The Complete Stories (2 page)

By the end of the year the novel was ready, and we began to prepare for publication. Flannery had less vanity than anyone I have ever known. When I asked her for a photograph to use on the book jacket, I expected a picture taken before her illness. The new one she sent was not unattractive, and she looked out at the reader with that clear-eyed gaze of hers, but her hair had not fully grown back nor had the puffiness induced by cortisone wholly subsided. The photograph was widely reproduced when
Wise Blood
was published in May 1952. I was disappointed by the reviews more than she was; they all recognized her power but missed her point.

In the five years between 1947, when a draft of the first chapter of
Wise Blood
was written, and 1952, Flannery's development was amazing. In the three years following, she wrote better and better. Starting late in 1952 with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a masterpiece of a story, she turned out one beauty after another, including “The River,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Displaced Person,” “The Artificial Nigger” and “Good Country People.” Catherine Carver, whom we were fortunate enough to have as an editor, and who worked with Flannery at this period, brought each new story into my office with more or less the same remark, “Wait till you read this one!” Early in 1955 Flannery completed work on her second book, a collection of these stories which she entitled
A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
In January we sent it to press, having set publication for June. I remember our amusement at Evelyn Waugh's reaction to the advance proofs we sent him: “If these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed remarkable.” At the beginning of April, before the book appeared, I resigned from the firm and joined the house with which I have since been associated. When Flannery sent me an inscribed copy, soon after my departure, I felt a twinge of sadness that my editorial association with her books had ended.

*   *   *

Once again fate rearranged what seemed to be an unalterable course. After the very successful publication of
A Good Man Is Hard to Find,
Flannery was offered a new contract about which she asked my advice, saying she wanted to stay as long as Catherine Carver remained as her editor. In that case, I suggested, why not ask that such a stipulation be incorporated in the contract? This was not readily granted, but Flannery had made up her mind and in the end she got what she wanted. Within three years, after Catherine Carver and Denver Lindley had left, it came to pass that Flannery was free to join the house she remained with until her death. We contracted for her third book, “a novel in progress,” on April 15, 1958, and published
The Violent Bear It Away
in 1960. Then I learned that
Wise Blood
was out of print, and we soon acquired this classic work. She wrote a short and eloquent preface for the second edition, describing the book as “a comic novel about a Christian
malgré lui
” and stating that it had been written by “an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.” She ended by defining her theme, free will or freedom, as “a mystery, and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.” We reissued
Wise Blood
in 1962, on the tenth anniversary of the original publication, and it lives on both in cloth and paperback editions. Didn't some wise man define a classic as a book that does not stay out of print?

*   *   *

One of Flannery's admirers was Thomas Merton, who became more of a fan with each new book of hers. Over the years I came to see how much the two had in common—a highly developed sense of comedy, deep faith, great intelligence. The aura of aloneness surrounding each of them was not an accident. It was their métier, in which they refined and deepened their very different talents in a short span of time. They both died at the height of their powers.

Finally, they were both as American as one can be. When publication of Merton's
The Sign of Jonas
was forbidden by the Abbot General in France, I was able to obtain its release only with the help of Jacques Maritain, who wrote him in beautiful French (the Abbot General did not read English and consequently had not read
The Sign of Jonas
), explaining what the “American Trappist” was up to. As for Flannery, whose work can only be understood in an American setting, when a German publisher wanted to drop some of her stories as too shocking for Germanic sensibilities, she wrote Miss McKee, “I didn't think I was
that
vicious.”

