Cancelling Flannery O’Connor

Thirteen years after naming a new residence hall at Loyola University Maryland in honor of the Catholic author Flannery O’Connor, Jesuit Father Brian Linnane, the university’s president, removed the writer’s name from the building.

The structure will now be known as “Thea Bowman Hall,” in honor of the first African American member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration.

Bowman, a Mississippi native, was a tireless advocate for greater leadership roles for Blacks in the Catholic Church and for incorporating African American culture and spiritual traditions in Catholic worship in the latter half of the 20th century. Her sainthood cause is under consideration in Rome.

Jesuits, man.

You might find this hard to believe, but once upon a time, the Jesuits had a reputation for being the most intellectual of the Catholic Church’s orders.

A reader sent me this letter going around academic circles:

Dear Friends,

I hope this finds you well. Please forgive this group email, but I wanted to communicate as quickly as possible about this time-sensitive issue.

As you may have heard, the president of Loyola University Maryland has decided to remove Flannery O’Connor’s name from one of its buildings on campus.  The impetus behind the initiative was Paul Elie’s article on O’Connor and race that appeared in the June 22nd NEW YORKER.  (I have a lot to say about that article, but not in this space.)   A Loyola  student read the piece, contacted me, since my name and a “review” of my new book (RADICAL AMBIVALENCE: RACE IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR) appears in the article, and asked if I would help her with the process.  I was, as you might imagine, horrified, and advised her not to go ahead with her petition, but she felt very strongly about the issue and, obviously, won over the president.

I, along with a group of O’Connor scholars, professors, and writers, have drafted and are circulating a letter of protest to the president. Among our 70 plus signatories thus far are Alice Walker, Richard Rodriguez, Mary Gordon, and an impressive gathering of distinguished O’Connor scholars and critics.  The letter appears below.  If you would like to add your name to the list of signatories, we would greatly appreciate your support. Also, if there are other people you might like to pass this along to, please feel free–or, if you prefer, please send their names to me.

Thanks for your consideration & prompt attention to this time-sensitive matter. Not to be too dramatic, I feel as if we are poised at a crisis point.  Cancelling confederate generals and taking down civil war monuments is a very different matter from cancelling writers, thinkers, and artists, none of whom were ever presumed to be saints or paragons of conventional virtue.  This is antithetical to university culture and life. Few, if any, of the great writers of the past can survive the purity test (which is a Puritanical rather than a Catholic impulse). If a Catholic Jesuit university effectively “cancels” Flannery O’Connor, why keep Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoyevski and other racist/anti-semitic/misogynist writers?  No one will be left standing.

Cheers & Onward,
Angela

P.S.  I realize this letter may not reflect the perspective of each person I have included in this email. Please feel free to send a letter of your own devising to President Linnane, if you prefer. In fact, the more letters he receives, the better. Richard Rodriguez, for instance, is signing on and, in addition, is sending his own–others have indicated they intend to do the same.

Here are the president’s email addresses:  blinnane@loyola.edu  & president@loyola.edu.

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Ph.D.
Associate Director

The Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies

Fordham University

That’s a good letter, and deserves wide support.

Here’s a link to the Paul Elie piece that provoked this cancellation. Elie writes that O’Connor — a rural Georgia white woman born in 1925 — had a “habit of racial bigotry.” Excerpts:

Those letters and postcards she sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman. In Massachusetts, she was disturbed by the presence of an African-American student in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her.

It’s not fair to judge a writer by her juvenilia. But, as she developed into a keenly self-aware writer, the habit of bigotry persisted in her letters—in jokes, asides, and a steady use of the word “nigger.” For half a century, the particulars have been held close by executors, smoothed over by editors, and justified by exegetes, as if to save O’Connor from herself. Unlike, say, the struggle over Philip Larkin, whose coarse, chauvinistic letters are at odds with his lapidary poetry, it’s not about protecting the work from the author; it’s about protecting an author who is now as beloved as her stories.

