The Misfit in Exile
(A Personal and
Critical Essay on Flannery O’Connor)
(1)
Backgrounding
Here’s an example
of what Southern was in the forties and fifties, when I was growing up. Our
town, Mt. Dora, Florida, had a population of 5001. A
carnival once came through when I was fifteen. They set up their tents out near
Pistolville; Farris wheels and whirly-gigs, freak shows. They had the sheep
with two heads, the snake woman, the kid in the iron lung. My friend L.W. was a
good boy, but he was fifteen as well and full of hormones. He paid a quarter to
get in one tent (males only). The audience sat up in bleachers, making
off-color comments, and then a bunch of malnourished redneck girls came
prancing out in bathing suits. They made circles around the proscenium, leering
and winking at the audience. Then they left, and the barker said, “All right,
yawl boys ain’t seen nothing yet. For another fifty cent, you proceed on back
into this here next tent, and I guaran-damn-tee you that when you get back
there, yawl won’t be looking at nothing but hot
hair and pussy.
Of course, everybody, including L.W., dug deep in their
dungarees, and they all proceeded into the next tent, where, it turned out,
they had only one scrawny blonde girl. She was performing behind a chain link
fence, prancing around, creeping up to the fence then backing off. She was wearing
absolutely nothing. Everybody was already seated but she was paying nobody any mind,
still doing her little tiptoed dance with the hip shimmy. Then, finally, she
yelled out to the men up in the stands: “All right, boys. Get your butts down
by this fence and get your flies unbuttoned. Whip ‘em out, boys, and put ‘em
through a hole in the fence. We gone see which one of yawl is the best man!”
Then, believe it or not, so L.W. told it, five or six of
those old boys in overalls (not bashful L.W., though) really did pull them out and stick them through that fence. Then
the scrawny girl would boogie-woogie up to each standing tool, take it unto
herself, and, in a loud laughing voice, give her opinion on its merits and
demerits. Did L.W. actually watch that embarrassing spectacle, with interest
and concupiscence, when he was only fifteen? He did, but he can’t recall the
vulgar business to this very day without blushing. Some readers may find it
hard to believe that a tent carnival in Georgia would put a hermaphrodite on
display, a creature who (in a story by Flannery O’Connor) informed his/her
audience: “God made me thisaway. . .This is the way He wanted me to be, and I
ain’t disputing His way. I’m showing you because I got to make the best of it.”
I have no trouble believing that, and neither would my boyhood friend. By the
way, L.W. has a doctorate in education now, and he’s teaching AP classes in
South Florida to this very day.
Only in the early seventies, when I already had a Ph.D.
in Russian from Vanderbilt, when I was a young assistant professor, teaching
Russian language and literature at Miami University, did it suddenly dawn on me
who I should have married: Flannery O’Connor. I read her fiction for the first
time, and I thought, in the vernacular of her native Milledgeville (which
differed very little from the vernacular that enveloped me as a child): (1) It
ain’t no two ways about it. I am in the presence of a hard, formidable
intelligence and a mighty fine creative talent (2) In every particular this woman
is writing about the life that surrounded me, smothered me even, when I was a
Southern child. Every line she writes is so
familiar, and, besides that, she has this quirky, wicked Southern sense of
humor. My sense of humor. I want to
marry her.
But it was far too
late. During the summer of 1964 I was in the army, living in a huge khaki field
tent with fifty other soldiers. We were up on a hill, in a wheat field,
overlooking the East German border, staring down at the barbed wire and the
mine fields of a country that no longer exists (the German Democratic
Republic). We were on a TDY exercise, we “Monterey Marys,” and we were supposed
to be &^%*&*&^% (previous passage deleted for purposes of national
security), but we spent most of our time listening to the Rolling Stones on a
pirate radio station that broadcasted out of Luxembourg. Yes, reader, believe
it or not, the Rolling Stones were already extant in 1964; they looked a bit
younger back then. As for Mary Flannery, who at the very time I was up there in
that wheat field, pulling guard duty, walking a German shepherd guard dog that
enjoyed attacking all of us friends (there were no enemies around to attack),
toting an empty M-14 assault rifle, protecting (ostensibly) my country from the
Roosskies, Flannery was back in Georgia, dying. I was entirely ignorant of that
fact; furthermore, I had never even heard of Flannery O’Connor.
