Mystery and Manners.
Flannery O"Connor.
FOREWORD.
These pieces are about equally divided between articles and essays the author published in her lifetime and material from her papers that she never revised for publication. In the second cla.s.s are most of section III, the first essay in section IV, and all but the first essay in section V. The word "selected" on the t.i.tle page of this book refers in particular to these items, but it barely suggests what the editors have done. Miss O"Connor left at least half a hundred typescripts for lectures, bearing slight indication as to where they had been delivered and most often none as to when. Apparently she typed out a substantially new script for each occasion. What this usually meant was that she experimented with the same observations in a new order or with changes of phrasing and a few new sentences or paragraphs. We could distinguish four or five types of talk, depending on the audience in view: university groups, Catholics, Georgians, writing cla.s.ses; but what she had to say to each overlapped what she had to say to the others, and she relied often on the same anecdotes and gags. It was difficult or impossible to discover any "original" or "master" talk in any category, although in two or three cases Miss O"Connor"s estate or her executor had allowed a version to appear in a college magazine. In this ma.s.s of material the editors floundered for some time. We were tempted to give up, in one of two ways. We could have picked out half a dozen of these ma.n.u.scripts and printed them in all their redundancy, or else we could have decided that, since these were talks drafted for reading aloud and were never worked up for publication, they should simply remain unpublished. Fidelity to the letter would have been served in the one case, fidelity of a sort to the author in the other. In neither case, it slowly became clear to us, would the reader be well served. In the end we decided to edit the body of the writing as we feel the author herself would now desire, having recourse to the same kind of shuffling as she herself so often practiced. We cut away most of the repet.i.tions and took interesting arguments in their best available form; where rearrangements and transpositions were necessary and possible, we performed them. We resorted to footnotes for two variant pa.s.sages, and two longer pa.s.sages of conspicuous interest were appended to relevant essays. In general, apart from adding here and there a word of transition or making the minimum change to correct an awkward sentence, we were scrupulous to retain Flannery O"Connor"s thought and phrasing, not to intrude our own.
Here then in reasonably full selection are the occasional writings of Flannery O"Connor. The volume begins and ends with prose on which the writer bore down with craft and care. In between are examples that vary in style from a certain formality to the informality of casual speech. Plain talk abounds in sections III and IV on the study and practice of writing. The author"s latest and deepest reflections are to be found in sections V and VI on the great subjects that she made peculiarly her own. It is clear that discourse, even here, had secondary importance for the author, who felt that her princ.i.p.al calling was to write stories and that her stories contained what she had to offer. On the other hand, she knew that those concentrations of experience and invention had their place in real contexts, literary, regional, and religious, that could and should be examined and discussed. She had a gift for this, too. Her papers not only complement her stories but are valuable and even seminal in themselves. The modest confidence with which she spoke was justified, in the view of the present editors, who in a like spirit present this book.
SF.
RF.
I.
The King of the Birds.
When I was five, I had an experience that marked me for life. Pathe News sent a photographer from New York to Savannah to take a picture of a chicken of mine. This chicken, a buff Cochin Bantam, had the distinction of being able to walk either forward or backward. Her fame had spread through the press, and by the time she reached the attention of Pathe News, I suppose there was nowhere left for her to go-forward or backward. Shortly after that she died, as now seems fitting.
If I put this information in the beginning of an article on peac.o.c.ks, it is because I am always being asked why I raise them, and I have no short or reasonable answer.
From that day with the Pathe man I began to collect chickens. What had been only a mild interest became a pa.s.sion, a quest. I had to have more and more chickens. I favored those with one green eye and one orange or with overlong necks and crooked combs. I wanted one with three legs or three wings but nothing in that line turned up. I pondered over the picture in Robert Ripley"s book, Believe It or Not, of a rooster that had survived for thirty days without his head; but I did not have a scientific temperament. I could sew in a fashion and I began to make clothes for chickens. A gray bantam named Colonel Eggbert wore a white pique coat with a lace collar and two b.u.t.tons in the back. Apparently Pathe News never heard of any of these other chickens of mine; it never sent another photographer.
My quest, whatever it was actually for, ended with peac.o.c.ks. Instinct, not knowledge, led me to them. I had never seen or heard one. Although I had a pen of pheasants and a pen of quail, a flock of turkeys, seventeen geese, a tribe of mallard ducks, three j.a.panese silky bantams, two Polish Crested ones, and several chickens of a cross between these last and the Rhode Island Red, I felt a lack. I knew that the peac.o.c.k had been the bird of Hera, the wife of Zeus, but since that time it had probably come down in the world-the Florida Market Bulletin advertised three-year-old peafowl at sixty-five dollars a pair. I had been quietly reading these ads for some years when one day, seized, I circled an ad in the Bulletin and pa.s.sed it to my mother. The ad was for a peac.o.c.k and hen with four seven-week-old peabiddies. "I"m going to order me those," I said.
My mother read the ad. "Don"t those things eat flowers?" she asked.
"They"ll eat Startena like the rest of them," I said.
The peafowl arrived by Railway Express from Eustis, Florida, on a mild day in October. When my mother and I arrived at the station, the crate was on the platform and from one end of it protruded a long, royal-blue neck and crested head. A white line above and below each eye gave the investigating head an expression of alert composure. I wondered if this bird, accustomed to parade about in a Florida orange grove, would readily adjust himself to a Georgia dairy farm. I jumped out of the car and bounded forward. The head withdrew.
