Let The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O'Connor (1960)

Flannery O'Connor (1925 to 1964, Savannah, Georgia, USA) is tremendously influential very highly regarded writer working a style called "Southern Gothic".  I have now read all of her short stories and both of her novels.   Virtually all of her work has deeply religious themes.   There was nothing moderate about O'Connor's commitment to her version of Catholicism.     Certainly she believes literally in damnation.   The plot in Let the Violent Bare it Away centers on a man and his nephew.  The uncle is certain the nephew is detained to bring a revelation. When the nephew rebels, he is in revolt against God.   Almost every sentence is a wonder.  As in her work, people are strange, given to violence.  There are things to ponder in O'Connor.  Why are women who have sex with men they are not married to called "whores", why do white characters nearly all call people of color "niggers"?  By 1960 this was unacceptable language, even in Georgia.  

This is a powerful work many will find disturbing.  

Of her two novels, I prefer Wise Blood".   

Her short stories are required reading in Masters in Fine Art programs focusing on creative writing.

Mel u

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor (1952, 232 pages)

Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964, born Savannah, Georgia, USA) is, in my opinion, one of the greatest short story writers of all time.  I have read all of her short stories and posted on a few of them.  O'Connor was a devout Catholic and she saw Wise Blood as an exploration of her faith.   People such as Kenzaburo Oe treat her work almost as if they are holy texts.   Wise Blood was her first of two novels.  

I don't know quite or even close what to say about this book.  I will start by saying I loved it.  Almost every sentence is amazing.  There are for sure deep themes about the meaning to believers of the death of Jesus, the nature of faith, and several other issues.  The people in the novel are all what most people would call back woods unsophisticated barely literate hicks from the poorest part of American in 1952, the rural south.  The literary term for the characters is "southern gothic grotesques".  Terrible things befall them and they do terrible things in turn.  I admit I was surprised that prostitutes (O'Connor calls them "whores") play a big part in the story.  I am sure one could write a book on why.  There are over 100 references to blood in the novel.  Two of the characters are preachers, one of a bizarre Church of Christ without Jesus.  There is no one near normal seeming and no one comes from or is part of a functional family.   The novel also has unbelievably funny or just to weird for words scenes.  Readers of Wise Blood will probably be jolted when the characters use the word "nigger" over and over.  

In 1952 when this book was made into a movie it was considered shocking for the sexual themes.  You can see how it was first marketed in the cover image at the top of this post.  Now it is considered a canon status world class master work, I see it that way.  John Houston made a movie based on it.

   

I will very shortly, I hope read her second and last novel, The Violent Bear it Away.  

Mel u

Flannery O'Connor's Last Short Story "Judgement Day"

"Judgement Day" by Flannery O'Connor (1965, 14 pages)

The Irish Quarter Welcomes Flannery O'Connor
A Celebration of the Irish Short Story
March 11 to July 1

1925 - 1964

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

My Prior Posts for ISSW Year Two

Posts by Participants 

Please consider joining us for this event.     Everything you need to participate is in the resources page, including links to 1000s of short stories, from brand new ones to stories now in the public domain.   Guests posts are also welcome.   

Today I welcome a wonderful guest to the Irish Corner, Flannery O'Connor, from Savannah, Georgia in the southern portion of the United States.   Sometimes people say they do not like short stories because they do not give them enough "meat" to sink their teeth into.   I would venture that no one who reads even a few of Flannery O'Connor's short stories would make such a claim.   Kenzaburo Oe, one of our other guests, treated her work as if they were holy texts, to be read over and over in a futile attempt to get to the bottom of them.  There are lots of Irish American authors of great short stories from F Scott Fitzgerald on down but no one, in my opinion, is on a par with Flannery O'Connor.   (There is some background information on her in my prior posts.)


As I began to read through her posthumous collection, The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor, my plan was to post on each story.   After seven stories I gave up that idea as something I was not up to, and this is not from the modesty which I do not have anyway.    I do know that there is a big interest in Flannery O'Connor out there as of the 1050 posts on The Reading Life, my few posts on her are often the top viewed posts of the day.   