But I knew her world, because it was mine. In the
mid-fifties I played baseball on the Mt.
Dora town team. Our
rickety old stadium was out in Pistolville (the white trash section of our
town). Our night games often coincided with services at a Holy Roller church
right next to the ball park. While gangle-shanked Cecil Barks was kicking high
his stick of a leg and delivering his knuckleball to the plate, I was standing
in center field, listening to the shrieking and testifying that emanated from
that concrete block building just outside the stadium gate. Listening to them
exalt the prophet Ezekiel (whose saint’s day in the Eastern Othodox Church, by
the way, is Aug. 3)—Ezekiel, who connected dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones,
and heard the word of the Lord.
“Son/Daughter of Man, can these bones live? And she, Mary Flannery, prophesied upon the
bones for almost forty years, saying unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word
of the Lord.”
As a boy I recall huddling in the dark on our tiny
screened front porch (two blocks from Hwy 441), watching, fascinated, as the Ku
Klux Klan cavalcades drove past, meandering around the streets of our town.
Their ultimate destination was East Town (black section), where they would
erect a cross and then burn it. My Yankee Catholic mother tried to pull me back
inside, but the spectacle was too eerie and thrilling to miss: those portly Ku
Kluxers, sitting proud in their white sheets and pointy white hoods. One of
them had a cigar (pronounced “seegar”), and he was smoking it through the mouth
hole in his hood, pointing a red dot toward me. The locals called this exercise
of putting on a presence and burning a cross “keeping the niggers in line.”
What else? Lots. But if you want a sampling of my childhood, just read
Flannery’s fiction. It’s all there.
In 1964 I had not yet learned how to read artistic
literature. In college (University of Florida, 1958-1962) I had majored in
political science and history, while taking a couple of creative writing
courses on the side. Andrew Lytle, Flannery’s old mentor, taught one of those
courses. He called me into his office one day, opened a Faulknerian text in the
middle of the book, and asked me to explicate some symbolic imagery. I sat
perplexed, turning red in the face, and he finally said, “Why, you didn’t read
this book. You just skimmed it!” I
suppose he was right. The textbook in Lytle’s course was Cleanth Brooks
and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding
Fiction, the same one Flannery once used. Did I understand fiction? Hell,
no!
Lytle never enlightened me. I left his course just as
ignorant about how to read or write creatively as I’d been when I walked in
there. One day we ran into each other at the university cafeteria and sat down
to eat together. I only wish that the imposing Lytle, with his musilaginous
Southern voice, had told me to read Flannery, instead of blithering on about
the merits of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, then asserting, with vehemence,
“The South should have won that war; the South could have won that war!” Like F.O., I was never much for
re-fighting the War Between the States, which was a common activity among the
people who lived in my home town: Billy Pat Harding, Anna Pearl Haskins,
Buddles Ledford, Flavell Bagwell, etc.
(2)
More Congruences
Our little town was
not in rural Georgia, but it was a lot like rural Georgia. My father was a
devoted Protestant from South Carolina who
hated Catholicism and all the values of the Yankees. My mother was a devoted
Catholic from New Jersey, a Yankee who despised Protestantism and other
Southern institutions, such as racism. My sisters and I were baptized in the
Catholic church, but we never were confirmed. Why? Who made us? God made us. My
mother and father had no argument on that, but they disagreed on almost
everything else. Daddy found my mother’s contention that only Roman Catholics
would go to Heaven rather off-putting, to say the least. Our childhood
consisted of a never-ending religious war, waged right in the middle of the household.
Oh, one more thing: it appears that my mother and daddy loved each other. F.O’s
works are good at showing how loving and hating often operate simultaneously.
After that stint in
a German wheat field the army sent me to England, where I worked in a building
without windows. I finished my daily intelligence tasks in three hours, then
spent the other five hours reading Russian novels. Once I was reading
Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, in
Russian. A red-faced sergeant intruded into the little cubby hole where we
worked, demanding to know what I was doing reading on the job. I simply held up
the book and showed him the cover: with Идиот
written
on it in big Cyrillic letters. Immediately he backed off, intimidated by the
hieroglyphics. We were allowed to read in Russian on the job. This was called,
“keeping up the skills of the linguist.”
