Flannery O’Connor and judgement

Lately, as a break between Greek and Roman literatures, I’ve been reading Flannery O’Connor. Ain’t she just great? When I was reading A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, I thought she must be the greatest writer of bigotry. As I recently read a few stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge, I would add that she must also be the greatest writer of self-righteousness: both “The Comforts of Home” and “The Lame Shall Enter First” depict a parent bringing a delinquent into their homes to save them; the mother in “The Comforts of Home” is the “bleeding heart” progressive type, who tries to help others out of naïve compassion and listens to no reason and ends up causing harm; the father in “The Lame Shall Enter First” feels virtuous and feels good about himself for rescuing a troubled adolescent, whilst neglecting his own son. Whereas many great writers—especially Tolstoy, Chekhov, and George Eliot—write with compassion and get you to understand different points of view and different kinds of people, Flannery O’Connor doesn’t. She judges. She condemns. She’s sharp, unsentimental, merciless. You can feel her contempt for all the characters as she cuts them open and studies them.

The interesting thing though is that when Flannery O’Connor writes about bigotry and racism, such as in “Revelation”, I can see that there’s some of her in Mrs Turpin, that she’s wrestling with her own bigotry, that she’s judging and condemning herself. It is foolish to dismiss her as racist and not worth reading—like that New Yorker piece from 2020—when she knew her own bigotry. 

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My list of the greatest short story writers would always have Flannery O’Connor. There’s something cold, harsh, intense about her—she is terrifying—but there’s also something striking and compelling. The contrast between her and Chekhov, my favourite short story writer of all, is fascinating: he’s warm, she’s cold; and she makes one feel deeply uncomfortable. 

I think the best stories in the first collection are “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, “The River”, “The Artificial Nigger”, “Good Country People”, and “The Displaced Person”. 

The best stories in the second collection are “Everything that Rises Must Converge”, “A View of the Woods”, “The Comforts of Home”, and “The Lame Shall Enter First” (but then I have two stories left to read). 

The Member of the Wedding: “an unjoined person who hung around in doorways”

1/ Himadri (Argumentative Old Git) has written at length about the characters in The Member of the Wedding and the themes of loneliness, identity, belonging, and so on—what can I possibly say?—so I’m gonna have to write about something else. 

Maybe Carson McCullers’s style? 

“She complained aloud, and her voice was fringed and sharp like the edge of a saw.” 

Later on: 

“So she sharpened her voice and chiselled the words.” 

Remember Nabokov’s idea that before the 19th century, writers didn’t “see” colours? “The sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green, the eyes of beauty black, the clouds grey, and so on”? 

“She opened her eyes, and it was night. The lavender sky had at last grown dark and there was slanted starlight and twisted shade. Her heart had divided like two wings and she had never seen a night so beautiful.” 

Lavender sky. 

“The air was chilled, and day after day the sky was a clear green-blue, but filled with light, the colour of a shallow wave.” 

Carson McCullers is not Flannery O’Connor, who fills her pages with strange and striking metaphors, but once in a while one comes across an interesting sentence in McCullers. 

“The noon air was thick and sticky as hot syrup, and there was the stifling smell of the dye-rooms from the cotton mill.” 

I like this: 

“In the silence of the kitchen they heard the tone shaft quietly across the room, then again the same note was repeated. A piano scale slanted across the August afternoon. A chord was struck. Then in a dreaming way a chain of chords climbed slowly upward like a flight of castle stairs…” 

This is an unusual sentence: 

“… But nevertheless there were times when Frances felt his presence there, solemn and hovering and ghost-grey.” 

These phrases are repeated later: “solemn”, “hovering”, “ghost-grey”. 

2/ As I read The Member of the Wedding, I couldn’t help thinking of the contrast between Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor—both female writers from the American South, about a decade apart. 

Carson McCullers is warm. Flannery O’Connor is cold. 

Tolstoy is warm. Flaubert, cold. Chekhov, warm. Ibsen, cold. Fielding, warm. Thackeray, warm. Choderlos de Laclos, cold. Dickens, warm. Jane Austen, I’d say cold. Vasily Grossman, warm. Nabokov, cold.

With Flannery O’Connor, you can feel her cold, pitiless stare as she cuts open her characters and studies them. Carson McCullers, in contrast, depicts her characters with compassion and warmth, even affection. 

