Flannery O'Connor's Shocking Manners

Flannery O’Connor’s Shocking Manners M A R I O N

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. traditional manners, however unbalanced, are better than no manners at all. -Flannery O’Connor THE SOUTH’S traditional hospitality, with its elaborate formalities called manners, is more generally known about than understood by the world at large, though an always-ready subject for vapid television comedy. Second only to goateed colonels with juleps is the pretty nonentity, the Southern Belle, mouthing her “you-alls.” It would delay us overlong to pursue the mint-julep back through the rituals connected with the fruits of the earth, back through Virgil to Homer and the Old Testament. As for the hilarious uses of you all, we may remark for what it is worth, as it has been remarked endlessly without penetrating to understanding, that the term is plural. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal says, “I know you all and will awhile .” etc. On the printed page we explode the idea into its particles: what is wedded as a whole by the voice is parsed abstractly, as when we learn a foreign language by disassembling it. The subtleties of thought, the nuances of a culture, caught in the poetry of language, dissipate in such exercise. “You all come” when presented as parody by the circumstances of a Southern belle speaking the words to another single per-

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son misses altogether the subtle recognition possible in that expression in the same circumstances. For the single person addressed may be a present member of an integral family, all of whom are included in the address. The phrase may thus find a delicate balance between intimacy and formality, which to some understandings at least speaks to the virtues of community. “We carry our history and our beliefs and customs and vices and virtues around in our idiom,” says Flannery O’Connor, that Southern novelist and short story writer who had such an exceptionally gifted ear and eye for nuance. 'Tau can’t say anything significant about the mystery of personality unless you put that personality in a social context that belongs to it.” The writer, says Miss O’Connor, gets one of those necessary qualities for good fiction -manner-“from the texture of existence that surrounds [him]. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don’t have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we’ve got them in abundance.” It is through the language of manners that personality is made concrete in its social context, and in this regard we

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organized jungles in which manners are must r e m d e r that for Miss O’Connor seen as arbitrary mechanisms of animal re“personality” is spiritual in its meaning. lationships, like traffic lights. In her story, When she plays the Misfit’s manners Miss O’Connor shows US with devastating against his actions in “A Good Man Is comedy just that decayed world through Hard to Find,” she is very deliberately rethe family relationships of her victims, up vealing ;L process of dccay in community. to the point where the story turns grim. Indeed, the Misfit’s mannerly address is One would be justified in taking the story one of the mediums of grace to the grandas her rather gleeful vengeance upon such mother, recalling her to a depth in the characters were it not for the intrusion of known but forgotten deportment of society. For, though the grandmother is much con- ,mystery upon the mannerly and unmannerly alike, but at the end we glimpse the cerned with good manners and somewhat grandmother, Bailey, and his wife strugembarrassed by the absence of manners in gling to recover, in their dazed condition, her immediate family, in contrast to Red the lost forms. How polite everyone beSammy Butts’ display of manners, she has comes; even to a degree the obnoxious lost the spiritual dimension in manners. “kids” of the story become children. Her oblivious daughter-in-law is the kind In our concern for manners as a matrix, of new woman Miss O’Connor speaks of in one form of the “form” in Southern litera letter to William Sessions: “There is a ature which anchors that literature in the difference . . in the class of person who community, we may comment on Faulkcalls her children ‘children’ and the class ner’s very careful use of terms of address. of person who calls her children ‘kids.’ This To do so will reveal both the degree to is going fast of course, but it still works in which manners have decayed in the South our parents’ generation.” The use of class between Faulkner’s time and Flannery here does not carry the sociological or ecw =)%iiiiui’s and show additiondiy a height,,A, I, an.. -..A as YSrLIUl. c. .*=us a , ,, i: ,d ened concern for manners as they relate to the post-Marxian world. In Miss O’Cona spiritual dimension in Miss O’Connor’s nor’s sense, the grandmother and her son thinking. For here there are two indispenoccupy different classes. The concern is the sable qualities of good fiction. “One is the same in Julian’s mother in that story whom sense of mystery and the other is the sense title is from Teilhard de Chardin, “Everyof manners.” A community’s manners rething That Rises Must Converge.” Julian veal an anagogical dimension between comis unable to understand his mother’s argumunity and that body of which we are each ments, seeing in them only a decay of false members and of which Christ is head in ideas about manners. Miss O’Connor’s thinking, a difference we , “I’m sorry I don’t have on a shirt before remark between her and Faulkner. The you ladies,” the Misfit says, but there is no comedy reflected in the play of manners as irony intended by him. Nor is there later we find it in Faulkner and in Flannery when he asks Bailey’s wife to please step O’Connor differs as a consequence, but they over in the woods and join her husband, nevertheless share in their perception of who has just been shot. “Hep that lady UP, manners and the immediate significance of Hiram,” he orders, “and Bobby h e , you manners in historical community. To get hold onto that little girl’s hand.” Of course at the likeness and unlikeness, we may look there is irony in the Misfit’s mannerly treatin brief at the complexity of relationships ment of his victims, but it is an irony that embodied in the Southerner’s old use of a points toward our waste land world, a term of address like “Miss,” a term whose world in which manners, with their impliuses become alternately the amusement and cations of love and responsibility, have despair of “outside” ears. Calvin S. Brown, been explained away by the minions of dein his Glossary of Faulkner’s South, preterminism, leaving us inhabitants of those