In 1953 (this is a “coincident,” as F.O.s characters
would say), Flannery O’Connor received a shipment of books and then had the
following conversation with her mother Regina:
SHE: “Mobby Dick. I’ve always heard about that.”
ME: “Mow-by Dick.”
SHE: “Mow-by Dick. The Idiot.
You would get something called Idiot.
What’s it about?
While I was eating
out with a fellow American professor in Moscow (1999), he casually mentioned
that he had once met Flannery O’Connor. He had been teaching in Atlanta then, and somebody got up a group to drive up
and visit Andalusia. He did not have a good
recollection of that visit, he did not remember much of interest, but I wanted
to reach over and touch him—one step (again), one short step away from the woman of my dreams!
(3)
Taking Flannery, and a Group of
Other Writers, to Russia
The closest that Flannery O’Connor got to Russia was in
her imagination, through her reading of Russian writers. Preparing for her reluctant
“pilgrimage” to Europe in February, 1958, she joked as follows in a letter to
Sally and Robert Fitzgerald: “Left for two minutes alone in foreign parts, Regina and I would probably end up behind the Iron
Curtain asking the way to Lourdes in sign
language.”[2] I
taught Russian literature, the Russian language, and Russian folklore for
thirty years. Toward the end of my academic career I received a Fulbright
Scholar grant for an academic year in Russia
(1999-2000). I taught in provincial Novgorod,
the oldest city in Russia, which claims the
year 859 A.D as its founding date. My main course was “Practical Methods of
Literary Translation.” I had prepared all the reading materials in advance,
aware that there would be no books or ancillary materials available at Novgorod University,
where the library facilities are a wasteland.
Here is a brief listing of the contents of that course:
Introduction. Theory of
Translation (Readings from Kornei Chukovsky,
A High Art)
The need to study a literary
text before translating it
Translation as adaptation:
Gogol’s story “The Nose,” Michael Frayn’s adaptation for stage of the Chekhov
story “The Sneeze.”
Translating humor: Chekhov’s
“The Death of a Petty Clerk, “Precious” (Dushechka)
Complications: (1) Into British or American? Note how Constance Garnett (in
“Precious,” or “The Darling”) translates a lovable Russian child into a lovable
British child (2) Music: translating the music of Chekhov’s prose; counterpoint
in “Precious”
Translating a writer with a
lavish style: Bunin’s “Light Breathing”
Translating awkwardness of
style into awkwardness (but not too awkwardly!): selections from Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Translating dialect and
substandard speech: Shukshin, “Bespalyj,
Bunin, “Porugannyj Spas,” Flannery
O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People” [abbreviated
below as AGM and GCP]
When a writer translates
himself: Nabokov, “Recruiting,” “Cloud, Castle, Lake”
The possibilities and
impossibilities of translating poetry: (1) Marina Tsvetaeva, “Mne nravitsja, chto Vy bol’ny ne mnoj”
(“I’m glad that you’re not sick with love for me”) (2) Philip Larkin, “This Be
the Verse” (3) e.e. cummings, “Buffalo Bills (4) Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Khoroshee otnoshenie k loshasd’jam”
(“Treating Horsies Nice”) (5) A.E. Housman, “Others, I am not the first”
What to do with an invented
language that has Russian roots? Selections from Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (Zavodnoj apel’sin).
Translating children’s verse:
(1) Kornei Chukovsky, “Telefon,”
(“The Telephone”) (2) Shel Silverstein, “Boa Constrictor,” “My Beard,” “Chester”
Final exercise: translating
Russian classics from English back into Russian, then comparing your
translations with the original
My students at Novgorod
University were, primarily,
females. On the cusp of the new millennium the Soviet Union as a country had
recently collapsed, and Russia was in economic crisis. Males were gravitating
toward courses in economics, accounting, etc., those fields that (so they
hoped) would enable them to get jobs when they graduated. I had to struggle
against a few longstanding Russian traditions: (1) Students kept up a steady
blather among themselves during the class, like junior high kids in the U.S. For some reason, this is an accepted practice in
the Russian classroom (2) Students thought they need not necessarily attend
classes, or even keep up with the work assignments, because everything depended
on the final (oral) exam, which they are allowed to take over and over, until
they have passed it (3) The head of the department was interested, primarily,
in how wonderful the grades of her students looked on paper. She was horrified
when I told her that I would give them the grades they deserved, and if they
did not show up for class they would flunk.
