In 1936​ , two very different novels about plantation culture and the Southern experience of the Civil War received verdicts from the New York Times. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind – with its cast of gallant gentlemen and cheerful slaves – was ‘in sheer readability, surpassed by nothing in American fiction’. William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! – with its gallery of ruthless parvenus and race-fixated slavers – featured ‘one of the most complex, unreadable and uncommunicative prose styles ever to find its way into print’. It soon found its way out again, while Mitchell’s novel won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and sold more than a million copies in just six months. The tastes of middlebrow readers had consequences for the reputation of the South. Was the history of the region murky, gothic, obscene? Or was it innocent, romantic, stirring? By the end of the decade, the answer proposed by Gone with the Wind had been imbibed by a generation.

Mary Flannery O’Connor hadn’t heard of Faulkner until she was in her twenties and a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (around this time she dropped ‘Mary’ from her name, to avoid sounding like ‘an Irish washerwoman’), but Mitchell’s novel was inescapable in her youth. She was born into a Catholic family in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, and was eleven – in her own description ‘a pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’ – when the novel was published. The following year, her father, an estate agent whose career had been scuttled by the Great Depression, was diagnosed with lupus; he died when she was fifteen. O’Connor grew up, according to her biographer Brad Gooch, ‘among a set of older women who were forever slipping on white gloves, and putting on big hats, to go off to chapter meetings of the Daughters of the Confederacy’. In 1939, when she was fourteen and living in a suburb of Atlanta, Victor Fleming’s film version of Gone with the Wind received its world première at Loew’s Grand Theatre – an occasion that was by some distance the most glamorous in the city’s history. The cinema was whites-only, meaning that Hattie McDaniel, whose performance would make her the first African American to win an Oscar, wasn’t invited, but Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh were, and around 300,000 people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of them. The crowd was entertained by a choir of Black children dressed as slaves, among them the ten-year-old Martin Luther King.

O’Connor’s story ‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy’, published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1953, lampoons the première and the sentimental vision of Southern identity it represented. This is how it begins:

General Sash was 104 years old. He lived with his granddaughter, Sally Poker Sash, who was 62 years old and who prayed every night on her knees that he would live until her graduation from college. The General didn’t give two slaps for her graduation but he never doubted he would live for it. Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn’t conceive of any other condition. A graduation exercise was not exactly his idea of a good time, even if, as she said, he would be expected to sit on the stage in his uniform. She said there would be a long procession of teachers and students in their robes but that there wouldn’t be anything to equal him in his uniform. He knew this well enough without her telling him, and as for the damn procession, it could march to hell and back and not cause him a quiver. He liked parades with floats full of Miss Americas and Miss Daytona Beaches and Miss Queen Cotton Products. He didn’t have any use for processions and a procession full of schoolteachers was about as deadly as the River Styx to his way of thinking. However, he was willing to sit on the stage in his uniform so that they could see him.

In terms of ‘sheer readability’, this is closer to Mitchell than Faulkner (O’Connor compared her ‘one-cylinder syntax’ unfavourably to his), but it’s no advertisement for Southern refinement. Sally Poker is desperate to have her grandfather appear in full battle dress at her graduation so that ‘they’ – not anyone in particular, ‘just all the upstarts who had turned the world on its head and unsettled the ways of decent living’ – could see ‘what all was behind her’. The only snag is that General Sash isn’t actually a general: ‘He had probably been a foot soldier; he didn’t remember what he had been; in fact, he didn’t remember that war at all.’ He was given the uniform to wear at ‘the preemy’, where after being introduced to the crowd as General Tennessee Flintrock Sash of the Confederacy, he stood to attention while the orchestra played the Confederate battle hymn. O’Connor’s stories – all of which showcase her enormous comic gifts for scene-setting and characterisation – tend to punish this sort of humbug. At the end of ‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy’, General Sash dies on stage, moments before Sally Poker arrives to receive her scroll.

O’Connor’s hearty contempt for Civil War nostalgia didn’t mean she underestimated the conflict’s effect on the attitudes of her community. She approved of Walker Percy’s remark that the South punched above its weight in literary terms ‘because we lost the war’. ‘What he was saying was that we have had our Fall,’ she explained in a speech to the Georgia Writers’ Association. ‘We have gone into the modern world with an inburned knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence – as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of our country.’