3/ Much has been said about the central character of the book, Frankie, the 12-year-old tomboy who belongs to no club and who so desperately wants to belong, to be part of something that she fantasises about her brother’s wedding, wanting to join him and his wife and get out of her ugly little town. Himadri for example has written a very good blog post about Frankie, who calls herself F. Jasmine in the second section of the book (a name she adopts to group herself with her brother Jarvis and his bride Janice), and who becomes Frances in the final section. 

It is very good, but I don’t particularly remember 12-year-old me. Perhaps I blocked it out of my memory. 

So I’m more interested in Frankie’s black cook, Berenice. This is a black woman in the segregated South. This is a woman who first got married at the age of 13, just one year older than Frankie now, and who has gone through many bad marriages, each time worse than the last. This is a woman who has a blue glass eye because her last husband gouged out her eye. 

But she was happy once (I should say, she was adored once too). 

“‘I loved Ludie and he was the first man I loved.  Therefore, I had to go and copy myself forever afterward. What I did was to marry off little pieces of Ludie whenever I come across them. It was just my misfortune they all turned out to be the wrong pieces…’” 

It is heartbreaking. I suspect that when I have forgotten everything else about The Member of the Wedding, I will still remember Berenice. 

Recent reads: Primo Levi, Flannery, Pamela, Shamela

In September, I read Moments of Reprieve, my third Primo Levi book after If This Is a Man (aka Survival in Auschwitz) and The Truce (aka The Reawakening). Wonderful writer. Primo Levi writes about the people he knew at Auschwitz—the moments of reprieve—he’s got a gift for portraiture and for images. Certain images get imprinted on one’s mind: a man playing the violin in the camp (at which point the listeners, for a brief moment, have a vision of a better world), the guided tour for Hitlerjugend, the “revenge” of the inmates through “bacteriological warfare”, etc. 

The last chapter, about Rumkowski, is thought-provoking.

The most moving chapter in the book is the one about Lorenzo, which is reminiscent of Vasily Grossman’s idea in Life and Fate about “senseless kindness”. Among my favourite writers, I especially like the temperament of Vasily Grossman and Primo Levi, men who have seen some of the worst horrors of the 20th century and yet still believe in salvation and goodness.  

(Today marks one year since the Simchat Torah Massacre, or the October 7 atrocities). 

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Is Flannery O’Connor the best writer of bigotry? She must at least be one of the best at depicting and dissecting it. 

In October, I read “Everything that Rises Must Converge” and “Greenleaf” from her second short story collection, but I’m also thinking of “The Artificial Nigger” and “The Displaced Person” from A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. There’s something cold, uncompromising, even harsh about Flannery O’Connor, but she is so good, so striking—she hits you right in the face. Some writers (Tolstoy, Chekhov, Cao Xueqin, Carson McCullers…) depict their characters with love and compassion; some others (Flannery O’Connor, Flaubert, Ibsen…) dissect them. 

Over the past 2 years or so, I’ve discovered a few short story writers: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Isaac Babel, Alice Munro, etc. and Flannery O’Connor is the most striking one, much more interesting than Alice Munro. She’s got a distinct voice, she picks strong images, and her stories are “the axe for the frozen see within us.” 

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Speaking of “the axe, etc.”, I went to the Kafka exhibition in Oxford. Finally got to see the original manuscripts and drawings! 

Last year, on my work trip to Prague, I visited the Kafka Museum and realised, in disappointment, that most of the originals were in Oxford or in Germany. 

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I read and gave up, nearly halfway through, on Pamela. How many times is the wench going to faint? And she goes on and on and on about her virtue.

Is there a Richardson vs Fielding split (like Tolstoy vs Dostoyevsky)? I seem to be Team Fielding. I know I cannot say till I’ve read Tom Jones and Clarissa, but Shamela is a hoot, and I’m now having a blast with Joseph Andrews.

Funnily enough, I’ve noted that both of these works are spin-offs from Pamela, but Joseph Andrews accompanies Pamela rather than Shamela. 

2023 in reading and film-watching

1/ The greatest novel I’ve read this year is easily The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. Sometimes I look at the suffering around the world, and around me, and think about the “I’ll return the ticket” chapter. 

Not hard to see why some people think The Brothers Karamazov is the greatest novel ever written. 