Of course I, the interloper professor from abroad, lost
this struggle against Russian traditional haphazardness, and at the end of the
semester the department head informed me that I wouldn’t have to worry about
retesting the students: she would have another professor do that for me. In
other words, the students, whom I had informed that there would be one and only
one final exam (no taking it over if you flunk), got to take it over anyway.
(4)
Teaching Flannery in Russia
When it came time for the students to read the two
O’Connor stories I had selected (AGM and GCP, in English and in Russian
translation), I realized that presenting such a writer to a foreign audience
would be a stupendous task. Presenting Flannery to any audience is no mean trick, make no mistake about that. But my
Russian students had little acquaintance with America, let alone with the
American South of the forties and fifties.
On Translation and
Interpretation
My students could
read English well, and I asked them to read the English originals before
reading the Russian translations. Some of them, I’m sure (if they were tired)
began with the translations, which are quite well done, given that a writer
like F.O. pulls up to the translator’s door with her mule hitched to a wagon-load of problems.[3]
Since most of my readers probably are not interested in a detailed analysis of
the translations, a few high points here will suffice. At the time they were
working on these stories (the seventies), the Russian translators were unlikely
to have travelled anywhere in the U.S., let
alone in the rural South. They probably had no idea what a chinaberry tree looks
like or why the mud puddles in Georgia are full of orange-red water (for the
same reason the river is red in the story “The River”—because of the red clay).
In translating you must resign yourself, as well, to the
fact of in-exactitude. Plenty of words simply do not have perfect equivalents
in other languages. For example, “misfit” (see AGM) has no Russian match. A
misfit is a person ill-adjusted to his/her environment or one who is
disturbingly different from those with whom he associates. The translator came
up with izgoj in Russian, which is
not bad, but is, nonetheless, inexact. Izgoj
is from the verb izgonjat’/izgonit’,
which means to banish, expel, drive out. Izgoj
is not someone who does not fit in, but someone who has been banished from
society—an exile. The difference may be minor, but it is a difference. What
else? Well, for example, the translator sometimes gives up on difficult words
or phrases, or is forced to give up where there is no equivalent. “Pickanniny,”
e.g. (the grandmother’s word for a little black child in AGM), is not
translated. Instead the grandmother says (I’m translating the Russian back into
English) “Just look at that. How cute!” Since they don’t have barbeque in Russia, the family (at Red Sammy’s) snacks on “fried
sandwiches.”
In AGM we have the following interesting sentence: “The
trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.” Not
knowing exactly what to do with those “mean trees,” the translator writes (I am
again translating this back into English from the Russian), “The trees were
bathed in silver-white sunshine, and even the ugliest of them sparkled.” Not
bad, but not exact. In the Russian the Misfit consistently addresses the
grandmother as “mamasha,” a
colloquial term that literally is an affectionate word for “mother.” In the
English original the word is “lady.” When the Misfit mentions that he was once
a gospel singer, the poor translator, having no conception of what that is (and
she could not find a suitable Russian translation even if she did) makes him
into a Russian pilgrim, “wandering the roads and singing the Psalms.” By way of
getting herself shot, the grandmother says her final words (in the Russian),
“You’re my son, you know. You’re one of my children.” The original reads, “Why
you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” At the end of the
story the Misfit (or rather, the Exile, Izgoj) says, “Shut up, Bobby
Lee. There’s no happiness in life.” The original reads, “Shut up, Bobby Lee. .
. .It’s no real pleasure in life.”
I mention all of this not as criticism of the
translation, which, I believe, is quite good. So is the translation of “Good
Country People” (titled literally “The Salt of the Earth” in the Russian), but
it has some of the same problems I’ve just illustrated from AGM. In both
stories, the translators, e.g., do a good job of finding colloquial or
dialectical expressions to translate the Southern speech, although they don’t
have a cat in Hell’s chance of capturing the exact Southern American tone in Russian,
and even if they did they could not win. Why? Because the idea of American
hillbillies speaking Russian is incongruous.
An old old truth: translating, to some extent at least,
cannot help traducing. Reading F.O. was hard enough for my students, who had
the English original as well as the translations, but most people in Russia
cannot read English; they have nothing but the translations. I can only imagine
how bewildered they are when encountering the works of F.O. for the first time.