"Judgement Day" is, as I knew it would be, a powerful work with many layers of meaning.  (Teachers will have to decide of if this story can be taught in school as it does contain political incorrect language, though the language is a replica of the speech of the time and central to the meaning of the story.)  O'Connor was a devout Catholic and there is deep religious symbolism in this story but it requires no acceptance of any religious code for its power, if it did that would diminish the power of the story considerably.   The central figure in the story is an older white man from Georgia whose daughter has taken to live with her in New York City.  He hated in there from the very first day.   One morning he overhears his son-in-law ask his daughter "Where do you plan to bury him?".   When he hears the plan is to bury him right there in New York City, he decides to ship himself home collect in a sealed box, on a train.  as that is all he can afford.    I just do not see a point in telling the plot of this story.   It goes deep into race relations, regional attitudes, mother father dynamics, reflections on the nature of the judgement day and no doubt numerous things that go quite over my head.    


Mel u

"The Displaced Person" by Flannery O'Connor

"The Displaced Person" by Flannery O'Connor (1955, 30 pages)

My Prior Posts on Flannery O'Connor

1925 to 1965

"The Displaced Person" is one of Flannery Connor's longest short stories.    I am currently reading through the stories in her posthumous collection The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor.   O'Connor is on many greatest of all time short story writer lists and is for sure now on mine.

O'Connor (from Savannah, Georgia, USA-the heart of the old south)is the very epitome of  a Southern Gothic writer with grotesque characters,  very dysfunctional families and deep as it gets symbolism.    That combined with her fearless depiction of the climate of pervasive racism and white supremacy of the time makes her hard to read or even take to some readers.   Most of her stories are told through conversations or the thoughts of her characters.   There is extensive use of "dialect" in the stories that will slow most readers down.  (I for sure needed to slow down for "The Displaced Person").

The white residents of the world of the south in the 1940s were not just prejudiced against blacks (there is constant use of very unacceptable language that may make these stories hard for teachers to use), but against Europeans, Catholics (O'Connor was a devout Catholic), any body that "talks funny", and anybody that just stands out at all.   This is a world where people would nod in agreement when someone said Poles and Germans were all the same (and right after WWII ended be real confused about what it was about and who fought who) and that "Italians" were white "technically speaking".

The story takes place on a farm in rural Georgia around 1947 or so.   The farm is owned by Mrs McIntyre, once a widow and twice divorced.   She runs her farm with the help of near no account white trash and shiftless blacks (of course she does not call them that!).   She has heard about the many displaced persons all over Europe and has a vague idea of concentration camps and such.   She contacts a local Catholic priest and asks him to get her a displaced man to work on her farm.   He gets her refugee from Poland.   He turns out to be an incredibly hard worker, has great intelligence and at once learns how to repair tractors and things like that.   At first Mrs McIntyre is thrilled by him then she gets worried about why he works so hard and what his private agenda might be.   Also he does not seem to understand the way relationships between blacks and white are supposed to work.    There is a lot of great plot action and conversations in the story.   Then Mrs McIntyre is completely shocked when she finds out he wants to bring his sixteen year old niece to Georgia as the bride for one of the black men on the farm.   This is just way too much.   There is much more in this story but I will leave it unspoiled.

I will not now explore the religious symbolism of this story.  As I read the remainder of her stories I may pick one of them and focus on the theological aspects of her story.

Please share your experience with O'Connor?

Mel u

Flannery O'Connor Three Stories from the middle 1950s

"A Late Encounter with the Enemy" (1953, 14 pages)
"The River" (1955, 13 pages)
"A Circle in the Fire" (1954, 16 pages)


"shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in
the circle the angel had cleared for them."



My Prior Posts on Flannery O'Connor

O'Connor around six-already reading

Flannery O'Connor (1925 to 1965-Georgia, USA) is just a flat out genius!   I do not see how anyone who reads her stories could dismiss the short story as an uninteresting genre.    (My page lengths may not be exactly the same as those in the hard copy of the book as I am working from an e-text.)    I am currently reading all of the stories in The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor (1971).   The stories will sustain as much analysis as one cares to give them and much more.   O'Connor was a very committed Roman Catholic deeply into very serious theological reflections.   Her stories are full of Christian symbolism but that is only one part of their interest.   I am not really trying to convince anyone of her import, just read the stories with an open mind and decide for yourself is my only suggestion.


