strange bird
by Douglas Messerli
Brad
Gooch Flannery: A Life of Flannery
O'Connor (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2009)
Flannery O'Connor Collected Works, contents selected and
chronology by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: The Library of America, 1988)
In his new biography of Flannery O'Connor, Brad Gooch dutifully notes
the families' comings and goings, based on brief mentions in the local
newspapers. But, except for their scuttling between houses little of interest
occurs in O'Connor's youth except at age five, when she was filmed by Pathè
with her pet chicken who was rumored to walk backwards: at first, things did
not go well, but "Finally, as the afternoon wore on, the bird began to
back up. O'Connor, a natural mimic, jumped next to her and began to walk
backward as well. The [camera] operator stuck his head under his tent. A few seconds
later, the hen hit a bush and abruptly sat down. Exasperated, 'the Pathé man'
gathered his equipment and made a quick exit...." The only major literary
contribution of her youth was a satirical portrait of her extended family. And,
although, Gooch goes out of his way to normalize her Catholic-school girlhood,
one cannot help but perceive her a bit like the red-faced child in O'Connor's
story "A Circle in the Fire," her face buried in a book from which,
from time to time, she would peer out at the world about. At age twelve, she
was overly wise and determined to not grow any older. And, in some respects,
Gooch and others hint that, at least sexually, she remained that age throughout
her life.
One aspect of her childhood education, however, reveals a great deal
about her later writing. Attending the local Catholic school, O'Connor, in
third grade, began resenting certain of what she described as "nun-inspired
doings." As Brad Gooch describes her "tussles" with authority:
In a state of mind
somewhere between a child's daydream and one of
the scriptural visions she
heard preached about the church, she imagined
bouts with a guardian angel
she pictures as half nun, half bird.
As O'Connor wrote to her friend,
Betty Hester, years later, "From 8 to 12 years it was my habit to seclude
myself in a locked room every so often and with a fierce (and evil) face, whirl
around in a circle with my fists knotted, socking the angel with which the
Sisters assured us we were all equipped.... You couldn't hurt an angel but I
would have been happy to know I had dirtied his feathers...."
Having lost his Dixie Realty Company (later expanded to include the
Dixie Construction Company), in part due to the Great Depression, her beloved
father soon after began to show signs of illness, lupus, which would eventually
kill him—and years later, O'Connor herself. In 1938, having been appointed a
real estate appraiser for the Federal Housing Administration, he and the family
moved to Atlanta, an experience hated by Flannery and, evidently, by her
mother, for the two returned in the Fall to live in Milledgeville—appropriately
named, given O'Connor's love of chickens peacocks, geese, and swans, a
"Bird Sanctuary"—with the father remaining weekdays in Atlanta, a
city much vilified in her story "The Artificial Nigger," where
grandfather and son agree: "I'm glad I've went once, but I'll never to
back again!"
O'Connor came alive, so it appears, during her college days at Georgia
State College for Women, located, as she later joked, across the street from
her Milledgeville home. There she quickly became active as a cartoonist,
regularly contributing to the college literary magazine, the Corinthian. Soon after she began to
publish short prose pieces and stories in that magazine and the Colonnade, where she became art editor
and also published weekly cartoons. Indeed, O'Connor took her cartoons seriously
enough that she sent some for possible publication in The New Yorker. It is fascinating to think what might have happened
to her writing talent had that magazine accepted her work.
For fiction, clearly, was not yet an area which O'Connor had thoroughly
explored as a possible career. Gooch carefully outlines the several courses in
English Literature O'Connor took, pointing to important early readings in her
textbook, including stories by Faulkner, Joyce, and Poe. It was a social
science course, however, that was ultimately to change her life. That course,
an Introduction to Modern Philosophy, was taught by George Beiswanger, who had
received is PhD at the University of Iowa. He had also worked as an editor for Theatre Arts Monthly and written on
dance in Dance Observer, as well as
taken part in a arts symposium at Black Mountain College. Later in her life,
philosophical theory, particularly of the religious sort, would occupy a great
deal of her energy. But in this course she sat through discussions of Descartes
and other Enlightenment thinkers with "persistent, subtle scowl."
"What kept me a sceptic in college was precisely my Christian faith,"
she confided in a letter of 1962. Yet Beiswanger clearly saw her abilities,
particularly from her classroom arguments with him. Not only did the student
receive an A, but he encouraged her to apply for graduate school at his alma
mater. She applied to both Duke University and Iowa, considering a career in
journalism. The latter accepted her with full tuition, to which she readily
agreed.
From almost the first moment of entering
the Iowa campus, however, O'Connor found her way to the office of Paul Engle,
then director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Their hilarious first encounter is
worth describing:
Sitting in his office early
in the fall of 1945, Paul Engle...heard a gentle
knock at the door. After he
shouted an invitation to enter, a shy, young
woman appeared and walked
over to his desk without, at first, saying
a word. He could not even
tell, as she stood before him, whether she was
looking in his direction, or
out the window at the curling Iowa River
below. ...[Engle]
introduced himself and offered her a seat, as she tightly
held on to what he later
claimed was "one of the most beat-up handbags
I've ever seen."
When she finally
spoke, her Georgia dialect sounded so thick to his
Midwestern ear that he
asked her repeat her question. Embarrassed by
an inability a second time,
to understand, Engle handed her a pad to
write what she had said. So
in schoolgirl script, she put down three short
lines: "My name is
Flannery O'Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come
to the Writers'
Workshop?"
A couple of days later, after Engle
read a few stories she had sent him, O'Connor was accepted into the program,
and an important new chapter in American literary history was begun.
It
was at the Iowa campus that Flannery O'Connor truly discovered herself.
Changing her name from Mary Flannery O'Connor in order to avoid "the
lilting double name that exaggerated her oddity as a Southern lady in Iowa
City," Flannery soon settled in to her home at Currier House, beginning a
series of "close reading" literary classes with Engle, Paul Horgan,
Austin Warren, Andrew Lytle, and guest lecturers John Crowe Ransom and Robert
Penn Warren. It was there she wrote early stories such as "The
Geranium," "The Crop," "The Barber," and others. In
1946 she began the story, "The Train," finishing it in early 1947,
soon after expanding it to become the first chapter of her novel Wise Blood. In May of that year, O'Connor was awarded the
Rinehart-Iowa Award for an early version of the novel.
