Flannery O’Connor was an inveterate rewriter, working, reworking, and deleting episodes from her stories and novels. Her archives, collected at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, bulge with deleted scenes and alternate versions of characters scarcely recognizable because the individuals who inhabit the published versions of her stories.
O’Connor spent five years crafting Wise Blood, her first novel. It took her seven years to finish a draft of her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away—and it was only 45,000 words long! (In her defense, she was concurrently producing a few of the most effective short stories ever written.)
When O’Connor died in 1964 on the age of 39, she left behind scraps and pieces of a 3rd novel called Why Do the Heathen Rage?—a dozen or so episodes repetitively, even obsessively rewritten. In the early Eighties, the scholar Marian Burns described these literary oddments as “an untidy jumble of ideas and abortive starts, full scenes written and rewritten over and over, several extraneous images, and one fully developed character.”
In the intervening a long time, Why Do the Heathen Rage? has been mostly ignored. But in the previous couple of years, writer and Pepperdine University professor Jessica Hooten Wilson has dived into that untidy jumble, hoping to make sense of it for the remaining of us. The result’s Flannery O’Connor’s “Why Do the Heathen Rage?”: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress, a book that alternates between Wilson’s explanatory essays and scenes from the novel that might need been .
Editorial decisions
The manuscripts from O’Connor’s archives totaled 378 typed pages dispersed over 20 file folders, in no particular order. O’Connor left no indication as to which iteration of a scene or character or sentence she considered closest to a “final” version. Nor did she leave any indication as to how the episodes must be sequenced. More to the purpose, it seems unlikely that O’Connor herself had an excellent idea what any final version might seem like. She very much seems to have been feeling her way through.
Describing her own editorial process, Wilson writes, “My version of those pages comes from intersplicing sentences and paragraphs from the left-behind pages, making editorial decisions about which words O’Connor meant to chop or keep, and presuming to point out the most effective of what was left unfinished.” The proven fact that Wilson boils O’Connor’s 378 manuscript pages all the way down to 60-something pages gives a way of just what number of editorial decisions she needed to make.
O’Connor indicated in her letters that she conceived Why Do the Heathen Rage? as a sequel or continuation of her short story “The Enduring Chill.” In her novel-in-progress, the protagonist is a version of Asbury from “The Enduring Chill,” though he’s now named Walter (except in those fragments where he is called Julian, or Charles, or Asbury).
Walter exchanges letters with a civil rights activist from New York named either Sarah or Oona (again, depending on the fragment), who’s either his cousin, his aunt, or a stranger. In his letters, Walter engages in what Wilson calls “epistolary blackface,” posing as a Black man who works for Walter’s family. Things move toward a crisis when Walter realizes that Sarah/Oona is speeding toward him in her convertible and can soon discover that he is just not certainly one of the “poor black people of the South,” as she supposes, but an overprivileged, overeducated, overfed slob.
Things move toward a crisis, but they never reach a crisis. There are experimental scenes, false starts, and contradictory character sketches through which O’Connor is clearly attempting to get a feel for the story she’s telling and the characters who inhabit it. But the moment before Sarah/Oona’s racial naiveté collides with Walter’s racial cynicism seems like the place where the principal trunk of the story is lopped off. From this point, O’Connor is unable to seek out any way forward. Here is the basic narrative problem, and O’Connor died before she solved it.
Any number of things help explain why O’Connor never finished (indeed, barely began) Why Do the Heathen Rage? A slow author in any case, she was slowed further by the illness that killed her a couple of years into the project. She was writing about social and political issues (civil rights, poverty, even euthanasia) way more directly than usual. Furthermore, she was writing for the primary time a couple of protagonist who receives grace early within the story fairly than at the tip.
After all those spectacular and terrifying conversions in her previous stories, O’Connor was now trying to write down a couple of protagonist who would must undergo the long, slow business of sanctification. Wilson quotes from a letter O’Connor wrote amid her work on Why Do the Heathen Rage?: “I’ve reached a degree where I can’t do again what I do know I can do well, and the larger things that I would like to do now, I doubt my capability for doing.”
Wilson makes a convincing case, nevertheless, concerning the best difficulty O’Connor might need been confronting. She had written herself right into a situation of needing to cope with race and civil rights in a more honest and thoughtful way than she ever had before. She knew that her customary glib and contradictory treatment of race was insufficient for her material, yet she didn’t know the best way to be less glib or more consistent.
On matters of race, O’Connor was only slowly learning to live (and write) as much as her own ideals; she was still growing into her higher, more sanctified self. A deeply theological author, O’Connor nevertheless tended to treat the civil rights movement as a social, political, and cultural matter fairly than a theological matter. Wilson writes, “She is trying to write down about race as one element of a story concerning the theological problems that face secular contemplatives and secular social activists. By not reading the difficulty of race with theological significance—which must include the Black perspective that so often eluded her—O’Connor seems to have been unable to complete the story she longed to inform.”
Acts of imagination
If Black perspectives are absent or elusive in O’Connor’s prose, New Orleans artist Steve Prince offers a corrective in nine haunting and thought-provoking linocut illustrations, and in an afterword commenting on his images.
For her own part, Wilson’s insights into O’Connor’s inner life and cultural milieu are almost as helpful because the work she has done in organizing and editing O’Connor’s manuscript fragments. “This book tells the story of the unfinished manuscript,” writes Wilson. “I consider Flannery as she drafted the novel and what would have influenced her creation of the story: what was she reading, what news stories were making headlines, who was giving speeches on her latest television?”
Less helpful is Wilson’s try to compose a “potential ending” to Why Do the Heathen Rage? She admits that it’s presumptuous to write down a final scene for a novel by Flannery O’Connor. Nevertheless, she argues, “all acts of imagination are presumptuous.” That could also be, but some acts of imagination are more presumptuous than others.
I have to register one other criticism, this one concerning the cover. A badge on the book jacket proclaims that that is “the unfinished novel in print for the primary time.” That is a misleading claim. Calling these fragments an unfinished novel is like calling a pile of Leonardo da Vinci’s pencil studies an unfinished Leonardo painting. I don’t imagine this badge was Wilson’s idea. Its promise of an unfinished novel is neither fair to O’Connor nor true to Wilson’s accomplishment.
O’Connor’s prose accounts for a couple of third of Flannery O’Connor’s “Why Do the Heathen Rage?” It is prose that O’Connor considered unready for public consumption. I can’t help but look, but I still have misgivings. I had similar misgivings in 2013 when Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a book of personal prayer journals O’Connor had written at age 20. (I looked that point too.)
In the prayer journals, as in those first ten stories of her celebrated short story collection (also written during her student days), we see a really young Flannery O’Connor struggling to determine the best way to be Flannery O’Connor. In these fragments of Why Do the Heathen Rage? now we have a reminder that even when Flannery O’Connor was as mature as she would ever be, she was still struggling to determine the best way to be Flannery O’Connor. She struggled each time she sat all the way down to the typewriter. Writers in all places, take courage.
Jonathan Rogers is the writer of The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor. He is the host of The Habit Podcast and the writer of The Habit Weekly on Substack.