"A Late Encounter with the Enemy" is a very funny story.   O'Connor is believe it or not laugh out loud funny at times and her stories are very cinematic.    Creative writing schools tell their students to show what happens, not tell it and this is just what O'Connor does.   There are really only two characters that matter in this story, General George Poker Sash who is 104 years old,  and his sixty three year old granddaughter Sally Poker.   The general cannot remember much of anything about his life.   He cannot recall his children or his wife or even the American Civil War in which he was supposedly a General.   He is now brought out for public occasions like parades and holidays and put on the podium as a distinguished person.   He loves this as pretty girls come up and make a fuss over him.    His granddaughter is a teacher and for the last twenty years or so she has been going to summer school to get her teaching degree.   Her goal in life is for the general to live long enough to be on the podium when she gets her degree.  The date is coming up very soon.

"The River" centers on the effects of a riverside baptism of a young man.  Travelling preachers and faith healers were a big part of the culture of the rural American south in this period and O'Connor jumps right into this.   This is a very interesting story with a lot of symbolism and religious topics to reflect on.   It is also about family ties and the roots of dysfunctional families.

"A Circle in the Fire" just screams out to be analyzed and then analyzed over and over again.   As I read Flannery's work I am trying to figure out whether or not I should take her symbolism literally or if it is tinged with layers on tops of layers of narrative and historical irony.   I do not really feel inclined to retell at all the plot of this amazing story.   It is just so densely written.   I will simply say it might be a really strange retelling of the story of the attempt by King Nebuchadnezzar to burn three men in a fiery furnace because they refused to worship his gods.   It is also a story about class in the south.

O'Connor's stories more or less set the standard for Southern Gothic stories.

I am so glad I have the opportunity to read her stories now thanks to the generosity of a patron of my blog.  

O'Connors stories are a world class cultural treasure of the first order.

Please share your experience or thoughts on O'Connor with us.  Do you love her work or is it too Southern Gothic for you.     There is constant use of politically incorrect racial terms in the stories that may give teachers pause for fear of too much controversy.

Mel u

Flannery O'Connor-Three Wiseblood Stories from 1949

"The Peeler"  (1949, 12 pages)
"The Heart of the Park" (1949, 14 pages)
"A Stroke of Good Fortune" (1949, 12 pages)

In The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor there are four stories that were worked into her first novel, Wiseblood  (1952).  I have already posted on one of them "Enoch and the Gorilla".   I have not yet read Wiseblood  but I think I can safely say it has got to be a strange and wonderful book with enough symbolism, hidden depths of meaning and sheer verbal brilliance to amaze anyone.  There is some background information on O'Connor (1925 to 1965,  Georgia, USA) in my prior posts on her.

These stories are a quantum leap up in depth and complexity as well as beauty from the six stories in her master's thesis, The Geranium and Other Stories,  submitted to the University of Iowa writers program in 1947.

I think with these three stories I will just sort of do a brief entry on each story.   I can already see I will at the end of my first read through of her stories see her as a "must read" genius of the form.   Also I am  not sure if  O'Connor really meant these stories to be experienced as standalone works.   Maybe she just for practical reasons found it necessary to publish these stories while she was working on Wiseblood.  


"The Peeler" starts out in front of a traveling salesman who has set up an impromptu shop where is he selling a marvelous potato peeling machine.    The machine takes the potatoes in brown and turns them out pure white.  Remember that in rural Georgia in 1949 to be white was considered the best thing to be.   Hazel Motes is at first fascinated by the machine and held captive by the pitch of the very practiced salesman.   He ends up being distracted by a blind preacher who is accompanied by a young woman who is handing out religious leaflets.    He runs into Enoch, one of the central characters in Wiseblood  and they both end up following the blind man down the street.

"The Heart of the Park" is about Enoch's very strange personal  life.   I was surprised to see his attitude to women and to find the large number of prostitutes in the world of this story.   The narrator of the story calls the women that Enoch as sex with whenever he can afford the two dollars they charge, "whores".    It is not clear if this is meant literally or is a devise to get us into the mind of Enoch.   He also likes to go to the public swimming pool as a lot of the women there have splits in their bathing suits and sometimes he gets to see more than he is suppose to.   I know there is enough symbolism in this story to fuel numerous dissertations.      For sure there  is a lot to think about in this story.

