BOOK REVIEW
The Thirteenth Century Lives
William Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of
Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874-1908 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008), $50, 401 pp., Hardcover.
Brad Gooch, Flannery: A
Life of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), $30, 448
pp., Hardcover.
Reviewed
by James G. Bruen, Jr.
Flannery O’Connor and G.K. Chesterton were artists,
and not merely of the written word. “I don’t know how to write,” O’Connor told
the adviser to her high school newspaper, Brad Gooch recounts in Flannery.
“But I can draw.” In high school and college she regularly contributed cartoons
to the school newspaper, and, for graduate study, she applied to “the
journalism program at Iowa, mulling a possible career in newspaper political
cartooning.” Chesterton, of course, attended the Slade School of Art and
continued to draw throughout his life, though, notes William Oddie in Chesterton
and the Romance of Orthodoxy, “his formal artistic studies did little to
turn him into a real artist.”
In Mystery
and Manners, O’Connor commented on the propensity of writers to draw.
“I know a good many fiction writers who paint, not because they’re any good at
painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things.
Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of
showing things.” O’Connor and Chesterton were two of the last century’s best at
showing things in fiction. And neither O’Connor, a cradle Catholic, nor
Chesterton, a convert, was content to depict things superficially, stripped of
any deeper or spiritual meaning.
I found Wise
Blood oppressive. O’Connor kept me pinned under her thumb for the
entire novel, never letting me up to breathe. Her prose controlled my
reactions, never allowing me any respite. I finished the book with no desire to
ever reread it, nor was I eager to read any other novels by her. O’Connor is
today best known for her short stories, many of which are brilliant, and each
of which made me eager for more.
From childhood, Flannery O’Connor was defiantly
different, a taciturn loner who was to find herself at home in the thirteenth
century with Thomas Aquinas. In Georgia, O’Connor stood apart and observed
others, who become the grist for her stories. O’Connor’s adult friends were
from elsewhere, drawn to her by her writing. A slow, meticulous writer who
produced a small corpus of work, O’Connor was nevertheless very confident. “‘She was very serious about her
mission in life, and had a sort of destiny,’ says Barbara Hamilton. ‘She knew
she was a great writer. She told me so many times.’”
With a wry sense of humor,
“weird imaginings,” and contrariness, O’Connor is known for the grotesque,
which, given her artistry, is not condemnation, but praise. As Chesterton wrote
in The Everlasting Man,
artists understand that one branch of the beautiful is the ugly, the grotesque.
Indeed, Chesterton frequently used the gargoyle as an “emblem for Christian
exhilaration and generosity,” notes Oddie. “Laughter and love are everywhere,”
observes Adam Wayne in Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
“The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous
grotesques.” O’Connor is also known for peacocks, which she raised and wrote
about. This, too, would have delighted Chesterton. At Bethlehem, he wrote in The
Everlasting Man, “all the eyes of wonder and worship which had been turned
outwards to the largest thing were now turned inward to the smallest. The very
image will suggest all that multitudinous marvel of converging eyes that makes
so much of the coloured Catholic imagery like a peacock’s tail.”
Gooch begins with a quotation from O’Connor: “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.” Many
reviewers have taken this bait, commenting on the difficulty of writing her
biography. Perhaps, though, it was more quip than prediction, an example of her
wry wit. O’Connor, who preserved carbon copies of her correspondence and who
took pains to explain her writing and control its interpretation, can easily be
viewed as endeavoring to aid expected biographers.
Gooch thoroughly and artfully describes O’Connor’s upbringing,
family, education, literary style, work habits, literary friendships, and the
real-life observations and situations that underlie her stories, as well as the
impact of her lupus on her writings. Gooch’s treats O’Connor’s Catholicism
descriptively, sometimes uncomprehendingly, and he does not delve deeply into
the underlying Catholicism inherent in her stories, which therefore do not
spring to life in his book. “Now I think it behooves me to try to establish
with you the basis on which reason operates in [A Good Man is Hard to Find],”
said O’Conner in remarks to introduce a reading of that story at Hollins
College. “Much of my fiction takes its character from a reasonable use of the
unreasonable, though the reasonableness of my use of it may not always be
apparent. The assumptions that underlie this use of it, however, are those of
the central Christian mysteries. These are assumptions to which a large part of
the modern audience takes exception. About this I can only say that there are
perhaps other ways than my own in which this story could be read, but none
other by which it could have been written. Belief, in my own case anyway, is
the engine that makes perception operate.” A thorough biography would explore
such statements in depth. Gooch’s depiction of O’Connor is more detailed than
Paul Elie’s in The
Life You Save May Be Your Own, but Elie’s book is more ambitious
concerning the Catholic meaning in her work.
