I mentioned last week that The Things They Carried was not going to be the last short story collection to appear on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language,” because I’m allowing the list to include shorter forms of fiction. And indeed, here’s one now. Interesting coincidence that two of the most lovable collections of short stories are written by writers with names as close as O’Brien and O’Connor. Flannery O’Connor wrote two novels and 31 short stories in her short life, and although her first novel Wise Blood appears on the Observer’s list of the 100 greatest world novels, it’s really the short stories in which O’Connor excels. In 1971, O’Connor’s Complete Stories were published posthumously: she died of Lupus in 1964 at the age of 39. The book collected the stories that had appeared in O’Brien’s two previous collections (A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything the Rises Must Converge), plus other uncollected stories, and was very well received. Eight years after her death, O’Connor won the National Book Award for Fiction. In an online poll conducted in 2009, O’Connor’s Complete Stories was voted the best book ever to win the National Book Award.
I must admit that I had never read a Flannery O’Connor story until, fresh from my Ph.D., I started teaching a freshman Intro to Lit class, in which I decided to explore requiring the O’Connor story in the required anthology—“Revelation”—and I still remember my astonished reaction. I marveled at the way she had sucked me in and then hit me between the eyes with a baseball bat. After that I couldn’t get enough of O’Connor.
O’Connor was a southern writer, having spent all but five of her 39 years in Georgia (born in Savannah, died in Milledgeville), and her style is often referred to as “Southern Gothic”: this is a genre that focuses on certain common elements of southern history, including the legacy of slavery and racism, a distrust of the outside world (those damn Yankees), and a fascination with violence and with the grotesque. This focus on the grotesque—defined as a fictional character, either physically or spiritually deformed, who performs abnormal actions—is how critics have often defined O’Connor fiction. She herself was not comfortable with that classification, and has been quoted as saying that “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case, it is going to be called realistic.”
O’Connor preferred to call her stories “Christian realism.” She was a devout Catholic herself, though she was certainly well acquainted with the fundamentalist evangelical Protestantism characteristic of southern churches. She would have called her stories ironic and unsentimental, which they are, and though she believed, with Thomas Aquinas, that the created world is “charged with the grandeur of God” as Hopkins put it, her stories are not at all didactic or “apologetic.” And they do indeed deal with racism and with violence. There is, in fact, often a character who displays a kind of spiritual deformity, one that the violence of the story may in fact reform, in a manner that recalls John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” whom he asks to “break, blow, burn, and make me new.”
As I did with O’Brien’s collection, let me pick out four of O’Connor’ stories—the ones that most hit home with me—to discuss in this review. The title story of her first published collection in 1955, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” is a profoundly disturbing one that my students very often would respond to with “I wish I hadn’t read it right before going to sleep.” As O’Connor herself summarized the story, it’s “the story of a family of six which, on its way driving to Florida, is slaughtered by an escaped convict who calls himself the Misfit.” The story remains her best known and most anthologized.
The story focuses on the grandmother of an Atlanta family, who wants to go to Tennessee rather than Florida, and tries to talk her son out of Florida by drawing his attention to a story in the paper about an escaped criminal called “The Misfit” who seems to be on the loose in the direction of Florida. But her son Bailey, his wife and infant child, and their pre-teen children June Star and John Wesley, all ignore her. She is eager to go on the trip anyway, and sneaks her pet cat Pitty Sing into the car in a basket. On the road, she admires the Georgia scenery, and at one point sees a naked black child waving from an old shack, and thinks the scene would make a good painting. They stop for lunch at a place advertised for its “famous barbecue,” and the proprietor Red Sammy (“a veteran!”) gets on well with the grandmother, with whom he exchanges one platitude after another about the loss of the values of the good old days, and the grandmother calls Sammy a “good man,” lamenting the fact that “a good man is hard to find” in these degenerate days. Sammy, it should be noted, has done nothing but order his wife around like a servant during their whole lunch. That afternoon, the grandmother is sure she remembers an old plantation in the neighborhood they are passing through, and convinces the family it would be fun to take a look at it. Reluctantly, Bailey turns down a dirt road that takes them farther and farther into a kind of wilderness.
When the grandmother realizes with a start that the plantation she thought was down this road was actually in Tennessee, she overturns the box with the cat, who leaps onto Bailey. He loses control of the car and gets stuck in a ditch. As they sit in the ditch, an ominous black car comes slowly down the road toward them. Three men get out, one of whom the grandmother recognizes by his picture in the paper: it is the Misfit, and she unthinkingly blurts out his name. While his two companions usher Bailey and his family into the woods, and the grandmother hears gunshots, she pleads with the Misfit for her life, saying she knows he is a good man. The Misfit admits that he isn’t, and the grandmother urges him to pray, but the Misfit says he cannot reconcile his life’s punishments to his crimes, and doesn’t see how Jesus can change that injustice. Moved by the Misfit’s words, the grandmother reaches out to touch his shoulder and remarks he is one of her own babies, at which point the Misfit jumps back and shoots her dead. When his companions return, he remarks that the grandmother “would’ve been a good woman if it were someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.” When he leaves, he takes the cat with him.