On a trip south in 1959 I stopped at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky to see Merton, before going to see Flannery in Georgia. He gave me a presentation copy of the beautifully designed private edition of
Prometheus: A Meditation
to take to her. He was much interested in Flannery's peacocks. From previous visits to “Andalusia” I was able to tell him about their habits—how they roost at dusk by gradual hops from ground to fence post to tree limb; how their trains get caught under car wheels because they refuse to hurry; how vain they are (they seemed to jockey for good angles when they saw my camera); how funny it is to see peachicks rehearsing with their immature featherduster tails; and how rare it is to see the ultimate display, when the peacock shimmers and shakes his feathers in a kind of ecstasy at the height of preening. I could not tell Merton enough about them or about Flannery and her surroundings. What was Milledgeville like? Well, one of its sights was the beautiful ante-bellum Cline house, where Flannery's aunt served a formal midday dinner. He was surprised to learn that far from being “backwoods” Milledgeville had once been the capital of Georgia. I also showed him a letter in which Flannery wrote: “Somebody sent me a gossip column that said Gene Kelly would make his TV debut in Flannery O'Connor's ‘backwoods love story' [
The Life You Save May Be Your Own
]. I certainly can't afford to miss this metamorphosis.”

When I got to the O'Connors', Flannery was curious to hear about Gethsemani. Was Merton allowed to talk to me? Yes, without restriction. I described our walks in the woods and the monastic routine of the day: first office (Matins) at two a.m. and last office (Compline) at sunset, followed by bed. I mentioned that in Louisville I'd bought Edith Sitwell's recording of
Façade,
which Merton played over and over, laughing so hard that tears ran down his cheeks, and Flannery asked me to recite some of the poems. Even my pallid approximation of Dame Edith's renderings of “Daisy and Lily, lazy and silly,” “Long Steel Grass” (pronounced “Grawss”), “Black Mrs. Behemoth” and the rest made her face light up with smiles.

When Flannery died, Merton was not exaggerating his estimate of her worth when he said he would not compare her with such good writers as Hemingway, Porter and Sartre but rather with “someone like Sophocles … I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor.”

Up to the very end, she worked hard. She was working on
Everything That Rises Must Converge
during her final illness. “I have been thinking about this collection of my stories and what can be done to get it out with me sick,” she wrote Miss McKee on May 7, 1964. “I am definitely out of commission for the summer and maybe longer with this lupus. I have to stay mostly in bed … If I were well there is a lot of rewriting and polishing I could do, but in my present state of health [the stories] are essentially all right the way they are.” This is a typical O'Connor understatement; some of these last stories, like “Revelation” and the title story, are as nearly perfect as stories can be. In the same letter she proposed eight stories for the book, one of which, “The Partridge Festival,” she later withdrew. All eight had appeared in magazines. Later in May she wrote, “I forgot to tell Bob Giroux that the title
Everything That Rises Must Converge
is all right with me if he thinks that is what it ought to be.” It seemed absolutely right and (though she never said so) may have dated from a few years earlier when I sent her a French anthology of the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, one section of which was entitled
Tout Ce Qui Monte Converge.
I was unaware of the two unpublished stories she was working on.

The first of these new stories was “Parker's Back.” Caroline Gordon later wrote of it: “Miss O'Connor's stories are all about the operations of supernatural grace in the lives of natural men and women. Such operations are infinitely various but so delicate that they have eluded some of the subtlest writers. In … ‘Parker's Back,' Miss O'Connor seems to have succeeded where the great Flaubert failed: in the dramatization of that particular heresy which denies Our Lord corporeal substance. We do not naturally like anything which is unfamiliar. No wonder Miss O'Connor's writings have baffled the reviewers, so much so they have reached for any
cliché
they could lay hold of in order to have some way of apprehending this original and disturbing work.”

The final story, “Judgement Day,” was mailed to me in early July. It is a revised and expanded version of “The Geranium,” which appears to have been a favorite of hers, for letters to Miss McKee reveal that in 1955 she had also worked on an intermediate version under the title “An Exile in the East.” As “Judgement Day” it became the ninth story in the collection published posthumously in 1965.

