Remembering Flannery O'Connor.

AS AN enraptured veteran of all the O'Connor stories, I am most frequently asked, i.e., by people I am anxious to enlist in the same enthusiasm: Well, what manner of woman was she? Who was this passionately committed sould for whom everything in this world was to be centered on Christ, including--you say--the terrible illness of her own body? Just what sort of character had she, this child of our century who managed, despite all of its dissociated sensibility, actually to "feel life," as she put it, "from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for"? this pious child, if you please, of the institutional and hierarchical Church, who yet could advance arguments on behalf of its paradoxical mystery as brilliant as anything out of Bossuet? This thoroughly modern woman, no less, her life and work riveted not upon gestures of neurotic feminist defiance against an alleged patriarchy oppressing her spirit, but upon a sacramental vision everywhere validated by its teachings? "The Catholic sacramental view of life," she wrote, "is one that sustains at every turn the vision that the storyteller must have if he is going to write fiction of any depth." And like Jean Cardinal Danielou--who loved best of all that Church "mud-splashed from history," because finally it was Christ Himself covered with its mud--Flannery O'Connor's romance with Roman Catholicism remained both ardent and uncomplicated right up to the end.

Who, the question persists, was she? What was she really like, this doomed Southern lady of nearly 39 years--dying nine days before her birthday--and more than half as many stories, among them the finest blooms of American fiction? This strangely blithe, self-possessed figure in whose letters, says Sally Fitzgerald, who has done us the inestimable favor of collecting them, "we cannot fail to see the increase in her own being, commensurate with and integrally related to her growth in stature as a writer"? If, as Mrs. Fitzgerald suggests, the correspondence constitutes an aspect of her life nearly quintessential--a being, that is to say, whose habitus of growth the letters meticulously record--what then are the characteristic features, the lineaments as it were, of her soul?

"There she stands, to me," recollects Mrs. Fitzgerald in her moving Introduction to The Habit of Being, "a phoenix risen from her own words: calm, slow, funny, courteous, both modest and very sure of herself, intense, sharply penetrating, devout but never pietistic, downright, occasionally fierce, and honest in a way that restores honor to the word."

And here, by anyone's reckoning, is an inventory of human character altogether arresting. How difficult it is to imagine anyone this side of sanctity at all worthy of it. Certainly from among the current fraternity of arts and letters, distressingly few examples leap to mind. With the possible exception of Mr. Walker Percy, I cannot think of a single American writer whose passing would inspire anything remotely lapidary. The late Miss O'Connor was clearly someone of special distinction, perhaps of blessedness even. And not, I'd want to insist, at this or that high moment either, in between which lay long stretches of unrelieved mediocrity. "Not the intense moment," writes T. S. Eliot near the end of "East Coker,"

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment . . .

What must, I think, have threaded all her moments, stitching everything into place, was courage. There is the uncommon quality, the unending, unvanquished capacity for the one thing needed, the one condition upon which literally everything else in the moral life must depend. "What shall I say of fortitude," asks St. Bruno, "without which neither wisdom nor justice is worth anything? Fortitude is never conquered; if it is conquered it is not fortitude."

In the absence of this virtue, wisdom tells us--and experience confirms the telling--no other virtue will do because none can survive the moment of real crisis, of testing, without it. At such moments virtue herself must put on courage, else all enactment will fail for want of resolution. "For most of us," continues Eliot in "The Dry Salvages,"

this is the aim

Never here to be realized;

Who are only underfeated

Because we have gone on trying . . . It is courage alone on which the human task of trying, again and again, completely to realize sanctity--"Never here to be realized"--is sustained.

And as always, ineluctably, there stands in the midst of each man's struggle, each effort of soul to have or hold integrity, the Evil One. He remains the one, Miss O'Connor unhesitatingly believed, against whom all salvation is at issue, no greater drama than which can ever exist. It is the decisive human drama, one destined to be played out somewhere in this world by everyone in this world. A world, moreover, in which the devils, despite Christ's definitive work of Redemption, remain at large, more than ever holding their own. Athwart the Evil One, she insisted, who is not "simply generalized evil, but an evil intelligence determined on its own supermacy," the indispensable weapon will be courage.

We face, now and for the duration of this world at least, the Dragon. Others, alas, must face him forever. He is the very one against whom St. Cryil warned the Children of Light, besieged then by the Arian darkness engulfing the fourth century (a period, incidentally, full of alarming and instructive parallels to our own). "The Dragon," he wrote to the catechumens of Jerusalem, "is by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the Dragon."

Infinitely wise words these, fashioned for "the dark city where," observed Miss O'Connor, "the children of God lay sleeping." They are of course meant of awaken, and thus to mobilize, all in whom the drama of salvation has grown dim. So resonant did Miss O'Connor find St. Cyril's warning that she placed it at the beginning of her first collection of stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955), which she thereupon dedicated to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald ("Nine stories about original sin, with my compliments").

Of the encounter with the Dragon, including both the responsibility of the writer truthfully to render it and that of the reader even vicariously to face it, she would say this:

No matter form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.

In thinking of this gallant woman twenty years after her death, one has the sense that in her stories--stories in which the most harrowing passages of literature are construed, countless passages both past and frequently into the jaws of the Beast--she reveals far more of herself than simply her craft; she bares something of her own soul as well, and a soul every bit as compact of mystery and struggle, God and the devil, as may be found in even the strangest scenes of her books. This, I submit, is as it should be. How could it be otherwise with human beings? We are creatures shaped, after all, almost entirely by our choices, which is to say, by ourselves. Whatever the complex mix of freedom and grace in this vale of soul-making--and ultimately the equation can never resovle itself arithmetically, however hard the theologians work to unpuzzle it--we remain essentially responsible beings before God for whatever we do, He having long ago paid our race, in C. S. Lewis's phrase, "the intolerable compliment" of taking us seriously. We are, finally and forever, what we do, and those changes wrought in us by what we do, whether for good or for ill, can best be understood in the light of what some have insisted on calling character. For example, Francois Mauriac, who probably shaped as much as anyone could from a distance the contours of Miss O'Connor's character, has this to say on the subject: "Just as there is a close bond between a man's character and what happens to him during his life, so there is a similar relationship between a novelist's character and the creatures and events brought into being by his imagination."

One of the reasons why, I believe, Miss O'Connor's world intrudes so powerfully upon our own, leaving aside here matters of technique and craft--why, in other words, her images appear so to startle and disturb, their violence so often the instrument of that grace which, when seized upon greedily enough, yields even the Kingdom of Heaven (it sufferish violence, we are told on very good authority, and the violent bear it away)--it that, having herself been there all her life, many times face to face with the Dragon, she knew the mysterious and apocalyptic cast to the human story. "My subject in fiction," she wrote once, "is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil." And we believe her because, putting it simply, it could not be so in her stories were it not already so in her story.

Her own life, thus, constitutes a continuing and compelling theather of instruction; in it we glimpse something of that characterological drama on which depended, besides everything else, the destiny of her own soul (which, one supposes, subsumes everything else). It is to that stage, then, and to the decisive moments enacted on it, that one ought to turn, twenty years after her death, in search of her moral style. Without that style the stories she wrote could not exist as they do. In fact, they could never have been written at all but for her character, for its extraordinary capacity to work, as her friend and mentor Caroline Gordon once put it, "within the Terrain of the bull," It was courage, before all else, that enabled her to do so.