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 I was unaware of the two unpublished stories she was working on.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 cliche 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.”
The Geranium (1946)
OLD DUDLEY 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. eves 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.
He must have been sick when he said it. He couldn’t have been well and said it. He had been sick and she had been so taken up with her damn duty, she had wangled it out of him. Why did she ha ve to come down there in the first place to pester him? He had been doing all right. There was his pension that could feed him and odd jobs that kept him his room in the boarding house. The window in that room showed him the river-thick and red as it struggled over rocks and around curves. He tried to think how it was besides red and slow. He added green brotches for trees on either side of it and a brown spot for trash somewhere upstream. He and Rabie had fished it in a flat-bottom boat every Wednesday. Rabie knew t
he river up and. down for twenty miles. There wasn’t another nigger in Coa County that knew it like he did. He loved the river, but it hadn’t meant any’thing to Old Dudley. The fish were what he was after. He liked to come in at night with a long string of them and slap them down in the sink. “Few fish I got,” he’d say. It took a man to get those fish, the old girls at the boarding house always said. He and Rabie would start out early Wednesday morning and fish all day. Rabiewould find the spots and row; Old Dudley always caught them. Rabie didn’t care much about catching them—he just loved—the river. “Ain’t no use settin’ yo’ line down dere, boss,” he’d say. “Ain’t no fish dere. Dis ol’ riber ain’t hidin’ none nowhere ‘round hyar, nawsuh.” And he would giggle and shift the boat downstream. That was Rabie. He could steal cleaner than a weasel but he knew where the fish were. Old Dudley always gave him the little ones.
Old Dudley had lived upstairs in the corner room of the boarding house ever since his wife died in ‘22. He protected the old ladies. He was the man in the house and he did the things a man in the house was supposed to do. It was a dull occupation at night when the old girls crabbed and crocheted in the parlor and the rran in the house had to listen and judge the sparrow-like wars that rasped and twittered intermittently. But in the daytime there was Rabie. Rabie and Lutisha lived down in the basement. Lutish cooked and Rabie took care of the cleaning and the vegetable garden; but he was sharp at sneaking off with half his work done and going to help Old Dudley with some current project—building a hen house or painting a door. He liked to listen, he liked to hear about Atlanta when Old Dudley had been there and about how guns were put together on the inside and all the other things the old man knew.
Sometimes at night they would go ‘possum hunting. They never got a ‘possum but Old Dudley liked to get away from the ladies once in a while and hunting was a good excuse. Rabie didn’t like ‘possum hunting. They never got a ‘possum; they never even treed one; and besides, he was mostly a water nigger. “We ain’t gonna go huntin’ no ‘possum tonight, is we, boss? I got a lil’ business I wants tuh tend tuh,” he’d say when Old Dudley would start talking about hounds and guns. “Whose chickens you gonna steal tonight?” Dudley would grin. “I reckon I be huntin’ ‘possum tonight,” Rabie’d sigh.
Old Dudley would get out his gun and take it apart and, as Rabie cleaned the pieces, would explain the mechanism to him. Then he’d put it together again. Rabie always marveled at the way he could put it together again. Old Dudley would have liked to have explained New York to Rabie. If he could have showed it to Rabie, it wouldn’t have been so big—he wouldn’t have felt pressed down every time he went out in it. “It ain’t so big,” he would have said. “Don’t let it get you down, Rabie. It’s just like any other city and cities ain’t all that complicated.”
But they were. New York was swishing and jamming one minute and dirty and dead the next. His daughter didn’t even live in a house. She lived in a building—the middle in a row of buildings all alike, all blackened—red and gray with rasp-mouthed people hanging out their windows looking at other windows and other people just like them looking back. Inside you could go up and you could go down and there were just halls that reminded you of tape measures strung out with a door every inch. He remembered he’d been dazed by the building the first week. He’d wake up expecting the halls to have changed in the night and he’d look out the door and there they stretched like dog runs. The streets were the same way. He wondered where he’d be if he walked to the end of one of them. One night he dreamed he did and ended at the end of the building—nowhere.
The next week he had become more conscious of the daughter and son-in-law and their boy—no place to be out of their way. The son-in-law was a queer one. He drove a truck and came in only on the weekends. He said “nah” for “no” and he’d never heard of a ‘possum. Old Dudley slept in the room with the boy, who was sixteen and couldn’t be talked to. But sometimes when the daughter and Old Dudley were alone in the apartment, she would sit down and talk to him. First she had to think of something to say. Usually it gave out before what she considered was the proper time to get up and do something else, so he would have to say something. He always tried to think of something he hadn’t said before. She never listened the second time. She was seeing that her father spent his last years with his own family and not in a decayed boarding house full of old women whose heads jiggled. She was doing her duty. She had brothers and sisters who were not.
