Political Companions to Great American Authors

Henry T. Edmondson, Henry T. Edmondson III

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813169422
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Acclaimed author and Catholic thinker Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) penned two novels, two collections of short stories, various essays, and numerous book reviews over the course of her life. Her work continues to fascinate, perplex, and inspire new generations of readers and poses important questions about human nature, ethics, social change, equality, and justice. Although political philosophy was not O'Connor's pursuit, her writings frequently address themes that are not only crucial to American life and culture, but also offer valuable insight into the interplay between fiction and politics.

A Political Companion to Flannery O'Connor explores the author's fiction, prose, and correspondence to reveal her central ideas about political thought in America. The contributors address topics such as O'Connor's affinity with writers and philosophers including Eric Voegelin, Edith Stein, Russell Kirk, and the Agrarians; her attitudes toward the civil rights movement; and her thoughts on controversies over eugenics. Other essays in the volume focus on O'Connor's influences, the principles underlying her fiction, and the value of her work for understanding contemporary intellectual life and culture.

Examining the political context of O'Connor's life and her responses to the critical events and controversies of her time, this collection offers meaningful interpretations of the political significance of this influential writer's work.

I

O’Connor’s Politics

1

Flannery O’Connor and the Agrarians

Authentic Religion and Southern Identity

John D. Sykes Jr.

Nothing was more instrumental in shaping Flannery O’Connor’s politics than her placement in the two polities with which she was constantly identified, the Roman Catholic Church and the American South. Even in the midst of resisting stereotypes associated with Catholics and southerners, she defined herself in relation to them, as she does most explicitly in the essay “The Catholic Novelist in the South.”¹ Given her investment in the topic of southern identity, it is surprising that she did not read I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition until 1964, the year of her death.² When she did read it, she wrote her friend Betty Hester that the book marked “the only time real minds have got together to talk about the South.”³ O’Connor’s high opinion of the authors of these essays, which were published in 1930, was grounded in personal experience. Four of the twelve contributors would serve at various times as her teachers, editors, referees, and friends. Indeed, it is not too much to say that John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Andrew Lytle were the faces of the southern literary establishment for O’Connor when she came of age as a writer—especially if Tate’s wife, Caroline Gordon, is added to the list. As may be seen from Sally Fitzgerald’s chronology, Ransom, Warren, Tate, and Lytle all interacted with O’Connor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop during O’Connor’s two years as a student there.⁴ As editor of the Kenyon Review, Ransom published a number of O’Connor’s stories, beginning in 1953. Lytle later had a similar editorial relationship with O’Connor as editor of the Sewanee Review. And after O’Connor left graduate school, Caroline Gordon became her unofficial writing coach. O’Connor would continue to send stories-in-progress to Gordon for the remainder of her career.

Thus, although O’Connor was unfamiliar with the Agrarians’ 1930 manifesto, she was very well acquainted with former Agrarians. Although O’Connor took no interest in the policies and programs that the group advanced in the 1930s, she shared their concern to describe and defend a certain type of society. She was decidedly influenced by their characterization of the South. Finally, however, O’Connor’s love of the South was outweighed by her devotion to the other polity that claimed her, the Church. O’Connor’s explicitly theological notions of human community and history ultimately offer an alternative to the Agrarian vision. Indeed, in her own way, she solved one of the major problems that confounded them.

The Agrarians and the Dilemma of Self-Consciousness

Any treatment of the Agrarian movement must acknowledge two facts at the outset: aside from a few key attitudes and broad principles, the contributors’ views diverged nearly as often as they coincided; furthermore, the practical aims of the group were never achieved. By 1940, the movement was, in effect, dead. The Agrarian men O’Connor met in the postwar era had long since abandoned the cause. Nonetheless, the philosophical agenda at the heart of the original enterprise had lasting influence in shaping definitions of the South.

