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She is herself a fascinating character. She was proud of the regionalism of her work and rarely wandered far from her Georgia farm after leaving the Iowa Writers Workshop, yet she saw the whole world as clearly as Emily Dickinson had from her Amherst garret. A humorist sharp enough to prompt giggles from graduate students, she nonetheless takes deadly aim at the foibles of the human heart in almost all of her stories. While her characters seem drafted from freak shows, we know them well because they are not as strange as they often appear.
I first read O'Connor's fiction almost thirty years ago when I was a student at a small Christian college in Iowa, the place where I teach today, hundreds of miles from any literary center. At that time she was championed, even canonized, as the premiere Christian writer, the role model, the Joan of Arc of all onward, Christian soldiers. She was one of us, a Christian writer who made it big on sheer excellence.
I was surprised, a few years later, when Raymond Carver assigned Mystery and Manners (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1979), O'Connor's book of essays, to a fiction writing class I took when Carver was a visiting lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He told us he thought no other book on the craft was quite as comprehensive, quite as simple, quite as strong. He said we all had to read it--the whole thing, not just selected essays. So I did. And I blushed when I read lines like this from "The Fiction Writer and His Country": "I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that. I don't think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction."
I was uncomfortable reading those professions then and I still am, because brandishing one's religious faith in literary circles seems almost gauche. That O'Connor would be so forthright, so guileless, so out-of-the-closet was, in a way, inspiring to me, a believer; but such a testimonial, like the gospel's own self-assessment, cut like a two-edged sword. Bolstered as I was by her profession, I felt very uncomfortable in the neighborhood of such frankness, despite the fact that I'd grown up singing finger-wagging Sunday School songs about not hiding one's light under a bushel. I was conscious then--and still am--of the embarrassing violations of public space Christian zealots all-too regularly make. I knew a whole cast of holy fools myself, in fact, and I wanted no part of in-your-face evangelism. I never forgot James Russell Lowell panning his own work in his "Fable For Critics," where he described himself as a poet toting "a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme." And I knew the intent of the warning he gives to himself in that poem: "The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching/Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching."
What's more, it seemed clear to me that throughout my graduate programs at two different universities, paranoid as I might have been, the only form of bigotry not officially banned from the classroom was prejudice against most religious faiths--especially Christianity. I didn't want to be martyred, never sought it in the least, and I wondered what my peers thought when they read O'Connor's unabashed testimonies. I saw myself, accurately or not, as a victim of their oddly raised eyebrows. Even though it was no less a presence than Flannery O'Connor who said those things--and Ray Carver who told us to read them--her words were something of an embarrassment because they were--and are--potentially very offensive. They scared up areas of my life that I was happier keeping out of the public forum.
It's ironic, in a way, that in O'Connor's work, her most sympathetic believers tend to be zealots, holy rolling embarrassments. These characters, unlike their more culturally astute Christian brothers and sisters--the ones she always humbles in her stories-- blunder rather unabashedly into bizarre forms of spiritual ecstasy. O'Connor herself was nothing at all like the caricature tub-thumper her work frequently, although backhandedly, admires. In the landscape of her fiction as well as her Georgia neighborhood, a landscape that often seems, as some have said, not so much God-ruled as God-haunted, she was no shivering Pentecostal but a stolid Roman Catholic. She wasn't anything like Mrs. May's embarrassing neighbor in "Greenleaf," a "huge, human mound," who looks monstrous in prayer, "her legs and arms spread out as if she were trying to wrap them around the earth." At the Iowa Writers Workshop, people say, she was known by the excellence of her work, as well as her silence in the classroom. But her profession of faith, in Mystery and Manners at least, is baldly candid.
O'Connor knew the pitfalls of preaching, however, as well as its perceived arrogance. "The first product of self-knowledge," she says in that same essay, "is humility," a virtue hard to come by in the culture of contemporary Christian evangelicalism, with its show time preachers, its gaudy mega-church excesses, its simplistic answers, and its dutiful marriage to political conservatism. O'Connor, not only by the excellence of her work, but also by her profession of faith--as well as her silence--continues to teach believing writers how to be, specifically those who desire to take both faith and writing as seriously as she did.
There can be no question about the fact that the phrase "Christian writer"
is problematic, when applied to O'Connor or anyone else who subscribes
to the teachings of Jesus Christ. It asserts a double identity.
But most of us connect to more than one sub-grouping of the populace.
For instance, my ethnic background makes me a Dutch-American writer, I
suppose.
