Such a catholic.(Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor)(Book review)

IN 1972 Flannery O'Connor was posthumously honored with the National Book Award for her Complete Stories. As her publisher, Robert Giroux, was readying himself to receive this highest of American literary prizes, he was caught short when an eminent author asked, "Do you really think Flannery O'Connor was a great writer? She's such a Roman Catholic." Brad Gooch might well have begun his much-anticipated biography--Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown, 416 pp., $30)--with this remarkable charge. Instead, he places it on the penultimate page. This decision is regrettable, for it leaves us still needing the book that hasn't been written during the 45 years since O'Connor's death in 1964: a critical biography showing that her life and work are quite incomprehensible apart from her being "such a Roman Catholic."

The problem is not merely that O'Connor fell prey to the anti-Catholicism that remains the only acceptable bigotry among some American intellectuals. She did, of course, endure the condescension of such ex-Catholics as Mary McCarthy, who said: "Considering how intelligent she was, [O'Connor] was more pious than any other Catholic I've ever known." The deeper problem is far more perplexing: Why, prior to Flannery O'Connor, had this country--the only Western nation "with the soul of a church," as G. K. Chesterton famously said--failed to produce a single major writer whose work is Christian in both form and substance? Why would a triple outsider to the American project--a self-declared advocate of 13th-century Catholicism, a southerner who refused to apologize for the evils of her region, a sympathizer with backwoods Protestant fundamentalists--become this country's first thoroughly Christian writer of fiction? Why are nearly all of our eminent writers--Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Frost, Faulkner--heterodox at best, atheist or even nihilist at worst? Why was Flannery O'Connor the first distinguished American writer to have her imagination shaped by the scandalous claims of the Gospel? Why, above all, does her greatness lie precisely in her being "such a Roman Catholic," a Christian convinced that the triune God has uniquely and definitively identified Himself and His will for the world in the Jews and Jesus and the Church?

These unanswered questions point to what is truly remarkable about Flannery O'Connor. She was a woman who died at age 39; a southerner who except for seven years lived an almost reclusive life in the small city of Milledgeville, Ga.; a fiction writer who during her lifetime produced only two novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away) and a single collection of short stories (A Good Man Is Hard to Find); an author who left only three more books to be published after her death--another collection of short stories (Everything That Rises Must Converge), a gathering of essays (Mystery and Manners), and a large sampling of her letters (The Habit of Being).

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Gooch lays O'Connor's genuine distinctiveness to the side, and thus fails to bring her life into the sharp focus it demands. His biography has no over arching theme, no compelling trajectory, no revealing figure in the carpet. He seems to believe that O'Connor was a rara avis, but his main evidence is that, as a child, she trained a chicken to walk backward and that, as an adult, she raised peafowl and other exotic birds. The patronizing intimacy of Gooch's title turns out, moreover, to be a distancing device. Instead of probing the complex depths of "Flannery," Gooch has written a jauntily superficial book.

It has become virtually standard procedure, among interpreters of Gooch's kind, to say that O'Connor's life and work must not be confined or reduced to her Catholicism, that she had not merely one but many strings on her fiddle, that we deny the variousness of her fiction by concentrating chiefly on its religious quality. Gooch establishes the small truth contained in this charge by showing that O'Connor did not confine herself within a religious cocoon but was keenly attuned to writers as various as T. S. Eliot and Guy de Maupassant, Caroline Gordon and William Faulkner, and even J. D. Salinger. He also demonstrates that O'Connor was remarkably alert to popular culture, finding both irony and revelation in seedy cliches and banal commercials. Having seen a hucksterish stunt for a film called Mark of the Gorilla, she put it to hilarious use in Wise Blood, where an ape impersonator greets moviegoers in order to boost attendance. Yet Gooch doesn't take time to observe the significance of Enoch Emery, the youth who seeks the tawdry fame of this pseudo-simian: Cut off from religious rituals that might have given redemptive shape to his life, Emery must invent his own ceremonial patterns for living. He bases his life on the vain promises of advertisements, making their blandishments his credo. The result is something at once farcical and pathetic, as Emery becomes a telling caricature of our unacknowledged nihilism.

Instead of attending to such moral discernments, Gooch chooses to make Freudian readings that obfuscate rather than clarify. He interprets the brilliant brat in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" as wrestling with her dawning erotic desires, arguing that her sexuality is finally "sublimated in religious expression." Such sexual preoccupations blind Gooch to the child's real problem: She is afflicted with a condition far more fundamental than her prepubescent sexuality--namely, her religious pride as a Roman Catholic. O'Connor the Catholic, Gooch might have noticed, is far from uncritical of her Catholicism. Missing such subtleties, Gooch declares that there is a hidden "Jansenist aspect of Flannery's character." He also speaks condescendingly of O'Connor's "intact innocence," as if she were a naive virgin who feared and loathed her carnality.