In September we board the train on a journey to the city of Taulkinham with Flannery O’Connor’s debut novel Wise Blood (1952). Our book club’s first dip into the southern gothic genre. Though I might say that we brushed up against the genre with Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men earlier in the year.
Southern Life in the 50s
Flannery O’Connor born in 1925, grew up in Savannah, Georgia… a Catholic in a sea of Southern Baptists. Her father passed away in 1941 from complications associated with lupus. She graduated from the Georgia State College for Women in 1945 with a degree in Sociology, and English Literature. After graduation she was accepted into the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa , she received her Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) in 1947. Then lived in artistic communities in New England for a few years working on what would become her first novel, Wise Blood but because of an illness returned to her mother’s home in Georgia in 1950, and was tragically diagnosed with lupus in 1951. In 1952 her first novel Wise Blood was published.
It was the era of television with I Love Lucy, Dragnet and The Honeymooners. Films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, A Street Car Named Desire, Singing in the Rain and High Noon were shining from the screen. JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Anne Frank’s, Diary of a Young Girl were flying off the book store shelves. General Eisenhower had become President Eisenhower the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Trial was just beginning and the American involvement in the Korean War was growing.
It was also two years before the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court decision which sparked the Civil Rights Movement that changed the fabric of the segregated society in southern states and America as a whole. The South in which Flannery O’Connor was introducing her readers was on the precipice of a change that her first novel seems unaware of. I have to remember all of this as I read her main character, Hazel Motes use a racial slur to describe the porter on the train and when he later enters a bathroom with the phrase “Mens Toilet – Whites” above it.
In Her Own Words
They say to write what you know, and Flannery O’Conner was writing as from a South that she did know.
From Commonwealth Magazine — 1
Here are the long-withheld remarks. In a letter to Maryat Lee dated May 3, 1964, O’Connor wrote:
“You know, I’m an integrationist on principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. 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. Particularly the new kind.”
Those remarks were followed by others that have been known since 1979. But on May 21, 1964, O’Connor wrote to Lee again:
“About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it means to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too. M.L. King I dont think is the ages great saint but he’s at least doing what he can do & has to do. Don’t know anything about Ossie Davis except that you like him but you probably like them all. My question is usually would this person be endurable if white. If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute.”
Flannery passed away on August 3rd 1964 from complications associated with lupus, as her father had 23 years earlier, she described herself in her youth as a “pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex.” She died the year President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and 4 years prior to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. We can only speculate how Flannery may or may not have evolved with the growing conversation around race and civil rights in this country. But for me her racism, and the racism of the south still haunt her stories.
Wise Blood
I can understand how someone might feel that the racism haunting Wise Blood would overshadow the narrative. It did me after my first reading of it, but on subsequent reads it formed into an unintentional character. There’s something quite absurd about all of Flannery’s characters, a twisted but uncomfortably familiar reflection of the reality of our world. Alongside the Nihilistic Evangelicalism of Hazel Motes, and the Commercialistic Evangelism of the man selling potato peelers, the Primitive Spirituality of Enoch Emery, the bankrupt religion of Asa Hawkes, the liberated sexuality of Sabbath Lily and the Spiritual Profiteering of Hoover Shoats, there is this unintentional character of the awkwardly normative racial prejudice of Taulkenham.
Flannery was a Catholic, and an earnest one at that. Her novel Wise Blood is littered with her criticisms of pop culture, trendy beliefs and shallow commercial protestantism. She was a girl who bites. I have to imagine that she wouldn’t be opposed to having had that bite turned onto herself.
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