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The Bad Catholic discusses Graham Greene's 1935 novel England Made Me at The Eclectic Reader.

A Life Between the House and the Chicken Yard

“As for biographies, there won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.”
Flannery O’Connor


I have been thinking and reading a lot the last month about the life, work and faith of Mary Flannery O’Connor. In January, I was able to attend a four day retreat on the life and work of O’Connor at the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia. The retreat was led by Dr. Victor Kramer, retired professor of literature at Georgia State University in Atlanta. I had previously attended a retreat which Dr. Kramer led on the life and work Walker Percy (read my post about the previous retreat). Dr. Kramer is a true scholar and a Catholic gentleman.

During my pilgrimage of literary devotion to Milledgeville last year (read my previous post about my “Pilgrimage To the Shrine of Saint Flannery”), I read Lorraine Murray’s magnificent “spiritual biography,” The Abbess of Andalusia: Flannery O’Connor’s Spiritual Journey (2009).

After returning from Conyers, I was thirsty to hear more. First I read Professor Jean W. Cash’s Flannery O’Connor: A Life (2002). This morning I finished Professor Brad Gooch’s excellent biography Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (2009). As far as narrative writing skill and non-fiction as literature, Professor Gooch’s book wins the best biography writer contest hands down. In some places, Professor Cash’s book feels like reading a police report: “this and that happened and so and so witnessed it and said thus and such about it.” Gooch’s book delves more into O’Connor’s personal life and struggles while Cash’s book seems more oriented on O’Connor’s literary life. With these two books and Murray’s Abbess of Andalusia, there is no stone unturned in the short life of this great Southern Catholic author.

If I had to recommend just one book about O’Connor’s life, it would have to be Gooch’s. However, after reading all three, I feel like I have spent the afternoon sitting on the porch at Andalusia drinking Coca-Cola spiked with coffee (Yuk!, but according to Professor Gooch, Flannery liked it) and talking with Miss Mary Flannery about the great questions of life and faith.

O’Connor can be placed at the tail end of the so-called “Catholic Literary Revival,” of which her contemporary Thomas Merton was a part. O’Connor and Merton shared the same editor, Robert Giroux, and, although they never met, both admired the work of the other. Although she was one herself, Flannery derided the “Interlecshuls.” Her connections with the literati and Catholic intelligentsia of the 50's and early ‘60s is like a who's who of those “Interlecshuls.”

From a Christian and Catholic perspective, there is a tremendous amount of spiritual wisdom to be gained from a study of this life lived “between the house and the chicken yard.” This is somebody who found her God given gift and used it to the best of her ability despite her debilitating terminal illness. A strong Catholic who appears never to have wavered in her faith, she never lost her sense of humor. She remained optimistic and was still working on her stories up to the last.

Flannery obtained a prayer card with a prayer to Saint Raphael the Archangel which she prayed every day. Murray’s book contains O’Connor’s prayer to St. Raphael in the appendix:

O Raphael, lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us:

Raphael, Angel of happy meetings, lead us by the hand toward those we are looking for. May all our movements be guided by your Light and transfigured with your Joy.

Angel, guide of Tobias, lay the request we now address to you at the feet of Him on whose unveiled Face you are privileged to gaze.

Lonely and tired, crushed by the separations and sorrows of life, we feel the need of calling you and of pleading for the protection of your wings, so that we may not be as strangers in the province of joy, all ignorant of the concerns for our country.

Remember the weak, you who are strong, you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder, in a land that is always peaceful, always serene and bright with the resplendent glory of God.

More Waugh!

There's no such thing as enough Waugh! The Bad Catholic discusses Evelyn Waugh's Labels: A Mediterranean Journey at The Eclectic Reader.

PILGRIMAGE TO THE SHRINE OF SAINT FLANNERY

The BAD CATHOLIC recently had occasion to be in Milledgeville, Georgia. As you may know, Gentle Reader, Milledgeville was the antebellum capital of the State of Georgia. Along with visiting the Old Governor's Mansion and the Old Statehouse and riding by the famous Central State Hospital, which at one time was the largest mental hospital in the world, I also made the pilgrimage to Andalusia Farm, the home of Flannery O'Connor.