In her early twenties, she lived away from the South for short periods. After graduating from Iowa in 1948, she went to Yaddo to work on her first novel, Wise Blood (1952). She returned the following year and formed close friendships with two of the other residents, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Lowell’s anti-communist crusade soon caused a ruckus (he accused another writer, Agnes Smedley, of being a Russian spy and the colony’s director, Elizabeth Ames, of colluding with her). When he cut his stay at Yaddo short, O’Connor did the same and followed him to New York, where she rented a room that smelled like ‘an unopened Bible’ and expanded her circle to include Mary McCarthy, Robert Giroux (who went on to publish all of her books) and Robert Fitzgerald (who, together with his wife, Sally, edited her essays after she died). During a visit home she wrote to her agent: ‘Were it not for my mother, I could easily resolve not to see Georgia again.’

That decision would be taken out of her hands. When she was 25, and lodging with the Fitzgeralds in Connecticut, the pain and heaviness she had been experiencing for some time in her arms (she attributed it to typing) spread to her legs. She returned to Andalusia – the farm that her mother had moved to near Milledgeville, Georgia, after her father’s death – and was diagnosed with lupus. She remained there for the rest of her life, attending Mass with her mother every morning, reading and writing for the rest of the day, and conducting most of her friendships through letters. Her main source of amusement was raising peacocks. As her health deteriorated, she became unable to walk without crutches. Her first kiss (unchivalrously described by the man involved: ‘as our lips touched, I had a feeling that her mouth lacked resilience, as if she had no real muscle tension in her mouth … I had a feeling of kissing a skeleton’) was probably also her last. But she was able to turn the inadequacies of her personal life to her artistic advantage.

In her stories, one scenario crops up time and again: an over-educated adult child cooped up, for reasons of infirmity, with a smug, intellectually limited mother. ‘Good Country People’ is about a farm owner called Mrs Hopewell and her daughter, Joy, an atheist with a PhD, a heart condition and a wooden leg. ‘Mrs Hopewell thought of her as a child though she was 32 years old and highly educated.’ The story, which is told partly from Joy’s perspective, gains its best effects from the comedy of impotent resentment:

Nothing is perfect. That was one of Mrs Hopewell’s favourite sayings. Another was: that is life! And still another, the most important, was: well, other people have their opinions too. She would make these statements, usually at the table, in a tone of gentle insistence as if no one held them but her, and the large hulking Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her face, would stare just a little to the side of her, her eyes icy blue, with the look of someone who has achieved blindness by an act of will and means to keep to it.

O’Connor had a knack for assembling groups of bitterly mismatched characters, but she didn’t always know what to do with them. Too many of her stories end in heavily significant reversals or cartoonish acts of violence. In ‘Good Country People’, following a few pages of entertaining mother-daughter friction, a Bible salesman shows up – ‘a tall gaunt hatless youth’ with ‘prominent face bones and a streak of sticky-looking brown hair falling across his forehead’ – and Mrs Hopewell invites him to dinner. Joy (who in order to wind up her mother has changed her legal name to Hulga) decides to seduce him, but when they go up to the hayloft together, he steals her wooden leg. ‘I’ve gotten a lot of interesting things,’ he tells her. ‘One time I got a woman’s glass eye this way … And I’ll tell you another thing Hulga … you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!’

Compare that to ‘The Enduring Chill’, one of O’Connor’s best stories, which is inexplicably absent from Lauren Groff’s new selection. It follows an aspiring writer called Asbury, who after falling ill in New York returns to Georgia – abandoning his groundbreaking play about ‘the negro’ – to die at home with his mother. He has written her a letter (‘such a letter as Kafka had addressed to his father’) which he intends her to find after his death (‘her literal mind would require some time to discover the significance of it, but he thought she would be able to see that he forgave her for all she had done to him’). In the meantime, although he suffers from dizziness and chills, his mind performs with ‘terrible clarity’, leaving him vulnerable to his mother’s conversation, which is ‘largely about cows with names like Daisy and Bessie Button and their intimate functions’. It turns out – in a twist much more satisfying than the one in ‘Good Country People’, because it emerges directly from the set-up – that Asbury’s illness is undulant fever, which he picked up on a visit home the previous year, when as research for his play he invited the Black farmhands Morgan and Randall to drink raw milk with him (they very sensibly refused). He isn’t going to die after all, although he will be subject to frequent relapses. ‘When you get well,’ his mother tells him, ‘I think it would be nice if you wrote a book about down here. We need another good book like Gone with the Wind.’

