White Girls

by Hilton Als

  O’Connor received her MFA in June of 1947, and Engle arranged for a fellowship that allowed her to stay at Iowa for another year and begin work on her unsettling first novel, Wise Blood. Hazel Motes, O’Connor’s Evangelical hero, wears a blue shirt and a black hat and has white skin that crackles like pork rind in the hot Southern sun. He may look like a standard preacher, but he’s not like any the good citizens of his adopted town, Taulkinham, have ever heard of. An itinerant prophet, he believes only in his own church, “The Church Without Christ...where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” Motes is a backward innocent, raised a Baptist, who, instead of accepting Christ into his life, decides to be him. By denying Jesus, he turns his back on those who came before him and who no doubt learned much of their discourse from the black preachers whose rhetoric soaks the Southern soil. But Motes has a grudge against Jesus: He equates Him with sin, or more specifically with the sins that he himself has committed and cannot escape—not in the eyes of his relatives, rotten with fake piety, who believe that only the Lord can wash him clean and are no better than niggers who think that the Lord will make them white.

  Of Wise Blood, the writer and critic Stanley Edgar Hyman said, “Whatever caused Miss O’Connor to choose Protestant Fundamentalism as her metaphor for Catholic vision, it was a brilliant choice... It freed her from the constraints of good taste.” O’Connor’s humor lay in such paradoxes—in being an alienated Catholic in a world of Bible thumpers, a single girl in a society of matrons. “It becomes more and more difficult in America to make belief believable, but in this the Southern writer has the greatest possible advantage. He lives in the Bible Belt,” she wrote, and went on:

  The Catholic novelist in the South is forced to follow the spirit into strange places and to recognize it in many forms not totally congenial to him...I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department or sociology or culture of personality development. His interest and sympathy may very well go—as I know my own does—directly to those aspects of Southern life where the religious feeling is most intense and where its outward forms are farthest from the Catholic...The result of these underground religious affinities will be a strange and, to many, perverse fiction, one which...gives us no picture of Catholic life, or the religious experiences that are usual with us, but I believe that it will be Catholic fiction.

  In 1948, she was accepted at Yaddo as a writer in residence. There she was championed by several other writers: Alfred Kazin, Robert Lowell, and Lowell’s wife-to-be, Elizabeth Hardwick, who once described O’Connor as being “like some quiet, puritanical convent girl from the harsh provinces of Canada.” Although Philip Rahv eventually published O’Connor’s work in the Partisan Review, she first began to attract attention in the Sewanee Review and, through the Southern Agrarian John Crowe Ransom, in the Kenyon Review. With the exception of Kazin, virtually none of O’Connor’s early supporters were Jewish, and O’Connor had little exposure to European immigrants, to intellectual debate as a form of socializing, or to agnosticism. The North was still a black-and-white world, though in a different way than she’d experienced it at home.

  The following year, O’Connor secured a contract for Wise Blood, with Holt, Rinehart. The association was not a happy one. She wrote to Paul Engle, describing the experience:

  I learned indirectly that nobody at Rinehart liked the 108 pages...that the ladies there particularly had thought it unpleasant (which pleased me). I told Selby [O’Connor’s editor] that I was willing enough to listen to Rinehart criticism but that if it didn’t suit me, I would disregard it...To develope at all as a writer I have to develope in my own way...I will not be hurried or directed by Rinehart. I think they are interested in the conventional and I have had no indication that they are very bright...If they don’t feel I am worth giving more money to and leaving alone, then they should let me go...Selby and I came to the conclusion that I was “prematurely arrogant.” I supplied him with the phrase.

  It is incredible to read, in this age, a letter by a writer whose use of ego serves to protect, not inform, her work. O’Connor was soon released from her contract and, in 1950, signed with Robert Giroux, then at Harcourt, Brace, whom she had met through Robert Lowell. The year before, Lowell had also introduced her to the Catholic poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally. The young couple had children and a home in Ridgefield, Connecticut; they needed a boarder to make ends meet, and O’Connor moved in that fall. O’Connor attended Mass daily with the Fitzgeralds. And, as her literary mastery deepened, she became better able to define her faith. She wrote to Elizabeth Hester: “I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic.”

  As W.H. Auden put it, “In 1912, it was a real vision to discover that God loves a Pernod and a good fuck, but in 1942 every maiden aunt knows this and it’s time to discover something else He loves.” Unlike the majority of Catholics the Fitzgeralds had known, O’Connor lived her faith. In a memoir about her, Robert Fitzgerald wrote admiringly of her inability to speak in abstractions: “She could make things fiercely plain, as in her comment, now legendary, on an interesting discussion of the Eucharist Symbol: ‘If it were only a symbol, I’d say to hell with it.’”