The Russian collection I used is in bad need of explanatory notes—not
footnotes, which intrude too directly upon the author’s text, but notes at the
back of the book. It has none.
Any translator is, willy-nilly, an interpreter of the
literary text. Translation is a kind of interpretation. But so is the very act
of reading. Someone who did not grow
up in the American South is highly unlikely to understand the cultural baggage
that goes with phrases like “good country people,” or “I’m just a country boy.”
The cliches of one’s time and one’s society cannot be grasped by someone living
in a different language and culture. When I read F.O. I have the advantage of
having lived in practically the identical milieu. Like her, my family sewed
drapes and dresses out of chicken-feed sacks with flowered patterns. We coped
with the summer heat (no air conditioning), with enormous roaches and redbugs
(chiggers), we watched the newsreels called “The March of Time,” in a movie
theater (“picture show”) where, exactly as in Milledgeville, there was a
separate entrance for blacks, who sat in the balcony (see Brad Gooch, p. 89,
241, 244). Above all, we talked the talk. Rather, my parents and their generation
recycled, over and over, the same tired opinions, while I myself listened
quietly, aghast at the pettiness of this blather—like so many of Flannery’s
younger characters, her “intellectual” types, listen as well, gnashing their
teeth.
(5)
Perspectives
Even during her lifetime Flannery sometimes despaired of
being understood by “stupid Yankee liberals smacking their lips over typical
life in the dear old dirty Southland” (HB, p.537). In speaking of Poles and
Germans, Mr. Shortley (in “The Displaced Person”) opines, “It ain’t a great
deal of difference in them two kinds.” Leaving aside Mr. Shortley’s considered
opinion, there is, nonetheless, less difference then you might imagine between
a Russian reader of F.O. and an American reader living in, say, Detroit or New
York City. “Them two kinds” may both be incapable of translating the language
of her stories into a language comprehensible to them. This is not to say that
intelligent readers of the twenty-first century cannot grasp the fiction of
O’Connor. They can, even if they do not comprehend all the background detail.
What it takes, above all, intelligent reader, is a willingness not to
stereotype people.
Is it possible, e.g., for a bigot to be a good person?
Yes. I grew up with bigots all around me, and so did Flannery, but she did not
consign her bigots to eternal perdition. They were people, many of them her
close relatives, and a lot of them were pretty good people. This is hard to
grasp for those who avert their eyes from life’s grey tones, preferring
everything to be either black or white. These are the sanctimonious types, who,
to this very day, in American liberal academic circles everywhere, produce that
predictable smirk of derision: “Ah, those redneck idiots.”
What would Flannery say about such hasty judgments? If
Flannery were alive to hear the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s recent comment about
his former parishioner Barack Obama, would she be quick to condemn the
reverend? I don’t think so. He’s saying something not very palatable, but he’s
still a human being. He said (June, 2009) that he had not been able to speak
with Obama lately “because all them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me.”
Judge not.
Humiliation is one
of the worst things a person or a people has to bear. It can break the spirit,
or it can enrage a person to the point where he/she cannot think rationally.
The Reverend Wright is a good example. American blacks were still being openly
humiliated in the American South of the fifties and sixties (and not only in
the South, by the way). They are somewhat better off now, but they certainly
have not forgotten that humiliation. My white grandfather was born in South Carolina in 1876. He was humiliated too, because
when he was born his state was still “under Reconstruction,” occupied by
federal occupation forces. My father remained “un-reconstructed” all his life.
He and my grandfather were little concerned about how blacks were humiliated,
since they were festering in their own humiliation. The humiliated do not
necessarily sympathize with the humiliated. Often, rather, they humiliate
others in their turn.
Flannery O’Connor may seem, to some modern liberals, all
too unconcerned with the problems of the black race in her time, but her
ambivalent attitude toward integration makes sense to me. She had the brains to
see that the Civil Rights movement had religious truth and common-sense
morality behind it, but she still did not like callow outsiders (who took joy in
preaching sanctimony) coming into her native state and telling people how to
behave. As for literature, she took umbrage at works that oversimplified the
situation, painting, say, an oppressed black hero with the brush of rectitude,
while smearing tar all over the racist bad guy. Besides that, the fact that she
(and we) resisted help from outside is just human nature. F.O. understood human
nature. She was certainly no racist. She certainly never would have advocated
beating up or murdering freedom riders. Of course, she had one irremediable
beef with the grand liberal agnostic/atheistic secular humanist crowd. Them
folks simply did not believe. Had she
lived, I’d imagine that she would have voted for Obama. She would have also
denigrated most of the academic fads that have come out of the “revolutionary”
years of the sixties. She would be horrified beyond measure at the excesses of
“political correctness.”