Although Gooch describes O’Connor’s cartoons at length and whets the
reader’s appetite to sample them, none are found in Flannery. Gooch
includes a man’s tasteless description of a kiss the man insists he did not
force upon a passive O’Connor. And, Gooch’s depiction of her funeral is meant
to be moving, but fails. Otherwise, he writes well, and the biography is well
researched, informative, and worth reading, particularly by those enamored of
O’Connor’s writing. Those unfamiliar with her work should instead begin with A
Good Man is Hard to Find, a collection of short stories that bears the
title of one of them, and, as she said in Mystery and Manners, “just try
to enjoy them.”
Two of Gooch’s statements brought me up short. They
may be the key to understanding his approach to Flannery O’Connor; they
definitely color it.
“No matter what routines she did privately, in her
stories she always presented blacks with dignity,” writes Gooch. What is he
implying? That fiction must always depict blacks with dignity? That O’Connor
depicted others (who? Jews? whites? Poles? Native Americans?) as lacking
dignity? That blacks are exempt from original sin? Gooch’s statement is
patronizing, as if he said she always presented Indians as noble or gays as
superior. O’Connor would have recoiled from his generalization. When “a student
complimented her dignified, respectful portrayal of a black servant,” Gooch
recounts earlier in the book, “Flannery’s answer went something like this, ‘No.
That’s just the way he was.’”
O’Connor recognized the
dignity inherent in each person as a creature and child of God, but also
depicted fallen nature. Original sin and free will suffuse her stories. Her
approach thus makes some people uncomfortable. After she had “shift[ed] her
direction away from art toward what was called ‘imaginative writing’ at Iowa,”
the poet John Crowe Ransom, founder and editor of the Kenyon Review,
made a classroom visit to her writers’ workshop and chose one of her stories to
read to the class. “When Ransom came across the word ‘nigger,’ he refused to
read it aloud, substituting the word ‘Negro.’ ‘It did spoil the story,’
Flannery complained [later]. ‘The people I was writing about would never use
any other word.’” Or as O’Connor put it in another context, “I say a plague on
everybody’s house as far as the race business goes.” A “type of artistic
racism,” Gooch sniffs, “worked well for her.” By saying that she always
presented blacks with dignity, Gooch perhaps is merely signaling that it’s okay
for enlightened, educated folks to read O’Connor despite her use of the word
“nigger” in her fiction.
Similarly, when Gooch writes that O’Connor was
“opening up to Teilhard, and moving beyond while never abandoning an absolute
Thomism that some felt ‘too straightjacket,’ or old-fashioned,” what does he
mean? How does one move beyond but never abandon an absolute Thomism? Can Gooch
really mean that her views evolved but never changed? Or, again, is he again
merely sending a signal, this time telling the enlightened that they may read
O’Connor despite her Catholicism?
Edmund White, Professor of Creative Writing at
Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts, contributes a blurb on the book’s dust
jacket. “With elegance and fairness, Gooch deals with the sensitive areas of
race and religion in O’Connor’s life,” he says. Perhaps to enlightened,
educated folks, especially openly gay men such as Professor White, religion is
a “sensitive area.” How, oh how, could a gifted writer be a faithful Catholic,
even a Thomist?
Brad Gooch, a professor of English at William
Paterson University, is gay, too. He has written extensively on issues of
interest to homosexuals, such as “finding the boyfriend within.” His proclivity
is reflected in Flannery in his discussions of sexuality, and he seems
disconcerted by O’Connor’s apparent chastity. He describes Wise Blood’s
cruising homosexual predator as “a broadly stereotypical character” used to
exhibit “her extreme theology.” He does, however, allow O’Connor to speak for
herself, and she is eloquent: “As for lesbianism, I regard that as any other
form of uncleanness. Purity is the twentieth centuries (sic) dirty word
but it is the most mysterious of the virtues.”
