Suffering in a Sentimental Age

Flannery O’Connor, who died fifty years ago this year aged only thirty-nine, knew much about suffering as a result of the serious medical problems that constrained her brief life, yet she could still write:

People’s suffering tears us up now in a way that in a healthier age it did not. And of course everybody weeps over loneliness. It is practically a disease.

The particular ways O’Connor thought the modern age was unhealthy are found in her selected correspondence, The Habit of Being. It is also possible to chart her medical history from her correspondence, but this is a matter of assemblage because she mentions her many maladies only in passing except when she needs to explain to a friend, her agent or her editor why she could not accept this invitation or undertake that task.

O’Connor wrote from a Catholic perspective; she was a sharp, observant layperson whose commitment to the Church never wavered. In 1962, she replied to a letter from a young poet, Alfred Corn, who was troubled by the challenges of atheist thought he encountered at university:

Much of the criticism of belief that you find today comes from people who are judging it from the standpoint of another and narrower discipline … Learn what you can but cultivate Christian skepticism. It will keep you free—not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you.

It was this “narrower” perspective based on the human intellect as the final judge and arbitrator of what was possible that O’Connor identified as one of the key characteristics of the modern, unhealthy age: it was an age in revolt against its Judeo-Christian heritage yet it had only nihilism as an alternative; it was an age of flux, rebelling against any metaphysical framework. O’Connor’s Catholicism provided her with a framework, a hierarchy in which to locate her life, her vocation as a writer, and her sufferings. She thought those without this framework were not free but were subject to tyrannies: the tyrannies of the intellect and of the emotions. In other words, they became the vassals of rationalism or sentimentality. To one of her closest friends who was exploring Catholicism, O’Connor advised:

I doubt if your interests get less intellectual as you become more deeply involved in the Church, but what will happen is that the intellect will take its place in a larger context and will cease to be tyrannical, if it has been—and when there is nothing over the intellect it usually is tyrannical.

O’Connor saw too that when the emotions are not placed in a larger context the result is sentimentality, a disposition she fought against because it hurt people while ironically championing sensitivity. She admired Russell Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, and in her copy she placed marginal lines beside this sentence: “Abstract sentimentality results in real brutality.” It was important to her thinking about suffering and the right, and wrong, ways to respond to it.

O’Connor’s letters reveal that she suffered a good deal more than many young women: her father died of lupus when she was fifteen; at twenty-six, she nearly died of lupus herself, hovering near death for several weeks, emerging from this crisis with acute joint pain requiring daily cortisone injections which had unpleasant side effects: they caused her mind to race in an exhausting way, her hair to thin out and her face to bloat. Because the lupus required careful management, she had to surrender her dreams of living anywhere but at home with her mother on the family farm in rural Georgia. She thought this might mean the end of her literary ambitions but she worked within the limits of her geography, her health and her talent to create a unique oeuvre. To her lifelong friend Robert Lowell, she wrote, “I am making out fine in spite of any conflicting stories … I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.” At times she needed frequent blood transfusions; she was hospitalised with kidney infections, and she contracted shingles; she was amused to report that her doctor said this disease “conferred no distinction”. At thirty, she was on crutches as a result of the softening of her hip bone, further restricting her freedom. She wrote, “I am learning to walk on crutches and I feel like a large, stiff anthropoid ape who has no cause to be thinking of St Thomas or Aristotle.”

To minimise the interaction of sunlight and lupus, the family car had to be fitted with dark green glass, and O’Connor had to dress in a particular way: “The doctor says I can’t go out of the house without stockings, gloves, long sleeves and a large hat … The spectacle of me in this get-up all summer is depressing to my imagination.” The drugs that were used to control her lupus were derived from the organs of pigs, a fact that O’Connor reported with the sardonic wit that makes reading her letters so rewarding:

I owe my existence and cheerful countenance to the pituitary glands of thousands of pigs butchered daily in Chicago, Illinois at the Armour packing plant. If pigs wore garments, I wouldn’t be worthy to kiss the hems of them. They have been supporting my presence in this world for the last seven years. What you have met here is a product of Artificial Energy.

All her maladies meant she often had the energy to work only two or three hours each day, and then she had to rest; sometimes days of rest were required if she engaged in more intense activity. To a friend who was sick and weary, she offered, “If you need any advice about resting, ask a professional rester like me.” She also noted, “My greatest pleasure and exertion these last years has been throwing the garbage to the chickens and I can still do this, though I am in danger of going with it.” When she was thirty-eight, she was tired more than usual, multiple blood transfusions made little difference, and it was discovered she was anaemic due to a uterine tumour. An operation, which was a great risk because the stress of surgery might reactivate the lupus, was undertaken to remove the tumour. Within weeks, aged thirty-nine, O’Connor was dead.

To one correspondent she confessed:

I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense, sickness is a place more instructive than a trip to Europe, and it’s a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow.

Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.

To another friend she wrote,

“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”

There is no trace of bitterness in O’Connor’s letters or essays. Her larger perspective provided her with a framework within which to accept her suffering, even “to take it as a blessing”. It helped that she did not focus on her maladies, but rather on what she was still able to achieve. She wrote often of “vocation”—a word little used any more because it has teleological connotations—and she realised her vocation was to write; so as long as she could write, anything else affecting her was of secondary concern. The enjoyment she gained from writing more than compensated for the health problems she endured, and in time she came to view her confinement to rural Georgia not as a curtailment but as a gift because it was there her talent and vision were fed by the social environment.