What turned out to be my last letter to Flannery was dated July 7, 1964. I knew of the recurrence of her illness, of course, but I did not know that the lupus was now uncontrolled. I enclosed with my letter an advance proof of our catalogue description of
Everything That Rises Must Converge
as it was then conceived. She never replied and in late July she was taken to the Baldwin County hospital at Milledgeville, where she died in a coma on August 3.

*   *   *

There are thirty-one stories in this volume. Nineteen are taken from Flannery's two collections and twelve
*
appear for the first time in book form. For this edition we have followed the author's original manuscripts for “The Partridge Festival,” “Why Do the Heathen Rage?” and the first six stories. For the latter group we have also retained the order she followed in her thesis. The order of the other stories is chronological according to date of composition and does not duplicate the arrangement the author worked out for the two collections, which are of course available as she wanted them. Nor is it implied that all the stories here are of equal merit. It simply seems desirable to preserve as complete a collection of Flannery O'Connor's short fiction as possible.

Elizabeth Bishop, who with her poet's eye sees more than most of us, wrote at the time of Flannery's death: “I am sure her few books will live on and on in American literature. They are narrow, possibly, but they are clear, hard, vivid, and full of bits of description, phrases, and an odd insight that contains more real poetry than a dozen books of poems.” She added a bit of testimony that Flannery herself would have relished: “Critics who accuse her of exaggeration are quite wrong, I think. I lived in Florida for several years next to a flourishing ‘Church of God' (both white and black congregation), where every Wednesday night Sister Mary and her husband ‘spoke in tongues.' After those Wednesday nights, nothing Flannery O'Connor ever wrote could seem at all exaggerated to me.”

R
OBERT
G
IROUX

The Geranium

O
LD
D
UDLEY
folded into the chair he was gradually molding to his own shape and looked out the window fifteen feet away into another window framed by blackened red brick. He was waiting for the geranium. They put it out every morning about ten and they took it in at five-thirty. Mrs. Carson back home had a geranium in her window. There were plenty of geraniums at home, better-looking geraniums. Ours are sho nuff geraniums, Old Dudley thought, not any er this pale pink business with green, paper bows. The geranium they would put in the window reminded him of the Grisby boy at home who had polio and had to be wheeled out every morning and left in the sun to blink. Lutisha could have taken that geranium and stuck it in the ground and had something worth looking at in a few weeks. Those people across the alley had no business with one. They set it out and let the hot sun bake it all day and they put it so near the ledge the wind could almost knock it over. They had no business with it, no business with it. It shouldn't have been there. Old Dudley felt his throat knotting up. Lutish could root anything. Rabie too. His throat was drawn taut. He laid his head back and tried to clear his mind. There wasn't much he could think of to think about that didn't do his throat that way.

His daughter came in. “Don't you want to go for a walk?” she asked. She looked provoked.

He didn't answer her.

“Well?”

“No.” He wondered how long she was going to stand there. She made his eyes feel like his throat. They'd get watery and she'd see. She had seen before and had looked sorry for him. She'd looked sorry for herself too; but she could er saved herself, Old Dudley thought, if she'd just have let him alone—let him stay where he was back home and not be so taken up with her damn duty. She moved out of the room, leaving an audible sigh, to crawl over him and remind him again of that one minute—that wasn't her fault at all—when suddenly he had wanted to go to New York to live with her.

He could have got out of going. He could have been stubborn and told her he'd spend his life where he'd always spent it, send him or not send him the money every month, he'd get along with his pension and odd jobs. Keep her damn money—she needed it worse than he did. She would have been glad to have had her duty disposed of like that. Then she could have said if he died without his children near him, it was his own fault; if he got sick and there wasn't anybody to take care of him, well, he'd asked for it, she could have said. But there was that thing inside him that had wanted to see New York. He had been to Atlanta once when he was a boy and he had seen New York in a picture show.
Big Town Rhythm
it was. Big towns were important places. The thing inside him had sneaked up on him for just one instant. The place like he'd seen in the picture show had room for him! It was an important place and it had room for him! He'd said yes, he'd go.