“When I finally printed out the manuscript,” writes
Gooch, ending Flannery on a personal note, “my partner, Paul
Raushenbush, the ultimate ‘good guy,’ asked brightly, after years of daily
discussions, ‘What will we talk about now?’ I’m confident that we’ll find
plenty of other topics to discuss, Paul, though nothing quite the tenor of
Flannery O’Connor.” Even O’Connor, with her focus on the grotesque, could not
have envisioned that the last words of her biography would be a schmaltzy
proclamation of homosexuality.
Although Gooch is among that portion of O’Connor’s audience
that takes exception to the central Christian mysteries, he nevertheless is
attracted to her writing. For him, O’Connor’s talent trumps her medieval,
backward faith, at least when it comes to her stories. And, of course, if she
had not died so young, well, Teilhard de Chardin would have led her out of her
primitive beliefs to enlightenment. For Gooch, it’s acceptable to read O’Connor
despite her racism and her religion.
Flannery is an enjoyable read, but my estimation of it waned
as I reflected afterwards on what I had read. In contrast, my esteem for Chesterton
and the Romance of Orthodoxy waxed upon reflection. Oddie’s volume, the
first of two that together will constitute a complete biography of Chesterton,
delves deeply into Chesterton’s intellectual development. Although not a
difficult read, it’s a bit academic. Oddie seems intent on correcting each
mistake, and clearing up each misinterpretation or mistaken emphasis, that he
finds in those who have written previously of Chesterton, including, naturally,
Chesterton himself. Sometimes this approach is illuminating; other times it
interrupts the flow; the less important errors and discrepancies should have
been relegated to endnotes.
DAUNTING TASK
Oddie undertakes a daunting task: “to trace the
process of intellectual discovery which comes to a fairly clear terminus ad
quem in 1908 with Orthodoxy.” His book’s “aim,” Oddie says, “is to
trace the growth of Chesterton’s mind from early childhood to the point in his
literary career at which … he had fully established the intellectual
foundations on which the massive oeuvre of his last three decades was to be
built.” He thus chooses to focus on Chesterton’s writings, rather than on a
“cornucopian assembly” of “endearing anecdotes, love letters, holiday
reminiscences, [and] the posthumous memories of friends.”
Chesterton’s wit is inescapable, so it necessarily
percolates through Oddie’s analysis though it is not his focus; indeed, the
volume sometimes seems to avoid it. “Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers
who ever existed,” commented Étienne Gilson; “he was deep because he was right;
and he could not help being right; but he could not either help being modest
and charitable, so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he
was right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made
up for being deep by being witty. That is all they can see of him.” Without
that wit, though, Chesterton would attract far few readers today; once
captivated by his wit, contemporary readers can then be captured by his depth.
Oddie extensively uses Dr.
R.A. Christophers’ recent catalogue of Chesterton’s papers at the British
Library, a resource unavailable to previous biographers, which, Oddie predicts,
will be “the foundations on which all future Chesterton scholarship will be
built.” He has delved deeply into those archives, exploring materials
unconsidered by earlier biographers and revisiting those they had used, without
limiting himself to them. “One of the most tantalizing problems of studying
Chesterton’s intellectual development lies in the difficulty of establishing
the external influences which nurtured it,” writes Oddie. “[O]ne of the main
ways Chesterton absorbed ideas” was “through the medium of private
conversation, through probably endless discussions and arguments, often
extending into the small hours of the morning.” For Chesterton, “personal
contact, cor ad cor, was his lifeblood.” And, of course, after the death
of his father, Chesterton famously had boxes of the copies of his writings that
his father had kept hauled to the dump, only to have his secretary, Dorothy
Collins, salvage what she could.