"A Stroke of Good Fortune" is mostly about a married woman in her mid-thirties.   Her brother has just come home from the war in Europe so that makes the date 1946 or so.    When her brother left he was according to the woman the worst most ignorant kind of backwoods slow minded hayseed.   She hoped the years away had smartened him up and made him worldlier.     She is very disappointed when the first food he asks for upon coming home is not some fancy French dish but simple down home collard greens.   We learn about the very dysfunctional family the brother and sister are from.   We learn how their mother was an old woman worn out at thirty four.   There is just a lot of great lines in this story.   Who else but Flannery O'Connor would describe a car like in this fashion:

"He saw a high rat, colored car passing, which sounded as if
its motor were dragging out the back."


I will be posting on additional stories soon.  


Please share your experience and feelings on O'Connor with us.

Mel u

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own" and "Enoch and the Gorilla" by Flannery O'Connor

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own" (1955)

"Enoch and The Gorilla" (1950)

Podcasts of Two Flannery O'Connor Stories

A Great Podcast Resource

So far I have read and posted on five of Flannery O'Connor's (1925 to 1965-Georgia, USA) thirty two short stories.  (There is some background information on her in my prior posts.)    The five stories I read, particularly "Good Country People" were enough to convince me she was true master of the form (and to put her picture in my header collage!)   

My main purpose in this post is to spotlight a new too me resource I have recently discovered, Miette's  Bedtime Story Podcast, which has online 100s of literary quality short stories as podcasts.   The selection is just brilliant including some items you will be shocked to see.   Miette has been posting podcasts for four years now and her webpage has a strong personal feel and reflects a deep love and appreciation of the short story as an art form.   Miette has a beautiful speaking voice.   She does her posts at home and sometimes you can hear her dog barking in the background and the doorbell or phone ringing but this just added to the charm for me.   

Podcasts are a kind of a trade off for me-they take a lot more time to experience than simply reading a story which is bad but they do force me to slow down a bit and reflect on what I hear.   They are also good when you are feeling lazy or are in a car for a long ride etc.   I am just a newbie when it comes to podcasts and such but I was after a bit of a learning curve easily able to listen to them on my Ipad.   

I listened to both of these stories twice, once last night and once this morning.   

"Enoch and the Gorilla" (running time  17.5 minutes) was turned into a chapter in her first novel, Wise Blood (1952).   Enoch (the name comes from an ancestor of Noah-I looked it up!) is a young zoo keeper in Georgia (part of the American South) in the years right after WWII.   Enoch hears that there is a gorilla at the local movie theater, there to help promote a movie.   He goes to the theater to see the gorilla and is shocked to realize it is a man in a gorilla suit.  (not everybody in O'Connor's stories is real bright).   The gorilla for pretty much no reason curses at Enoch and tells him to go to hell.   This causes him to have a minor revelation of sorts.   There is a lot of religious, Catholic, symbolism in her stories and I am sure there are biblical references and symbolism galore in this story.   

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own" (running time 35 minutes) seems the deeper of the two stories and is very typically O'Connor in its use of dysfunctional characters right out of the core of the Southern Gothic vocabulary.   (Personal fantasy disclosed, I wish O'Connor could have written some True Blood episodes.)  O'Connor seems to have a thing for amputees, women and their daughters who have their lives heavily impacted by a wandering stranger in the form of a single man.   The men are near rootless close to tramps.   Relationships form quickly and are ended just as fast.   Men are pretty much the villains in these stories.   In The Life You Save May Be Your Own" a man shows up at the home of a single woman and her sixteen year old daughter.   The man is a carpenter by trade ((OK Jesus was a carpenter also-run with the idea!).   The woman offers him work but says she can give him only food and he can live in her broken down for 15 years car.  In the old South it was, I believe, common for people to have broken down cars in their front yards.   This is taken kind as a class mark kind of item.   The daughter is 15 or so and is supposed to be quite beautiful.  She also might be mentally dysfunctional as she does not speak much.   When the mother decides she wants the man as a son-in-law, she uses that as a selling point for the girl.   I will leave the rest of the story untold.   This is a really brilliant story and I am sure it also has a lot of symbolism just below the surface.   

Fact of life, a lot of material that is not in the public domain can be found online.   Who knows how this happens and maybe in some cases it is legal or the web master has permission.   Maybe podcasts are an exception.   The laws of some countries are very specific on Internet posts of material, other countries legal codes have not been updated for decades so the question is not addressed.   Maybe residents of one country can legally download material that others cannot.   In some places  publishers and authors have easy recourse to remedies, in others pretty much nothing can really be done.  

