Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [94]
Yet this praise could backfire for Flannery, who had never made it through Kafka’s novels The Castle and The Trial. As she reported reaction on the home front to the Fitzgeralds: “Regina is getting very literary. ‘Who is this Kafka?’ she says. ‘People ask me.’ A German Jew, I says, I think. He wrote a book about a man that turns into a roach. ‘Well, I can’t tell people that,’ she says.” When speaking with students from Dr. Helen Greene’s history class at the college, O’Connor was “distressed” to find them thinking that she shared in the European intellectual pessimism associated with Kafka that was “just getting to the young people of this country” — a harbinger of misunderstandings to come.
Not simply the neutral package, but the 223-page, unconventional novel itself invited high-contrast reactions. Written in a poker-faced style, its tale of lanky Hazel Motes — truculently arriving in the fictional town of Taulkinham, preaching in his “sharp, high, nasal, Tennessee voice,” conjuring a church where “the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk” — was evidently satiric, but the object of the satire could be a question mark. Playing Sancho Panza to Haze’s Don Quixote, Enoch has the “wise blood” of the title, but he winds up exiting the scene in a foolish monkey suit. Haze is pursued by the hormonal fifteen-year-old Sabbath Lily Hawks, the fake-blind Asa Hawks’s daughter, but no sex or romance occurs. In its final chapters, the episodic novel changes tone, revealing itself to be a morality play, as Haze — his pulpit of a junk car pushed over a cliff by a redneck cop — removes the “mote” in his own eye by self-blinding, and eventual death in a ditch.
Since this singular story of a pilgrim’s backward progress was expressed in poetic shorthand, indicating a high order of talent, the slim novel could not be ignored. Yet by crossing two literary wires — a Southern gothic tale with a medieval saint’s life — O’Connor opened herself up for criticism, somewhat unwittingly, as she was a newcomer to publication. “One reason I like to publish short stories is that nobody pays any attention to them,” she would tell an interviewer several years later. “In ten years or so they begin to be known but the process has not been obnoxious. When you publish a novel, the racket is like a fox in the hen house.” By the time she knew enough to dread the review process, though, she also understood why Haze Motes may have missed his mark with some early readers, a lesson learned: “he was a mystic. . . . The failure of the novel seems to be that he is not believable enough as a human being.”
Critical reaction was mixed. Especially during the postwar decades, most of the attention of reviewers was taken up with books in competition for the laurel of the Great American Novel — that year Ernest Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea; John Steinbeck, East of Eden; and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man won the National Book Award. Yet some quieter Catholic literature was succeeding, too: Dorothy Day released her memoir, The Long Loneliness; and François Mauriac, once said by O’Connor to be her single greatest influence, won the 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature. Another adolescent, male antihero was cutting a wide swath across the popular imagination — Holden Caulfield, in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, published the year before; Flannery thought “that man owes a lot to Ring Lardner. Anyway he is very good.”
Yet Haze Motes’s spiritual agon was not as legible to the first line of critics, the guardians of public taste, as Holden Caulfield’s more general teenage angst. “I can tell you that from a publishing point of view Wise Blood