As a postgraduate student the next Fall, O'Connor moved out of Currier
House and became friends with several individuals with whom she would
communicate throughout her life, including the story writers and novelists Jean
Williams, Robie Macauley, and Walter Sullivan. She also met poet Robert Lowell,
who gave a reading in Iowa City's Old Capitol building.
In early June in 1948, O'Connor arrived for her first stay at Yaddo, the
writer's colony located at the former Trask estate in Saratoga Springs, New
York. Among the many noted figures visiting during O'Connor's stay were Patricia
Highsmith, Frederick Morton, Clifford Wright, Elizabeth Hardwick, Malcolm
Cowley, and Robert Lowell, who quickly became "Flannery's champion."
Here, working on and reworking Wise Blood,
O'Connor, despite her monastic writing habits which kept her at arm's distance
from the wild behavior of Lowell (his romancing of Elizabeth Hardwick was the
talk of the colony), had finally found her milieu, determining to remain at
Yaddo over the Christmas holidays instead of returning home to her mother.
The post-War anti-Communist hysteria of the "Red Scare,"
however, found its way to the isolated institution's doors. General Douglas
MacArthur's accusation that Agnes Smedley had run a spy ring out of Shanghai,
startled the residents, since she had been a close friend of the Yaddo director
and "monarch," Elizabeth Ames. An FBI check of Communist sympathies
at Yaddo quickly followed. Clifford Wright, believed by Ames to be an FBI
informant, was sent packing. Lowell, also one of the directors of Yaddo, held
an "inquisition" against Ames, accusing her of arbitrary decisions,
even involving a reluctant and distanced O'Connor, who announced that she would
be leaving the next Tuesday.
Left without a place to go, O'Connor suddenly found herself in
Manhattan, staying for a while first with Elizabeth Hardwick, and moving over
later to Tatum House, a YWCA residence on Lexington Avenue. Lowell, in turn,
helped her make contacts, introducing her to translator Robert Fitzgerald and
his wife Sally, who, through their shared Catholicism and intellectual abilities,
would become lifetime friends of O'Connor, with Sally later editing O'Connor's
letters and essays, and creating a chronology of O'Connor's life in the 1988
Library of America edition for O'Connor's Collected
Works.
Lowell also introduced her to Robert Giroux, in those days an editor at
Harcourt Brace, the publisher, ultimately, of Wise Blood, and who, later as a publisher at Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, would promote O'Connor's other works.
Lowell's increasing madness during this period, however, and his
ultimate rebuke from the Yaddo directors of his charges against Ames, left
O'Connor once again in the lurch, a woman with little money and a mother
fearful of her living alone in Manhattan. In March the author returned home,
staying through Easter, with the intention of returning to New York.
When O'Connor did return, she faced a muggy summer, and, according to
Gooch, spent most of her time in her humble room, revising the last sections of
Wise Blood, only rarely getting out
into the New York streets. As O'Connor herself describes these outings: "I
finally ended up eating at the Columbia University student cafeteria. I looked
enough like a student to get by with it, and it was one of the few places I
suspected the food of being clean." In August, the film Mighty Joe Young opened at the Criterion
Theatre in Times Square, flanked by a publicity stunt in which a man in a ape
suit greeted theater-goers, an incident that made its way in her first novel.
An invitation to stay as "a paying
guest" at the Fitzgerald's large country house in Connecticut saved her
from further suffering in the city which, she later admitted, she knew only
that there was a "uptown" and a "downtown." But the daily
business of family life with three children and another on its way, clearly
made for some distressing interruptions in her writing time. During a trip back
to Milledgeville in December O'Connor became seriously ill and was hospitalized
for an operation for a floating kidney, a disease described as "Dietl's
crisis." And, although she made good progress in writing upon her return
to the Fitzgerald's, she described the heaviness in her "typing
arms." So serious did the pain become that Sally took O'Connor to a local
doctor who diagnosed the joint pains as rheumatoid arthritis, recommending a
complete examination when she returned to Milledgeville for Christmas. A few
nights after O'Connor's return home, Regina, her mother, called the Fitzgeralds—insisting
that they keep the fact a secret from her daughter—to announce that Flannery
was dying of lupus.
2
Gooch aptly compares O'Connor's
return to the South to that of Asbury Fox's return home in O'Connor's story
"The Enduring Chill." Fox's "illness," although he believes
it to be a deadly one, is later discovered, ironically, to be undulant fever, a
fever which will destroy his life without truly killing him. O'Connor's illness
was of a far more serious nature, and even though she was told it was only
arthritis, she described her feelings to a friend that belied her fears:
I am languishing on my bed
of semi affliction, this time with
AWRTHRITUS or, to give it
all it has, the acute rheumatoid
arthritis, what leaves you
always willing to sit down, lie down,
lie flatter, etc....I will
be in Milledgeville Ga. a birdsanctuary for
a few months, waiting to see
how much of an invalid I am
going to be...but I don't
believe in time no more so its all one
to me.
It was during the painful hospital
stays in Atlanta and back in Milledgeville of this period, however, that
O'Connor finally came to comprehend the major character of Wise Blood, Hazel Motes, in her own illness, as she described it,
spelling out the book. In June of that year, after having been rejected by
Rinehart, Harcourt Brace accepted the book, with Giroux sending a list of
suggested additions and corrections. Through Robert Fitzgerald's intercession,
the book was also read and edited by Southern novelist Caroline Gordon, who
became another of the author's literary friends and a reader of all O'Connor's
later work. Gordon's editorial influence upon O'Connor's work was evidently
quite significant and appreciated by the writer, yet, as an editor, I would
certainly have questioned editorial changes such as that Gooch describes
wherein the color of Emery Enoch's tie was changed from "greenpeaish"
(a perfect O'Connorism) to "the color of green peas," a far more
standard metaphor.
On May 15, 1952 Wise Blood was, at last, published.