Take a good look at Miette's  Bedtime Story Podcast-

It looks like as great resource and there are a lot of works on there that really shocked me to see.   Miette has superb taste and a wonderful voice and her write ups on the stories are also delightful.   She posts a new story about once a week.   

Mel u

Three Great Short Stories by Ladies from the American South

"He"  by Katherine Anne Porter (1927, 8 pages)
"A Visit of Charity" by Eudora Welty (1941, 5 pages)
"The Geranium" by Flannery O'Connor (1946, 5 pages)

Three Wonderful Short Stories by

Ladies of the American South

I know it  is considered in some very trendy quarters to be no longer correct to refer to a collection of women as "ladies"  but in the case of Katherine Anne Porter (Texas), Eudora Welty (Mississippi) and Flannery O'Connor (Georgia)  I cannot bring myself to refer to them in any other way.      Each  produced world class treasures in the novel and the short story.    I have posted on all three of these writers already so I just want to let people know about these three stories I have recently read.    The stories are a bit "regionalized" in the same way Irish short stories often are but don't let that stop you from reading these stories!

"He" by Katherine Anne Porter.    Porter (1890 to 1980-Indian Creek Texas) is probably best known for her 1962 novel Ship of Fools.   She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for her collected short stories.   The received opinion is that, the same is true of all the writers of today,  her short stories are her best work.    (There is additional background information on her in my prior post on her.)   "He" is a heart breaking story about a mother's love for her mentally challenged son.   The family in the story is struggling to survive in the face of some of the worse times in American history.    The setting is small town Rural Texas just before the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.    This story, told in the third person, is so beautifully written it is almost painful.   As the story opens we learn that the mother cannot help but love him more than her other two children.    He is also a burden on her and her husband.   I think one of the biggest concerns of parents of mentally challenged children lies in their fears about what will happen to them when the parents are gone.     Who will take care of their mentally handicapped ten year old son when he is twenty, thirty, forty or fifty.   When he is stronger than his father?   Can or should he be prevented from reproducing?    Porter does a masterful job of making us feel the parents concerns.   We also see how having such a child can change (and sometimes wreck) a marriage.    At the end of the story we have to decide if the right thing has been done for the right reasons.   This story will make you think.

You can read "He" HERE

"A Visit of Charity" by Eudora Welty (1909 to 2001-Jackson, Mississippi-Pulitzer Prize 1973) is a favorite of book bloggers world wide.    She was a good friend of Elizabeth Bowen and spent some time at her castle in Ireland (I would loved to have listened in at tea time!)    This story is set in small town Mississippi in the 1940s in  a time when all of the negative stereo types about the American South were reality.    As it opens a young girl is making a visit to a charity home for old people.    She is going so she can earn "points" in her Girl Scout type of group. What is great about this story is the interaction of the girl, the two very old women she visits (they are roommates) with each other and the women with the girl.    It is up to us to decide what the girl gets from the visit.   (There is additional information on Welty in my prior posts on her.)

You can read "A Visit of Charity" Here.    Lakeside Musings has an excellent post on this story.

Of these three writers, I guess Flannery O'Connor's star is now shining brightest.   Kenzaburo Oe treats her work as a near holy text.    O'Connor (1924 to 1964-Savannah, Georgia) was the author of the well regarded novel Wise Blood but it is her short stories that will bring her immortality.   (There is additional background information on O'Connor in my prior posts on her.)

"The Geranium" was O'Connor's master thesis at the famous Iowa Writer's Academy.   I think is one of her very first published stories.    She was only 21 when she wrote it.    I concede it does not have the full power of some of her more mature work but it is for sure worth reading and not just to see her first short story (but to lovers of the short story, that is really a good enough reason).   The story centers on an elderly man that has been rescued from a charity home by his adult daughter.    The fun of this story is in the depiction of the relationship of the father and his daughter and his interaction with his enviornment.   The story is also about race relations and it makes use of words that may rule it out as a class room story.