What's more, we're all regionalists,
in a way, since our immediate world often commands our immediate attention;
O'Connor's fiction, like that of Faulkner and even John Grisham, simply
wouldn't work if set in Minnesota. What's more, most of us are set
in a certain time period. We are, like it or not, Sixties-types,
Generation X-ers, Boomers, or some label yet to be devised. Steinbeck's
masterful portrayals of California life evoke a place that doesn't exist
anymore. The truth is we all can be both called and defined by a
number of different names.
In some ways, therefore, being a "Christian writer" presents internal challenges
no different from those facing a gay novelist or a Native American poet,
since each of us has to choose a primary identity to hold with the most
spirited conviction. At one time or another in their writing lives,
Gish Jen or Amy Tan likely needed to ask themselves what they owed their
own people, how much they would say about their communities, maybe even
how they might, as writers, serve those communities. Christian writers,
like Chinese or Jewish writers or writers from the Pacific Northwest, need
to ask themselves very similar questions.
And those questions are not easy to answer. Almost every social group
one can imagine has its own fiery fundamentalists; fundamentalism exists,
after all, wherever people stake claims to the absolute truth. In
every sub-culture, among Texans and Mormons and the Lakota Sioux, some
argue that reneging on one's commitment to what they see as their primary
community is a refutation of identity. Are women writers primarily
women
or primarily writers? Is there a wholly unique African
American aesthetic? These are complex questions, but questions almost
every writer, at least individually, has to think through as he or she
faces the empty page.
One significant difference between being a "Christian" writer, and, for
example, a Latino writer, is money, plain and simple. For some Christian
writers, there's lots of it. For almost fifty years, the Christian
Booksellers Association (CBA), an organization of 2,500 bookstores in the
US, has provided evangelical Christian readers with novels and non-fiction
general interest books as a supplement to the annually strong business
they do in Bibles, hymnals, and biblical reference texts. What the
CBA calls "Christian products," which includes much more than books, annually
brings in three billion dollars or more, an amount that doesn't pass unnoticed
by mainline or New York publishers.
Lots of Christian writers publish exclusively with presses that market
exclusively in Christian bookstores, and a good number of Christian writers
make a decent living. But the castle wall around the CBA bookstores
successfully keeps the infidels out. The criteria by which books
are chosen for marketing in CBA bookstores are very rigid--even though
the CBA itself doesn't stand guard on the walls of Zion. Publishers
are very much aware of the thin-skinned sensibilities of CBA bookstore
owners, and violating the code means banishment from the aisles, stockpiles
in the factory, and early remaindering.
Just exactly what does pass muster? One might expect, of course,
that a clear sense of a "Christian," evangelical vision is required,
an open acknowledgment of orthodox Christian faith. But many bookstores'
written or unwritten guidelines also cover subject matter, style, and word
choice, because the mission, at least in part, is not to offend anyone
in the pew--there are biblical injunctions against causing offense after
all, and many of the devout will be more than happy to offer quick reference
to chapter and verse. In many CBA stores, the only potentially scandalous
fare on the shelves is the Bible itself, whose seamy stories always manage
to get by, creating the impression that it is the only book in the store
not written by a Christian.
Although a few Christian writers do very well financially by way of CBA
bookstores, the stores are often a world unto themselves, providing "Christian
products" for, of course, Christian people. Although many mom-and
pop bookstores still see their work as mission, the engines of the huge
Christian publishers who use their outlets have begun to push out books
and publicity as effortlessly as Madison Avenue. Three billion, after
all, is no small potatoes.
Of course, entrepreneurs discovered centuries ago that the devout were
remarkably easy pickin's, wonderfully capable of paying big money for spiritual
trinkets and paraphernalia. Increasingly, it seems, CBA bookstores
have become evangelicalism's Hallmark shops, wholesomely stocked with T-shirts,
ink pens, wall hangings, and porcelain dolls adorned with scripture verses.
In many CBA bookstores today, such merchandise takes up more floor space
than bookshelves. Today, the word book does not appear in
the vision statement of the of the CBA: "to see excellent Christian
products impact the lives of Christians everywhere." In recent years,
approximately 28% of the total take in CBA bookstores came from the sale
of books--and that includes Bibles. What has happened is that the
CBA bookstore, right there between The Gap and Victoria's Secret, has become
a cultural center for the ever-burgeoning and politically conservative
American evangelicals.