Hazel Motes, the central character of Wise Blood, from the very beginning of the fiction, is a man
defined by his eyes. On the train ride to Taulkinham, Mrs. Hitchcock sees the
ex-soldier, dressed in his "glaring blue" blue suit and broad-brimmed
hat, "a hat that an elderly country preacher would wear," as a figure
with his eyes trained on something outside of her own vision. "...His eyes
is what held her attention longest. Their settings were so deep that they
seemed, to her, almost like passages leading somewhere and she leaned halfway
across the space that separated the two seats, trying to see into them."
Just through Hazel Motes' name, the reader recognizes that the deep-set
eyes that Mrs. Hitchcock observes is, in part, accounts for the fact that she
cannot see into them. Not only are they the color, O'Connor tells us, of
"pecan shells," a kind of "hazel-like" color, but they are
"hazy" and, as his last name hints, they contain "motes," specks
that symbolically speaking, does not allow him to properly see. This image, in
turn, suggests the famous Biblical passage repeated in both Matthew and Luke:
And why
beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's
eye but
considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or wilt
thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote
out of thine
eye; and behold, a beam is in thine
own eye?
Thou
hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own
eye; and then
shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out
of thy brother's
eye. (Matthew 7:3-5)
With this warning against hypocrisy, O'Connor sets the tone for her tale
of a man, destined to become a preacher, yet who rejects the religion of his
father and grandfather. Clearly effected by his military experiences, the death
of his father (who does not arise from his coffin as he has promised) and by
the cultural and social-political changes in his state and small hometown (he
is convinced that the train porter is a Parnum "nigger" from his now
empty hometown of Eastrod, pretending to be born and raised in Chicago), Motes
is determined to promulgate a new faith, "The Church without Christ."
The dilemma of preaching for a church of disbelief in a world where most
individuals perceive themselves as eternally saved results in a comic
situation, leading to a world in which, as Haze puts it early in the book,
"If you're been redeemed...I wouldn't want to be," a predicament
played out in the works of the devout Catholic writer again and again. Indeed,
through O'Connor's serious engagement of this dark comedic existentialism,
Motes' predicament—wherein the more he fights against his lost faith, the more
he reveals his own Christian temperament—becomes a terrifying tale of
redemption.
Without even trying, Motes immediately attracts disciples, first Enoch
Emery, a frictional rock of faith. In his name, Enoch, the eldest son of Cain
and the murderer of his brother Abel, is a sort of reverse image of God's
chosen, recognized even by the waitress of the zoo's Frosty Bottle stand, as a
"pus-marked bastard...a goddamned son a bitch." She recognizes Motes,
on the other hand, as "a clean boy." Again, however, Motes perceives
his purity in oppositional terms: he is clean because there is no Christ.
The relation between Enoch and Haze, like Christ's relationship with
several of his disciples, is an inexplicable one, with Enoch immediately
sensing some change in his life and attempting to please the new stranger in
Taulkinham. As for Motes, Enoch, coming from the country finds city life lonely,
a place in which people are unfriendly. He recognizes in Motes a potential
friend and a kind of older brother with whom he might bond. Yet O'Connor goes
out of her way to make their relationship even more complex, presenting it as a
kind of sacramental kinship in which Enoch is determined to award Motes with
something of significance. In that sense, their relationship, without having
anything directly to do with sex, is based on an immediate male-to-male
attraction, at least on Enoch's part, and made even more sexually ironic when
we realize the gift he chooses is a shrunken man, in Enoch's eyes a kind of
immortalized baby. That latent sexuality energizes their relationship in the
same way that Motes is determined to sexually seduce Sabbath Lily Hawks, the
second of his disciples, a kind of Mary Magdalene and Mary, the Mother of Jesus
rolled into one.
If Enoch is perceived as an "unclean" figure, Sabbath Lily and
her father, also a preacher, are true hypocrites, the old man pretending that
he has blinded himself in order to proclaim his faith. In truth, they are both
sham artists, attempting to make a meager living from their prayers of
salvation. For her part, Lily is determined to marry the preacher because he is
"good to look at." More sexually experienced than Motes, she has a
difficult time engaging him until she moves in with him, Motes desiring to rid
himself of her even then.
Predictably, what most intrigues Motes about the couple is the father's
presumed blindness, and he goes out of his way to find out what is "behind the dark glasses." Just as
people cannot properly see into Motes' eyes, so Motes cannot glimpse the secret
of Hawks' vision. Indeed, unlike other preachers, Hawks makes no attempt to
convert Motes or invite him to join his church.
Motes' own attempts at converting the Taulkinham crowds to join his
"Church without Christ" are a complete failure. That is, until Hoover
Shoats, another of O'Connor's Christian hypocrites, speaks up as having been
converted by Motes. But his claim that he previously "met the
prophet," who completely changed his life, infuriates the honest Haze, who
turns on Shoats and the crowd both, bellowing "Blasphemy is the way to the
truth."
When he discovers, the next evening, that Shoats has found a new boy in
his preaching scheme, a man who looks to be the twin of Motes, he has no choice
but to destroy his double if he and his message is to be heard.
In some ways, Motes' faith in the
"Church without Christ" is so fervently straight forward, so humanly
honest in its utter rejection of faith and miracles, that no one can believe
him, for there is nothing he offers to believe in. Just as ironic is
Enoch's robbery from the Museum of "the shrunken man," which he
delivers to Motes' room soon after Sabbath Hawks has taken up quarters there.
Her language and her actions create a symbolic scene that stands against
everything that Motes has preached. Calling Motes the "king of the
beasts" and insisting he "Make haste," it is inevitable that
Sabbath take up Enoch's gift of the shrunken man as if it were a baby to nurse,
taunting Motes with the very image of the nativity. Haze flings the object out
the window!
Shaken by events, Motes, unlike the fake preacher Hawks, having the
courage of his convictions, puts lime into his eyes, symbolically removing his
motes and snaring the Hawk simultaneously.
Enoch, meanwhile, filled with the wonder of "expectation,"
attends the premiere of Gonga, Giant
Jungle Monarch, escaping with a gorilla suit "awarded by its
god," donning the costume and slouching through the countryside like
Yeats' rough beast towards Bethlehem to be born anew.
3
The forces at work in O'Connor's
first fiction are fierce oppositions, ironies that point to possible redemption
rather than awarding those who believe themselves saved. It will be a pattern
she will repeat in the remainder of her writings, a vision that, as she
admitted back in Iowa, arises from a Third Century point of view of
Christianity.