You can read "The  Geranium" HERE

Mel u

"Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor

"Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor (1955, 7 pages)

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week Year Two, March 12 to March 22.   All you need do is post on one short story by an Irish author and send me a comment or and e mail and I will include it in the master post at the end of the challenge

"Good Country People" is the fourth story I have read by Flannery O'Connor (1925 to 1964-Georgia, USA).
With the reading of this story,  I am now firmly convinced of  the genius of O'Connor.   (There is some back ground information on O'Connor in my prior posts.)

Like her other stories and her novels, "Good Country People" is set in the rural south.    There are three central characters in the story.   Mrs Hopewell who has a farm she runs with the help of tenants, her daughter, and a traveling bible salesmen.    The mother prides herself on being a good country woman.    Her daughter,  she  named her "Joy", is  32.   She lost part of one of her legs in an accident with a shot gun when she was 12.   She has a prosthetic leg.   The daughter for reasons that completely baffle her mother, has gotten a PhD in philosophy.     The mother is a devout Christian, which does not stop her from speaking harshly about lots of people when they are not around.    One day a traveling bible salesman, Manly Pointer, comes by the house on a sales call.

Manly says he can see right away that Mrs Hopewell is a good country woman and he does not understand why she does not have a bible in her parlor.    She tells him that her daughter, who  for reasons not real clear, legally changed her name to "Hulga", is an atheist and so she has to keep her bible in the bedroom.

Mrs Hopewell tells Manly that she will not be able to buy a bible from him but he still accepts her offer to have dinner with her and her daughter.   Of course the daughter at first looks down on the bible salesmen.

What happened next in the story really shocked me.    I do not want to tell anymore of the plot.   It is just a perfect story.   Somehow all that the daughter learned in her vast education is useless in the face of real evil.

In just a few pages O'Connor brings the people in the story completely to life.   I admit I was left wanting to know what happens latter on in the live of the characters.   Some who do not like short stories will feel the story leaves them hanging.

You can read it online HERE.

If you have experience with O'Connor please let us know which of  her works you prefer.   I will be reading four more of her stories soon.    I hope in time to read all of them and will ponder reading her novels.    People who have read all of her work mostly say her short stories are her best work.

"Miss O'Connor, as far as I am
concerned you are Irish"-Rory

Mel u

Flannery O'Connor: Two Short Stories

"Revelation"   and "Everything That Rises Must Converge"  both by Flannery O'Connor (1955)

Flannery O'Connor (1925 to 1964, Savannah, Georgia, USA) is best known for her novel, Wise Blood and her short stories.     Connor's work and life was very rooted in the American South, in a time when racial prejudice was just beginning to be challenged.    (I have previously posted on her short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and there is some additional background information on O'Connor in that post).   "Revelation" and "Everything that Rises Must Converge" deal directly with the hatred and contempt that white people in Georgia had for blacks.     The stories are about two things which O'Connor weaves together:   the consequences of racial prejudices and the playing out of Catholic theology in the events in the life of characters in  the story.    O'Connor's stories unfold through conversations between the people in the stories.    With just a few words, O'Connor can  bring a character totally to life.  

To help readers relate, if like me you like the HBO TV series True Blood  then the local town characters in the series are straight out of world of O'Connor.     You need to project yourself into the USA South circa 1952 to relate to these stories.     Maybe once you go below that they are universal.    Each story does make a lot of use of horribly offense expressions to refer to African Americans.

"Everything That Rises Must Converge" (which can be read HERE) is about a woman and her adult son, in his early twenties.    I will just give a brief account of the story as I hope some will read it.    As the story begins we can see the mother and her son have had a long running argument about the mother's prejudices and her use of racial insults.   The son is  a college graduate.    The mother  worked very hard to put him through college.    The only problem is there do not seem to be a lot of jobs where they live that call for college degrees.    Under the continual acrimony between the mother and son I sensed a very strong bond and a great emotional mutual dependency.   The son is constantly abusing his mother for her racial views.   O'Connor's stories are all about guilt and something terrible does happen that will send the son into a well of guilt from which he will not escape in this life.

"Revelation".  (The story can be read HERE.)    The action of the story takes place in the waiting room of a doctor.    Keep in mind when reading the story,  that the races had their own doctors.     In this world one of the worst insults a white person can give to another is to say they act like black people.   All sort of attitudes are played out in the doctor's office and afterwards.    This story also deals with the class structure of the society.    There is an amazing action scene also.   The story also has heavy religious underpinnings.    I will leave the plot pretty much unspoiled other than to say it is a lot of crazy fun.    It is also very much involved with Catholic tenants.    The title comes from contemporary Catholic theology.

