Flannery O'Connor Everything That Rises Must Converge HER DOCTOR HAD TOLD Julian's mother that she must lose twenty pounds Mary Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only on account of her blood pressure, so on Wednesday nights Julian had to take child of Roman Catholic parents. When she was thirteen her father was found to her downtown on the bus for a reducing class at the Y. The reducing class was have disseminated lupus, an incurable disease in which antibodies in the immune designed for working girls over fifty, who weighed from 165 to 200 pounds. system attack the body's own substances. After her father's death in 1941, His mother was one of the slimmer ones, but she said ladies did not tell their O'Connor attended Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, where she I age or weight. She would not ride the buses by herself at night since they had published stories and edited the literary magazine. On the strength of these sto- been integrated, and because the reducing class was one of her few pleasures, ries, she was awarded a fellowship at the Writers' Workshop at the University of necessary for her health, and free, she said Julian could at least put himself out Iowa and earned her M.F.A. degree there. Late in 1950 she became ill with what to take her, considering all she did for him. Julian did not like to consider all was diagnosed as lupus, and she returned to Milledgeville to start a series of she did for him, but every Wednesday night he braced himself and took her. treatments that temporarily arrested the disease. Living with her mother on the family's 500-acre dairy farm, O'Connor began to work again, writing from nine to She was almost ready to go, standing before the hall mirror, putting on her twelve in the morning and spending the rest of the day resting, reading, writing hat, while he, his hands behind him, appeared pinned to the door frame, wait- letters, and raising peacocks. ing like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to begin piercing him. The hat was new O'Connor's first book, Wise Blood, a complex comic novel attacking the con- and had cost her seven dollars and a half She kept saying, "Maybe I shouldn't temporary secularization of religion, was published in 1952. It was followed in have paid that for it. No, I shouldn't have. I'll take it off and return it tomorrow. 1955 by a collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find. O'Connor was able to I shouldn't have bought it." It see a second novel, The Violent Bear Away, through to publication in 1960, but I Julian raised his eyes to heaven. "Yes, you should have bought it," he said. she died of lupus in 1964, having completed enough stories for a second collec- "Put it on and let's go." It was a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on tion, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). Her total output of just thirty- l one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like one stories, collected in her Complete Stories, won the National Book Award for a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was less comical than jaunty and fiction in 1972. Despite her illness, O'Connor was never a recluse; she accepted as many pathetic. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him. lecture invitations as her health would permit. A volume of her lectures and occa- ! She lifted the hat one more time and set it down slowly on top of her head. sional pieces was published in 1969 as Mystery and Manners. It is a valuable I Two wings of gray hair protruded on either side of her florid face, but her eyes, companion to her stories and novels, because she often reflected on her writing I sky-blue, were as innocent and untouched by experience as they must have I and interpreted her fiction. As a devout Roman Catholic, O'Connor was uncom- been when she was ten. Were it not that she was a widow who had struggled promising in her religious views: "For I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose fiercely to feed and clothe and put him through school and who was support- and no vague believer. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in 1 ing him still, "until he got on his feet," she might have been a little girl that he our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that." had to take to town. As Joyce Carol Oates recognized in her essay "The Visionary Art of Flannery "It's all right, it's all right," he said. "Let's go." He opened the door himself O'Connor," O'Connor is one of the great religious writers of modern times, I and started down the walk to get her going. The sky was a dying violet and unique "in her celebration of the necessity of succumbing to the divine through the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a violence that is immediate and irreparable. There is no mysticism in her work that uniform ugliness though no two were alike. Since this had been a fashionable is only spiritual; it is physical as well." O'Connor's stories, like the three included here, frequently involve family relationships, but they are not meant to be read neighborhood forty years ago, his mother persisted in thinking they did well as realistic fiction, despite her remarkable ear for dialogue. O'Connor said she to have an apartment in it. Each house had a narrow collar of dirt around it in wrote them as parables, as the epigraph to "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" attests. I which sat, usually, a grubby child. Julian walked with his hands in his pockets, his head down and thrust forward, and his eyes glazed with the determination RELATED CASEBOOK I to make himself completely numb during the time he would be sacrificed to See Casebook on Flannery O'Connor, pages 989-1015, including Flannery her pleasure. O'Connor, "From Letters, 1954-55," page 990; "Writing Short Stories,"page 992; The door closed and he turned to find the dumpy figure, surmounted by "A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable," page 997; Joyce Carol Oates, "The I the atrocious hat, coming toward him. "Well," she said, "you only live once and Parables of Flannery O'Connor," page 1000; Wayne C. Booth, "A Rhetorical Read- I paying a little more for it. I at least won't meet myself coming and going." ina--"- of O'Connor's- 'Everything That Rises Must Converge,'" page 1008; Dorothy Tuck McFarland, "On '~oodcouitryPeople,'" page 101 1. 678 690 FLANNERY O'CONNOR Good Country People 691 shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted Mrs. Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carrarnae were two farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him of the finest girls she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady and that she was nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow. meet. Then she would tell how she had happened to hire the Freemans in the first place and how they were a godsend to her and how she had had them four years. The reason for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good country people. She had telephoned the man whose name they had given as a reference and he had told her that Mr. Freeman was a good farmer but that his wife was the nosiest woman ever to walk the earth. "She's Good Country People got to be into everything," the man said. "If she don't get there before the dust settles, you can bet she's dead, that's all. She'll want to know all your business. 1955 I can stand him real good," he had said, "but me nor my wife neither could have stood that woman one more minute on this place." That had put Mrs. BESIDES THE NEUTRAL EXPRESSION that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Hopewell off for a few days. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human She had hired them in the end because there were no other applicants dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of but she had made up her mind beforehand exactly how she would handle a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story the woman. Since she was the type who had to be into everything, then, Mrs. turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used Hopewell had decided, she would not only let her be into everything, she the other expression because it was not often necessary for her to retract a would see to it that she was into everything - she would give her the respon- statement, but when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was sibility of everything, she would put her in charge.