2/ The greatest non-fiction book I’ve read this year is Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty.

The book was a birthday present from Tom of Wuthering Expectations and it was just my thing, exploring Russian literature and history of ideas—from the period leading up to the Revolution, to the Stalinist years—and the big questions.

Gary Saul Morson also wrote about intellectuals’ bloodlust and love of violence and embrace of revolution for the sake of revolution, which I didn’t expect to see playing out across the West just a few months later.  

3/ 2023 has been a strange year. Things fell apart. My life took a new turn.

Looking back at my reading and viewing in 2023, I realise that I didn’t read many novels, nor watched many films. Busy with work. Unable to concentrate. And all that. So I mostly binged on The Mentalist and watched Inside No.9 and read short stories.

The writer who has meant the most to me this year, on a personal level, is Chekhov. Tolstoy continues to be the prose writer I admire the most—Anna Karenina and War and Peace are part of my mental furniture—but Chekhov is the writer to whom I feel the closest. 

And yet here’s a paradox: Chekhov brings comfort in difficult times but might also make me pessimistic. Tolstoy and Shakespeare don’t have that effect. 

4/ I read Hamlet for the third time this year and finally something clicked, finally I grasped something that had previously eluded me. I love the play, and love the Kevin Kline production. 

5/ In 2023, I discovered Mishima Yukio, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, and Isaac Babel.

Flannery O’Connor is one of the few short story writers about whom I do not think “not quite Chekhov but…”. I think that when reading Alice Munro or Isaac Babel or Balzac, but not when reading O’Connor. She’s her own thing. And she is a great writer. 

6/ For a long time, my idea of Russia was either Tolstoy’s Russia or Soviet Russia. Isaac Babel’s Russia, now Ukraine, is very different as he wrote about Jews, Jewish gangsters, and pogroms. 

I was reading Odessa Stories on my Prague work trip: it was strange, and horrible, to read Isaac Babel’s depiction of the 1905 pogrom, then see the memorial to Holocaust victims in Bohemia and Moravia, and then look at the internet and see the antisemitism taking hold of many people and institutions in the West today. 

Now reading Red Cavalry. 

I’d like to read more Jewish literature. 

Anyway, thanks for reading my blog, and thanks for all the interesting conversations here. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!

Musings on Flannery O’Connor and vision

There is often something violent in the works of Flannery O’Connor. In A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, the weakest stories are those in which nothing happens—like “A Stroke of Good Fortune” or “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”—stories of nothing happening, the domain of Chekhov, are not her thing. In her best stories, there’s usually something shocking, something violent or brutal or destructive. And she doesn’t hold back. 

Flannery O’Connor is a strange, fascinating writer. Strange, because she has a weird way of seeing and depicting things, and I often find her elusive. Fascinating, as she has an imposing personality and an uncompromising, pitiless quality. 

Above all, it is strange that I don’t know what draws me to her short stories. Not long ago, I tweeted that I didn’t find the great works of Russian literature depressing even though they depicted war, disease, death, cruelty, humiliation, suffering… whereas the works of Tanizaki (specifically Naomi), Joyce Carol Oates, or Elfriede Jelinek filled me with disgust and left a bad taste in my mouth. The difference, I’ve concluded, is in vision: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky…, in spite of everything, still demonstrate a love of life and humanity, and a belief in freedom and human dignity; Vasily Grossman, even when he writes about the worst horrors of the 20th century, believes in dignity and kindness and offers a glimpse of hope; whereas the works of Tanizaki, Elfriede Jelinek, or Joyce Carol Oates are devoid of light, depicting human beings as just base and depraved. 

I don’t share such a vision of life. Even my current job, in which I regularly speak to refugees, victims of religious persecution, and victims of human trafficking, doesn’t make me cynical, for I still see people stand up for the truth and for justice, I still see people try to help others, I still see people try to make changes. 

Why then do I like Flannery O’Connor? She has a dark, dark view of humanity. In one story, a group of fugitives kills an entire family. In two stories, some men deceive and take advantage of disabled women. In another story, a group of adolescents causes havoc for no reason but their own meanness, and sets the woods on fire. And there’s a story in which a grandfather, the moment he’s needed the most, rejects his own grandson and debases himself out of fear and cowardice. It is a cold, brutal world she depicts and there is no glimpse of hope, no glimpse of human kindness. 