I voted for Obama; I was happy that he was running. I like
to imagine that my SC granddaddy (“Col. Bob”) and my SC grandmother (“Bowie
Mom”) and my daddy and my Uncle Cecil and Aunt Wren are whispering
encouragement to me (as my mother is) from beyond the grave, but if the
personality undergoes no essential revamping after death I can imagine them,
rather, screaming indignantly, in unison: “You did what?”
(6)
A Good Man Is Hard
to Find
I agree with R.V. Cassill that AGM “may not be
susceptible to exhaustive rational analysis.”[4]
In fact, it is clear to me that the story has been over-analysed now by the
vast O’Connor academic critical industry. Someone has even found a source for
the cat’s name, “Pitty Sing” and made much of that. Maybe this is worth making
much of, but I just assumed, as I told my Russian students, that this was
babytalk for “Pretty Thing.” Had she not been, as she wrote, “in a state of
shock,” Flannery herself would have been amused by a letter she once received
from an English professor, who informed her that he and his students had
concluded that the Misfit was a sort of
hallucination in Bailey Boy’s mind, and that the car accident might
never have occurred (HB, p. 436-37).
O’Connor frequently came out “against interpretation.”
The look she directed toward “the Academy” often had a wry grin stuck on it.
Another expression you see facing down the camera in some of her photos says,
“Don’t nobody mess with me.” A student once sent a letter asking “just what
enlightenment” she was supposed to derive from the stories. Flannery replied,
“I wrote her back to forget about the enlightenment and just try to enjoy them.”[5] This
is an answer I especially appreciate, since when I taught literature I always
told my students that the main thing they should “get” out of reading artistic
prose is aesthetic pleasure. Flannery and I also agree that in teaching
literature, the high school teachers and the college profs should go easy on
the social studies. Hunting for symbols, as well, is a barren and futile
exercise. A young teacher at Wesleyan asked F.O. (HB, p. 334) if the Misfit
represented Christ, and he was told (in the typically blunt O’Connor style),
“He does not.” The same fellow, who was searching diligently for the symbolism
of the Misfit’s black hat, was informed that the significance of the hat was
“to cover his head.”[6] In
“On Her Own Work” (p. 108) she also writes that “A story really isn’t any good
unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands in
the mind.” Amen, Flannery, and I believe that AGM is precisely such a story.
Speaking of symbolism, here is another excerpt from
Flannery’s conversations with her mother. When F.O. was writing The Violent Bear It Away, Regina
O’Connor asked, “Does it have symbolisms in it? You know, when I was coming
along, they didn’t have symbolisms” (Gooch, p. 317). Regina
was right: we’re all better off without symbolisms. Considering her own stance
“against interpretation and symbolisms,” I think that F.O. made a big mistake
when she went around to universities reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and
then explicating it for her audience. She, of course, was afraid that the story
would never be understood as she wished it understood—from the point of view of
her religion, her theology—so she had to tell people what it was about. The
grandmother, heroine of the story, has (according to this explication) a kind
of religious epiphany at the end, when she reaches out to the Misfit and calls
him one of her children. She dies happy, smiling, because in her final moments
on earth she has been granted the grace of God. Meanwhile, the Misfit, will be
somehow inspired by the old lady’s last gesture, which, “like the mustard seed,
will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit’s heart, and will be
enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to
become. But that’s another story” (“On Her Own Work,” p.113).
Yes, ma’m. It certainly
is another story. It’s like the story that Fyodor Dostoevsky promised to
write at the end of Crime and Punishment
(which novel, incidentally, reverberates faintly through the “mean” trees
of AGM). For how many pages, (five
hundred?) the protagonist-murderer Raskolnikov has resisted expiating his sin.
At the end of the novel he is still resisting, so the author elbows him over
into the camp of Christ, then concludes by telling us that Raskolnikov’s
redemption, how he will learn to know “a hitherto undreamed-of reality,” is a
new tale, “but our present one is ended.” In other words, “Sorry, reader, but
it seems I’ll have to write another novel to explain how Raskolnikov gets
saved.”