Gooch also notes several events in
Andalusia and Milledgeville as sources for the stories O'Connor was writing
during these years, pointing in particular to newspaper articles, Langkjaer's
relationship with Flannery, the hiring by Regina of a Polish family, the
Matysiaks, and O'Connor's relationship with her mother. What is apparent after
reading Gooch's biography is how much O'Connor depended on her local community
for her writing; but equally important, I would argue, is how the author
transformed those local events—or perhaps reconceived her daily encounters as
satiric and spiritual fables. It is quite apparent that O'Connor could not have
survived those years without the help of her mother, but it is also quite
evident that Regina often stood like a thorn in her side, entreating her
daughter, again and again, to write about nicer subjects and people. During a
visit from Robert Giroux, the publisher describes just such an occasion. During
breakfast with mother and daughter, Regina asked: "Mister Giroux, can't
you get Flannery to write about nice people?"
Giroux said, "I started
to laugh. But Flannery was sitting utterly deadpan.
I thought, 'Uh, oh. This is
serious to her.' Flannery never smiled, or raised
her eyebrow, or gave me any
clue."
The "small, managing
indomitable mother," as Giroux later described Regina to Elizabeth Bishop,
is both an important source for many of O'Connor's forbearing and unbearable
mothers, but was also someone who O'Connor, just as in her youth she had fought
against the nuns and her guardian angel, saw as a force with whom she had to
daily reckon.
4
Despite her illness, by June 1953 O'Connor was ready to return to the
Fitzgeralds, also making a day trip with Caroline Gordon to New York City. This
time, the slightly older children were full of mischief, made even worse by a
Yugoslav "shepherdess" brought to the US to help with the children
and pets. Accordingly, life in the Fitzgerald home was more chaotic than
before, and O'Connor surely found it difficult to write. Of the greatest
importance, however, was a piece of information that would change her
perception of everything. Gooch effectively describes the scene:
"On the way back, on a lovely summer's afternoon, she [Sally] glanced over at her passenger...[having] made up her mind, following much inner struggle, that Flannery should know of her illness. At that instant, Flannery happened to mention her arthritis. "Flannery, you don't have arthritis," Sally said quickly. "You have lupus." Reacting to the sudden revelation, Flannery slowly moved her arm from the car door down into her lap, her hand visibly trembling. Sally felt her own knee shaking against the clutch, too, as she continued driving.....
'Well, that's not good news,' Flannery said, after a few silent, charged moments. 'But I can't thank you enough for telling me....I thought I had lupus, and I thought I was going crazy. I'd a lot rather be sick than crazy. ....But don't ever tell Regina you told me, because if you do she will never tell you anything else. I might want to know something else sometime.'"
What with the continued difficulties
with the Slavic nanny, Sally being pregnant with a fifth child and turning ill,
and Flannery's own contraction of a virus, O'Connor arranged for Sally's care
and returned to Georgia. The lupus had been reactivated by the viral infection,
further sealing O'Connor's future.
By 1954, as Erik Langkjaer reported O'Connor was "using a
stick" to help in her walks, which would follow by her need for crutches.
Yet O'Connor continued to write new stories, and by the end of that year, she
promised Sally Fitzgerald a forthcoming volume of tales. By May 1955, O'Connor
found herself seated before an NBC camera in New York City to discuss with
Harvey Breit her upcoming collection, A
Good Man Is Hard to Find. The book was published on June 6th.
Even in her first work, Wise Blood, one perceived that
O'Connor's writing, at times, could be comically violent, but now, facing her
own mortality, O'Connor's dark humor entered what one might speculate is a new
phase. Particularly in the title story, Flannery proffers a work in which all
characters might be said to be fiends. As in so many of her fables, the major
struggle in A Good Man Is Hard to Find
is between the self-righteous societal figures, particularly represented by The
Grandmother, and those outside of societal values, exemplified by The Misfit
and his gang. But there is a second and more subtle battle played out in this
tale between The Grandmother and the family, her son Bailey, his wife and their
two children, John Wesley and June Star. Had O'Connor written this tale a
couple of years later, after she had seen Tennessee Williams' 1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Caroline
Gordon in New York, one might suspect that the two children of this tale were
based on what Maggie the Cat describes as her sister-in-law's "no-neck
monsters." For the children here are true terrors, selfish, overweight
brats whose major activities include dismissing the world around them and
reading comic books. In his diffident hatred of his family, however, Bailey is
no different, dismissive of any imagined past his mother might conjure up and
determined just survive their trip to Florida. O'Connor doesn't even name the
mother, who is described as "a young woman in slacks, whose face was as
broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief
that had points on the top like rabbit's ears." The Grandmother, another
figure clearly inspired by Regina, is a busybody, do-gooder, who has an answer
for everything and believes her values, particularly those inspired by the past,
are superior to the modern world in which she had discovered herself. It is her
determination to revisit a Southern Plantation she had seen earlier in her life
that takes the family down the dirt road to their doom. Even her sudden
revelation, as the car is propelled off the road in an accident, that the
mansion she had witnessed as a child was in Tennessee, not in Georgia, does not
alter for a moment her faith in her own righteousness, a belief she is
convinced can be imposed upon people if spoken insistently and strongly enough.
As The Misfit they discover upon this ill-fated journey takes the family away
to shoot them, one by one, The Grandmother repeats over and over how she can
see The Misfit is "A Good Man" at heart, who only needs to rediscover
God through prayer. Unable to recognize true evil, she insists up until the
moment of her death that he can be redeemed. The utterly cynical statements of
The Misfit and Bobby Lee at tale's end, reveal to the reader how absurd she has
been in her empty faith and her shallow prescriptions for life.
"She would of been a
good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been
somebody there to shoot her every
minute of her life."
"Some fun!" Bobby
Lee said.
"Shut up, Bobby
Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life.
The parents of the young boy in "The River" are as ineffective
as Bailey and his wife. But these figures are perhaps even more detestable in
their endless partying, followed by mornings of drunken sleep. Their young son
seems expendable, a child who has little to do in his life "but eat,"
and they are happy to surrender him to the hired Black woman who intends on
taking him to an old-fashioned Southern Baptism.
