale to me. I’m appalled that the attacks were not struck down at the outset by some serious literary titan. What it reminds me of more than anything else is the doctored Access Hollywood videotape used against Donald Trump in October 2016. Under an old 2005 visual of a tour bus, somebody attached a few seconds of audio tape in which Trump, or something that sounds like him, talks about being able to pick up women and “grab ‘em by the pussy.” Trump does not say that on video, and most certainly did not say it in the 2005 television episode. I realize many people will say this comparison is about the most damning, degrading argument one could use to defend Flannery O’Connor. But I don’t care. It’s the same principle, I insist, and the same sort of deceit and defamation.

[2] People forget the horrifying aspect to Thurber because they mainly remember him for not being able to draw very well, a perception that tended to persuade everybody and his aunt that You Too Can Be a New Yorker Cartoonist, thereby bringing us to the sorry state of New Yorker cartooning today, where the average gag now seems to have been drawn by someone’s fingernail on one of those electronic tablet dinguses.

[3] I am consulting The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor, edited by her friend Robert Giroux. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1971.) There are thirty-one stories here, and black people and/or racial discussions appear in about ten of them.

[4] Our new Vice President, J.D. Vance, set off alarm bells recently by making a similar point, telling a TV news interviewer that Christianity does not require you to cherish and welcome illegal aliens.

[5] Paul III, Sublimis Deus, 1537.