The people who have opened the house and farm to the public are doing the best they can, but many of the outbuildings of the dairy farm run by the O'Connors are in very bad shape. Much work needs to be done in the main house and on the grounds as well. I am sure that donations would be appreciated.

I very much enjoyed my visit. Like other visitors, I was struck by the fact that whereas 50 years ago Andalusia Farm, which is located five miles outside of Milledgeville on the road to Eatonton, was out in the middle of nowhere, now it is surrounded by Walmart, fast food restaurants, strip malls, car dealerships and motels. (As an aside, Eatonton is the home of another famous Georgia author, Joel Chandler Harris of Uncle Remus fame). The curator at Andalusia, Mr. Craig Amason, is very friendly and an expert on all things Flannery.

Miss Mary Flannery's bedroom on the first floor, which needs a paint job, shows the spartan conditions under which the stricken young writer lived and worked. There is a simple bed, a crucifix, some bookcases, a typewriter, and a pair of crutches. Flannery would write for several hours every morning and then in the afternoon she would read, write letters and enjoy the menagerie of animals including her famous peacocks. As I walked up to the house, I was delighted to see a peacock in a pen displaying his fabulous tail feathers.

I also went to the Saturday vigil mass at Flannery's Church, Sacred Heart Parish. This small 19th century structure is much unchanged from its original appearance. I was delighted to see what I presume are the pre-Vatican II statutes of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph flanking the altar and the intact marble altar rail. When I visited, there were young people standing outside waiting for the priest to open the doors to the Church to go to confession before mass, and the exposition of the blessed sacrament and recitation of the rosary were well attended. The Church was packed for mass. I can report that Catholic Christianity is alive and well in Middle Georgia.

Even though it's summer, there seemed to be plenty of students from Flannery O'Connor's alma mater, Georgia College and State University (formerly Georgia Women's College) still in Milledgeville. My tour guides at the Governor's Mansion and the Old Capitol Building were both history majors at Georgia College.

If anyone out there goes to Milledgeville, the place where the locals hang out downtown is a bar and grill across from the Georgia College campus called The Brick. The food is excellent, the beer is on tap, and the service from some very attractive young waitresses is outstanding. (Like Andy Griffith said "My wife told me I could look at the pretty girls so long as I never touched nary a one of 'em. So I've had to do an awful lot of lookin' to make up for that one disability.")

Flannery, history, worship and girl watching all in one trip. Can't do any better than that. It might make a good short story, don't you think?

The Violent Bear It Away

As I mentioned, the Bad Catholic has been catching up on reading Catholic authors. I have previously read Wise Blood, the short story collection A Good Man is Hard To Find and dipped into the letter collection The Habit of Being. I have also read most of the lectures and non-fiction contained in the Library of America's Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works.

After visiting Graham Greene's West Africa, I decided to pay a visit to Miss Mary Flannery's South. I am aiming to stay for a while.

O'Connor's best writing is in her short stories and in her letters. She wrote two novels Wise Blood and the one under consideration, The Violent Bear It Away. Of the two, I think that the latter is by far the better book. Toward the end, Wise Blood became confusing and hard to follow, whereas, The Violent Bear It Away moves inexorably towards its inevitable, horrifying ending.

Following Jesus is never easy and you are liable to get maimed in the process. Jesus went to suffering and death, and if we are going to follow him then we must be prepared to go to Crucifixion and death along with Him.

The Violent Bear It Away refers to a quote from the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible: "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away." Matthew 11:12.

The novel is the story of a young teenager, Francis Marion Tarwater. Tarwater has been raised by his great uncle, Mason Tarwater, who kidnapped the orphan child away from Rayber, Mason's nephew and Tarwater's uncle, in order to raise Tarwater to do the Lord's work.

Mason considers himself to be an Old Testament prophet. Rayber, referred to throughout the novel as "the schoolteacher," marries a social worker known as "the welfare woman." Mason tells young Tarwater that the welfare woman was older than Rayber and only able to give him one child, and the Lord spared the child from their evil ways the only way He could by making him dim-witted. Mason believes that he has been chosen by the Lord to baptize Rayber's retarded child, Bishop.

