Flannery O’Connor, the 20th-century writer who is the subject of the new movie “Wildcat,” is at a dinner party. Sitting around the table with eight, mostly Protestant, writers, the topic of the Mass comes up. One of the men asserts that the Eucharist is simply symbolic, which is a Protestant dogma. Wiry, thin-framed O’Connor perks up as if she is about to lunge at him across the table like a wildcat and says defiantly, “Well, if it’s just a symbol, to hell with it.”
Everyone at the table becomes quiet and she realizes how uncomfortable she made them feel and gets up and walks away by herself.
That scene captures O’Connor’s strong defense of her faith and how we need God’s grace to do the right thing. The movie’s title, “Wildcat,” is taken from one of her early short stories about a blind, elderly African American man who is afraid of a wildcat he can smell. It depicts his struggle with impending death and foreshadowed the last third of O’Connor’s life as lupus ravaged her body.
O’Connor’s stories depicted human depravity devoid of faith and morals, yet she is one of the most Catholic American writers of fiction. My associate, Father Philip Miceli, who has read a lot of her works, said she resented bourgeois, watered down Christianity, which lost its fervor. She took her Catholic faith seriously, attending daily Mass when possible and celebrating the sacraments. She lived in Georgia in the segregated South and pre-Vatican II church. Born in 1925, she died in 1964 at the age of 39.
Most Catholics may have never heard of her even though she was recognized as a gifted, if prickly, person and writer. But that may change now that acclaimed actor Ethan Hawke and his daughter Maya have collaborated to bring “Wildcat” to the big screen. Ethan directed and co-wrote the film, in which Maya plays O’Connor and other characters out of some of her stories, which helps the viewer appreciate O’Connor’s imaginative writing style.
Excerpts from “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” one of O’Connor’s short stories, are included in the movie. In it, a one-armed wanderer meets a mother and her deaf, mute daughter living all alone in the plains. The mother lets him sleep in her car as their handyman. He takes an interest in the daughter and teaches her to say one word at a time. The mother blesses their marriage and gives him money to take her daughter for a nice dinner as a honeymoon, which he does, then ditches her at the diner and takes off with the car. His heartless action shows the need for God’s redemption.
In another recreated story, a traveling Bible salesman who is somewhat of atheist and con, convinces a woman to a tryst in the loft of a barn. As he makes his moves on her, she resists because she is a good Christian, she says. He convinces her to remove her prosthetic leg and begins to fondle her leg stump tenderly thinking he can still win her over. She resists even more, and he steals the artificial leg and leaves her stranded in the loft. What a cad as your heart breaks for the poor young woman, alone and frightened.
O’Connor saw the need for the grace of God at work in a brutal world as her life’s mission: “My writing is always about the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil,” she once said.
In all, she published two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. In 1945, she was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she first went to study journalism and received an M.F.A. in 1947.
The film takes some liberties and casts the school’s director as Cal. There’s a telling scene in a train station where O’Connor is talking to him about how her editor wants her to write nicer stories. Even her mother, Regina, played by Laura Linney, tells her the same thing — to focus on not bizarre characters but the kind that can run in Harper’s Bazaar.
Cal, though, tells her that Robert Giroux, at the time with publisher Harcourt, likes her writing. Giroux later becomes her publisher at Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
Six degrees of separation, sort of, for me because Giroux grew up in Jersey City and attended St. Aloysius Grammar School. He eventually resided in the St. John’s Apartments above Journal Square. As an associate at St. Aloysius, I hosted him to speak in a series at the church in the 1980s. He was also the editor of Thomas Merton’s “The Seven Storey Mountain,” which became a Catholic classic.
As someone who had only read excerpts prior to seeing “Wildcat,” I was inspired to dust off a book I had in my library, “O’Connor,” totaling over 1,200 pages and begin to delve into her vivid writing.
Toward the end of the film, a priest played by Liam Neeson comes to visit her in her room where lupus debilitated her. They have a brief conversation when he asks her, “Is your writing honest?” and “Is your conscience clear?” She nods yes. Then he tells her, “The rest is God’s business.” And that phrase captured what she tried to convey to the reader throughout her short, stellar, literary career.
The Rev. Alexander Santora is the pastor of Our Lady of Grace and St. Joseph, 400 Willow Ave., Hoboken, NJ 07030. Email: padrealex@yahoo.com; X: @padrehoboken.