And yet, her stories don’t leave a bad taste in my mouth. Why? What does she have that Elfriede Jelinek, Joyce Carol Oates, and Tanizaki lack? 

A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Flannery O’Connor’s similes

Let other pens dwell on plot, I’d like to focus on the writing—for now. 

Flannery O’Connor is very different from Alice Munro. Intense. Bang. In-your-face. There’s something cold and pitiless, perhaps even cruel, in Flannery O’Connor.

But if Alice Munro’s prose doesn’t draw attention to itself, Flannery O’Connor’s does, and it is interesting. 

For example, look at this image from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: 

“Bailey didn’t look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children’s mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green headkerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit’s ears.”

Her similes are odd: 

“Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe.”

Very odd. 

“Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth.” 

I don’t know what I expected, reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, but it went in a direction I didn’t anticipate: the author follows a family going on a little trip and builds it up and lets us get to know the characters, and bang, gives us a shocking, brutal ending. It is even more shocking because of the way she depicts it. 

““You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?” the grandmother said and removed a clean handkerchief from her cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it.” 

This is what I mean when I say Flannery O’Connor is cold and pitiless.

“There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water and called, “Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!” as if her heart would break.” 

Who else would describe an old woman—a grandmother—in such a situation as “a parched old turkey hen”? 

“The River” is another story that goes in a direction I didn’t expect. 

“She lay her head back and as he watched, gradually her eyes closed and her mouth fell open to show a few long scattered teeth, some gold and some darker than her face; she began to whistle and blow like a musical skeleton.” 

“She” is Mrs Connin, a babysitter. She takes a little boy of 4 or 5, who is named Harry Ashfield but who lies to her that he’s called Bevel, to spend the day at her house and then at the river, to see a preacher and healer called Bevel Summers. 

“There were two round photographs of an old man and woman with collapsed mouths and another picture of a man whose eyebrows dashed out of two bushes of hair and clashed in a heap on the bridge of his nose; the rest of his face stuck out like a bare cliff to fall from.” 

Flannery O’Connor has a strange way of looking at things. Writers such as Flaubert or Proust or Mishima also come up with unusual metaphors, but there’s something freakish, something grotesque in the way she looks at people.  

“The air was so quiet he could hear the broken pieces of the sun knocking in the water.”

The story for the most part feels like an innocent story about a little boy spending a day away from home—what did I think was going to happen?—then at the end, it grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. And when it’s over, I needed a little break. 

The third story in the collection is “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”—it is less shocking, but also dark.

“The tramp stood looking at her and didn’t answer. He turned his back and faced the sunset. He swung both his whole and his short arm up slowly so that they indicated an expanse of sky and his figure formed a crooked cross. The old woman watched him with her arms folded across her chest as if she were the owner of the sun, and the daughter watched, her head thrust forward and her fat helpless hands hanging at the wrists. She had long pink-gold hair and eyes as blue as a peacock’s neck.” 

Her writing is good. 

“A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with the chickens.” 

“The Life You Save May Be Your Own” is not shocking because the author has prepared us.  

“The ugly words settled in Mr. Shiftlet’s head like a group of buzzards in the top of a tree.”

Ominous. 

“In the darkness, Mr. Shiftlet’s smile stretched like a weary snake waking up by a fire.”

“A Stroke of Good Fortune” is, I think most people would agree, not a very strong or memorable story. But there are some striking similes in it: 

“She was too tired to take her arms from around it or to straighten up and she hung there collapsed from the hips, her head balanced like a big florid vegetable at the top of the sack.”

That is the main character, Ruby. 

“Standing up straight, she was a short woman, shaped nearly like a funeral urn. She had mulberry-colored hair stacked in sausage rolls around her head but some of these had come loose with the heat and the long walk from the grocery store and pointed frantically in various directions.”

I can’t help thinking that Flannery O’Connor doesn’t like people very much.

“Madam Zoleeda […] had sat back grinning, a stout woman with green eyes that moved in their sockets as if they had been oiled.” 

Freakish. 

“She remembered her mother at thirty-four—she had looked like a puckered-up old yellow apple, sour, she had always looked sour, she had always looked like she wasn’t satisfied with anything.”

The apple imagery later reappears:

“She felt her face drawn puckered: two born dead one died the first year and one run under like a dried yellow apple…” 

Fascinating writer.