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sents succinctly the importance of that complexity in Faulkner’s careful use, pointing out for instance that The point of Rosa Coldfield’s elaborate comments about the fact that Clytie “had called me Rosa” [in Absalom, Absalom!] is not the use of the first name, but the use of it without the title: Clytie would have been expected to call her “Miss Rosa,” as Judith does when speaking to Clytie. . The same point is made in a different way [in another p a s sage] : “your grandfather thought how he could not say ‘Miss Judith,’ since that would postulate [Bon’s Negro] blood more than ever. . . So he said Miss Sutpen.”

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With this clue we may see that, in “A Rose for Emily,” the tender community concern for Emily is deeper than the community’s curiosity. Gossip and gospel mingle in the attitudes of Faulkner’s community and are reflected in its forms of address to its members. The “god-kin” in that community exercise in some degree the “good news” of love in their relation to that ripely decaying spinster, for she provides more than a community’s oral version of a New York tabloid. One of the key signs of that difference is that she is “Miss Emily” and not Miss Emily Grierson or Miss Grierson. Miss Emily is raised by that loving curious interest toward a mythical presence in Faulkner’s story and &e comedy thereby transformed, so that something like awe binds the community to her, without however that community’s losing its bearings in the realities of the world. They know more than they will say. One may add here that witty tribute in which such a complexity is recognized by John Crowe Ransom in “Emily Hardcastle, Spinster.” If we contrast Faulkner’s story and Ransom’s poem to Joyce’s “Clay” and Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Aunt Imogene,” the function of manners in relation to concerns social and spiritual in Southern literature will be somewhat enlightened. That reflection will enlighten as well the dramatic conflict Miss O’Connor re-

veals in the decay of manners in her fictional “personalities.” One observes that for all his mannerliness, the Misfit’s “yes ma’am’’ and his address to those “ladies” randomly encountered on a Georgia country road show him an outsider to community, though his ancient origins in c o r n u nity are vestigially present in his words. But more important, the members of communi- , ty itself have so far decayed within the community that only the grandmother hears the faint echoes of a “good man” possible in the Misfit’s language. Manners, for Miss O’Connor, are signs of the community’s and individual’s relation to transcendent mystery, and in that concern she goes considerably beyond Henry James, and beyond Faulkner as well. One may hazard the prophecy that, because of our recent poets, Southern “hospitality” will be remembered long after it disappears as subject for slapstick comedy, long after the manners themselves are faded from us as a regional characteristic suitable to color our newspaper accounts of the region. We shall be the poorer for the fading, and our fiction and poetry are Certain to be the poorer. Again, as Miss O’Connor puts it: Manners are of such consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers. For to the poet, things reveal themselves passing away, as Yeats remarked. Poets and prophets try to recover the permanent things, which is one reason that a decline of a culture in particular points of history is so often reflected as a flowering of its literature, a flowering in which its immediate history, and communal manners out of that history, are crucial to the capture of a fleeting image of reality. For a brief period the woman who calls her children “kids” makes possible by contrast children aa “children.” The child who addresses a venerable lady