In all of O’Connor’s work, there isn’t a single character you could describe as admirable, or even vaguely sympathetic. If they’re not pseudish, patronising liberals like Asbury, they’re complacent know-nothings like his mother, scheming charlatans like the Bible salesman or twisted ideologues like Hazel Motes, the hero of Wise Blood, who proselytises the Church of Christ without Christ and ends up blinding himself with quicklime. O’Connor said that her interest in such unedifying types was an antidote to ‘the hazy compassion demanded of the writer now’. If anything, she was inclined to exaggerate the unsavoury. ‘Certainly when the grotesque is used in a legitimate way,’ she explained, ‘the intellectual and moral judgments implicit in it will have the ascendancy over feeling.’

Her judgments were broadly religious in character. ‘If I were not a Catholic,’ she wrote in 1955, ‘I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified.’ She described her subject as ‘the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil’. The way this plays out in the stories is sometimes hard to distinguish from the classic Joycean epiphany. In her most famous story, ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’, a family from Atlanta are making a road trip to Florida when they cross paths with an escaped convict known as the Misfit. His accomplices divide up the family, taking first the father and the son, then the mother, daughter and baby, into the woods, where gunshots ring out. Last to be taken is the grandmother, who pleads for her life. ‘I know you’re a good man,’ she tells the Misfit. ‘You don’t look a bit like you have common blood.’ The Misfit – one of O’Connor’s deranged prophets-gone-wrong, like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood – seems unmoved by this. He’s no more susceptible to theological argument. ‘Jesus thrown everything off balance,’ he complains. ‘If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can – by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.’ His voice seems to crack as he considers, briefly, the challenges of faith. The grandmother, moved to sudden pity, reaches out to touch him on the shoulder. The Misfit springs back ‘as if a snake had bitten him’ and shoots her dead. ‘She would of been a good woman,’ he reflects afterwards, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’ It’s a terrifying performance, the brisk comedy of the early pages giving way to slow-motion horror, but O’Connor was very clear about the way she wanted it to be read: ‘In this story you should be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the grandmother’s soul, and not for the dead bodies.’

Some of her admirers have found this hard to accept. ‘Considering how intelligent she was, she was more pious than any other Catholic I’ve ever known,’ Hardwick remarked, as if piety and intelligence were obviously incongruous qualities. Harold Bloom felt that ‘O’Connor would have bequeathed us even stronger novels and stories, of the eminence of Faulkner’s, if she had been able to restrain her spiritual tendentiousness.’ She was aware that many of her readers felt this way. ‘You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject,’ she once said. ‘But it is an added blow.’

A source of deeper embarrassment to O’Connor’s admirers has been her attitude to race. When Groff approaches the subject in her introduction, she begins to waffle:

If short stories are to live for decades, they must be flexible; they must bend and shift under the various pressures of the changing world, which the author at the time of writing couldn’t have foreseen. Since O’Connor’s death in 1964, we have become aware of the tremendous violence that a single word can contain, and a modern audience has to confront the fact that she frequently uses the n-word, one of the most hurtful and hideous epithets in the English language, meant to dehumanise Black people … Some people may try to defend O’Connor by saying that when she was alive the word didn’t fully hold the freight it holds now, and that the word was commonly used in the South at the time and the use of it is in service of verisimilitude. But surely O’Connor, with her subtle understanding of cruelty and pain, knew how hideous the appellation was, how much violence it carries.

This doesn’t seem to make much sense. If ‘we’ (by which Groff presumably means white people) have only become attuned to the word’s violence ‘since O’Connor’s death’, it’s hard to see how she can be blamed for having used it. But what could she, or anyone else, possibly have imagined the word was for if not to ‘dehumanise Black people’? It’s also unclear why Groff believes that knowing ‘how hideous the appellation was’ stands in opposition to using it ‘in service of verisimilitude’. There’s no question that O’Connor was doing the latter. Gooch reports that when the poet John Crowe Ransom selected one of her stories to read aloud in Iowa, he substituted the word ‘negro’ for the slur. O’Connor complained that he’d ruined the story. ‘The people I was writing about would never use any other word.’

