The Devil Is the Greatest Believer

Reading and re-reading the work of a favorite author. I watch a new documentary about her and an old film based on one of her works.

In anticipation of the new PBS American Masters documentary Flannery, I’ve been re-reading all of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction and comics and taking my first look at her religious meditations in A Prayer Journal and the adaptation of her first novel into the John Huston film Wise Blood.

The television documentary, directed by Mark Bosco and Elizabeth Coffman, is well-made and interesting enough to be enjoyable to any casual viewer. I’ve read and admired O’Connor’s work for years and liked learning a number of facts and episodes from her life and character that I didn’t know. For those who haven’t read her, the documentary will make you want to find out what the fuss is about. The things many people know about her, like her fascination with peacocks, devout and scholarly Catholic faith and death from lupus at the age of thirty-nine are adroitly interwoven with novel insights about her relationships, opinions, quirks and flaws, done effectively in the current style in which crisp, tasteful animations and the Ken Burns effect are cut with talking-head commentary and primary source recordings and documents.

The documentary also offers fresh insights about her stories and novels. Of her four books’ worth of fiction, you can’t go wrong even if you’re going to confine yourself to just one book. If you’ve never read her stuff, pick any of them.

Everything That Rises Must Converge was O’Connor’s second short story collection and was published posthumously in 1965. In a Little Free Library I recently found a copy with the first edition cover design. The introduction is by O’Connor’s close friend, the eminent writer and critic Robert Fitzgerald. Of the nine stories in the book, six of them involve a character meeting an ironic and usually gruesome death. Characters in the other three stories have brushes with mortality but take little solace in the privilege to go on living. All of the protagonists are stalked by missed opportunities to pierce through the veil of self-deception and recognize and accept grace when it is within grasp. I’m particularly affected by the story The Lame Shall Enter First, which has several elements in common with my favorite O’Connor piece The Violent Bear It Away, especially in the character of a self-satisfied and faithless man who thinks he can imbue his life with meaning by civilizing a rowdy and headstrong adolescent boy. The myopia of the atheistic character in this particular story is no vendetta against the non-religious on O’Connor’s part; she had it in for fools and hypocrites of all kinds.

O’Connor’s first novel Wise Blood, published in 1952, still feels ahead of its time. It’s funny and grotesque and manages to be both bleakly realistic and head-scratchingly absurd. Like O’Connor herself, all of her protagonists are Southerners, and Hazel Motes of Wise Blood is a particularly strange one. A young veteran of World War II who has no home left to return to, he travels to a city he doesn’t know for reasons he doesn’t seem to understand and starts preaching his own anti-religion from the hood of his piece-of-shit car. And that’s leaving out the capers with the museum mummy and the gorilla and the good fun that ensues when the blood starts to flow.

Her second novel is called The Violent Bear It Away, and my only gripe with the Flannery documentary is that it makes no mention whatever of the O’Connor book I like the best. Where Wise Blood is essentially a comedy (albeit a biting, confrontational one), O’Connor’s second novel has the feeling of pagan deities hurling lightning bolts at one another in a zero-sum struggle for the fate of their own parochial concerns and of everything in the universe, which to them seem indistinguishable. While Wise Blood is more violent than The Violent Bear It Away, the characters in the earlier novel almost uniformly have no clear sense of why they feel compelled beyond control to do the peculiar things they do, while in the latter book the characters’ actions are motivated, serious and determined. They are willing to kill for their beliefs because they understand them much better than they understand themselves. One character sees himself as a prophet and another, his adult nephew, sees himself as a scholar. The nephew’s nephew, a lad on the verge of adulthood who is torn between two men who want his potential to redeem their own failures, is left to realize the full power of his will to mediate between them by becoming a reluctant instrument of the Lord. This story ends with a sense of the grotesquerie and claustrophobia of O’Connor’s gothic vision of the South closing in around a fallen angel who has finally decided to pick up a flaming sword and start cutting his way out of a moral ambush. I generally avoid audiobooks, but I didn’t have a physical copy of this book handy and checked out a recorded version from the public library read by an actor named Mark Bramhall who did an excellent job. Looking over his output as an audiobook reader, I note that Bramhall has also recorded versions of Ron Chernow’s great biography Grant and of Oren Jay Sofer’s book Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication, which is the first prose book I read in 2021.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories is the short story collection that brought O’Connor to prominence when it was published in 1955. There are fewer stories that end in violence compared with her other collection, but the several that do manage to be more shocking and surprising, particularly the infamous title story which leads off the book with a bang, or rather several of them. I listened to part of this collection in the form of an audiobook read by an actor named Marguerite Gavin who does as strong a job as Bramhall, especially since in this instance she has way more characters to embody over the course of a short story collection. But when I got my hands on a physical copy from the library I switched over and finished re-reading this book the old-fashioned way. The last story, The Displaced Person, is one of O’Connor’s longest and best. There’s also a funny story called A Late Encounter with the Enemy where O’Connor gets a chance to take some shots at the Southern pride and hoopla around Gone With the Wind, a movie she apparently found insipid, possibly in part because, as the documentary states, her mother wished she could write about nice people the way Margaret Mitchell did. Thank goodness she didn’t.