So dissociated from life is the child, that overhearing that the
minister who he will soon see is named Bevel Summers, he tells his sitter, Mrs.
Connin, that his name is Bevel, thus becoming a new being even before he is
ultimately "reborn" in the river, immersed in the water as a symbol
of new life.
The world where Mrs. Connin takes the child does, in fact, represent a
"new life," a world completely different from his, and when he arises
the next morning to discover his parents in a drunken stupor once again, he
steals away from the house by himself, returning to the river to "Baptize
himself and to keep on going this time until he found the Kingdom of
Christ." The only witness to his death, inevitably, is Mr. Paradise.
In "A Circle of Fire," another Regina-based figure, Mrs. Cope,
must indeed "cope" with her hired hands, particularly the
Pritchard's, her current head workers. As I previously mentioned, her daughter
is a Flannery-life figure, her head buried in a book throughout most of the
story—except when three strangers arrive, one a boy, Powell, whose family once
worked on the place.
The boys have escaped their homes in Atlanta (a city despised by many of
O'Connor's figures) to return to an
idyll that Powell has often described to them, of fresh air and riding
horses. At first, Mrs. Cope attempts to placate the young men, inviting them to
stay. But it quickly becomes apparent through their manners and refusal to eat
what she serves, that they are not at all "Good Country People,"
that, in fact, they are dangerous in their carelessness and sexuality. Mrs.
Cope is terrified of fires, and the boys smoke, tossing their cigarettes into
the grass. Her tormented daughter, moreover, is fascinated by the young men. Mrs.
Cope orders them off her land, but they refuse to leave, becoming interlopers
who threaten the ordered world she has created.
Like Hedda Gabler, the daughter escapes
to the woods with a pistol, intending to enforce the exit her mother has been unable
to accomplish. But when the boys come close to her, she grows silent with
wonderment as she watches them naked, bathing in the cow trough. The boys are
clearly torn in their desires to live in this rural Eden and, since it cannot
belong to them, determine to destroy it, setting the woods afire as the girl
runs home terrified of the possible desolation of her future life: "Mama,
Mama, they're going to build a parking lot here!" In that mix of new
sexuality and loss, she hears the whop of the boys, as they, like the Biblical
boys Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, having refused to bow before the golden
idol, survive Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace:
She stood taut,
listening, and could just catch in the distance a
few wild shrieks of joy
as if the prophets were dancing in the
fiery furnace, in the
circle the angel had cleared for them.
A opposition between mother and daughter is also at the center of
O'Connor's great story, "Good Country People." Mrs. Hopewell does
indeed "hope well," facing all of life's difficulties with her
favorite clichés, "Nothing is perfect" and "That is life!"
Her major sorrow, however, is her overeducated daughter, Joy, a woman with an
artificial leg, who has renamed herself Hulga, in part just to irritate her
well-meaning mother.
When a traveling bible salesman arrives, Mrs. Hopewell, although having
no intention of buying a Bible, politely invites the young man to dinner and,
later, allows him to stay in the house. In her world of empty homilies, Mrs.
Hopewell, sees the young man as "Good Country People," the salt of
the earth, "honest" and "genuine." Hulga, detesting her
mother's refusal to see what she perceives of as reality, dares the situation
by arranging with the salesman, for the next day, a sexual encounter in a barn.
But the irony here is that it is not only the ridiculous Mrs. Hopewell
who is duped. When the bible salesman has deposited Hulga in the hayloft, Hulga
is shocked when the boy who she sees as a complete innocent offers her a drink
out of a flask embedded in one of the bibles, and, after cajoling her to
explain how her artificial leg is attached, steals the leg, leaving her in the
helpless lurch.
"The Displaced Person" is also a story strongly based on
events at Andalusia. Like Mrs. McIntyre, convinced by a local priest to hire a
family displaced by World War II, Regina had hired a Polish family, displaced
people, to work on the farm. In O'Connor's tale the good work done by Mr.
Guizac and his wife, while first greatly admired, is rewarded with fear and
doubt, particularly since Mr. Guizac has little of the Southern prejudice again
Blacks that his employer does, and is quite willing to suggest a marriage with a
family member still in Poland to a meek and uneducated Black worker on the
place.
As in many of the stories in A
Good Man Is Hard to Find, a secondary cast of characters is central to the
action, in this case the Shortley's who previously ran the farm, but in their
daily gossip and lack of ambition are quickly shown up by the newcomer. Their
hatred of the outsiders, accordingly, is even more fervent that Mrs. McIntyre's,
who cannot make up her mind to ask the displaced family to leave. By the time
she has gotten her courage up to fire Guizac, she enters the barn just in time
to witness Mr. Shortley accidently (?) driving his tractor over the Polish
worker. With Guziac's death and the Shortley's departure, Mrs. McIntyre grows
ill, herself becoming a kind of displaced person on her own land, a Protestant
now regularly visited by the priest explaining to her the doctrines of his
church.
5
Unlike Wise
Blood, which had received mostly negative reviews, A Good Man Is Hard to Find received a great deal of praise in the Herald Tribune Book Review, the New York Times and the Times Book Review (written by Caroline
Gordon). The New Yorker, on the other
hand, called the work brutal and the Times
Literary Supplement described the works as "intense, erratic and
strange." Yet it was clear that O'Connor had begun to find an audience and
appreciative readers.
During this same period, O'Connor also received her first letter from a
woman who would later become her closest and most regular correspondent, Betty
Hester. With Hester and others, O'Connor would explain, as Gooch describes it,
"her artistic intentions," building up a series of expressed concerns
that she would soon use to good example in her several university lectures and
in essays such as "The Church and the Fiction Writer," "Some
Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction," "The Regional
Writer," and "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South."
When Hester felt compelled to reveal to O'Connor her "history of
horror," that she was dishonorably discharged from the military for
"having been intimately involved with another woman," O'Connor's
response, as Gooch describes it, "was immediate and caring":
"'I can't write you fast enough and tell you that it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference in my opinion of you, which is the same as it was, and that is: based solidly on complete respect.' As to Betty's point about scandal, Flannery argued, 'I'm obscure enough. Nobody knows or cares who I see. If it created any tension in you that If don't understand, then use your own judgment, but understand that from my point of view, you are always wanted.' Flannery did suggest that they not tell Regina as 'she wouldn't understand.' Given the nature of their friendship, she parsed the matter theologically, 'Where you are wrong is in saying that you are a history of horror. The meaning of Redemption is precisely that we do not have to be our history.'"