The impetus for what became the Agrarian movement was generated by Ransom, Tate, and their friend Donald Davidson, perhaps the most passionate southern patriot of the group. Having met at Vanderbilt University, where Ransom was a young English professor, and where first Davidson, then Tate, enrolled as students, the three became close associates in the group of poets called the Fugitives. By the mid-1920s, Davidson was an instructor at his alma mater, and although Tate had left for New York and France, the three corresponded regularly.⁵ At least two factors drove the three to action. The first was their reaction to the Scopes Trial of 1925 and the attendant criticism directed at the South as a benighted, backward region deserving of H. L. Mencken’s scathing appellation of 1917, “Sahara of the Bozart.” The second was dissatisfaction with what they considered a “New South” defense of the region put forward by progressives such as those found at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, notably Howard Mumford Jones in English and Howard Odum in sociology.⁶ From the point of view of the future Agrarians, the New South strategy of seeking to discredit attacks on the South by insisting that the region was on its way to becoming like the rest of the country was completely misguided. Ransom and Tate in particular took the opposite tack. They maintained that the South was praiseworthy precisely because it had not succumbed to the acids of modernity. It remained a traditional society not yet alienated and fragmented by what they began to call “industrialism.”⁷ Although the two volumes that eventually emerged from the Agrarian response took up additional issues and included other agendas, the effort to champion the virtues of the South as a cure for the deepest modern social ills remained central.

In making their case for the South, the Agrarians revived an older tradition of conservative political thought in the region, as Eugene Genovese argues in The Southern Tradition.⁸ However, they combined this line of thought with the critique of modernity Tate found in T. S. Eliot and Ransom found confirmed in Unamuno and Santayana. These contemporary sources for the Agrarian stance were more influential than one might suppose. Tate in particular was driven to a “southern” position only after having fallen under Eliot’s influence. During his Fugitive years at Vanderbilt (roughly 1918–1924), Tate scorned southern cultural life as provincial. He detested sentimentality and championed the modernist turn in literature, which had already swept Europe.⁹ His animosity toward the southern intellectual establishment of the time was exacerbated by a personal contretemps with Edward Mims, the chairman of the Vanderbilt English Department. With his New South leanings and Victorian tastes, Mims represented the sort of moderation and mediocrity that the brilliant and impetuous Tate could not tolerate. Tate insulted Mims severely enough to sting the older man into refusing to recommend Tate for graduate school, effectively shutting him out of an academic career, at least in the short run.¹⁰ Tate’s unhappiness with things southern was not limited to campus politics. Before heading for New York, he complained to friends of the oppressive dullness of southern rural life. As would be true for many southern writers, Tate went “north toward home,” in Willie Morris’s phrase. He later told an interviewer, “I think if I’d stayed in the South I might have become anti-Southern, but I became a Southerner again by going East.”¹¹ Living outside the south reinforced his “southernness,” and the influence of Eliot made him more deeply critical of modernity. In effect, Tate decided to wrest the idea of the South from people such as Mims and rehabilitate it into an ideal that could resist the slide of Western societies into the Wasteland.¹²

Ransom’s motives follow a similar trajectory. Unlike Tate, he remained in Nashville during the period that produced I’ll Take My Stand, but he had already had a lengthy sojourn away from the South, having studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Feeling that he was neither adequately appreciated nor sufficiently compensated at Vanderbilt, he left the South for Kenyon College in 1937. But, like Tate, his experience and his reading led him to look to the South for his social ideal.

The crucial run-up to Ransom’s participation in the I’ll Take My Stand project was his book God without Thunder.¹³ In it, Ransom puts forth a view of religion that anticipates Tate’s contribution to the manifesto volume and points us to the key connection between the Agrarians and O’Connor. Ransom’s personal history disposed him to see religion as a key component of southern identity. His father and uncles were Methodist ministers in the Nashville Conference, and throughout Ransom’s childhood the family moved to a new charge every four years in keeping with the Methodist circuit-riding tradition. Given the argument of the book, it seems a bit odd that Ransom would dedicate the volume to his father, but no doubt he meant to acknowledge that he owed his firsthand acquaintance with religion to his family.