  This most psychologically astute and least “psychological” of writers watched the action unfold in her stories and novels with a kind of amateur glee. As someone whose worldview was in part ecclesiastical, O’Connor also knew that having faith involved hard, often dispassionate work: You did not embrace the leper at the side of the road because you “identified” with him; in fact, “because” wasn’t even part of the equation. Seeing his skin drop off in flakes and handing over a fiver to sustain him were actions that called for description, not explanation. O’Connor understood comedy as the flashy side of tragedy. In her work, disaster puts on a red shirt and acts the fool for the Devil’s amusement.

  In 1950, while typing the first draft of Wise Blood, O’Connor began to experience a heaviness in her arms. She was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. But later that year she became seriously ill. She was suffering from lupus, the disease that had killed her father. Lupus put her in and out of hospitals for the rest of her life. It caused her face to swell and her hair to fall out; it required her to give herself injections of cortisone, and, eventually, to walk with aluminum crutches because “the misery,” as she termed it, affected her hips.

  Except for a few speaking engagements and a visit to Europe with her mother, which included a pilgrimage to Lourdes (“I am going as a pilgrim, not a patient,” she wrote. “I will not be taking any bath. I am one of those people who could die for his religion easier than take a bath for it”), O’Connor lived from 1952 until her death, in 1964—at age thirty-nine—near Milledgeville, on Andalusia, a dairy farm that her mother had inherited. There she raised peacocks and ran a theology-and-literature reading group. She also wrote The Violent Bear It Away, and the stories that appeared in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. These stories glisten with intelligence and with startling antisolipsism: She describes, never preaches.

  O’Connor may have found comfort in her religion, which allowed her to enter into a dialogue with God about suffering. But she was surprisingly intolerant of the religious struggle of others, particularly that of women intellectuals. “The life of this remarkable woman...intrigues me while much of what she writes, naturally, is ridiculous to me,” O’Connor wrote of Simone Weil, a Jew who immersed herself in Catholicism. “Weil’s life is the most comical life I have ever read about...If I were to live long enough and develop as an artist to the proper extent, I would like to write a comic novel about a woman—and what is m
ore comic and terrible than the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth?” Was O’Connor instinctively recoiling from her own reflection in the mirror?

  O’Connor, in return, was viewed as “homely” by most women of her time. Feminists have long looked up to her for her lack of compromise and her relative isolation, but they rarely factor in the emotional toll both took on her and her work—or the painful rewriting O’Connor has had to endure at the hands of memoirists such as Katherine Anne Porter, who emphasize how attractive she was, as if a woman must balance intelligence with prettiness to be legitimate. What was lacking in O’Connor’s life—and in her art—was the spontaneous experience of intimate love, with its attendant joys and tedium and security. In O’Connor’s fictional world, carnality, when it comes up at all, is brutal and hilariously symbolic. Mr. Shortly, in “The Displaced Person,” for instance, “makes love” to his wife by placing a lit cigarette inside his mouth like the tip of the Devil’s tail:

  When he had done his courting, he had not brought a guitar to strum or anything pretty for her to keep, but had sat on her porch steps, not saying a word, imitating a paralyzed man propped up to enjoy a cigarette. When the cigarette got the proper size, he would turn his eyes to her and open his mouth and draw in the butt and then sit there as if he has swallowed it, looking at her with the most loving look anybody could imagine. It nearly drove her wild and every time he did it, she wanted to pull his hat down over his eyes and hug him to death.

  Sally Fitzgerald noted in a chronology that accompanies O’Connor’s Collected Works (1988) that in the early fifties O’Connor had been in love with a visiting Danish textbook editor, but there is scant reference to him in the selected letters, The Habit of Being (1979), which was overseen by O’Connor’s protective mother. Regina O’Connor’s deep-seated respect for the social hierarchy created a gap between her and her daughter, and Flannery wrote amusingly in letters to friends about Regina’s efforts to bridge it. In a 1953 letter to the Fitzgeralds:

  My mamma and I have interesting literary discussions like the following which took place over some Modern Library books that I had just ordered:

  SHE: “Mobby Dick. I’ve always heard about that.”

  ME: “Mow-by Dick.”

  SHE: “Mow-by Dick. The Idiot. You would get something called

  Idiot. What’s it about?”

  ME: “An idiot.”

  Much is left out or elided in the selected correspondence, the rights to which Regina controlled until her death, in 1995. But on the matter of faith the letters are often fierce and beautiful. The most conclusive statement appears in a letter written in the summer of 1955, to Hester:

  If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now. With such a current to write against, the result almost has to be negative. It does well just to be. Then another thing, what one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

  And yet she would have little by way of experience for the next nine years. Visitors came through Milledgeville. Admirers wrote letters. But as the years went on, O’Connor’s view of what Marianne Moore called “the strange experience of beauty” became the subject of her jokes, not of serious examination. Like many people crippled by illness, O’Connor cleaved to the world as she knew it. In her early work, she had taken an intense interest in hustlers and freaks and “niggers.” “Whenever I am asked why Southern writers particularly have this penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one,” she said once. But as her lupus progressed she spent less and less time discussing identity and its political implications, and, when she did, it often felt cavalier. “No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia,” she wrote in 1959 to a friend who had tried to arrange the introduction. “It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on—it’s only fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia.” One feels a sense of loss on reading this, not only because of what such a union might have produced but also because of the limitations of O’Connor’s time and place and the inevitable restrictions they placed on her art. Her regionalism was both a strength and a weakness; the emotional distance caused by her physical suffering was the axis on which both her comedy and her cruelty turned.

