Reflecting on the qualities needed to work at a suicide prevention hotline in her 1980 book The Stranger Beside Me, writer Ann Rule, a former volunteer herself, says the successful counsellor must be “kind, solicitous, and empathetic.” Rule ascribes those attributes to one of the most caring operators she ever worked with, a University of Washington psychology major stationed next to her when she was volunteering at a Seattle hotline in 1971. Rule remembers her friend “hunched over the phone, talking steadily, reassuringly,” the psychology student exhibiting “infinite patience and caring in his voice…. Never brusque, never hurried.” One particular anecdote stands out. Rule overheard this counsellor “agreeing with an elderly woman that it must have been beautiful indeed when Seattle was lit only by gas lights.”
For hours a day, Rule and the psychology student took phone calls from suffering souls, talking them back from the proverbial and literal ledge and coaxing them into putting down the pills, the razor blade, the shotgun. The psychology student “saved lives. I know he did, because I was there when he did it,” she writes. That student’s name was Ted Bundy. More shockingly, the year he worked alongside Rule was the same one in which he began his prolific career as a serial killer. Finally executed in Florida in 1989 after being convicted for twenty murders, he was likely responsible for many more across states ranging from Washington to Florida. Guilty of murder, rape, assault, and necrophilia, the man who Rule claimed “saved lives” seemingly lived according to the dictum that Flannery O’Connor gave to the character of “The Misfit” in her 1953 short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find”: “No pleasure but meanness.” O’Connor knew well the complexity of the human soul, its ever-confusing labyrinths, in which one’s intentions can be hid even from oneself. She dwelled in that inconsistency, the moral negative capability that makes not just a Bundy but everyone so ethically mysterious.
And according to George A. Kilcourse Jr. in Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination: A World with Everything Off Balance (2001), what the Georgia writer accomplished was the creation of an “imaginative sacramental universe,” the description of a reality that’s both debased and blessed, corrupted and sacred, fallen and filled with grace. Born one hundred years ago, on March 25, 1925, this eccentric literary genius returned permanently to her family’s Milledgeville farm after the Iowa Writers Workshop and a brief period in New York to live and write alongside her widowed mother and resplendent pet peacocks, all the while coping with physical decline from the lupus that eventually took her life in 1964, before she was even forty. A devout Catholic, she created her Bundy-like Misfit as one instance of the American grotesque that fascinated her, in this case, a roadside serial killer who seemed capable, if for only a moment, of a kind of grace, if not enough to merit salvation.
Short though her life was, O’Connor produced a distinctive body of work—two short-story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything that Rises Must Converge, and her two novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, along with luminous essays and a rich, often hilariously detailed, correspondence—that more than justifies her standing as a classic American author. Her fiction is replete with certain types—hillbillies and carnival barkers, tent revival preachers and geek show performers—but her concern was always with grace, of the ways in which the irredeemable can be redeemed, the unsalvageable can be saved (which is to say all of us to varying degrees). What fascinated O’Connor, intellectually and spiritually, were the complexities of the soul, not how good people can be capable of bad, but how even evil people are sometimes capable of good, the ways in which “this current comes openly to the surface and is seen as the sudden emergence of the underground rivers of the mind into the clear spring of grace,” as she wrote in a 1956 book review. A moral universe with original sin, yes, but not total depravity.
Because she was a Catholic writer in the deeply Protestant South, her coreligionists are largely absent from her oeuvre, even while the theology of the church is ever present in this place that she refers to as “Christ-haunted.” Although O’Connor matter-of-factly stated in a 1959 letter that “I’m a Catholic writer,” her genre was never apologetics; she was no C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton. The critic Jonathan Rogers writes in The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor (2012) that her opponents “included not only the religious skeptic, but also the religious believer.” The heterodox manner by which she explores grace and salvation, transcendence and immanence exclude her from the realm of mere doctrinal exegesis. As a serious Catholic writer—and not just in the cultural sense—O’Connor is yoked to figures such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh as authors who dwell within a complicated faith even amid secularity. For a period, there was no looking at the faculty page of a Catholic university’s English department without seeing an O’Connor scholar, arguably something also true of departments in the South. One imagines it is doubly so for Catholic universities in the South.
Yet on the centennial of her birth, O’Connor’s literary star has dimmed a bit, especially as her private racial prejudices (even though in the public sphere she was an unassailably good liberal regarding civil rights) have become more widely known, though the fact that she held such opinions should sadly come as no great surprise, given where and when she lived most of her life. That O’Connor was fully aware of the malignancy in her own soul does not mitigate her failing. Her struggle with it demonstrates the theological principle her work sought to explore—namely, the contradictions and inconsistencies that mark us as fallen creatures. Instead of turning away from O’Connor because of those errors of her soul, we should acknowledge them as part of what she and her work fully were. Reckoning with her own shortcomings, O’Connor posits a universe in which we are mostly fallen but not lost to the possibility of salvation—at least not always. Eschewing notions of predestination, she creates characters who are free to choose grace when it is offered—free, if they choose, to do the right thing.
O’Connor’s work can help us approach, if not understand or forgive, the Bundys of the world. Psychologists, criminologists, and sociologists can venture their own plausible hypotheses to square the seeming inconsistency of the gruesome killer who told investigators that was the “most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet” with the earnest student volunteer who could talk at length with a depressed and lonely old woman about her memories of the Seattle of her youth. Chief among these explanations, rather obviously, is that a skilled manipulator of other humans would be able to put his talents to use in a variety of circumstances, that a narcissist enjoys having peoples’ futures under his control, whether to save or destroy. But these are merely conjectures. A man whom his last attorney Polly Nelson would describe as the “very definition of heartless evil” also saved lives as readily as he took them. This is something that O’Connor could describe if not fully understand and certainly not explain away. As the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” says to The Misfit before he kills her, he could have been “one of my own children.” That is an obligation O’Connor’s herself shared: the obligation to remember that even the darkest of souls was once the most innocent of beings, a newborn child.
As for The Misfit himself, he is shaken by this final act of tenderness offered by an imperfect woman to an evil man. “She would have been a good woman,” he says, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” It is a moment of grace for the grandmother, a martyrdom that left her in a “puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.” The grandmother died witnessing, if not for Christ then at least for the possibility of human connection. Nor did The Misfit remain unchanged. Even as he murdered the grandmother, her embrace made him spring “back as if a snake had bitten him.” Something charged and luminescent had occurred, even within the corruption and evil of a fallen world.