Meanwhile Raskolnikov, he of
the incorrigibly split personality, while well aware that “Jesus thown
everything off balance,” is glowering at his creator Dostoevsky, snarling, “Yeah,
just try writing another novel about me, and see how far you get!” Assuming
that the Misfit can somehow go on existing beyond the bounds of the story (as
his creator imagines when she explains the story), I figure that he’ll go right
on repeating, as well, that he “don’t need no hep” from Christ.
In recently reading Richard Giannone’s treatment of AGM,[7]
which echoes the author’s explication in Mystery
and Manners, I wrote “Huh?” all over the pages of the book, in the places where
he tells us that the grandmother, “unlike the morose killer, finds a way to
pleasure by becoming a child of love. . . .She chooses to love, and her
tenderness crushes the gunslinger’s might.” Huh? To me the grandmother at the
end of the story remains perfectly in character. She goes on talking, but now
she knows that her life depends on how persuasive that talk will be. She is
portrayed as a woman trying to save her skin, and whether she finds a moment of
grace or not is secondary. Imagine my having to present F.O.’s rather dubious
interpretation to a group of Russian students, who were born in the atheistic Soviet Union and have no comprehension of theology in
any form. I’m afraid, furthermore, that it cannot be presented convincingly to
modern readers anywhere. Without prompting on the part of the author or her
acolytes (professors with a religious bent), readers have little more chance of
seeing this “moment of grace” and the Misfit’s promising future than unprompted
students, say, who read Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Vane Sisters” have of finding
that acrostic in the final paragraph of the story.
So, if I knew that the theological approach was
impossible (even had I accepted it, and had I had the theological background to
do it justice), just how did I go
about teaching “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People” in
Russia? I started out by trying to provide my students with certain cultural
markers. I told them some of the things I have mentioned above, about growing
up in a town much like Milledgeville,
Georgia. I told them that my
town was, in fact, only five miles from Eustis, Florida, where my father worked
as a “policy man,” selling “nickel and dime” life insurance, and from where
Flannery ordered her first “hen and rooster peafowl” in 1952.[8] I
was there. I could have driven past that peafowl farm with my daddy, could have
seen the birds being packed up in crates for shipment to Georgia.
Maybe I did see that. I certainly can
hear their yowls (“Help! Help!”) in my imagination today.
I tried to explain the place names (real and invented)
and the rather skewed itinerary of the family (they headed north from Atlanta
first, then somehow ended up just off Highway 441 near Milledgeville—in Toomsboro,
that ominous town, with the spelling changed slightly—after spending time at
Red Sammy’s place in the fictional “Timothy.” We discussed the names of the
characters: John Wesley (the religious connection), June Star (the Shirley
Temple connection). I told the students that I was well equipped to deal with
characters named “June” and “Bobby Lee,” since I have a sister named June, and
I myself am a Bobby Lee. I talked about the television program “Queen for a
Day,” sang the song “Tennessee Waltz” for them. I explained to them what red
clay is and what a chinaberry tree looks like.
I told my students
stories. I told them the way it was in the segregated South of the forties and
fifties. Searing moist heat, black mammies in East Town,
sitting out in brassieres on the porches of their shanties, fanning themselves
with cardboard church fans, mumbling
“Lord, I mean to tell you. Ain’t it hot, though?” Rural white families
giving their sons feminine names (Hazel, June), poisonous snakes, voracious
mosquitoes, ringworm on children’s legs; bamboo groves, Spanish moss hanging
from live oaks and water oaks, horse flies, deer flies, “separate but equal,”
camphor trees, crape myrtles, folks riding boats on Lake Gertrude (in Sylvan
Shores, the rich whites’ section of our little town), the tentative social
interactions between blacks and whites (beautifully illustrated in so many of
O’Connor’s stories), the way they talk to each other, about each other, “I
ain’t got nothing against no colored folks, ‘long as they know their place,”
the games of conversational song and dance, “Yassuh, yassuh, huh, huh, huh,”
(which feigns stupidity, but is, among other things, a way of not agreeing with
what the white man just said), the bob and weave of the integrated
conversation, the love-hate feelings blacks and whites share for each other.
Still do. I know. I live in the rural South today.