Anyone wanting the rest of the plot summary can read the entire thing here. Otherwise, I'm going to assume that everybody knows the basic story outline.

The Bad Catholic is also probably a bad literature critic, because, if I'm honest, just like I didn't know what I thought of Greene's The Heart of the Matter, I don't really know what I think of The Violent Bear It Away either. However, I'm a real fan of the Southern Gothic style. Greene is good but he ain't no William Faulkner, or Flannery O'Connor for that matter.

It's pretty obvious that Mason Tarwarter represents the religious outlook on life and that Raber, "the schoolteacher", represents the modern secular world view. Tarwater must either choose the Lord or choose modern agnosticism. In O'Connor's hands there is a certain fanaticism on both sides. Old Mason had been committed to the mental hospital, but in their way, both Rayber and his absent wife are just as crazy. There is a lot to think about here. Why would a good God let there be retarded children like Bishop? If there is no God, is everyone better off if Bishop was dead?

This being an O'Connor novel, even without knowing the ending, when I read that Rayber had once tried to drown his son in the ocean but couldn't go through with it, I knew that Tarwater would drown Bishop while baptizing him. Thus the paradox. If Rayber had drowned Bishop, in Rayber's secular world view, Bishop would just be dead. When Tarwater drowns Bishop and baptizes him at the same time, Bishop becomes the Lord's and is born to new life.

O'Connor's sacramental theology runs throughout the book. As in the teachings of the Catholic Church, baptism operates as a channel of grace which affects the individual whether the person wants it to or not. You can reject the grace, like Rayber has, but you can't ignore it. It exists whether you like it or not.

I also don't know what I think about Tarwater's voice that he hears througout the novel challenging him to go against his destiny. Is it the devil? The evil side of himself? The rational side? Because we know that following the Lord isn't rational. You got to be a fool for God like all them prophets in the Old Testament was, and like Saint Francis was. After all, Jesus himself went and got his self kilt when all he would have had to done to avoid it was to keep his mouth shut and not be a raisin' the dead and healing the lame and a makin' the blind see.

I have to say that the homosexual child molester that gets Tarwater near the end of the book surprised me as much as the murder of the family by the Misfit in A Good Man is Hard to Find surprised me when I first read it.

Tarwater is destined to be a prophet of the Lord. No matter what he does he can't shake off the destiny that the Lord has for him. He can try to reject it, but he can't get away from it.

Well, the Bad Catholic has a got get up from this here computer and quit bloggin' and git on with his bidnis of lawyerin' and makin' a livin' and fallin down and worshipin' the Great God Mammon and all like that.

The Violent Bear It Away is grotesque, silly, and profound all at the same time. I think that that's a good definition of a masterpiece. Don't you?



Miss Flannery rocking on the porch.

The Heart of the Matter

I've been catching up on my reading of "Catholic novels" lately. This afternoon I finished Graham Greene's famous 1948 novel The Heart of the Matter. Honestly, I don't know what I think of it. Like everything I have ever read by Greene so far, the book is well written and engaging. The characters are well drawn and the reader comes to care about what happens to them.

However, The Heart of the Matter is a strange novel. I can't do any better than George Orwell's review for the July 17, 1948 edition of The New Yorker magazine. Orwell's review is literature in its own right:

Here is the outline of the story: A certain Major Scobie, Deputy Commissioner of Police and a Catholic convert, finds a letter bearing a German address hidden in the cabin of the captain of a Portuguese ship. The letter turns out to be a private one and completely harmless, but it is, of course, Scobie's duty to hand it over to higher authority. However, the pity he feels for the Portuguese captain is too much for him, and he destroys the letter and says nothing about it. Scobie, it is explained to us, is a man of almost excessive conscientiousness. He does not drink, take bribes, keep Negro mistresses, or indulge in bureaucratic intrigue, and he is, in fact, disliked on all sides because of his uprightness, like Aristides the Just. His leniency toward the Portuguese captain is his first lapse. After it, his life becomes a sort of fable on the theme of 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave', and in every single instance it is the goodness of his heart that leads him astray. Actuated at the start by pity, he has a love affair with a girl who has been rescued from a torpedoed ship. He continues with the affair largely out of a sense of duty, since the girl will go to pieces morally if abandoned; he also lies about her to his wife, so as to spare her the pangs of jealousy. Since he intends to persist in adultery, he does not go to confession, and in order to lull his wife's suspicions he tells her that he has gone. This involves him in the truly fearful act of taking the Sacrament while in a state of mortal sin. By this time, there are other complications, all caused in the same manner, and Scobie finally decides that the only way out is through the unforgivable sin of suicide. Nobody else must be allowed to suffer through his death; it will be arranged as to look like an accident. As it happens, he bungles one detail, and the fact he has committed suicide becomes known. The book ends with a Catholic priest hinting, with doubtful orthodoxy, that Scobie is perhaps not damned. Scobie, however, had not entertained any such hope. White all through, with a stiff upper lip, he had gone to what he believed to be certain damnation out of pure gentlemanliness.

I have not parodied the plot of the book. Even when dressed up in realistic details, it is just as ridiculous as I have indicated. . . .

The Bad Catholic has to agree with Orwell. The book is well written, engaging, interesting, but . . . Orwell is right, the plot is ridiculous. Orwell is absolutely spot on, in my opinion, when he says that "If he (Scobie) were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed in Hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women."

At one point in the novel, when Scobie is taking communion in a state of mortal sin, and has decided to kill himself to spare the feelings of his wife and his mistress, he prays that God accept his damnation on their behalf. Greene is here almost parodying the Catholic theology of offering up one's suffering on behalf of others as a form of prayer. We can offer up suffering because Christ suffered. How can one offer up a sin as prayer? It is certainly interesting fiction but it's very, very bad theology.

Orwell's classic review of The Heart of the Matter has some other great quotes:

"In addition, it is impossible not to feel a sort of snobbishness in Mr. Greene's attitude, both here and in his other books written from an explicitly Catholic standpoint. He appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingue in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only, since the others, the non-Catholics, are too ignorant to be held guilty, like the beasts that perish."

Or this quote, which I absolutely love:

"Every novelist has his own conventions, and, just as in an E.M. Forster novel there is a strong tendency for the characters to die suddenly without sufficient cause, so in a Graham Greene novel there is a tendency for people to go to bed together almost at sight and with no apparent pleasure to either party."

The Heart of the Matter is acknowledged to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It's fun to think about the issues raised in the book and it's fun to sit around and feel sorry for poor Scobie, but it's terrible theology. And in fact, the ending of the novel shows that Scobie accomplished nothing by his suicide. His wife Louise knew he was having an affair all along and figures out that her husband committed suicide. Scobie's girlfriend, Helen, can't live with Scobie's death and sinks into moral depravity by being willing to sleep with any man who wants her. When asked what he thought happened to Scobie, Evelyn Waugh famously said "Scobie is in Hell." The Bad Catholic has to agree.


Graham Greene

The Mystery of the Church

"I shall pray," the man said without hope.

"Why not?" Scobie said.

"You are an Englishman. You wouldn't believe in prayer."

"I'm a Catholic, too," Scobie said.

The fat face looked quickly up at him. "A Catholic?" he exclaimed with hope. For the first time he began to plead. He was like a man who meets a fellow countryman in a strange continent. He began to talk rapidly of his daughter in Leipzig; he produced a battered pocketbook and a yellowing snap-shot of a stout young Portuguese woman as graceless as himself. The little bathroom was stiflingly hot and the captain repeated again and again. "You will understand." He had discovered suddenly how much they had in common: the plaster statues with the swords in the bleeding heart; the whisper behind the confessional curtains; the holy coats and the liquefaction of blood; the dark side chapels and the intricate movements, and somewhere behind it all the love of God. . . . They had in common all the wide region of repentance and longing.

From THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene.