Forum / Forget Flannery? Fat chance, even if good men are hard to find

Mathew Paust
Oct 22, 06:07pm

Imagining being forced at gunpoint to nominate someone for the title of Ultimate Forgotten Crime Writer, only one name comes to mind: Flannery O'Connor.

“You ignorant cretin,” the literary gunsel likely would snarl, waving his delicately engraved Mauser pocket pistol in my face as other literati circled around, agape. My attacker would add, voice rising to include the onlookers, “How did you get in here, anyway? Surely you weren't invited?”

“Yeah,” a voice would thunder from within the gathering herd, “Forgotten, hell! I'm focusing my seminar this term on her work.” A soprano shrills above the swelling rumble of crisply sophisticated mutterings: “Crime? How dare you disparage Miss O'Connor as a genre writer! Shame on you.” Another voice, a baritone: “Get the bricks! Let's stone this dumb bastard!”

[more: https://mdpaust.blogspot.com/2015/10/flannery-forgotten-good-man-is-hard-to.html]

Chris Okum
Oct 22, 07:50pm

i always felt that wise blood was pure noir. the only difference is that she put back into noir everything that had been taken out. you are correct. a woman from the south, a frail unassuming woman, could do the existential drag with the best of them. she showed that belief and religious conviction still had a place in this world.

James Lloyd Davis
Oct 22, 08:19pm

Wise Blood and A Good Man... are reason enough not to forget Ms O'Conner whose crackling mind, incisive humor and curious metaphors cut like razors through every stereotype, bending genres along the way... not unlike Samson broke the backs of many a Philistine before he got that haircut.

Mathew Paust
Oct 23, 03:08pm

I didn't know there was a film version of Wise Blood. A friend pointed it out on my Facebook post: https://www.amazon.com/Wise-Blood-Brad-Dourif/dp/B00A5IY9PY/ref=sr_1_1/ref=sr_1_1?_encoding=UTF8&keywords=wise%20blood&qid=1445612821&s=movies-tv&sr=1-1

Nonnie Augustine
Oct 23, 05:58pm

The story with the teenage girl and the creep? What was the name of that one? Anyways. Chilled me to the bone. The Bone!

Sam Rasnake
Oct 23, 11:13pm

Wise Blood is one of the five or ten best reads I've ever had.

Matthew Robinson
Oct 24, 02:31am

Funny this post comes up as I'm finally digging deep into her collected stories, several of which I've read before but are worthy of revisiting. I also just picked up a sweet copy of The Violent Bear It Away at the used bookstore across the street from my mechanic. Truly immense, intimidating talent.

Nonnie, I think you're thinking of Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

Marcus Speh
Oct 24, 12:07pm

Haven't read it but the comments are compelling & I'll correct that oversight now. Love noir, esp. Southern darkness. When there's so much brightness & glare, one can take a little blackness & gloom.

strannikov
Oct 24, 02:22pm

Begin with her fiction and end with her fiction, but somewhere in between, do not fail to consult the collection of her essays and addresses assembled in the title Mystery and Manners: her critical judiciousness and irrepressible humor remain conspicuous.

A concise substitute for a Master of Fine Arts apprenticeship. (I don't know what her graduating class roster looked like, but more than many another graduate of the University of Iowa program, she got her money's worth.)

Notable studies: Miles Orvell/Flannery O'Connor: An Introduction is basic and comprehensive. Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity by Frederick Asals offers additional insight (his Bibliography helpfully cites many titles that were in O'C's personal library).

For good or ill, Faulkner's assessment of Henry James ("one of the nicest old ladies I ever met") reached me years before I'd even heard of Cousin Flannery, so in spite of her kind efforts, I'll never share her estimation of James (Flannery's assessment of Faulkner: "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down"--from "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction", found in Mystery and Manners).

Mathew Paust
Oct 24, 02:46pm

Nonnie, maybe you're thinking of Parker's Back?

Many of her male characters tend toward the creepy side of life.

Her collection of letters is enormous, but enormously fascinating. She was a marvelously honest and insightful correspondent.

David Ackley
Oct 24, 03:51pm

In the same great collection cited by Strannikov, Mystery and Manners, she talks about the difference between what she thought she was doing and how it was received by others. I'm paraphrasing without the book at hand but she says more or less that all her work was intended to demonstrate the action of Grace on an unprepared and sinful world. The confusion coming when people took her intended religious allegories for some order of realism. But maybe as Lawrence says, all we misinterpreters were just rescuing the art from the artist.

Mathew Paust
Oct 24, 07:22pm

And in the doing so she took pains keep piety at bay, which worried some of her fellow Catholics. Confuses still many who can't get past the grotesque she always insisted was just the way she saw things.

Something that occurred to me just this morning, still musing on Good Man, is the perhaps the Misfit's unintended allegorical connection to the thunder and fire and brimstone in the Bible, especially in Revelations where it all comes together in a grande finale so overt I can almost hear Ride of the Valkyries in the background.

When the Misfit says, after blasting Grandma to Kingdom Come, "she'd've been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life," I can see a fade to John's last hurrah warning Christians that despite the seeming ease Christ has made it to be saved you'd damned well better behave or the shit's gonna drop all over you and your descendants and their descendants and theirs too and anybody who ever laughed at one of your sick, blasphemous jokes, you pathetic backslider.

Seems a tad much coming after Peter's "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins," which makes me wonder if Revelations wasn't added by some script fixer Constantine hired to "put some teeth into that damned thing before I lose control here, knowwhatimean?"

Chris Okum
Oct 24, 07:31pm

When I was in school I had a crush on a very imposing looking redhead from Louisiana named Wendy Barnes. I always tried to talk to her about books and stuff but she didn't like me. Her boyfriend was old and French. She would smoke cigarettes and take a long drag before talking or answering one of the questions I was always asking her. I wanted to he to know I was interested in her but I didn't want to be a creep about it so I asked her lots of questions. She told me to read Flannery O'Connor. She said it out of the blue, apropos of nothing. I don't know why she told me to do that, but I did.

Mathew Paust
Oct 24, 08:11pm

She sized you up as The Misfit.

Ann Bogle
Oct 25, 11:13am

This subject -- Flannery O'Connor's world and work -- has changed over time, not only for me. I read her along the way, early during college (not in college, since she is an American, and in college, An American is Hard to Find). Then I read more recently among 100 titles recommended as required reading for all men in _Esquire_ only one written by a woman: Flannery O'Connor's short stories. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" needs a good classroom teacher to alert the student reader who may without her believe that O'Connor believes that the Misfit is a good man. I suppose some of you reading this thread may believe that the happenstance that brings the characters together near the end indicates something deserved about lapsed religion, since O'Connor herself is seen as religious. I have always believed the story is not titled cautiously enough for her likely audience, since it is too subtle and therefore too mature. The title refers to the absence of good men by heritage or in society, and for a genetic reason one must flip back in time to before the era given in the story. There are signs that the man taking his family on vacation is trying to be in a family leadership role for his wife, mother, and children. I read O'Connor's _Mystery and Manners_ with a sense of awe (outside class, and yet in some way led from inside fiction workshop by a Northern Catholic Graduate Woman Writer awaiting her turn to teach Southern Literary Tradition that didn't arrive until she was ten years into Theory). I revisited the book after immersing myself for years in lay religion, and I decided it is okay yet not awe-inspiring as it was. Awe-inspiring is the children's classic _To Kill a Mockingbird_ that I am in the midst of rereading this month after seeing an adaptation of it on The Guthrie stage. The Guthrie play features what at first I believed was the greatest performance by a child actor I had ever seen. Later I decided it is the best stage performance by any actor I have seen. The girl who plays Scout -- Jean Louise Finch -- is Isadora Swann. Near the end of the play Scout finishes our thoughts when she tells the audience, "Now we know almost everything, and we aren't even grown up yet." I profoundly hope (and would like to expect) that the world as we call it will never let down or leave behind or strand or delay or cause to lag this brilliant young actor. The boy who played Dill was also sharply inspired. The book is even greater, however, and there are all the details, delivered in the split (not schizoid) point of view of the woman-within-a-child and child-within-a-woman narrator who grows out of the writer. It is that book that has finally caused me to believe that literature is always for children. Literature is our ally and hears our snores. "Parker's Back" is not included in _A Good Man is Hard to Find_, so, sadly _Esquire_ readers may never find it or place blame for that on the publishing industry. It is findable in Norton. My favorite O'Connor story is called "Temple of the Holy Ghost," and I liked another one best about a grandfather who travels with his grandson on a journey to Atlanta. I can't remember without looking what that one is called. The others are old-school familiar, grim, startling, and somehow necessary. Is it true that O'Connor's body was frail? I wonder ... she might have been narrowly brawny or sinewy or muscled like a free range turkey who spent its life running the yard, unlike the cooped plump ones that go to Butterballs.

Mathew Paust
Oct 25, 06:36pm

Flannery had lupus, Ann. She explains in excruciating detail the problems she had with it and the treatments that sometimes worked and others didn't. At the end some procedure that was fairly experimental caused her body to pretty much shut down altogether. Her collected letters--an enormous volume--fascinated me more than her serious essays, as her strong personality seemed to adapt to her many correspondents depending on the closeness of their relationship. Yet she never seemed to lapse into a formality that left out those unique elements that made her recognizable no matter what the forum. Ironic, self-effacing humor comprised the bedrock. The letters follow her life right up to the very last one--a few lines she wrote to a woman, a playright, who had become her closest friend, was dated a day or two before she died. I don't recall the precise words, but they contained something of her characteristic country smartassedness altho a tad subdued as she admitted being pretty worn out. Indeed she was.

Anyone interested in a formal presentation she gave at Hollins College in 1963 on Good Man can find it here: http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/lewiss/Oconnor.htm

Nonnie Augustine
Oct 26, 12:11pm

Thank you, Matthew Robinson, you are dead right! I was think of Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
"Gonna get you, girl." Shudder.
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