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without the respectful acceptance of those differences which allow a helpful intimacy between members of a community (“Miss Katherine”-not “Katherine” or “Mrs. Katherine Howard”) provides to the poet metaphors of unlikeness, disjunctions of a dramatic potential. If the decline seems inevitable, the poet will nevertheless recognize in that destruction something of what is being destroyed, as one sees in evil something of its dependence upon good. And in respect to tihe world the poet builds, it may be of consequence other than aesthetic that Homer’s great song of Greek victory at Troy is made of materials filtered to him through a defeated people, for a northern invasion of the “Greek” world was long since successful before Homer came to sing a victory from the ambiguous ashes of old wars. More than one critic, including Miss O’Connor (who quotes Walker Percy on the point), ponders the question of whether the Southern Renaissance in our literature is not a direct effect of that drama at Ap~CEEZ~~C CXC ~ ~ ~ E V Zwhaie X, iiii exhiusid ragtag army limped at attention to stack arms, so proudly that its victorious enemy came to attention and saluted. Of that war she s a y s “we . . . had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery. . . .” And so although the intricate details of Reconstruction, or arguments about the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution perhaps, may prove more commanding of our interest in history and political development, the impetus from General Custer’s bad manners in stripping General Benjamin Huger of his spurs at Appomattox stirs the poet in us to sing the walls of flaming Troy. Such violations helped keep manners alive, among other benefits to us. It fueled the fires in us for survival as a necessity larger than animal survival, heightened pride toward the possibility of pridefulness, and thereby made of us a rich country in which a poet might read the fortunes of humanity in the world.

Little wonder that the South ‘has proved rich grounds for the prophetic writer, such as Flannery O’Connor, who in accepting her “vocation” realizes in it the “prophetic function of recalling people to known but ignored truths.” The fury of our survival carries dangers for the poet no less than for his people, precisely the sort of danger Stark Young would guard against when he says, “we defend certain qualities not because they belong to the South, but because the South belongs to them.” They are finally a property common to the spirit of mankind at large, which we in the South share with such enlightened Northern invaders as my reader may name or may be. Not to recognize this distinction means for the regional writer that he becomes isolated and provincial rather than regional. According to the degree of his bitterness, either a crabbed local colorist, or according to the degree of his amnesia or his indifference to those larger qualities to which mankind belongs, a sentimental local colorist. What the writer must always remember, as a de$ruidei of &e Listiiig, is ihe sori of baiance that Homer exhibits toward the putative (6 enemy” of the Iliad. One compares the scene where Hector bids farewell to his small son at the gates of Troy, removing his plumed helmet to calm the frightened child, and the scene where Paris hides fearfully in Helen’s chambers. The prophetic poet sees more deeply than the schoolboy’s defiant boundary drawn in the dirt with his toe whether the line be called the walls of Troy, the Mason Dixon Line, or Mrs. May’s pasture, protected by its circling pines, in Flannery O’Connor’s “Greenleaf.” Miss O’Connor was acutely aware of the dangers as well as &e advantages of being a Southern writer, even as those young Fugitive poets at Vanderbilt were when they hazarded their first issue in April 1922:

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. a literary phase known rather euphemistically as Southern Literature has expired, like any other stream whose source is stopped up. . THE FUGITIVE flees from nothing faster than from the