In 1956, through the auspices of the new president of Georgia State
College for Women, Robert E. Lee, Flannery met Lee's sister, Maryat Lee, a
larger-than-life six-feet tall woman, educated at National Cathedral School in
Washington, D.C., who finished her MA at Union Theological Seminary under the
direction Paul Tillich, and who worked for a while for anthropologist Margaret
Mead. Maryat had also written a street play in Harlem, Dope!, covered by Life magazine
and selected the 1952-53 edition of Best
Short Plays. Like Rosalind Russell's version of Auntie Mame, Maryat showed
up in Milledgeville "outfitted in pants, boots, a black overcoat, and an
imposing Russian lamb's wool hat," bearing brown bags with cans of beer,
illegal in that part of the state. Both she and O'Connor feared for their
meeting, Maryat worried, since she had not read of even previously heard of
O'Connor, that she would be encountering "a local lady writer." The
encounter at Andalusia did begin well, with Reginna disapproving of Maryat's
worn, pink sneakers and remarking that she had to keep doors locked because of
"the niggahs." As Maryat the politically liberal Maryat was about to
respond, however, O'Connor came thudding upon her crutches into the room and
swept Maryat away into the back yard, where she explained her illness and the
necessity of remaining with her mother as well as sharing with the newcomer her
dream of turning the henhouse into an office.
When Maryat finally read some of her stories, including "You Can't
Be Any Poorer Than Dead," the original title for The Violent Bear It Away, she was, as she writes, "excited,
relieved, impressed—and mystified." Thus began a correspondence between
the two of over 250 epistles, many of the letters signed by or addressed to the
two significant figures of O'Connor's novel with whom they identified, Maryat
predictably siding with the intellectual rationalist, Rayber, O'Connor with the
boy-would-be-prophet Tarwater.
Even the news that Maryat's marriage to the Australian, David
Foulkes-Taylor had gone astray when he met a man to whom he was attracted, and
that in Tokyo, Maryat herself had fallen in love with film critic Donald
Ritchie, did not alter their friendship. Only when Maryat, who in the 1970s
would admit to bisexuality, wrote Flannery that she too was in love with her,
was there a temporary chill. Again, O'Connor did not, as Gooch describes it,
"blink" about the issue of lesbianism, but she did "transpose
the discussion into a more spiritual key": speaking of the grace in the
blood of Christ, O'Connor concluded her discussion: "Even if you loved
Faulkes and Ritche and me and Emmet and Emmet's brother and his girlfriend
equally and undividedly, it all has to be put somewhere finally."
When Maryat reacted by describing
O'Connor's comments as full of "pious clichés, not flesh and blood,"
the communications ceased for several months; but when Maryat resumed the
letters, O'Connor assured her, "I am not to be got rid of by crusty
letters."
During these same years, O'Connor enjoyed great creativity, writing
several of the stories that would appear in her last volume, Everything that Rises Must Converge, but
her main frustration was working through her promised novel. She had found it
easy to deal with her Tarwater figure, but felt ill-at-ease with Rayber, and
believed that she had some 50 pages yet to complete, without any certainty that
she was up to the task.
Further clouding the waters was a planned trip, to be paid for by her
Cousin, Katie Seemes, to Europe on the occasion of the Lourdes Centennial. As
she fumed over the enforced vacation in which feared would be made up of
"fortress-footed Catholic females herded from holy place to holy
place," ending in "holy exhaustion," her doctor advised that she
cancel the trip because of hip deterioration, a side effect of lupus. Gooch
describes O'Connor as being secretly relieved, but her cousin again intervened,
offering Flannery and Regina a less exhausting itinerary, in which they would
stay with the Fitzgeralds now ensconced in Italy (where Robert was translating The Odyssey), who would accompany them
to rejoin the pilgrims gathered in Paris, O'Connor had little choice but to
agree.
After four days at the Fitzgerald's villa, Flannery, Regina, and Sally
flew to Paris, traveling south to the region of Lourdes. Flannery had not
wanted to enter the baths at Lourdes, as she had insisted before leaving on the
trip that she was going as "a pilgrim, not a patient." But after
Sally's insistence that Katie Seemes would be highly disappointed if O'Connor
did not take part in the ritual, Flannery capitulated. Joking about the
medieval hygiene of the place, she later wrote Betty, "Nobody I am sure
prays in that water."
From Lourdes the group flew to
Barcelona, leaving Spain on May 3rd for Rome, the highpoint of O'Connor's trip.
For in Rome it was arranged for the travelers to attend a general audience with
Pope Pius XII, at which time, witnessing her on her crutches, he granted her a
special blessing.
The return to Georgia meant that O'Connor had to face the completion of
her novel, now called The Violent Bear It
Away, which she was determined to do with new vigor. The book, so many
years in the making, finally reached the public on February 8, 1960.
In some respects, the new novel was a retelling of Wise Blood. Tarwater, a boy, a few years younger that Hazel Motes,
is raised by his preacher grandfather in rural Georgia to become a prophet of
the church. In this case, however, the boy has been stolen from his family
home, just as, previously, the old man tried to steal away the boy's uncle,
Rayber, whose short time under the preacher's tutelage, has, he feels, tainted
his entire life. He is now a rationalist, a schoolteacher who will have nothing
to do with religious faith.
In the first few pages of this
book, the grandfather dies, and Tarwater, a stubbornly independent child
determined to find his own calling in life, is faced with the old man's request
for burial. In a highly Faulknerian flourish, the body is left to rot as the
young boy retreats to the preacher's still, drinking himself into
unconsciousness. Awakening in a funk, Tarwater sets the house, with the old man
in it, on fire and heads for the city and his uncle Rayber, the only relative
remaining.
Through dreams and personal memories revealed in the first two chapters
of the book, we quickly discover what life was like for Tarwater living with
the old man.