The funny papers:
Nancy, Smiling Jack, Gasoline Alley, Henry, and Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead.
Pork barbeque from East
Town with hot hot sauce, General Sherman, Southern mores (how a “lady” should
behave, the difference between “poor white trash” and “good country people”). I
assured my students that, believe it or not, I, as a child, ran across
characters like Red Sammy Butts on a daily basis. In fact, one thing that so
fascinates me about O’Connor’s writings is how perfectly she captures the
essence of the country people living in her milieu. To me L.C. Durden—part of
that huge Durden clan from over in Pistolville—L.C. with his stump on one arm,
out in his airboat hunting gators for a living, was not “grotesque” at all;
like everybody else all around me back then, L.C. was just folks (well, okay, I
never met anybody like the Misfit).
(7)
More Backgrounding
Our town had a population of five thousand and one. That
one was the man we all called “The Walking Jesus.” He was the local rambler,
traipsing the streets and byways, muttering the word of the Lord, shouting out
prophecies. He had shoulder-length white hair and a long white beard. He
dressed in white satin trousers and silk shirts. Sometimes he had chartreuse
handkerchiefs tied around his neck. No matter how cold the weather, no matter
how hot, he always went barefooted.
One scorching day we were riding the back roads in our
blue forty-eight Chevy (my Daddy, my sister June and I, Bobby Lee), drinking
ice-cold Coca-Colas, and there he was, ambling along the roadside.
“Hey, there goes the Walking Jesus!” said June. She had a
little package of salted peanuts, and she was transferring its contents into
the top of her Coke bottle.
“It’s him, all right,” said Daddy. “You reckon he’d like
a ride?”
We didn’t really believe he’d get in the car. The Walking
Jesus didn’t ride in cars; he walked. But mirabile dictu! When we stopped and
opened the door, he crawled in the back seat, where June was sitting.
We drove on down the road, wrapped in a sense of wonder.
Nobody spoke. We drank our Cokes, out of those original classic bottles, which
were all steamed up and sweating in the heat. We drove past the old clay pit,
those brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple, crowned by sharp
scrub pines sparkling in silver-white sunlight.
Finally Daddy said, “It’s a hot one today, I mean to tell
you.”
The Walking Jesus said, “Sho nuff is.”
“Would you like a Co-Cola?” asked Daddy.
The Walking Jesus blanched.
“I ain’t about to take the spawn of Satan into my body,”
he replied with a scowl.
Nobody said anything else. We tooled on down that hot
asphalt, on the Old Sorrento Road. I sat
there still feeling wonderstruck. Just imagine: it was Daddy and June and me,
ten-year-old Bobby Lee, and we were riding along in our car, past the citrus
groves, past the live oaks strewn with Spanish moss, past the clay pits,
chinaberries, the mundane realities of our lives. We were imbibing the devil’s
spawn as we went, and riding along with us in the back seat that day was none
other than The Walking Jesus. I just wish Flannery O’Connor could have been
there to see that.
But what about the “meaning” of AGM? As I’ve made clear
above, I think that it has all kinds of meanings for all different people. Most
of my Russian students were shocked and chagrined by the change of tone, when a
light-hearted story about a silly family on a trip to Florida suddenly turns
into a tale of mass murder. This bothers Martha Stephens too, a critic who has
written an intelligent book about F.O.[9]
Others have insisted that the tonal change makes for a “failure” of the story
as fiction. As for me, I agree with the writer T.C. Boyle, who has remarked
that “It’s very powerful when the safety net drops away from the comic universe
where nothing can go wrong, and there’s this overpowering, terrible violence.”[10]
I, personally,
think that a central theme in a lot of O’Connor’s stories is palaver, what I
call good ole Southern b.s. People blather their way through their lives like
the grandmother does, saying, essentially, nothing, and finally they persiflage
their way on out of this life. Such talk is so absolutely familiar to me that I
could put myself, say, on the bus with Julian and his mother (“Everything that Rises
Must Converge”) and I would already know by heart everything everyone would
say. Southern people of my time (the fifties) could have been playing roles in
a play: they knew their lines perfectly. A literary scholar could write an
article (probably already has): “Slouching Loquaciously Toward Valdosta: Phatic
Southern Speech in the Works of Flannery
O’Connor.” Of course AGM, as any great work of fiction, is about a whole lot of
other things too.
(8)