O’Connor later wrote that the story is about grace. The grandmother, who in the early part of her conversation with the killer is solely concerned with saving her own life, first uses Jesus as a kind of talisman by which she hopes to distract the Misfit from his murderous purpose. In the end, though, the anguish of his suffering allows her to recognize her kinship with this fellow human being for whom, as for herself, Jesus has died, and finally inspires her to do the right thing, to make a gesture of love toward him. Her failures earlier to feel any compassion for the impoverished boy in the run down shack, and to unthinkingly categorize the bully Red Sam as “good,” are superseded here by her recognition, in the end, of the humanity of her attacker. The Misfit, who cannot balance his punishment with his actions and cannot summon the faith to believe in Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, thereby reveals his inability to understand Original Sin and his lack of faith strong enough to believe in Jesus (“if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now”), is offered a final chance at saving grace by accepting the grandmother’s gesture but instead leaps away “as if a snake had bitten him.”
Another unforgettable story from this first collection is “Good Country People.” The title, like that of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” is a cliché, and in O’Connor’s fiction, people who speak in such phrases have usually forfeited their own tendency toward original thought, if they ever had any, to a kind of mass popular conventionality. In this story, Mrs. Hopewell, mother of the protagonist Hulga, is a font of such unthinking clichés. She runs a Georgia farm assisted by her tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Freeman. Hulga is thirty-two and lives with her mother. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy, but having lost a leg in a childhood gun accident, she seems to feel there is no place for her in the greater world. She is an atheist and also rejects any Southern expectations of being a wife and mother, and she rejects her mother’s expectations of her acting like a “Southern belle,” deliberately embracing ugliness to the extent of changing her name from “Joy” to “Hulga”—the ugliest name she could think of, as Mrs. Hopewell interprets it.
Into this skewed paradise enters a serpent in the form of Manley Pointer, a young and apparently simple and naïve Bible salesman. While Joy/Hulga and her mother are not in the market for a Bible, Mrs. Hopewell is favorably impressed by the young man and invites him to dinner, believing he’s “just good country people.” Joy/Hulga is less impressed, but as he leaves, Pointer invites her to have a picnic date with him the following day. Hulga agrees: it’s unusual for a male to show any interest in her, but she also believes that her superior intellect will enable her to seduce the young man, after which she will convert him to her own view of the meaningless universe. As she tells Pointer during their “date,” in the pompously condescending tone of a superior intellect to a country hick, “I’m one of those people who sees through to nothing.”
Pointer, of course, reveals the extent to which Hulga and her mother have misjudged him. Having convinced Hulga to go up into the loft of the barn where they can be alone, he talks her into removing her prosthetic leg and takes her glasses. Then he produces a bottle of whiskey, a deck of pornographic playing cards, and a package of condoms, all hidden in a hollowed out Bible. He half-heartedly makes advances to her, but when she denies him he puts the leg into his case, tells her he’s got a collection of such items, and just before his head disappears below the loft, he tells Hulga, “you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born.”
This reversal is typical O’Connor. Hulga’s physical condition is the outward sign of her spiritual handicap. She is one of O’Connor’s “grotesques,” whose pride in her intellectual achievement has led her to reject the Joy she might receive by accepting the grace she has consciously and deliberately been rejecting. The evangelical Bible salesman has believed in nothing his entire life, and perhaps is beyond saving by his own stubborn will. But perhaps there is hope in the end for Joy/Hulga.
It’s probably no coincidence that O’Connor has made Hulga a 32-year old educated woman returning home to live with her mother because of a physical disability. O’Connor herself, after college and time spent in the prestigious Iowa Writers Program, went home to live with her mother in 1952 after being diagnosed with the same Lupus that had killed her father. There may be some self-parody in her portrayal of Joy—just as there may be some in the depiction of the college-educated son Julian in the title story of O’Connor’s next collection, Everything that Rises Must Converge (1965).
The title of the story comes from the Catholic theologian, priest, and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, with whose writings O’Connor was fascinated at the time, In a nutshell, Teilhard de Chardin suggested that evolution was producing beings with increasingly higher levels of consciousness, and in the end, human consciousness would merge with Divine Consciousness. The ultimate goal of humanity was to be found in the convergence of our ego with the mind of God. In O’Connor’s fictional world, convergence takes a somewhat more violent form.
The stories in the second collection, written during the Civil Rights movement in the early 1960s, often take race relations as their central focus. In this title story, the protagonist, Julian, is a recent college graduate and an aspiring writer who lives with his mother to make ends meet. Once again, one sees the parallel to O’Connor’s own situation. Julian’s mother rides the bus once a week to go downtown to the YMCA to take an exercise class to help her “reduce.” But she is nervous about riding the bus at night because the buses of her southern city have recently been integrated, and so she makes her son ride with her. On this particular evening, she is undecided about wearing an unusual hat, but decides to wear it—at least she won’t see herself coming and going, she says. Julian is an ill-tempered young man who resents accompanying her, and despises her racism while feeling intellectually superior to her. On this evening, there are no black riders when Julian and his mother get on the bus, and his mother makes a point of loudly expressing relief to the other white riders about having the bus to themselves. “They should rise,” she remarks about black people, “but on their own side of the fence.” When a black man does get on the bus, Julian deliberately moves to sit next to him in order to get his mother’s goat, and though he tries to be friendly the black passenger ignores him.
When a black woman and her young son get on the bus, Julian’s mother is astounded at first to see that the woman is wearing the same hat as she is. But she actually warms to the child on the bus ride, and when both sets of mothers and sons get off at the same stop, Julian’s mother wants to give the black child a penny. The child’s mother is so insulted by this that she whack’s Julian’s mother with her purse. His mother dazed, Julian takes the opportunity to lecture her, telling her she got just what she deserved. The black mother, he says, represents “the whole colored race which will no longer take your condescending pennies.” But when he realizes that his mother is seriously impaired—perhaps by a stroke brought on by the buffet?—he calls to her as she staggers off “Mother! . . . Darling, sweetheart, wait!” And as she dies, we are told “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”
Largely because the story is told mostly through Julian’s consciousness, as readers we make some of the same assumptions he does: that his mother is simply a bigot with no redeeming qualities—although we’ve already been told that after her husband died, she had “struggled fiercely” to pay for Julian’s schooling, and continues to support him now. Her eyes are described as “innocent and untouched by experience as they must have been when she was ten.” This childlike quality comes to the fore as she plays peekaboo with the little black boy on the bus. Her thoughtless racist comments, in fact, turn out to be the result of her ignorance rather than dyed in the wool bigotry. Like the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Julian’s mother is salvageable in the end. And her death is as much of a shock to the reader as it is to Julian, who in the end comes across as the unredeemed one in the family. If you’ve been siding with Julian throughout, that purse that smacks his mom smacks you in the face as well.
“Revelation” is another story from this second volume. O’Connor was working on the story essentially on her deathbed. It first appeared in The Sewanee Review in spring 1964, and just before her death in August of that year, O’Connor received word that it had won the O Henry Award as best short story of the year (it was her third such award). The story takes place mostly in a doctor’s waiting room, where a cross section of Southern society comes together and where Mrs. Turpin, the story’s protagonist, mentally categorizes and judges everyone else in the room. It’s clear that she is a vain and self-righteous middle-class white woman who is in no doubt of her own superiority, not only socially and economically but spiritually, to everyone else in the room. She is so confident in her own salvation that she even feels justified in her harsh judgments of others in the room, who she assumes are not destined for heavenly bliss. She judges other women based on their shoes, for instance. She mentally blames a poor white woman for her son’s illness, blaming it on the woman’s laziness. She thanks Jesus for not making her a black woman or “white trash,” who are certainly not so clearly bound for heaven as herself—black people, she says, all want to go to New York City and marry white people to “improve their color.” She has a number of black workers on her farm who pick her cotton, but complains to one of the women in the waiting room that it’s hard to get blacks to pick cotton anymore because they want better jobs: “they got to be right up there with the white folks.”
There is a college aged girl named Mary Grace (nothing symbolic there, right?) in the waiting room who is reading a textbook called Human Development, who keeps casting harsh glances at Mrs. Turpin as if she knows what the other woman is thinking. Suddenly, the girl throws the book in Mrs. Turpin‘s face, after which she tells the stunned woman to “go back to hell where you come from, you old warthog.”
Mrs. Turpin takes the curse to heart, as if it is in fact a direct message from God through the prophet Mary Grace, and ponders the curse the rest of the afternoon, getting what she clearly sees as empty flattery from her black workers, who simply want to be on her good side. She ends by hosing off the hogs in her pig parlor, to which she has been likened in Mary Grace’s prophecy, and engaging in a Job-like colloquy with God, demanding to know why he made her as she was instead of white trash, if that’s the kind of person he wanted to save. She gets so worked up in her complaint to God that she calls out , “Who do you think you are?”—an ironic blasphemy that echoes back at her. Finally, she has a vision in which she sees the souls of all the people she has looked down upon dancing toward heaven and singing “hallelujah,” while people like herself and her husband Claud, who have “always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right,” are confusedly bringing up the rear in the procession, being purified by purgative fire, and “she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”
Clearly “Revalation” is a story that warns against spiritual pride and a kind of Pharisaical hypocrisy. It is significant to point out that, in her last year of life, O’Connor wrote letters to a friend in which she signed herself “Mrs. Turpin.” In these letters, she confessed that although intellectually she supported Dr. Martin Luther King and the integration of the south, emotionally she did not personally like integrating with black people. Such comments in her private letters have caused a number of readers to reject her works and even to “cancel” her. But the fact that she specifically identified herself with a character in her last story who needed a prophet from God to turn her from sin and point her the way to salvation says something about her view of herself, and her own need for grace. Remember she was a devout Catholic all her life. The letters, perhaps, were a kind of confession for her. The stories, especially Mrs. Turpin’s, a kind of penance, and a recognition of the need for burning away those sinful tendencies. Like everyone else, O’Connor recognized she was a sinner, and in need of divine grace.