Revenge Porn for the Righteous

In its Christmas, 2014 issue, the Catholic literary magazine Dappled Things published a link to “Thank You for the Light,” a story submitted by F. Scott Fitzgerald to The New Yorker in 1936. In only 1,200 words, Fitzgerald recounts how Mrs. Hanson, a “pretty, somewhat faded woman of forty” who sells corsets and girdles, faces disapproval from her buyers whenever she pulls out a cigarette. “Smoking,” Fitzgerald explains, “had some ability to rest and relax her psychologically…[it] had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.” But this cuts no ice with her associates – apparently, the same Pecksniffs who kept H.L. Mencken in business.

Ground down by her job and sensing the onset of a nicotine fit, Mrs. Hanson ducks into a Catholic cathedral. She figures: “if so much incense had gone up in the spires to God, a little smoke in the vestibule would make no difference. How could the Good Lord care if a tired woman took a few puffs in the vestibule?” But then she realizes her matches are gone and learns all the votive candles are about to be snuffed out for the night. After nodding off before a statue of the Virgin, she wakes up to discover that some mysterious power has lit the cigarette in her hand.

The New Yorker ran the story in August, 2012, but only as a curious artifact: initially, it rejected it as “too fantastic.” As a smoker who can’t stand for his life’s sentences to run unpunctuated for long, I could be biased, but I found it charming – an urban update of Anatole France’s “Our Lady’s Juggler” told with just enough irony to balance the fantasy. What really makes the story a keeper is something much more basic: It shows God – or at any rate, Mary – being nice. In other words, it’s not a Flannery O’Connor story.

I recently ran across an article in Thema, the Reformed Evangelical journal, where a writer named Douglas Jones claims to find something “odd about selling Flannery O’Connor to Christians.” Jones’ Christians like their divine Grace tidy and pleasant. Or as O’Connor herself put it, “they think faith is a big electric blanket.” They’d rather not pray to a God who might play a sick practical joke on them.

Douglas Jones needs to get out more, especially among Catholics. Where I come from, you can’t have a decent Facebook exchange without someone quoting “Flannery” – yes, fans speak of her familiarly, as though she were the current GOP front-runner. (Does anyone refer to “Evelyn”?) It’s plain that these readers love O’Connor’s stories, not despite the brutal, often telegraphed endings, but because of them. They actually prefer their Grace dark. In their view, any other kind is second-rate – a knock-off Grace you might buy at a swap meet.

This may reflect a purely artistic judgment. For some, the working of God’s hand may just make for livelier reading when it’s violent and disruptive. That’s a defensible opinion, though one that raises the question of why so many of the same people will submerge themselves for thousands of pages in the company of Hobbits. It could also be that dark grace rings truer than any other kind to some folks’ own life experience, although it seems to me these folks must have had it pretty rough in order not to find Norton’s fate in “The Lame Shall Enter First” way over the top.

What I’ve always feared is that Flannery O’Connor’s most devoted fans take such a pessimistic view of human nature that they believe God can hold people’s attention only when he’s kicking them in the teeth. Douglas Jones never comes right out and says this, but I believe he hints at it here:

You soon realize how her visitations of dark grace stand out as huge gifts when compared to actual life. Most people’s actual lives seem to be Flannery characters who never have the privilege of meeting dark grace. Think of the people around you. Think of the secularists. Most go on for decades in their self-deception and self-righteousness and pettiness until their bitterness just grinds to a close at the end.

Every sentence here begs a question. Maybe I’m lucky, but I don’t know too many people as purely or narrowly self-righteous or self-deceptive as Flannery O’Connor characters, though most of us have our moments. Dark Grace might count as a huge gift and a privilege if no other kind were available (kind of like how, if it weren’t for bad luck, those Hee-Haw singers would have no luck at all). But kinder, gentler forms of Grace do exist and, I suspect, could be shown to have about the same retention rate, flock-wise, as the flashy, nasty kind. Many of the recipients, including me and anyone reading this from outside an iron lung, may not deserve it, but that’s why they call it Grace and not a pension.

None of this is meant to knock Flannery O’Connor. Quite apart from her mastery of pacing and dialogue, her ear for dialect and her genius for allusion, she kept her faith even after suffering a fate about as bad as any of her characters’. When it came to dark Grace, she earned the right to talk. But for many of us who have had it easier, claiming her vision and overidentifying with her point of view — Flannery-ing her, you might say — is a little too much like indulging in revenge porn for the righteous.

In “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” O’Connor complained about critics who accused her of lacking compassion. “Compassion,” she wrote, “is a quality which no one can put his finger on in any exact critical sense…Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human.” She’s right on both counts, and damn those New York interleckshuls for using such a blob of a word to signify what they found missing from her work. They should have come right out and told her, somewhat after the manner of St. Francis de Sales: “Lady, why don’t you try lighting people’s cigarettes instead of lighting their whole damn heads on fire?”