That O’Connor had a sophisticated understanding of the word’s function is obvious from ‘The Artificial Nigger’, another story that Groff leaves out of her selection. It concerns an old man called Mr Head who takes his grandson, Nelson, into Atlanta, with the aim of ridding him of his romantic view of city life. On the train they see a large, well-dressed, ‘coffee-coloured man’ and Mr Head squeezes Nelson’s arm hard until he moves past:

Mr Head’s grip on Nelson’s arm loosened. ‘What was that?’ he asked.

‘A man,’ the boy said and gave him an indignant look as if he were tired of having his intelligence insulted.

‘What kind of a man?’ Mr Head persisted, his voice expressionless.

‘A fat man,’ Nelson said. He was beginning to feel that he had better be cautious.

‘You don’t know what kind?’ Mr Head said in a final voice.

‘An old man,’ the boy said and had a sudden foreboding that he was not going to enjoy the day.

‘That was a nigger,’ Mr Head said and sat back.

The title refers to a lawn ornament that the pair encounter when they reach Atlanta, ‘the plaster figure of a Negro sitting bent over on a low yellow brick fence’. Perhaps it’s anachronistic to hear in it a comment on the construction of racial categories, but it’s clear that Mr Head is training his grandson to see Black people as separate and inferior, and that his choice of language is an important part of the lesson.

The story was included – like all but three of the dozen in Groff’s selection – in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). That book was mainly written before the Supreme Court had ruled on Brown v. Board of Education; it was published before the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Over the next few years, as the civil rights movement chalked up further victories, O’Connor touched on the subject in several of her letters. These comments can be hard to reconcile with one another. On the one hand, she wrote in 1963 to William Sessions, a professor at Georgia State University, that she felt ‘very good about those changes in the South that have been long overdue – the whole racial picture. I think it is improving by the minute, particularly in Georgia, and I don’t see how anybody could feel otherwise than good about that.’ On the other, her correspondence with the playwright Maryat Lee – who was dedicated to the cause of civil rights – suggests, at the very least, a gap between her intellectual response and her emotional one. From a letter dated 29 April 1959:

No, I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia. 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. I have read one of his stories and it was a good one.

This is awkward for those who have tried to make the case that she was anti-racist – the traditions of the society she fed on were the whole problem – but some of her subsequent letters to Lee are a lot worse. ‘You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway,’ she wrote in May 1964. ‘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.’ Two weeks later she expanded on this remark:

About the negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophising prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too. M.L. King I don’t think is the age’s 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.

In 2020 the New Yorker ran a piece by Paul Elie, the author of a biographical study of four Catholic writers including O’Connor, in which he suggested that her admirers had been ‘downplaying’ her comments about Baldwin ever since they were first published in 1974. This wasn’t entirely true: in 2001 an appreciation of O’Connor by Hilton Als, which appeared in the same magazine, quoted from one of the letters and described ‘a sense of loss’ on reading it ‘because of the limitations of O’Connor’s time and place and the inevitable restrictions they placed on her art’. Still, it was sufficiently true (several commentators have argued that her letters to Lee were a comic performance, as if that excused them) and the context in which Elie’s piece appeared was sufficiently febrile (George Floyd’s portrait was on the cover of that issue of the New Yorker) that it caused quite a fuss. Not long afterwards, Flannery O’Connor Hall, a dormitory building at Loyola University Maryland, was renamed Thea Bowman Hall in honour of an African American teacher and religious sister. A letter protesting the decision, with signatures from more than a hundred academics and writers including Alice Walker and Tobias Wolff, was delivered to the president of Loyola and diatribes against cancel culture appeared in various right-wing outlets, including Quillette and the Spectator. It seemed a bit of an over-reaction to a small Catholic university in Baltimore changing some of its signage.

O’Connor responded to desegregation with considerably more grace in her fiction than she did in her correspondence with Lee. She tackled the subject most directly in ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’, the title story of her posthumously published second collection of stories. It’s told from the perspective of Julian, another of her ineffectual, self-righteous liberals, whose mother is supporting him ‘until he got on his feet’. She likes him to accompany her to her weight-loss class every week, as she feels uncomfortable riding the buses at night now they’re no longer segregated. Julian’s only protest against this is the fantasy that he might one day ‘make friends with some distinguished Negro professor or lawyer and bring him home to spend the evening’, although to his chagrin ‘he had never been successful at making Negro friends.’

