I can vividly recall my first exposure to Flannery O’Connor’s stories. Ruby Turpin’s confrontation with God in Revelation made me feel like I had stepped into the book of Job; Sarah Ruth’s simultaneous beating of her husband and Christ in Parker’s Back brought me a new depth of understanding about grace building on nature; and Manly Pointer’s theft of Hulga’s prosthetic leg in Good Country People made me put down the book in shock. I had never read anything like these stories. And I couldn’t get enough.

After making my way through the rest of O’Connor’s short stories and then her two novels, I turned to posthumously published collections of her work. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald edited a collection of her prose entitled Mystery and Manners in 1969, which includes some of O’Connor’s most polished and insightful reflections on writing and literature. It’s an exceptional book. But even more seminal to my own appreciation of O’Connor’s thought is the correspondence collected in The Habit of Being, edited by Sally Fitzgerald and published in 1979, fifteen years after O’Connor’s death. It won that year’s National Book Critics Circle Special Award and has been a popular read ever since. We are greatly in debt to Fitzgerald for her labors in bringing us such an intimate portrait of O’Connor from the author’s own pen. It satisfied a desire that many like me continue to have—we want more from Flannery O’Connor. 

Others have followed Fitzgerald’s lead in bringing to the public unseen and uncollected parts of O’Connor’s corpus. Her book reviews, several of her interviews, other collections of correspondence, the cartoons she drew in college, a prayer journal she kept in graduate school—all of these have found the light of day since the publication of The Habit of Being. And with each publication, O’Connor fans are left wondering if this will be the last time that we’ll see something new from that perceptive and faithful mind that has been at rest since 1964. 

Though I have enjoyed all these books, each allowing me to see a new side of O’Connor and creating an odd illusion that she is not yet fully in the grave, I also find myself wondering if I am peering into aspects of her life that are rightly left private. The prayer journal, for instance, is clearly a diary that she kept at a formative time in her life. It is not the work of a seasoned writer, but that of a young woman who has just left home for the first time and is questioning her vocation. I’m not sure she wants me reading that. I know that 50 years after I die, I don’t want people reading anything I wrote when I started graduate school. I set my guilt aside and read it, only to say the same thing I had said of O’Connor’s stories, prose, correspondence, and everything else: her prayer journal is unlike anything I have read. It is completely sincere and confirms that she views her vocation as a writer as a calling from God. I am glad to have read it, even if it approaches the line of what should be left unpublished. 

An editor must exercise considerable circumspection in showing the public something that was intended to be kept private. If it contributes to our appreciation of the author and her work, then a strong case can be made in its favor. But what happens when an author brings something into the light that does not elevate our appreciation? Truth requires that we not keep things that should be known hidden, but surely not every word O’Connor ever wrote needs to be shown to the world. Like many (probably all) great writers, her most celebrated stories were only possible because so many poorer attempts were set aside as practice. I’ve never felt the need to see early drafts of works that O’Connor or any other author found unfinished. In fact, I have learned to leave such things alone from reading The Habit of Being. In one of her early letters, O’Connor explains how she approaches her work, saying, 

I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.

Only after saying something over and over until she was fully satisfied with it would O’Connor allow others to see what she said. And what she says publicly is well worth the look. I’m not sure we should be looking at what was not completely said. It’s a bit like tasting something that a great chef has not finished preparing, and perhaps even abandoned because something in the process went wrong. 

Jessica Hooten Wilson’s Flannery O’Connor’s Why do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind the Scenes Look at a Work in Progress is the most recent effort to bring to the public something new to read by O’Connor. This too is a book unlike anything I have ever read, but the reason has more to do with Wilson’s approach than O’Connor’s words. Wilson’s idea is to reconstruct from various fragments and drafts the novel that O’Connor had been working on when her body submitted to the lupus that had been hounding her for nearly fifteen years. Only a small portion of what would have been her third novel appeared in print during O’Connor’s lifetime, a short piece included in an issue of Esquire magazine meant to give readers a taste of what well-known authors were currently writing. O’Connor’s contribution was entitled “Why Do the Heathen Rage,” which she intended to call her new novel. The short piece is not really a story, but because it was published it is included in collected editions of O’Connor’s works. I remember being confused when I first read it, not understanding that it was a teaser and not the complete literary effort. 

Wilson’s book takes what drafts exist of Why Do the Heathen Rage and puts them together to give us a sense of what the novel would have been had O’Connor been able to complete it. Wilson must choose between drafts of episodes. And because O’Connor had not produced drafts of the book’s finale, Wilson provides her own account of how the story might end. She pulls all this off well enough, but it’s rather a strange exercise. I still don’t quite know what to make of it, other than I walked away feeling I know Wilson better but not O’Connor. Using the food analogy from above, the book is a bit like eating a meal started by one chef and finished by another. 

In addition to her creative ending of the novel, Wilson provides an ongoing commentary about O’Connor that is interspersed throughout the book. Parts of the commentary are helpful, others confounding. The effect is that O’Connor’s drafty novel is entangled with Wilson’s polished interpretations, making it difficult to approach the unfinished drafts on their own terms. Wilson calls herself an editor in the Introduction, but in reality, she’s the author of this book. Readers should know that before cracking the cover. 