In God without Thunder, Ransom argues that one of the great losses in modern, scientific culture is the ability to feel awe. Living in a world he believes he can understand and control, modern man has nothing to fear and nothing to worship. With everything cut to his own measure, man finds that nature has been stripped of mystery, and life has been rendered petty. Insofar as belief in God continues, the God worshipped by moderns is a tamed God, a God without thunder. Ransom urges instead a return to belief in a God of power—unpredictable and terrible, but worthy of worship. Belief in such a God fills a psychological need in human nature; indeed, holding such a conviction is necessary to do justice to the totality of human experience. Ransom does not flinch from calling the required religious attitude fundamentalism. With the Scopes Trial in the recent past as he writes, his embrace of the term is an audacious stroke. However, Ransom does not have in mind a naïve belief that sees no distinction between myth and fact. His “fundamentalist” is one who understands the mythic nature of his religious affirmation and is able to affirm it nonetheless. He is a sophisticate bearing little resemblance to the fanatics with which O’Connor scandalized her secularized readers. Ransom’s “fundamentalist,” when he speaks religiously, speaks “as if.” Ransom defends what may appear to be duplicity on the part of such a worshiper in this way: “I hardly believe that he would be either nobler or more intelligent if he elected to cross his fingers whenever he repeated his creed. It would be asking too much to require him to take the pains to say to himself each time, ‘remember, this is myth, not fact; this is als ob, my hypothesis; don’t be taken in.’ If he did that he would seem only pusillanimous.”¹⁴ Indeed, in a secularized, scientific culture, Ransom suggests such religious belief is an act of courage.

Unfortunately, Ransom’s argument also threatens to turn belief into fiction. It is no coincidence that his recommendation to embrace religious myth as if it were literally true bears a strong resemblance to Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” Ransom’s approach to religion is essentially poetic, and herein lies the chief weakness of his position—one that O’Connor will assiduously avoid. The reader of poetry knows she must eventually close the book and adopt the more skeptical attitude of the real world; even great poetry yields only a secondary reality. Since religion is supposed to concern ultimate reality, however, treating it as fiction is self-defeating. When at the end of God without Thunder Ransom rallies his readers, whatever their religion, to “insist on a virile and concrete God, and accept no principle as a substitute,” he is doing so on the basis of a principle concerning God, namely that “God” has many valid concrete (mythological) expressions.¹⁵ But in that case, how could one take any “virile and concrete God” as more than an expression of a general principle of divinity? Ransom’s advice is incoherent. Belief becomes a self-conscious assertion that qualifies what only seems to be a wholehearted affirmation. No wonder Ransom eventually gave up the practice of religion and turned his intellectual energies to literature.

Ransom’s unacknowledged dilemma shows itself in a different form in Tate’s essay for I’ll Take My Stand. When Ransom undertook the writing of an introductory essay for the volume, the topic of religion fell to Tate. “Remarks on the Southern Religion” is the most ambitious and sophisticated essay in the volume, but the lines of its argument are often obscure, reflecting the difficulty Tate had in writing it. In fact, the essay is in part an attack on the South, or at least a deep criticism of its past. According to Tate, deeply flawed motives marred the very first English settlements. Jamestown was launched as a commercial enterprise. A spirit of competitive, capitalistic individualism was thus present from the beginning, fostered by the Protestant ethos the settlers brought with them. Jeffersonian notions of democracy exacerbated the individualism rooted in Protestantism, compounding the problem. And so although the South managed to develop into a stable society governed by tradition, social hierarchy, a code of manners, systems of kinship, and love of the land, it harbored a fatal flaw capable of bringing it down to the level of its Yankee neighbors. Tate’s analysis suggests that the South was undone not by the direct northern “aggression” of the Civil War and Reconstruction but rather by impulses that it had always harbored.

Harking back to the model of medieval Europe, Tate submits that the principal ingredient the South lacked to sustain its social order was the Roman Catholic Church. The South was an anomaly, “a feudal society without a feudal religion.”¹⁶ Unlike Protestantism, the Catholic Church presupposes and reinforces social unity, hierarchy, and a sacramental attitude toward nature. A South unified by Catholicism, Tate implies, might have withstood the cultural crisis provoked by the war. However, he stops short of calling for Catholic conversion of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I. O’Connor’s Politics
• Part II. Kindred Spirits
• Part III. O’Connor and Modernity
• Part IV. Beyond Politics
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index