The “permanent anticipation of surprise induced by
Chesterton’s father,” Oddie notes, became “the driving force of his almost
unconscious tendency towards the unearthing of paradox in apparently unfruitful
soil.” A happy childhood and adolescence were followed by a spiritual crisis
brought on by his exposure to aesthetes, decadents, impressionists, and
pessimists while he attended the Slade School of Art, but Chesterton emerged
from the confusion and darkness to discover what he already knew, as he put it
in his Autobiography:
“The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged
sunrise of wonder; so that a man might suddenly understand that he was alive,
and be happy.”
In a detailed review of Chesterton’s fiction and
non-fiction writings, including a short story he dictated to an aunt when he
was three years old, Oddie recounts Chesterton’s journey from doubt and
anti-clericalism to faith to Christian belief to a firm Anglo-Catholicism that
Oddie thinks barely indistinguishable from the Roman Catholicism that later
welcomed him. “In the circles in which Chesterton moved as an Anglican, his
Marian devotion was not unusual; but once beyond the invisible walls of the
Anglo-Catholic ghetto, he was to find his singularity in this respect, as in
others, increasingly irksome, and when in the end he was received into the
Roman Catholic Church, he was grateful to find his Catholic eccentricities
normalised as he joined the mainstream. As he explained in his Autobiography,
‘I do not want to be in a religion in which I am allowed to have a
crucifix.’”
Chesterton’s newspaper disputes with Robert Blatchford, a determinist,
in 1903-04 marked Chesterton’s emergence as a committed apologist for
Christianity. “[A]fter this ‘landmark’ year of 1903, in which for the first
time Chesterton publicly, persistently, and sometimes aggressively confessed
his faith, nothing he ever wrote about again was ‘irrelevant to the proposition
that Christianity is true,’” writes Oddie, quoting from Chesterton’s dictum,
“You cannot evade the issue of God; whether you talk about pigs or the binomial
theory, you are still talking about Him. … Things can be irrelevant to the
proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the
proposition that Christianity is true. Zulus, gardening, butcher’s shops,
lunatic asylums, housemaids and the French Revolution – all these things not
only may have something to do with the Christian God, but must have something
to do with Him if He really lives and reigns.” Notes Oddie, “if Christianity
was true, then those who had abandoned it would believe what was false: the
abandonment of orthodoxy had had consequences, not always understood, for
individuals and for the culture they had created.”
In publishing Heretics in 1905,
Chesterton described his method of argumentation: “I revert to the doctrinal
method of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general hope of getting
something done.” As he later wrote in St. Thomas Aquinas: “The
fact that Thomism is the philosophy of common sense is itself a matter of
common sense.” By the time of The Man Who Was Thursday,
published early in 1908, six months before Orthodoxy, “Chesterton
has become entirely possessed by the convert’s knowledge that he is living
suspended between two worlds. For him now, everything can be, inevitably must
be, understood in two entirely different ways, which must somehow be
reconciled. Everything has two meanings: that which can be known or experienced
by human reason and the material senses; and that which may be perceived only
when the world is seen, however dimly, sub specie aeternitatis. He is
‘in possession of’ the ‘impossible good news’ which ‘transforms ‘every other
thing’: and almost all his writings may now be seen as an attempt – often
unspoken, sometimes declared – to create a bridge, across which some part at
least of this good news may be carried.”
This volume is the first part of what promises to be
the definitive intellectual biography of Chesterton. In it, Oddie thoroughly
and convincingly plumbs Chesterton’s intellectual development, culminating with
“the great apologetic base camp of Orthodoxy, from which future ascents
to the theological summits of The Everlasting Man and St Thomas
Aquinas were to set out.” Allegations that Chesterton was an anti-Semite
did not arise early in his career, but, by demonstrating Chesterton’s early
hostility to anti-Semitism, Oddie sets up the discussion that undoubtedly will
be included in the second volume. Serious fans of Chesterton will await Oddie’s
second volume eagerly, as do I. Those less familiar with Chesterton may prefer
to begin with either the more popular approach of Joseph Pearce’s biography, Wisdom and Innocence, which
remains an admirable introduction to Chesterton, or Dale Ahlquist’s Common Sense 101: Lessons
from G.K. Chesterton, a cheerful systematic presentation of
Chesterton’s thought that brings Chesterton to life better than many
biographies.
This review was
published in the April, 2010 issue of Culture
Wars.
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