Christian writers who choose to write exclusively for the that market,
therefore, are forever ghettoized. A significant percentage of those
who patronize CBA stores would not, because of their faith,
darken the doorway of a Walden Books, a B. Dalton bookstore, or a Barnes
and Nobles. They want their stores, like their reading material,
perfectly safe. On the other hand, many a Walden Books patron wouldn't
enter a CBA store for fear of being proselytized--and they would be.
The result, in both marketing and readership, is a vast chasm that separates
evangelical Christian books from the mainline readership, something that
threatens those writers who profess the Christian faith, but who see a
world much less sanitized than that prescribed and enforced by CBA bookstore
censors. Many Christian writers find themselves too worldly or too
earthy for those rigid constraints, but too religious in orientation for
mainline publishers and agents. The Mason-Dixon line that separates
the American Booksellers Association and the Christian Booksellers Association
means that some developing Christian writers are intimidated by CBA publishers,
who question their faith based on their work, and ABA publishers,
who question their work based on their faith.
Last year, a newspaper reviewer told me she liked a recently published
novel of mine, even though she'd thought she wouldn't when the review was
assigned her. "Why does the book say the word Christian on
the back cover?" she asked me. "Now nobody is going to read it."
Yet the same novel was reviewed almost fearfully in some Christian watchdog
publications, who claimed it should be read very carefully since its content
included references to homosexuality, drug use, and adultery.
So while the CBA has been a boon to some, it's been a thorn to others.
Although it's true that obstreperous Christians have made writing and publishing
in the larger market tough on themselves, that doesn't diminish the fact
that the greater literary culture in this country, like the broader arts
culture, has been less than sympathetic to any kind of fusion of faith
and work. When art and literature search for meaning, most fundamentalist
Christians, like true believers of any stripe, have no need of it.
Why should they? They've already arrived at the truth.
Without a doubt, there will be conflict between moralism and aestheticism
as long as people continue to think and express themselves. Dr. Daniel
De Nicola, of Gettysburg College, writing recently on the subject, illustrated
this problem by using the uproar over exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's
Cincinnati exhibition. It was moralists, of course, who not only
condemned the explicit nature of the Mapplethorpe photographs, but brought
the exhibition's curators to trial. To them, quite simply, Mapplethorpe's
pictures were obscene. On the other side of the issue however (if
not on the other side of the world), stood one of those responsible for
the exhibition, who, when describing the work, testified that she "delighted,"
in De Nicola's words, "in the strong opposing diagonals in a [Mapplethorpe]
piece involving urination." Aesthetic sensibility simply went to
war with moral concern--as it has for thousands of years.
It's quite likely that Pat Buchanan was not wrong in his 1992 speech at
the Republican Convention; there is a culture war in this country,
just as in most cultures there always has been and likely will be.
What scared the daylights out of millions of listeners, however, was a
single assumption--that Buchanan himself knew perfectly well which side
he and his buddy God were on. That kind of fundamentalism is very
much worth fearing. That kind of Christianity--the kind that lavishly
makes divine claims--aggravates some and triggers fervid hate in others.
There are good reasons why antagonism exists toward believers in our society,
and in literary culture.
And yet, as novelist A. J. Mojtabai (Called Out/Doubleday/1994)
has pointed out in a recent Wilson Quarterly article, abandonment
of religion, of spirituality, often means simply shutting the door on any
possibility of the sublime, of aspiration itself. "If I had my wish
. . .," Mojtabai says in that article, "I'd wish as many of us were as
interested in healing as indicting, and if not able to name, at least willing
to point, or if not able to point, at least willing to search for
what could make our lives better than they are." In a spiritual vacuum,
hope itself has no room to breathe.
The literary community's abandonment of interest in America's spiritual
yearnings, something a part of the human character since we emerged from
whatever form we took before, means we've simply jettisoned a vital concern
of people all around us, according to Mojtabai. "It is my conviction,"
she says, "that there exists today a religious hunger in our country and
in our world so widespread that writers ignore or disdain it at our peril."
To create fictional characters who lack that very human desire to believe
is to create characters who are not true to what we see and know around
us; from a Christian perspective, characters without some aspiration for
belief create a false world, a life without soul, which is not life at
all.
So, how do Christians in the arts operate, when their attention and devotion
takes both their craft and their professions of faith with deadly seriousness?
It ain't easy.