The great Irish writer, Edna O'Brien said she could relate to short stories about small towns in the American south as the ignorance and prejudices of the people in these stories reminded her of her life in small town Ireland.

These are two good stories, really quite good.    Some people may find the world in these two stories to remote from their own to relate to the people in them.   But really how difference is the hatred in these stories from a million stories played out in real life around the world every day?

I will be posting soon on four more stories by O"Connor.  

O'Connor is on most  lists of best American short story writers.   Once and while you will see her on lists of world's best.      I accept the first listing but not the second.    It maybe her stories will turn out to be  period pieces mainly.  

Mel u

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Conner

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Conner (8 pages, 1955)

Flannery O'Conner (1925 to 1964-Savannah, Georgia, USA-southern region) is best known for her 32 short stories and her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away.   In a recent posting I asked readers to suggest short stories I might like that I could probably read on line.   DS of Third Story Window (whose blog I have happily followed for a long time) suggested I look at Flannery O'Conner.   I had heard of her and knew she was from the American South and was highly regarded as a short story writer as I have seen her work on a number of "Best Short Stories" type lists but I have never read any of her work.       I did find one of her more famous, according to the interesting Wikipedia article on her, on line, "A Good Man is Hard to Find".   In fact I learned from Wikipedia that the story title comes from a well known song first recorded by Bessie Smith in 1928.

As the story opens a family is debating where to go on a little trip.

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennes- see and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. "Now look here, Bailey," she said, "see here, read this," and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. "Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did."

In the phrase "seizing at every change" we at once see the family structure if we look a bit.  Some of her stylistic devices and charm can be seen in this passage:

"A good man is hard to find," Red Sammy said. "Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more."

He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said that in her opinion Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now. She said the way Europe acted you would think we were made of money and Red Sam said it was no use talking about it, she was exactly right. 

Somehow this suggests intelligence wasted and the universal  yearning of the old for the good old days.   We also wonder why the grandmother sees Europe as to blame for everything.    It also seems like a conversation that they have had many times!    The road trip begins very badly with an accident when the cat the grandmother did not want to leave behind gets out of his box and sinks his claws into the driver's neck.   I could for sure visualize the wreck through the marvelous prose of the 3rd person narrator:

Then he got out of the car and started looking for the children's mother. She was sitting against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the screaming baby, but she only had a cut down her face and a broken shoulder. "We've had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed in a frenzy of delight.

"But nobody's killed," June Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out of the car, her hat still pinned to her head but the broken front brim standing up at a jaunty angle and the violet spray hanging off the side. They all sat down in the ditch, except the children, to recover from the shock

After reading this we come to realize there is something grotesquely wrong with the family when we ponder why the children are screaming in delight and why the daughter is disappointed that no one has been killed.   The prose has a kind of disconnected feel and now we are starting to learn why.   The family then encounters The Misfit as the escapee from the Federal Prison is called.   At first the family is terrified of him so the grandmother tries to engage him in a conversation in the hopes he will not kill them (he has two confederates with him):

"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.

"Maybe He didn't raise the dead," the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.

There is a theology lesson in this.  From a biographical stand point it may be useful to know O'Conner was a devout Catholic living in a very Protestant area.   This story can be read in just a few minutes.   I do not want to give away the ending but it was very savage.   O'Conner had far to short a life.   She graduated from The Iowa Writers Workshop.   Her father died young also of Lupus which also took her life.   She never married and as far as I could find in several on line biographies I read of her, never had any known romantic relationships.   Her life may have been sheltered and tragically short, but if "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is any proof, she knew a lot about life.   She was  very much into the reading life and supported herself it appears from the sales of her books, grants, speaking fees and fees for book reviews.

It appears there are a few more of her stories on line (If anyone knows where or if all her stories are on line please leave a comment) and I will read some more soon.    Maybe she is not on the level of Katherine Mansfield (I mean not everyone can intimidate Virginia Woolf) but I really liked this story.   In a few pages she not only brought the lead characters to life but recreates a culture, the rural American South of the early 1950s.   Maybe we would not  have wanted to live there but it is enjoyable to read about it.   She also avoids making  the characters seem like buffoons which a less talented writer would have done.
Here is the link to the story