More:

After revising “Revelation” in early 1964, O’Connor wrote several letters to Maryat Lee. Many scholars maintain that their letters (often signed with nicknames) are a comic performance, with Lee playing the over-the-top liberal and O’Connor the dug-in gradualist, but O’Connor’s most significant remarks on race in her letters to Lee are plainly sincere. On May 3, 1964—as Richard Russell, Democrat of Georgia, led a filibuster in the Senate to block the Civil Rights Act—O’Connor set out her position in a passage now published for the first time: “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. 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 after that, she told Lee of her aversion to the “philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind.” Ravaged by lupus, she wrote Lee a note to say that she was checking in to the hospital, signing it “Mrs. Turpin.” She died at home ten weeks later.

Those remarks show a view clearly maintained and growing more intense as time went on. They were objectionable when O’Connor made them. And yet—the argument goes—they’re just remarks, made in chatty letters by an author in extremis. They’re expressive but not representative. Her “public work” (as the scholar Ralph C. Wood calls it) is more complex, and its significance for us lies in its artfully mixed messages, for on race none of us is without sin and in a position to cast a stone.

That argument, however, runs counter to history and to O’Connor’s place in it. It sets up a false equivalence between the “segregationist by taste” and those brutally oppressed by segregation. And it draws a neat line between O’Connor’s fiction and her other writing where race is involved, even though the long effort to move her from the margins to the center has proceeded as if that line weren’t there. Those remarks don’t belong to the past, or to the South, or to literary ephemera. They belong to the author’s body of work; they help show us who she was.

Read it all.

I think Elie makes a fair criticism. I love O’Connor, and hate that there was any flaw in her character, but she was a woman of her time and place. It is breathtakingly anti-intellectual, and anti-art, to believe that this character flaw negates her monumental literary achievements. There is no American Catholic fiction writer greater than Flannery O’Connor, and there the Loyola University of Maryland, a nominally Catholic institution, is going to shit on her because she held ugly opinions that were overwhelmingly common in mid-century rural Georgia. As others have pointed out, O’Connor’s work — especially the story “Revelation” — shows an artistic conscience struggling with her sinful nature. Ruby Turpin is the villain of that story. That O’Connor saw some of herself in that villain only makes her human, and adds to the moral and spiritual drama of her life. Of all O’Connor’s characters, the two I struggle against most in myself is Asbury (“The Enduring Chill”) and Mrs. Turpin — not because of her racism, but because of her pride. “Revelation” is a stunning rebuke of pride, and the pride that undergirded the racism of people like Ruby Turpin. One can learn more about what it means to be a Christian — and a Christian under judgment — by reading one story of Flannery O’Connor’s than by reading a bookshelf full of tepid politically corrupt work by writers who never give evidence of having had a sinful thought, or an actual heartbeat.

To live in the South — or at least to have grown up in the South in my generation — is to live with the awareness that most of the older people you know have a great blindness on the subject of race. This is a moral failing that cannot be separated entirely from the goodness in their hearts. Nor, though, can what is good and even great in them be separated from what is sinful and unworthy. This is true of every man and woman who walks this earth, but you can see it so vividly in the South. What a terrible thing this is, what these Philistines are doing to O’Connor. As Angela Alaimo O’Donnell rightly says, if Flannery O’Connor, despite her artistic greatness, gets canceled, who can possibly stand?

One big reason these Jacobins, especially the young ones so full of savage righteousness, keep winning is that older people who ought to know better — like the president of Loyola of Maryland — keep surrendering to the mob.

A university — even a Catholic university — is not a seminary. Flannery O’Connor was chosen for this honor not because she is a saint, but because she was a peerless American Catholic writer of fiction. Great art comes from suffering and struggle, including struggle against one’s own sinful nature. O’Connor herself, in her own lifetime, had to contend with people who thought it was wrong for a nice Catholic woman like her to write stories that had such violence in them. Those were ordinary pew-sitters; you can’t really be surprised by that. What is surprising, indeed shocking, is that now educated Catholic opinion, at least at Loyola of Maryland, now shares the same philistinism as the 1950s laity.

This is a sign to high school students  about whether or not Loyola of Maryland is a hospitable community to free thought and scholarship.

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