Of course, one could simply assert that quality will find its way to the
nation's bookshelves--and it will, undoubtedly. What must be said
is that O'Connor is not the only prominent North American writer who was
a Christian. John Updike has been remarkably candid about his faith,
frequently describing himself as a Christian. In the Beauty of
the Lilies (Knopf, 1996), his latest novel, has at its root the religious
attitudes of the three generations of the Wilmot family. For years,
National Book Award winner Madeline L'Engle has not hidden her faith from
her audience or the press. Frederic Buechner, whose belief in God
is clear in everything he has written, has created a sizable audience of
readers, and there are many, many more--Doris Betts, Wendell Berry, Ron
Hanson, Reynolds Price, Lee Smith, Larry Woiwode, to mention just a few.
However, for every star there are a hundred aspirants, and to many of us
interested in a wider world than the CBA, creating a nurturing culture
for Christians in literature and the arts is important work, just as it
is for Native Americans, for Generation X-ers, or for writers from the
Upper Midwest. What has developed in the past several years allows
some of us to believe that there is a promising future for the Christian
writer who desires a broader audience than the patrons of CBA stores.
Just a few years ago, Kathleen Norris's Dakota: A Spiritual Biography
(Ticknor & Fields/1993) was a surprising bestseller, given Norris's
sympathetic treatment of her tiny and rural North Dakota church, as well
as openness about her own pilgrimage to faith. Her new book, The
Cloister Walk (Riverhead Books/1996), is being reviewed prominently
and positively. Such books as Norris's, commonly called "cross-overs"
for their ability to secure audiences larger and more diverse than that
normally designated for religious books, promise good things to those of
us interested in climbing up and out of the chasm between ABA and CBA.
Things appear to be changing more broadly as well--and improving.
Undoubtedly, at least three factors are at work here. First is a
cultural change--the boomers, who've been generating business like no other
single generation in the past, are aging. As they do, they appear
to be moving in directions they believe will bring them toward peace, harmony,
and good will--only this time they're not finding it solely in San Francisco.
Many are becoming religious. Many, like Kathleen Norris herself,
identify what they are up to as kind of pilgrimage. Boomers buy books,
just like they bought records, tapes, and videos. Boomers buy, period.
Wall Street watches the Boomers' mood-changes closely, of course.
The result is that big, non-religious, non-Christian publishers have come
to understand that there is money to be made in the religious market.
Even 28 percent of the three billion the CBA bookstores annually bring
in is nothing to sneeze at, after all. Not long ago, The Catechism
of the Catholic Church (Doubleday, 1995) was mass-marketed, and for
the first time a religious book found its way into supermarkets and Wal-Marts,
right there beside the romances, the Westerns, and National Inquirer.
In our time, the new, postmodern climate appears to have relaxed slightly
the anti-religious sentiment often associated with the Modern Age, which
had little but guffaws for spirituality. Both the Quality Paperback
Book Club and the Book-of-the-Month Club offer subscribers selections from
a page they title "Inspiration" or "Spirituality," a menu of books
just down the pike apace from "Erotica." Today there appears to be
room for everyone, including Christians.
For serious Christians who are interested in doing serious imaginative
work, what's ahead appears to offer some interesting options unavailable
to many of us a decade or more ago. What's more, there seem to be
more of us. In April of 1996, directors of the Festival of Faith
and Writing, at Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, expected their
registrant total to climb to 250, after the success of the last, bi-annual
Festival. They were, instead, overwhelmed by the interest, had to
turn down applicants because of space limitations (despite a $100 registration
fee), but still hosted almost 1000 participants for a conference that included
speeches and readings by Annie Dillard, Donald Hall, Madeline L'Engle,
Lee Smith, Dan Wakefield, as well as a variety of other Christian writers.
Plans are already underway for an even bigger conference in 1998.
If there is a new interest today in the relationship between religion--and
especially Christianity--and writing, no single force is probably as central
to the movement as a tiny organization called The Milton Center,
who, via its own description, "supports work by writers who seek to animate
the Christian imagination, foster intellectual imagination, foster intellectual
integrity, and explore the human condition with honesty and compassion."
Created by Richard Foster in 1986 at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas,
with a $350,000 private donation, the Center began simply enough with weekly
workshops for interested area writers. But Foster, well known in
Christian circles for his work on spirituality, quickly recruited the novelist
Harold Fickett to be a Fellow at the fledgling institution, and almost
immediately new directions were proposed and created, including an annual
meeting/retreat of selected Christian writers.