The action takes place on an evening when Julian’s mother is wearing a ‘hideous’ new hat, ‘less comical’, he thinks, ‘than jaunty and pathetic’. When a Black woman gets on the bus with her son, ‘who might have been four’, Julian is delighted to realise that she has on the same hat as his mother. (‘Your punishment exactly fits your pettiness,’ he thinks.) But to his dismay his mother decides to laugh off the coincidence, and turns her attention to the boy (‘she thought little Negroes were on the whole cuter than little white children’). She offers him ‘a bright new penny’ and is promptly knocked to the ground by his mother – the only character to emerge from the story with a scrap of dignity. ‘The topical is poison,’ O’Connor wrote to her friend Betty Hester after it was published. ‘I got away with it in “Everything That Rises” but only because I say a plague on everybody’s houses as far as the race business goes.’ To another correspondent, she wrote that the story ‘expresses what I have to say on That Issue’.

She wasn’t being entirely candid. For some years, she had been planning a sequel to ‘The Enduring Chill’. The only result published in her lifetime was a story called ‘Why Do the Heathen Rage?’, which appeared in Esquire in July 1963. It concerns an Asbury-like character called Walter who lives with both his parents (Asbury’s father was dead in ‘The Enduring Chill’) and occupies himself by writing letters to newspapers under various aliases. The accompanying contributor note explained that ‘Flannery O’Connor’s third novel is as yet untitled, and she says it may be years before it’s finished. This excerpt is from the beginning sections.’ Fragments of the rest were transferred to her archive at Georgia College and State University after she died. Scholars had agreed that they were unpublishable: ‘an untidy jumble of ideas and abortive starts, full scenes written and rewritten many times, several extraneous images and one fully developed character’, according to one. In a recent book, however, Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, has pasted them together with short essays bridging the cracks, and has even had a go at composing her own ending.

It’s a somewhat eccentric scholarly project. ‘Why Do the Heathen Rage?’ isn’t an unfinished novel like The Trial or The Mystery of Edwin Drood; if those were viable foetuses, this remains a zygote. Much of what Hooten Wilson has assembled is little more than exploratory doodling. The characters change dramatically – their habits, their attitudes, even their names – from one episode to the next. Some scenes display a strong through line from ‘The Enduring Chill’; others don’t. Still, you get a tantalising sense of where the novel might have been going. At the centre of the drafts is a civil rights activist called Oona Gibbs (seemingly a portrait of Maryat Lee) who lives at Fellowship Farm, which Hooten Wilson calls a ‘thinly veiled allusion to Koinonia Farm’, an interracial co-operative founded in 1942. Walter feels annoyed by what he sees as the self-righteousness of the community. ‘The very thought of them generated a peculiar fury in him, even though, as far as the moral issues were concerned, he was more or less on their side.’ He decides to teach Oona a lesson by writing her letters in which he pretends to be Black. Their correspondence gathers momentum, but when Oona decides to visit him, Walter gets cold feet. He feels pretty sure that she’s white, but ‘he saw that she could be huge and vulgar and emaciated and loud and brash – the letters admitted of anything.’

The novel is intriguing as a prospect, but it’s impossible to know exactly where O’Connor would have taken it. Hooten Wilson thinks that the contradictions in her attitude to the subject matter defeated her. ‘By not reading the issue of race with theological significance … O’Connor seems to have been unable to finish the story she longed to tell.’ Perhaps that’s right. Then again, her first two novels had both taken her a long time and at this point she was unable to concentrate on writing for more than an hour or two a day, so perhaps it was that. She died from kidney failure on 3 August 1964 – a month after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. She was 39 years old.

Had she lived longer, Hooten Wilson suggests, O’Connor might in due course have become ‘reconciled to integration’. This possibility is raised in response to Elie’s ‘incendiary’ piece, which Hooten Wilson still seems to be smarting from. ‘Although many of us tried to debate the issue … the damage had been done by the insinuation. If Flannery O’Connor said or did racist things, then she – and thus her work – needed to be cancelled.’ It isn’t obvious that Elie was insinuating any such thing. Even if he was, how much damage was actually done? O’Connor’s centenary last year was marked by new editions of the stories from major publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.* Nobody seems to have protested their appearance, nor have they been bowdlerised in any way. In fact, the only recent editor who has censored O’Connor’s writing is Hooten Wilson. She has chosen to redact offensive words, as when Walter’s mother thinks ‘he could not work, he could not even make n——s work,’ which has the peculiar effect of putting 21st-century manners into the head of a 1960s segregationist.