Rayber's own son, Bishop, is an idiot, and when Tarwater shows up at his
door, he is, at first, convinced of a new possibility in his life, a kind of
redemption for his inability to deal with Bishop and his attempt, a failure, to
kill his own son early on. Imagining for himself a role similar to Holden
Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye,
"catching thousands of little kids" from falling off a cliff, Rayber
clearly intends, as we would describe it today, to "recondition" his
nephew, bringing him out of the darkness of his religious mania into the light
of the rational world.
But just as Motes was drawn deeper and deeper into faith the more he
fought against it, so does Rayber, through his sociological jargon, clichés,
and just plain American innocence, push the desperate Tarwater away, finally
finding himself giving up on his end of the conversion. Throughout O'Connor's
powerfully violent work (the book's title emanates from Matthew 11:12,
"From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven
suffereth violence, and the violent shall bear it away")—a book O'Connor
herself described to Maryat as "grey, bruised-black, and fire-colored"—
there are numerous terrifyingly surreal events. Perhaps the most cinematic (and
we must remind ourselves that O'Connor as a master of imagery) is the revival
meeting to which Tarwater, followed by a half-dressed Rayber, is drawn one
night. There a young girl, Lucette, having traveled the world with her parents,
powerfully preaches in a mix of Biblical poetry and lunatic-like incantation
("Leave the dead lie. The dead are dead and can stay that way. What do we
want with the dead alive?"), ending with her pointing to Rayber through
the window, "a damned soul before my eye!"
Strangely, or perhaps we should say, understandably, the most innocent
figure in this tale, Bishop, is completely mesmerized by the slightly abusive
elder boy, following him everywhere in a manner that is even more
sexually-charged than the relationship between Motes and Enoch Emery. And like Enoch's
final transformation, that relationship also ends in a kind a redemption when
Tarwater takes the child out on the lake and, in baptizing him, frees him also
into death.
Yet for Tarwater the baptism has been an accident, something against
which he has desperately fought, and his only possible escape is to go back
from where he has come. Yet even as he attempts to retreat to the source of his
compulsion, he is determined to remain independent, to simply live off the land
without becoming a prophet. His rape by a passing homosexual changes
everything.
As O'Connor argues, in what Gooch describes as her "extreme
theology," "Tarwater's final vision could not have been brought off
if he hadn't met the man in the lavender and cream-colored car." When the
Fitzgeralds suggested that perhaps the character was presented as too broadly
stereotypical, O'Connor argued, that she had seen just such an individual
"with yellow hair and black eyelashes—you can't look more perverted than
that."
In his anger for the violence against him, like the boys in "A
Circle of Fire," Tarwater takes up his matches, and in mad pyromaniac
dance, lights the woods afire.
But his final conversion comes only after he discovers that instead his
ridding the world of his grandfather's body through incineration, the
neighboring Black laborer Buford had buried him, giving him a decent Christian
funeral. The deep hunger Tarwater has long felt, swells: "His hunger was
so great that he could have eaten all the loaves and fishes after they were
multiplied," O'Connor writes. And suddenly in the fiery whirl of the
treeline, he understands his destiny as being connected with all those that
have come before him, Daniel, Elijah, Moses. Returning to the city, Tarwater
has becomes a true prophet of God.
For a non-believer like myself, this
fiction is not an easy read. Yet, strangely, I find it her most powerful work,
in part because of the intricacy of the story, which follows the mindsets of
its various characters, its fantastic apocalyptic imagery, and comically
surreal dialogue. Finally, one must remember what O'Connor herself insisted,
her works were not psychological realist pictures of life in the South, but, as
Hawthorne described his fictions, romances, a possibility for fiction that lay
outside of a presentation of social forces. Allying herself with the
"grotesque," O'Connor writes in "The Grotesque in Southern
Fiction":
In these grotesque works, we
find that the writer has made alive
some experience which we are
not accustomed to observe every day,
or win which the ordinary
man may never experience in his ordinary
life. We find that
connections which we would expect in the customary
kind of realism have been
ignored, that there are strange skips and gaps
which anyone trying to
describe manners and customs would certainly
not have left. Yet the
characters in these novels are alive in spite of
these things. They have an
inner coherence, if not always a coherence
to their social framework.
They fictional qualities lean away from typical
social patterns, toward
mystery and the unexpected.
The reviews for The Violent Bear
It Away were, predictably, given the dominant values of the realist fiction
of the day, quite negative, describing the author as a "literary white
witch," as belonging to "The School of Southern Degeneracy," and
even invoking images of the "Hillybilly South," the Time review even going so far as to
accuse the author for being negative because she suffers from lupus "that
forces her to spend part of her life on crutches." O'Connor, so Gooch
tells us, felt particularly violated by that review, "My lupus has no
business in literary considerations."
6
Over the past few years, O'Connor had written a sizable number of new
stories, but she now found herself, in 1962, at a kind "creative
impasse," and, as Gooch describes it, she began to reappraise her life.
The year before she had looked forward to a hip operation that might
have allowed her to walk without crutches. Her current regimen of cortisone and
Novocain lasted only temporarily. But her doctor advised against the surgery in
fear that it might reactivate her lupus. Her relationship with Betty Hester was
also strained when her friend announced her intentions to leave the church, a
decision which O'Connor attributed to Betty's reading of Iris Murdoch.
Although she was certainly heartened by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy's
decision to reissue Wise Blood,
O'Connor could not bring herself to write a new note to the book and, instead,
wrote a disclaimer, describing the work as "a comic novel about a
Christian malgre lui, and as such,
very serious," words which as any publisher might realize, would scare
away most readers.
O'Connor did travel, reading and lecturing at several Southern
universities, including East Texas State, the University of Southeast
Louisiana, and Loyola, the New Orleans trip including a meeting with Alabama novelist
Walker Percy.
Yet work on a new novel, "Why Do the Heathen's Rage?" was at a
standstill. As she wrote her friend John Hawkes, "I have been working all
summer just like a squirril on a treadmill, trying to make something of Walter
and his affairs and the heathens that rage, but I think this is maybe not my
material (don't like that word)."