  Had O’Connor and Baldwin met, they could have laughed together about their particular “Christ hauntings”: Baldwin was the son of a minister and had preached himself; his experience was not so different from that of the mad, naïve evangelists who populate O’Connor’s fiction. And what a discussion they could have had about whiteness! In 1955, after a stay at an all-white Swiss village, Baldwin wrote, “This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again”—meaning that blacks, as artists and men, could no longer be confined to the self-contained enclaves that had produced them. O’Connor’s later fiction was, in large part, an acknowledgment of this, and of the fear and fury it produced in her world. That conversation is lost to history. But O’Connor’s work is not. One can hear her syntax and thoughts in the stories of Raymond Carver, in Robert Duvall’s brilliant movie The Apostle, in the Samuel L. Jackson character’s final monologue in Pulp Fiction. Her work has moved away from the South as she defined and knew it, all the way to Hollywood, where Americans have embraced it, hearing in O’Connor’s voice her uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.

  GWTW

  SO WHAT CAN I tell you about a bunch of unfortunate niggers stupid enough to get caught and hanged in America, or am I supposed to say lynched? I’m assuming this aggressive tone to establish a little distance from these images of the despised and dead, the better to determine the usefulness of this project, which escapes me but doesn’t preclude my writing about it. Too often we refuse information, refuse to look or even think about something, simply because it’s unpleasant, or poses a problem, or raises “issues”—emotional and intellectual friction that rubs our heavily therapeuticized selves the wrong way. I didn’t like looking at these pictures, but once I looked, the events documented in them occurred in my mind over and over again, as did the realization that these pictures are documents of America’s obsession with niggers, both black and white. I looked at these pictures and what I saw in them, in addition to the obvious, was the way in which I’m regarded by any number of people: as a nigger. And it is as one that I felt my neck snap and my heart break, while looking at these pictures.

  In any case, America’s interest in niggers—and people more than willing to treat other people as niggers—is of passing interest since America’s propensity to define race and the underclass through hateful language and hateful acts is well-known and much discussed. What isn’t discussed is what interests the largely white editors (who constitute what we call Publishing) have in hiring a colored person to describe a nigger’s life. For them, a black writer is someone who can simplify what is endemic to him or her as a human being—race—and blow it up to cartoon proportions, thereby making the coon situation “clear” to a white audience. To be fair, no such offensive nonideas were put to me when this present collaboration was suggested, but would my inclusion in this book, as the nearly ahistorical, “lyrical” voice, have been suggested if I were not a Negro? Or am I “lyrical” and ahistorical because I am a Negro? I am not going to adopt a mea culpa tone here, since I agreed to supply what I have always thought of as a soundtrack to these pictures, which, viewed togethe
r, make up a sort of blockbuster disaster movie.

  But before I can talk about these pictures, such as the picture of the beautiful black guy with the incredibly relaxed shoulders who has been whipped—front and back—and who does not reveal anything to us—certainly not with his eyes—except his obvious pain: his flesheating scars, and the many pictures of people with their necks snapped, bowels loosened, feet no longer arched—before I can talk about any of the “feelings” they engender in me, I want to get back to the first question I posed: What is the relationship of the white people in these pictures to the white people who ask me, and sometimes pay me, to be a Negro on the page?

  Of course, one big difference between the people documented in these pictures and me is that I am not dead, have not been lynched or scalded or burned or whipped or stoned. But I have been looked at, watched, and seen the harm in people’s eyes—fear that can lead to becoming a dead nigger, like those seen here. And it’s those photographs that have made me understand, finally, what the word nigger means, and why people have used it, and the way I use it here, now: as a metaphorical lynching before the real one. Nigger is a slow death. And that’s the slow death I feel all the time now, as a colored man.

  And according to these pictures, I shouldn’t be talking to you right now at all: I’m a little on the nigger side, meant to be seen and not heard, my tongue hanged and, with it, my mind. But before that happens, let me tell you what I see in these photographs: I see a lot of crazy-looking white people, as crazy and empty-looking in the face as some of the white people who stare at me. Who wants to look at these pictures, who are they all? When they look at these pictures, who do they identify with? The maimed, the tortured, the dead, or the white people who maybe told some dumb nigger before they hanged him, You are all wrong, niggerish, outrageous, violent, disruptive, uncooperative, lazy, stinking, loud, difficult, obnoxious, stupid, angry, prejudiced, unreasonable, shiftless, no good, a liar, fucked up—the very words and criticisms a colored writer is apt to come up against if he doesn’t do that woe-is-me Negro crap and has the temerity to ask not only why collect these pictures, but why does a colored point of view authenticate them, no matter what that colored person has to say?