Before she was a ground-breaking fiction writer O’Connor was a cartoonist, and quite a good one at that. She had dabbled in combining writing and drawing since girlhood but took it on as a serious craft when she was attending college in Georgia during the War years and became active in student journalism, producing stylistically distinctive single-panel cartoons that are largely about campus life and are impressive for mostly having been made not on paper but as linocut prints. In 2012 the comics publisher Fantagraphics released Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, which collects all of O’Connor’s extant cartoon work. An essay from the book’s editor Kelly Gerald helps provide meaning and context. This is a fascinating aspect of O’Connor’s life and we are fortunate that these comics have been so well-preserved in this book, which is worth tracking down after having first spent time with O’Connor’s fiction.

In 2013 O’Connor’s longtime publisher released A Prayer Journal, which transcribes and reproduces a handwritten journal of prayers and self-examination that O’Connor maintained for a time in 1946 and 1947 when she was a student at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she initially intended to study journalism but ultimately came to terms with her destiny as a fiction writer. It covers some of her feelings about this change in her life as she accepted her responsibilities and aspirations as an artist and affixed them in the hierarchy of her values beneath her love for God and desire to be an honest Catholic. This is primarily for hardcore Flanneryans, though the entire read is worth it for the entry from January 2, 1947, where O’Connor, several months shy of her twenty-second birthday, records succinctly that “No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist. The devil is the greatest believer & he has his reasons.” That she could formulate insights like these with such force and simplicity as part of the foundation of her worldview at this early and crucial turning point in her creative development says a lot about why she was able to later become a writer who is rightly remembered as one of the greatest.

Robert Fitzgerald was O’Connor’s literary executor after her death in 1964, and eventually his son Michael Fitzgerald shepherded the idea of a Wise Blood film into the purview of the legendary filmmaker John Huston, who ended up directing the picture with a well-cast young Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes. Dourif is a versatile thespian who later played eccentrics and outsiders in high-profile projects like the Lord of the Rings films and the transcendent and sublime HBO program Deadwood. Harry Dean Stanton and Ned Beatty are equally well-cast as Motes’s rivals Hawks and Shoats. Dan Shor does a serviceable job playing Motes’s would-be acolyte Enoch Emery, though to my eye the Shor of 1979 was too good-looking to embody the character convincingly. In general it seems to me that all of the actors in the movie are too skilled to resist injecting a few more IQ points into their characters than the characters seem to have on the page. The movie also transcribes the novel’s postwar action faithfully but vaguely updates the setting to the late Seventies, with the odd result of seeming to trap the proceedings between eras and muddying the tone. And for such a dark, grotesque and funny story, the insistent refrain of “The Tennessee Waltz” on the soundtrack sweetens the flavor too much. (I wonder if it would have been possible for Wise Blood to have gotten made if not for the huge success a few years earlier of Deliverance, another film adapted from a great novel by a great Southern writer. Deliverance also features a distinctive performance from Ned Beatty and famously made use of discordantly happy music in a brutally violent story. Wise Blood seems to have borrowed a few tricks from Deliverance and managed an admirable failure where Deliverance struck a resounding success.) The Wise Blood movie is not an overall success but it’s a unique artifact and a strange addition to Huston’s distinguished filmography. The person who probably deserves the most credit for what works about the production is whomever was in charge of casting.