Unfortunately, the cover sets readers up to think they are reading a novel by O’Connor. The official title of the book is Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage. The first two words of that title (Flannery O’Connor) are presented on the cover without italics and in a slightly different color than the remaining five words, which are italicized (Why Do the Heathen Rage?). This gives the impression that one is about to read a previously unpublished O’Connor novel. The subtitle (A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress) is in smaller font, and it does mitigate this expectation but only somewhat. It is more likely that the unsuspecting reader will be drawn to the unofficial subtitle that also appears prominently on the upper corner of the cover. It reads, “The Unfinished Novel in Print for the First Time.” This is very misleading. 

Also on the cover is an illustration by artist Steve Prince, who produced seven linoleum cuts that appear throughout the book. Other than the collection of O’Connor’s own cartoons, no other collection of O’Connor’s work includes illustrations, one more indication of the novelty of Wilson’s approach. I found myself studying Prince’s art as I read through the book, not exactly sure what it was I was looking at but nonetheless fascinated. The cover art depicts an African American man with a stern expression on his face. I cannot tell if his eyes are open or closed. His collared shirt appears to also be a house. Out of the front door of the shirt-house, which the man is opening, escapes a spirit of some sort, a spirit that would be easy to mistake for a small pitchfork. Is the man losing his soul? I’m not sure, even after reading the book. 

In an Afterward, Prince offers us an explanation of his illustrations. He points out that O’Connor and Malcolm X were both born in 1925 and died before their fortieth birthday. Struck by the coincidence, Prince tells us, 

The contrast of these two individuals became the spark of my thinking of how to approach making art for this text. Each image is a sort of metanarrative: in one sense, to give flesh to the story that O’Connor is espousing, but in another sense to offer readers an additional narrative to embrace simultaneously. I attempt to give voice to the silence, the absence, the erased, the overlooked, the recesses, to encourage readers to embrace the fullness of our history during the period in which the text was written. 

I admit to not having ever thought about connecting Flannery O’Connor and Malcolm X, and I am intrigued by the ideas that influence Prince’s art in the book. My favorite illustration is one he entitled “Ancestral Water.” It depicts a baptism. The line of telephone poles in the background looks like the three crosses on Calvary. It is a nice representation of grace building on nature, which is very O’Connoresque. And at the same time, something about the picture does remind me of Malcolm X’s seriousness about the divine. The preacher in the scene reaches upward, his extended hand slightly leaving the frame as if to suggest that the search for God cannot be bounded. The baptismal waters also ripple outside the frame, suggesting that God’s grace is also without limits. It’s a powerful image. 

Prince’s art enriches Wilson’s book, and it reinforces the theme of race that runs throughout her commentaries. O’Connor scholars have long been interested in questions of race, but the tone has changed since Paul Elie’s piece in the New Yorker accusing O’Connor of being a racist. (Law and Liberty published my response to Elie’s accusation.) Wilson attempts to walk a line between admirer of O’Connor and critic of her insensitivity to systemic racism in America. She makes several references to O’Connor’s white privilege and ignorance of injustice. “Without feeling the damage caused by racism,” she writes, “O’Connor perhaps felt no compulsion toward repentance.” But she won’t go so far as to call O’Connor a racist. Immediately following these lines, she reminds us that “we should be wary to judge her in hindsight.” True enough. And yet, it seems to me that Wilson does judge her in hindsight. She explains that the issues of race in Why Do the Heathen Rage are written for a white audience without concern for the perspectives or experiences of African Americans. Prince’s artwork is meant as a corrective to O’Connor’s supposed shortcomings.

I’m not sure the fragments of O’Connor’s story Wilson presents in this book bear out this critique of racial insensitivity (or white privilege). It looks to me, based on what is presented, like the story is about a man who has a conversion to Christianity and for reasons that are still unclear (because it is so drafty) tries to imagine what it would be like to be African American so that he can engage in correspondence with a social activist. We will never know how well O’Connor would have been able to pull this off. Perhaps the novel would have amounted to nothing more than a parody; though, of course, that would have been a first for O’Connor. Given that we are only seeing excerpts of drafts, reserving our judgment is no doubt best. Any evaluation of O’Connor’s efforts at something that she herself did not yet think was good enough to show the world really is like judging a chef by what is left on the chopping block. Therefore, I think Wilson goes too far when she says, “By not reading the issue of race with theological significance—which must include the Black perspective that so often eluded her—O’Connor seems to have been unable to finish the story she longed to tell.” I can’t imagine that this is the real reason O’Connor never finished the story. I am pretty sure it is because she died. 

I don’t mean to be overly judgmental myself. I have long admired Wilson’s work and this latest effort is something I will continue to ponder. But this is a different sort of project than Fitzgerald’s The Habit of Being, from which I learned so much about O’Connor. It differs, too, from the publication of O’Connor’s prayer journal, which showed me the seriousness with which O’Connor took the discernment of her vocation. While it is true that Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heather Rage by Jessica Hooten Wilson is a book unlike anything I have previously encountered, readers should be aware that they are not getting a previously unpublished O’Connor novel. They are getting a book by another author made with a combination of scraps from O’Connor’s chopping board, critical commentary, and thoughtful art. Tasty enough in its own way, readers should know before sharpening their knives and tucking in their napkins that they are not getting anything new from Chef O’Connor.