Self-parody of the artist

Flannery O’Connor’s “Why Do the Heathen Rage?” is a scholar’s reconstruction of the novel O’Connor left unfinished when she died. Jessica Hooten Wilson, who has written elsewhere about O’Connor and Dostoevsky, and says she learnt to write fiction by reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, has worked from archive scraps to imagine a full-length story. Between chapters of new, funny and psychologically astute material (typically, grotesquely satirical of Southern country life, but untypically political), we get Wilson’s editorial explanations, illuminating O’Connor’s relationships and attitudes – her responses to friends and to the stories in the news at the time of writing this fiction about the “civil rights movement, euthanasia, and poverty”.

The novel’s plot centres on Walter, a twenty-eight-year-old “scholar” living with his parents on their farm in O’Connor’s home state, Georgia. Workshy and feckless, Walter embarrasses everyone by spending his days writing letters to people he doesn’t know and his nights tending the counter at the local liquor store. An update, we read, on the protagonist of O’Connor’s short story “The Enduring Chill”, Walter is a failed painter rather than a Time magazine-featured novelist. He is also O’Connor’s wickedly funny, gothic self-parody. Incapacitated by the lupus that had killed her father, she was forced to move back home in her mid-twenties, right as her career took off, and spent her fourteen remaining years known in America as a genius, but to the folks back home as “Regina’s daughter who writes”.

Wilson hints at this through imagined set pieces between O’Connor and her mother. She also sketches the background for Walter’s weird adventures in a sort of pre-internet trolling: his adoption of “epistolary blackface” to expose the hypocrisy of the white civil rights campaigner Oona Gibbs. Walter/O’Connor imagines Gibbs dressed in “sandals and peasant skirt”, determined to “be a veteran of Mississippi jails” and “to suffer with the oppressed but not silently”. She is based partly on Dorothy Day – leader of the Catholic Worker Movement, a civil rights antecedent – and partly on the activist and playwright Maryat Lee, whom the novelist also befriended by mail and who became a “muse to her developing interest in writing about social activism and its complications”. Just as O’Connor would goad Lee with parodies of Southern racism, so we hear her, in her journals, snared between admiration of Day’s compassionate bravery and an “ugly and uncharitable” schadenfreude at the news that she had been chased out of the South by local anti-integrationists. “I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral”, she mused.

That difficult two-mindedness is everywhere in Why Do the Heathen Rage? (as it is throughout O’Connor’s writing), and it deserves deeper contemplation than Wilson gives it. Like many scholars of problematic authors, she is understandably anxious to justify her subject. We hear O’Connor’s reticence about “entering the inscape of her black characters” explained with reference to Jane Austen, who avoided writing all-male dialogue since she had “never been a man alone in a room with another man”. The use of the n-word by O’Connor’s white characters is here presented with reference to John McWhorter’s work in linguistics and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “In Defence of a Loaded Word”. But the subject would be better served by joining the dots between Walter’s “rage” at the “naïveté and self-righteousness” in Oona’s pamphlets and O’Connor’s in her letters to Lee; or between his observation that “hysteria affects syntax” in her letters and O’Connor’s sardonic impatience with activists.

Like much of O’Connor’s fiction, Why Do the Heathen Rage? shocks powerfully by showing the inner workings of racism on a mind. It gives you the thoughts of people for whom the “sorrows” of Southern racial enmity were “muted and well-known and dependable”, a perspective in which “the negroes were shiftless and secretive and resentful, but they worked for what you could pay them, and they still cut each other, not their white people”. For Walter’s mother it is also a world in which desperation to preserve the old way of things is exacerbated by the uncanny certainty that “everything was wrong underneath”. This is the same O’Connor who celebrated “long overdue” change to “the whole racial picture”, but refused Lee’s offer to arrange a public meeting with James Baldwin for fear that her readers would no longer trust her objectivity. The same O’Connor, also, who saw racial progress in aesthetic as much as moral terms – “fuel for [her] kind of comedy and [her] kind of tragedy”.

In bringing these unpublished materials into the light, and hammering them into something like the shape of a novel, Jessica Hooten Wilson might not quite have achieved her aim to “serve the artist”. Her recombination of scenes works well enough to give a sense of Walter’s comedies and tragedies, and of the same in the world that produces them. But in some of her explanation of context, and her bold attempt to write in the novel’s missing ending, she falls flat of O’Connor’s nuance. What she has managed, though, is to offer one last audience with a voice of rare, if troubling, insight.

Guy Stevenson is a lecturer in English at Goldsmiths and Queen Mary, University of London. His first book, Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture, was published in 2020

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