Genius and virtue

“I don’t want your praise; I don’t want you to think I am clever,” Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) says to the priest (Liam Neeson) who has come to offer her counsel and comfort. She is wracked with pain from lupus, forced to move from New York City back to her mother’s home in Georgia, and railing against the limitations of her new life. She and the priest have been discussing whether “scandalous writing” can serve God. She has been carrying on a philosophical argument largely with herself, using the priest as her foil. Then she sits up violently and practically spits out the words, “But I do want it!”

Wildcat (directed by Ethan Hawke) is less a biopic than a luminous exploration of the tension between ambition and virtue and the power of constraint as an artistic discipline. We meet O’Connor as a young writer in New York City, trying to pitch her unfinished novel Wise Blood to an editor who wants her to rein in her prickly, often scathing style. “I don’t think you need to make [your readers] suffer in order to introduce them to the unusual way your mind works,” he says pointedly. O’Connor refuses to revise her novel into a more acceptable form. She knows her style is also its substance, an unflinching attempt to see reality without sentimentality. She also believes, in her heart of hearts, that it might represent her genius.

O’Connor both courts this genius and is terrified of giving in to her ambition. We watch her as a prize-winning young writer at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and then again in New York trading banter with Robert Lowell, already a famous poet. She is an outsider in these urbane situations, a southerner who writes about the South, a devout Catholic who writes about Christianity as though it might be more than a powerful myth. At a sophisticated dinner party where young writers attempt to outdo each other with wit and irony, writer Elizabeth Hardwick explains how she interprets the Catholic mass symbolically now that she has, presumably, outgrown it. “If the Eucharist is just a symbol, to hell with it,” O’Connor interjects bullishly. She moves through these spaces like an awkward ghost, haunting their edges, but we can see the hunger in her eyes.