Once she took him shopping with her but he was too slow. They went in a “subway”—a railroad underneath the ground like a big cave. People boiled out of trains and up steps and over into the streets. They rolled off the street and down steps and into trains black and white and yellow all mixed up like vegetables in soup. Everything was boiling. The trains swished in from tunnels, up canals, and all of a sudden stopped. The people coming out pushed through the people coming in and a noise rang and the train swooped off again. Old Dudley and the daughter had to go in three different ones before they got where they were going. He wondered why people ever went out of their houses. He felt like his tongue had slipped down in his stomach. She held him by the coat sleeve and pulled him through the people.
They went on an overhead train too. She called it an “El,” They had to go up on a high platform to catch it. Old Dudley looked over the rail and could see the people rushing and the automobiles rushing under him. He felt sick. He put one hand on the rail and sank down on the wooden floor of the platform. The daughter screamed and pulled him over from the edge. “Do you want to fall off and kill yourself?” she shouted.
Through a crack in the boards he could see the cars swimming in the street. “I don’t care,” he murmured, “I don’t care if I do or not.”
“Come on,” she said, “you’ll feel better when we get home.”
“Home?” he repeated. The cars moved in a rhythm below him.
“Come on,” she said, “here it comes; we’ve just got time to make it.” They’d just had time to make all of them.
They made that one. They came back to the building and the apartment. The apartment was too tight. There was no place to be where there wasn’t somebody else. The kitchen opened into the bathroom and the bathroom opened into everything else and you were always where you started from. At home there was upstairs and the basement and the river and downtown in front of Fraziers … damn his throat.
The geranium was late today. It was ten-thirty. They usually had it out by ten-fifteen.
Somewhere down the hall a woman shrilled something unintelligible out to the street; a radio was bleating the worn music to a soap serial; and a garbage can crashed down a fire escape. The door to the next apartment slammed and a sharp footstep clipped down the hall. “That would be the nigger,” Old Dudley muttered. “The nigger with the shiny shoes.” He had been there a week when the nigger moved in. That Thursday he was looking out the door at the dog—run halls when this nigger went into the next apartment. He had on a gray, pin-stripe suit and a tan tie. His collar was stiff and white and made a clear-cut line next to his neck. His shoes were shiny tan—they matched his tie and his skin. Old Dudley scratched his head. He hadn’t known the kind of people that would live thick in a building could afford servants. He chuckled. Lot of good a nigger in a Sunday suit would do them. Maybe this nigger would know the country around here—or maybe how to get to it. They might could hunt. They might could find them a stream somewhere. He shut the door and went to the daughter’s room. “Hey!” he shouted, “the folks next door got ‘em a nigger. Must be gonna clean for them. You reckon they gonna keep him every day?”
She looked up from making the bed. “What are you talking about?”
“I say they got ‘em a servant next door—a nigger—all dressed up in a Sunday suit.”
She walked to the other side of the bed. “You must be crazy,” she said. “The next apartment is vacant and besides, nobody around here can afford any servant.”
“I te
ll you I saw him,” Old Dudley snickered. “Going right in there with a tie and a white collar on—and sharp-toed shoes.”
“If he went in there, he’s looking at it for himself,” she muttered. She went to the dresser and started fidgeting with things.
Old Dudley laughed. She could be right funny when she wanted to. “Well,” he said, “I think I’ll go over and see what day he gets off. Maybe I can convince him he likes to fish,” and he’d slapped his pocket to make the two quarters jingle. Before he got out in the hall good, she came tearing behind him and pulled him in. “Can’t you hear?” she’d yelled. “I meant what I said. He’s renting that himself if he went in there. Don’t you go asking him any questions or saying anything to him. I don’t want any trouble with niggers.”
“You mean,” Old Dudley murmured, “he’s gonna live next door to you?”
She shrugged. “I suppose he is. And you tend to your own business,” she added. “Don’t have anything to do with him.”
That’s just the way she’d said it. Like he didn’t have any sense at all. But he’d told her off then. He’d stated his say and she knew what he meant. “You ain’t been raised that way!” he’d said thundery-like. “You ain’t been raised to live tight with niggers that think they’re just as good as you, and you think I’d go messin’ around with one er that kind! If you think I want anything to do with them, you’re crazy.” He had had to slow down then because his throat was tightening. She’d stood stiff up and said they lived where they could afford to live and made the best of it. Preaching to him! Then she’d walked stiff off without a word more. That was her. Trying to be holy with her shoulders curved around and her neck in the air. Like he was a fool. He knew Yankees let niggers in their front doors and let them set on their sofas but he didn’t know his own daughter that was raised proper would stay next door to them—and then think he didn’t have no more sense than to want to mix with them. Him!