That group of writers, called the Chrysostom Society, includes National
Book Award winners Madeline L'Engle and Walt Wangerin, as well as Ron Hansen,
Paul Mariani, Luci Shaw, Larry Woiwode, Phillip Yancey, and others.
Today, the Milton Center is still located in Wichita, Kansas, just down
the road from Friends University at Kansas Newman College, where its work
is now funded by Kansas Newman as well as significant grants from The Pew
Charitable Trusts. Fiction writer and memoirist Virginia Stem Owens
directs the work of the Center, which includes maintenance of the Center's
programs, as well as supervision of the work of two postgraduate fellows
in a program begun in 1995. The 1997 Fellows are Naomi Hirahara,
formerly the English editor of the Japanese-American newspaper in Los Angeles,
and Jerome Stueart, a graduate of the MFA program at Missouri.
Significant also in the Center's prominence is its Glen Workshops, a series
of writing workshops offered annually in August at the Glen Eyrie Retreat
Center, Colorado Springs, Colorado. In 1997, the workshops will be
led by Larry Woiwode and Christine Tachick (fiction), Jeanne Murray Walker
and Bryan Dietrich (poetry), Frederica Mathewes-Green (non-fiction) and
the Center's director, Virginia Stem Owens (memoir).
The Center has begun awarding annual Milton Center Prizes of $10,000 to
writers who have contributed significantly to the tradition of Christian
arts and letters. Annie Dillard and Richard Wilbur have been the
recipients. Since its inception, The Center has attempted to link
Christian writers by their twice-yearly newsletter, The Mark.
Presently being considered is a mentoring program that would would link
apprentice writers with professionals via mail and computer.
Perhaps the most visible outgrowth of the Milton Center's various projects
is Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, a 136-page quarterly
that features fiction and poetry, essays and interviews, as well as high-quality,
four-color reproductions of paintings and sculptures by famous contemporary
artists. In just a few short years, Image has multiplied its subscribers
by 1000 percent, from 400 to 4000, making it one of America's largest-circulation
journals of arts and literature. (Submissions can be sent or a sample
issue ordered for $10 from Image, P.O. Box 674, Kennet Square, PA
19348. An annual subscription costs $30, which should be sent to
Image,
P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834, or call 800-875-2997).
Image
is an American success story, birthed from small beginnings and thousands
of hours of unpaid labor. It is the brainchild of Gregory Wolfe,
who, with his wife Suzanne and managing editor Richard Wilkinson, produce
the quarterly journal out of an office in the Wolfe's home. The journal's
incredibly rapid growth was the result of a direct-mail campaign financed
by a grant from the Lilly Endowment.
Many celebrated writers have already contributed to its pages--among them,
Robert Bly, John Irving, and Elie Wiesel, as well as five Pulitzer Prize
winners: Annie Dillard, William Kennedy, Philip Levine, Louis Simpson,
and Richard Wilbur. Other notable contributors include James Lee
Burke, Louise Erdrich, Jon Hassler, Mark Helprin, Garrison Keillor, and
Denise Levertov, to mention only a few.
"Image is doing what seems counter-intuitive to most people," says
the journal's editor and publisher Gregory Wolfe. "When one thinks
of religion in connection with contemporary art, one tends to think of
rancorous political battles over scandalous art.. . . We're recovering
the great tradition of art that wrestles with the big questions about God
and his ways with man."
In its premiere issue four years ago, Image described its own vision
in a fashion that serves many Christians who are serious about writing
and serious about faith: "Religion and art share the capacity to
help us to renew our awareness of the ultimate questions: who we
are, where we have come from, and where we are going. In their highest
forms religion and art unite faith and reason, grace and nature; they preserve
us from the twin errors of superstition and rationalist abstraction."
Image,
along with the Library of Congress, co-sponsored an unusual event this
spring at the Library, a reading titled "Spiritual Mystery at the Heart
of Contemporary Poetry." Four Christian poets--Scott Cairns, Geoffrey
Hill, Andrew Hudgins, and Kathleen Norris--read selections from their work.
The reading was based on a new anthology of poetry, Upholding Mystery (Oxford
University Press), edited by David Impastato, which includes the work of
these and many other religious poets.
To those of us who take our Christianity seriously--as well as our writing,
things are looking up. There seems to be a place for us in America's
literary culture--as well there should. In the ecology of American
sub-cultures, the loss of any individual voice alters the nature of all
the rest. In the dialogue of voices we call "America," the thoughtfully
religious--and Christian--community should have a place and role.
And it seems it will.