Related to her sense of vocation was a concept she borrowed from Teilhard de Chardin: “passive diminishment”. The editor of her correspondence, Sally Fitzgerald, summarised:

From Teilhard de Chardin she eventually learned a phrase for something she already knew about; “passive diminishment”—the serene acceptance of whatever affliction or loss cannot be changed by any means—and she must have reasoned that the eventual effect of such diminishment, accompanied by the perfecting of the will, is to bring increase, which is not to say that acceptance made matters easy.

This is another way to express resignation to the mysterious but beneficent will of God. O’Connor explained in one letter:

Resignation to the will of God does not mean that you stop resisting evil or obstacles, it means that you leave the outcome out of your personal considerations. It is the most concern coupled with the least concern.

O’Connor took advantage of all the medical advances of her time to relieve herself of her illnesses. But when there was no more to be done, she accepted the reality, did what she could, and enjoyed what was to be enjoyed. She was not a victim of the tyranny of her emotions; she did not become soft and malcontented. She admired “a saying of Braque’s that he made about painting—‘I like the rule that corrects the emotion’.”

Her feelings weren’t as important to her as the commands of Christianity; they were the rules that corrected the emotions, including the emotions of self-pity, narcissism and resentment. She wrote to a friend, “I share your lack of love for the race of man, but this is only a sentiment and a sentiment falls before a command.” O’Connor explained that love for others was much more about doing rather than feeling because feelings could be “swept this way and that by momentary convictions”.

This is one reason I am chary about using the word, love, loosely. I prefer to use it in its practical forms such as prayer, almsgiving, visiting the sick and burying the dead and so forth.

As time passed, she realised too that her illnesses freed her from many of the obligations normally attendant to a celebrated author’s life; often, she was simply unable to attend book-launch parties (she hated them); she had to be careful about what invitations to speak she accepted; writers’ conferences could be avoided unless they paid well (she needed the money for medicine and hospital bills), and any work besides writing wasn’t possible, so most of her time and her available energy went into her writing.

Her thinking about suffering was focused when she helped some Dominican nuns at the Georgia Cancer Home to compile a biography of Mary Ann, a cheerful and friendly little girl with a painful and disfiguring facial cancer; her family was dirt-poor, they had other sick children, and they had entrusted her, aged three, to the nuns who cared for her until her death, aged twelve. The experience reinforced the sense of mystery around suffering as O’Connor learned more about the child and assisted with the biography: “What will come of the book I wouldn’t know, but I am convinced that the child had an outsized cross and bore it with what most of us don’t have and couldn’t muster.” To her great surprise the book, A Memoir of Mary Ann, became a best-seller in the USA and in Great Britain, published there as The Death of a Child.

In her introduction to the book, O’Connor wrote:

One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him … Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.

As O’Connor became more involved in the project, her understanding of vocation deepened. She understood that in the same way her vocation as a writer was to explore grotesque characters through stories, the nuns’ vocation was to care for people with grotesque tumours in the Cancer Home. When she met Mary Ann’s family it reinforced her sense that for some people, mysterious as it was, suffering was their vocation; they were stuck with it no matter what their attempts to avoid it, as she had herself discovered through her incurable illness.

Last Saturday two of the Sisters came down and brought [Mary Ann’s] family, all except [her sister], who has had a couple of tumours removed already and couldn’t take any more riding. The father is dying of cancer and looked it. They brought Mary Ann very close. The mother has huge black eyes and the father has an over-large elongated head, the face covered with warts. I was much impressed with them. You hear of The Poor, but you seldom see them. I don’t mean just poor folks, I mean people whose vocation it is to be poor and to have God touch them in just that way.

This is an offence to the modern, secular mind, which is intolerant of mysteries, dislikes talk of God-given vocations and is vague about the origins of evil and suffering, but confident in its own ability to diagnose and ameliorate the suffering of humanity. O’Connor knew all about these predilections and wrote to the novelist Cecil Dawkins:

The Liberal approach is that man has never fallen, never incurred guilt, and is ultimately perfectible by his own efforts. Therefore, evil in this light is a problem of better housing, sanitation, health, etc. and all mysteries will eventually be cleared up. Judgment is out of place because man is not responsible. Of course, there are degrees of adherence to this, all sorts of mixtures, but it is the direction the modern heads toward.

O’Connor thought this a narrower perspective because it excluded mystery, and because it was ultimately nihilistic; this emptiness lurked behind the liberal approach, which valued right-feeling more than right-thinking. One of the results of this tyranny of feeling is that any suffering, physical or psychological, including the suffering of animals, is regarded as intolerable and must be alleviated by any means possible at any cost. But when people don’t know how to cope with their suffering or the suffering of others they may react in hasty and radical ways, such as promoting euthanasia, abortion on demand, and eugenics. Writing of a suicide victim, O’Connor suggested, “His tragedy was I suppose that he didn’t know what to do with his suffering.”

O’Connor knew what to do with her suffering; she had a larger perspective. To one friend, she wrote: “Evil is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.” Both Mary Ann and Flannery O’Connor endured the mystery of their suffering, inspiring those around them and those, like me, who can meet them only in print: Mary Ann through the exuberance and good humour of her character, and Flannery O’Connor through the depth of her wisdom and the brilliance of her writing.

She warned, “In the future, anybody who writes anything about me is going to have to read everything I have written in order to make legitimate criticism and particularly the Mary Ann piece.” I have fulfilled this desire; reading all her works wasn’t work, it was a delight, particularly the Mary Ann piece—the introduction O’Connor wrote to the nuns’ book—because it may be the best non-fiction piece O’Connor wrote. Her heart was in it, but her Catholic mind was in command of it: it is filled with a practical concern for suffering but it avoids all sentimentality.