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high-caste Brahmins of the Old South. It is one of the points of common recognition between her and the Fugitive-Agrarians that makes her sympathetic to them. Her version of their point is that the Southern writer “will probably feel that the only way for him to keep from becoming [a narrow provincial] is to examine his conscience and to observe our fierce but fading manners in the light of an ultimate concern.” But examine and observe, not abandon them. Even bad manners are valuable because they are at least the darkening shadow of that light which good manners reflect. Hospitality, with its ritual of manners, is anciently connected with mystery. We learn from Homer that in a stranger we may be entertaining a god or goddess unaware. We know also the invitation and admonition from the New Testament, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” Miss O’Connor’s personal hospitality is commented on again and again by those who knew her intimately, and by those more casual souls who happened by Andalusia or Milledgeville on their wanderings to and fro. The comments usually carry some tone of wonder at that hospitality, but what we would rather wonder at would be to find in her an inhospitable nature. Not even John Howard Griffin charges her with rebu5ng him, though she did because of his attempt to violate her hospitality. I n connection with this incident recalled in Black Like Me, we ourselves recall that in one of her talks Miss O’Connor expands upon the sustaining value of a “code of manners based on charity.” Such formality, she says, “presemes that individual privacy which everyone needs and, in these times, is dways in danger of losing.” No wonder she was less than cordial to Griffin’s presumptuous encroachment upon her when he WBS making his celebrated tour of the South, his skin stained in disguise to see ihow things really were between the races. Zeus or Christ comes innocently before one to give him opportunity to be himself, not to col-

lect material for a book. You may find Griffin’s account of his attempt to call on Flannery O’Connor in Black Like Me, but what I remember is her scornful remark to me on his presumption in pressing himself u p on her in such a way as to call her chanty in question before it could be exercised.* Indeed, from Penelope’s suitors to Hoover Shoats and Mr. Shiftlet, dissimulation has had many uses beyond the purer ones of Homer’s Athene or St. John’s Christ. Perversions of hospitality must exact an inevitable destruction of our manners, and those “fierce and fading manners” have been victimized in the South from the days of the carpetbaggers to those of insurance and Bible salesmen, but most particularly in our post-World War I1 world. But we must remember that manners do more than preserve individual privacy or protect us in unexpected righteous or selfrighteous visitations. There are more steady virtues in them that sustain our daily experiences between these two extremes. They help establish and protect one’s personal integrity, a cause holy enough, while at the same time defining and maintaining the individual’s kinship in community, making possible a continuing stability of social structures, a better place to “be” than Haze Motes’ ancient Essex in Miss O’Connor’s comic waste land novel, Wise Blood. Not of course that manners are not subject to abuse. Christ may be turned away from the door for private reasons, as he may be made welcome f o r private reasons. That possibility, indeed, is the heart of some very good poetry, whether Eliot’s or Miss O’Connor’s. The more manners decay into empty ritual, the more fiercely they are abused. On the very first page of Wise Blood, Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock presumes upon Haze’s good manners to burden him with her self-centeredness. His reaction is to cast out all mannerly formalities. Indeed, Haze violates his “good raising” as we say, right up to the end of the novel, at which point his manner of address to the created world and its lost souls changes drastically. (How important Haze’s ill manners are to

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the novel can be demonstrated by one’s contrasting the first chapter as it exists in its short story form as “The Train” to the revisions Miss O’Connor made of it for the novel.) It is interesting that in his retreat into the desert at the novel’s end Haze displays some kindness beyond his gruffness to his landlady. She presses him relentlessly to reveal the mystery behind his actions, but he is now too wise to frighten the lost child willfully by telling her of the new terrors of being found. Mrs. Flood is very much a lost child. Haze’s bearing at the end awakens in her an awareness of the deeper meanings buried in such secularized terms as debt, reward, gift. Mrs. Flood’s initial fascination with Haze, incidentally, is analogous to Enoch‘s fascination with the animals at the zoo. She keeps Haze, now blind, as if he were a tame ape just learning to talk. But her self-interested charity becomes in the end very close to Christian charity, as Haze becomes for her a pinpoint of light in a dark world. It is the beginning of a t r s ~ s f ~ i~~ Mrs. ~ ~ tF !id ~, ~& i d by Haze’s manner, and it hints very resolutely of an eruption in that closed determinist world of Taulkinham (Atlanta) toward an outer mystery. Tarwater (in The Violea Bear I t Awuy), less mature or seasoned by the world than Haze in his final days, will go shouting to wake the sleeping children to the terrors of God’s mercy. Haze is possessed of an infinite patience, born of his finite violations, and his deportment in the world in his last days bears witness to that hard-earned patience which is just beyond despair, But his reserve must not obscure for us the point that light has penetrated the dark world we have followed him through. Miss O’Connor, then, is acutely aware of the abuse of manners, whether the violation of codes of social behavior or the selfish use of them that empties them of their proper significance. But this is also to say that she is aware of their saving virtue, an awareness that for effectiveness in drama must be made implicit by art. Thus Julian’s

mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” represents virtue to a more considerable degree than we recognize if we see her only with Julian’s eyes. Her deportment toward her fellow creatures is neither SO futile nor so condescending as Julian supposes, to speak nothing of a number of Miss O’Connor’s critics. The key to the meaning of Miss O’Connor’s interest in manners is not ultimately in their accurate reflection of a decline of community-a reflection of history-though they are that as well. As such a reflection, they are once more a point of departure toward spiritual depths beneath the historical or sociological or psychological. The real center of meaning in the contrast between the Misfit’s manners and action we find in his statement of that haunting question that makes him The Misfit, his self-elected title. (When Miss O’Connor refers to him in letters or talks, she usually capitalizes the article.) The center which she makes dramatic in her fiction comes directly from Saint Paul: “if Christ be not risen, then is our preachfiig V i i i , arid your faith is vain aiso.“ As The Misfit puts it, either Christ was what he said he was, in which case ‘‘it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him,” or he wasn’t, in which case “it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can.” So far so good, and many a hedonist has gained our respect by choosing the second of these alternatives. But when selfgratification is granted the status of absolute, there is no longer any reasonable objection to The Misfit’s practicing what gives him pleasure. You may give to the poor, if that’s your kick, or you may “enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you canby killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.” Except as we may be on the receiving end, we are hard pressed to justify one means of enjoyment over the other if we see the world with a relativistic intellect whose only absolute is its own being. Of course the flaw in this position is evident from Miss O’Connor’s point of view,

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and she makes it implicit in The Misfit’s own words. For given the second of his alternatives, the word meanness has no meaning, since evil itself has been abolished. The Misfit has “thown away everything” but evil, to which he clings as the last evidence of his being. He participates in the good by denial, as an instrument of evil, a surrogate of that Devil who can quote scripture to us and is therefore capable of laying out our alternatives clearly and directly. Non servio is the denominator of The Misfit’s arguments and actions, and that is in itself one of the great arguments of the existence of God, since one does not refuse to serve that which does not exist. This is a point of no little difficulty to Haze Motes’ struggling mind in Wise Blood. And so our poet leaves her Misfit standing before us, embodying the dilemma we must resolve beyond the limits of our aesthetic pleasures. The shock to our sensibilities from a reading of her

story, from our getting to know her Misfit, is somewhat like that shock Baudelaire intends when he ushers us into his Flowers uf Evil with “hypocrite lecteur!-mn semblable,-mon frgre!” Perhaps one might be a good man if he had always before him that disturbing Misfit; “if it had been somebody there to &oot [us] every minute of [our] life,” life might be saved. Better still, that bleeding, stinking figure of Haze Motes, an image of Christ in a dying, unclean man slowly stirring. Eitherlor? While we wrestle with the dilemma, we may be sustained somewhat in spite of our several weaknesses by the accumulated wisdom of those who struggled before us. One form that wisdom takes is manner-the manners of our fathers, more resonant of our being in community than t r a c lights or queue numbers at the supermarket or social security digits.

*Griffin reports, in Black Like Me, that the Trappist monk a t Conyers “invited me to go with him to visit Flannery O’Connor the next day, but I told him that since I had only a few hours, I felt I must spend them in the monastery.” At a Georgia Writers Association meeting in Atlanta, where she received an award and delivered the address printed in Mystery and Manners as “The Regional Writer,” she told me that Griffin called her to set up a visit but that she refused. She did

so for the same reason Old Tarwater refuses to continue as Rayber’s experimental subject. For Griffin’s journey in disguise to test individual charity is a species of Rayber’s going in the back door of Old Tarwater’s mind. Such clandestine invasion is sometimes found to he reprehensible. At the moment it is found so when it is practiced by the FBI or CIA, in our very selective application of outrage.

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