In a doctor's waiting room that Fall, however, the writer's block
finally ended. There in the room she found her country women that make up the
marvelous story "Revelation," a story she completed within eight
weeks. Planning a new collection of stories, she wrote Giroux, asking for the
addition of the new work.
Already in Winter 1963 O'Connor had a fainting spell on account of a low
blood count. But as Gooch quite forthrightly declares, "In truth, she had
begun the long, slow process of dying." In February she was told that
needed a hysterectomy to remove a fibroid tumor, an operation that was, at
first, declared a great success. But in two weeks’ time she was back in bed,
and by late March she clearly comprehended that "something was gravely
wrong." Forced to take a new regimen of drugs, O'Connor found her body
covered with the lupus rash. Unable to use the typewriter, she was forced to
begin writing stories in her head, including a rewriting of her early tale,
"The Geranium," which in Everything
That Rises Must Converge would become "Judgment Day."
In early July she returned home, but had little energy to crawl out of
bed. Receiving the local priest for communion, she asked that he also give her
the sacrament of Extreme Unction. For the rest of the month, she struggled to
type up "Judgment Day" and another new story, "Parker's
Back." But soon, even those few hours were impossible to maintain. After
three coronary arrests, her doctor refused to make further house calls, putting
her on a heavy dose of antibiotics. On July 28th O'Connor wrote her last letter,
a note to Maryat beginning "Dear Raybat" and ending, "Cheers,
Tarfunk."
On August 3 O'Connor died.
Her funeral was scheduled for the very next morning, and, accordingly,
many of her closest friends, including the Fitzgeralds, discovered that she had
died days later through newspaper obituaries.
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Many critics argue that O'Connor's greatest
work was the collection published shortly after her death, Everything That Rises Must Converge. And several of these stories
are, indeed, masterworks. Yet I find that O'Connor's major concerns are
repeated here rather than further developed, making all of her writing of one
brilliant piece.
Like Hulga in "Good Country People," the young son, Julian, of
the title story, is a frustrated intellect, out of place in the homey world of
clichés and myths in which his mother lives. Yet, despite his education, he has
found no employment and is dependent upon the small income of his mother.
Several of O'Connor's fables skirt issues of race relationships, but in
the Teilhardian-titled tale she meets the issue head-on as Julian's bigoted
mother is forced to come face to face with a Black woman, whose head is topped
with the same hat. While the son's smug pleasure in his mother's discomfort
might delight O'Connor's liberal readers, the tragic results of that encounter,
are equivocal, as Julian's mother, attempting to award the Black woman's child
with a penny, is accosted by the stranger. Even more delighted by the
"lesson" he imagines his mother has received in the encounter, Julian
must suddenly face her flight and death by heart attack. The final lines
ironically put him and the absurd situation in its place: "The tide of
darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his
entry into the world of guilt and sorrow."
Similarly, the Regina-like Mrs. May of "Greenleaf,"
unforgiving of the behavior of her worker, Mr. Greenleaf, and his two sons
farming nearby, ends in a comeuppance that does not expurgate the actions of
the other characters. The Greenleaf boys' bull has entered Mrs. May's property,
and she
She did not hear the shots but
she felt the quake of the huge body as it
sank, pulling her forward on
its head, so that it seemed, when Mr. Greenleaf
reached her, to be bent over
whispering some last discovery into the animal's
ear.
In many respects, "Revelation" is a kind of interweaving of
the two themes I have noted above. Once again we witness a battle between an
intelligent offspring, this time represented in a young woman awaiting a
doctor's appointment, and her well-meaning but cliché-spouting mother. Into this
minefield steps what may be O'Connor's most opinionated character ever, Mrs.
Turpin, who not only shares the well-dressed mother's jargon, but has created a
complex social-stratification topped by wealthy individuals and bottomed by
"white trash." As Mrs. Turpin insists throughout the tale, she would
rather be a "nigger" than a trashy white woman.
The pleasure of this story is O'Connor's dead-on dialogue, both in Mrs.
Turpin's inner thoughts and the two ladies' comments. So settled are they in
their absurd formulas of life that by story's end the reader may want, as Mary
Grace does to Mrs. Turpin, to slug her in the face. Yet it is not so much what
Mary Grace does, but what she says
that astounds and troubles the older woman. The girl's cry, "Go back to
hell where you came from, you old wart hog," shakes Mrs. Turpin's sense of
reality more than any possible event she might have encountered and simply
judged.
For one of the few times in O'Connor's work, moreover, this violent act
does not result in death or potential destruction, but ends in a beatific
revelation for Mrs. Turpin, whose entire system of societal values is suddenly
overturned as she witnesses, in an apocalyptic vision, the true meaning of a
forgiving Christ:
There were whole companies
of white-trash, clean for the first
time in their lives, and
bands of black niggers in white robes, and
battalions of freaks and
lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping
like frogs. And
bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe
of people who she
recognized at once as those who, like herself
and Claud, had always had
a little of everything and the God-given
wit to use it right.
....They alone were on key. Yet she could see
by their shocked faces that
even their virtues were being burned away.
In some senses, one could almost use that vision to describe the entire
range of Blacks, freaks, lunatics, and "good people" who inhabit
O'Connor's fiercely satirical fictions, all them redeemed in the blood of the
lamb.
Los Angeles, August 3, 2009 (the 46th anniversary of
O'Connor's death); September 1-7, 2009
The method I used to organize the above essay reflects the
process of my reading. I read Gooch's O'Connor biography in sections, each time
reading up until his announcement of the publication of a new O'Connor book,
then pausing to the read the work itself. Accordingly, I metaphorically "lived
through" the author's life and writing for a period of approximately two
months. The writing, as is apparent from the dates, also took me about a month
further in exploring the mind of Flannery O'Connor. Most of the facts of her
life are directly repeated from the Gooch biography, but I have incorporated a
few other details from her letters and Sally Fitzgerald's chronology published
in The Library of America's Flannery
O'Connor: Collected Works. The comments
on her fictions are, for the most part, my own. In this one instance, I did not
wade through the mass of essays and books written about the author for further
elucidation and critical support; rather, I felt it important to react to these
powerful works in a personal, unscholarly way. Accordingly, my own perceptions
may not be particularly original and are certainly not exhaustive, but are
merely meant to present immediate responses to her writing.