At home we uncrated the party in a pen with a top on it. The man who sold me the birds had written that I should keep them penned up for a week or ten days and then let them out at dusk at the spot where I wanted them to roost; thereafter, they would return every night to the same roosting place. He had also warned me that the c.o.c.k would not have his full complement of tail feathers when he arrived; the peac.o.c.k sheds his tail in late summer and does not regain it fully until after Christmas.
As soon as the birds were out of the crate, I sat down on it and began to look at them. I have been looking at them ever since, from one station or another, and always with the same awe as on that first occasion; though I have always, I feel, been able to keep a balanced view and an impartial att.i.tude. The peac.o.c.k I had bought had nothing whatsoever in the way of a tail, but he carried himself as if he not only had a train behind him but a retinue to attend it. On that first occasion, my problem was so greatly what to look at first that my gaze moved constantly from the c.o.c.k to the hen to the four young peachickens, while they, except that they gave me as wide a berth as possible, did nothing to indicate they knew I was in the pen.
Over the years their att.i.tude toward me has not grown more generous. If I appear with food, they condescend, when no other way can be found, to eat it from my hand; if I appear without food, I am just another object. If I refer to them as "my" peafowl, the p.r.o.noun is legal, nothing more. I am the menial, at the beck and squawk of any feathered worthy who wants service. When I first uncrated these birds, in my frenzy I said, "I want so many of them that every time I go out the door, I"ll run into one." Now every time I go out the door, four or five run into me-and give me only the faintest recognition. Nine years have pa.s.sed since my first peafowl arrived. I have forty beaks to feed. Necessity is the mother of several other things besides invention.
For a chicken that grows up to have such exceptional good looks, the peac.o.c.k starts life with an inauspicious appearance. The peabiddy is the color of those large objectionable moths that flutter about light bulbs on summer nights. Its only distinguished features are its eyes, a luminous gray, and a brown crest which begins to sprout from the back of its head when it is ten days old. This looks at first like a bug"s antennae and later like the head feathers of an Indian. In six weeks green flecks appear in its neck, and in a few more weeks a c.o.c.k can be distinguished from a hen by the speckles on his back. The hen"s back gradually fades to an even gray and her appearance becomes shortly what it will always be. I have never thought the peahen unattractive, even though she lacks a long tail and any significant decoration. I have even once or twice thought her more attractive than the c.o.c.k, more subtle and refined; but these moments of boldness pa.s.s.
The c.o.c.k"s plumage requires two years to attain its pattern, and for the rest of his life this chicken will act as though he designed it himself. For his first two years he might have been put together out of a rag bag by an unimaginative hand. During his first year he has a buff breast, a speckled back, a green neck like his mother"s, and a short gray tail. During his second year he has a black breast, his sire"s blue neck, a back which is slowly turning the green and gold it will remain; but still no long tail. In his third year he reaches his majority and acquires his tail. For the rest of his life-and a peachicken may live to be thirty-five-he will have nothing better to do than manicure it, furl and unfurl it, dance forward and backward with it spread, scream when it is stepped upon, and arch it carefully when he steps through a puddle.
Not every part of the peac.o.c.k is striking to look at, even when he is full-grown. His upper wing feathers are a striated black and white and might have been borrowed from a Barred Rock fryer; his end wing feathers are the color of clay; his legs are long, thin, and iron-colored; his feet are big; and he appears to be wearing the short pants now so much in favor with playboys in the summer. These extend downward, buff-colored and sleek, from what might be a blue-black waistcoat. One would not be disturbed to find a watch chain hanging from this, but none does. a.n.a.lyzing the appearance of the peac.o.c.k as he stands with his tail folded, I find the parts incommensurate with the whole. The fact is that with his tail folded, nothing but his bearing saves this bird from being a laughingstock. With his tail spread, he inspires a range of emotions, but I have yet to hear laughter.
The usual reaction is silence, at least for a time. The c.o.c.k opens his tail by shaking himself violently until it is gradually lifted in an arch around him. Then, before anyone has had a chance to see it, he swings around so that his back faces the spectator. This has been taken by some to be insult and by others to be whimsey. I suggest it means only that the peac.o.c.k is equally well satisfied with either view of himself. Since I have been keeping peafowl, I have been visited at least once a year by first-grade schoolchildren, who learn by living. I am used to hearing this group chorus as the peac.o.c.k swings around, "Oh, look at his underwear!" This "underwear" is a stiff gray tail, raised to support the larger one, and beneath it a puff of black feathers that would be suitable for some really regal woman-a Cleopatra or a Clytemnestra-to use to powder her nose.
When the peac.o.c.k has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peac.o.c.k will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn. When it suits him, the peac.o.c.k will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing, haloed suns. This is the moment when most people are silent.
"Amen! Amen!" an old Negro woman once cried when this happened, and I have heard many similar remarks at this moment that show the inadequacy of human speech. Some people whistle; a few, for once, are silent. A truck driver who was driving up with a load of hay and found a peac.o.c.k turning before him in the middle of the road shouted, "Get a load of that b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" and braked his truck to a shattering halt. I have never known a strutting peac.o.c.k to budge a fraction of an inch for truck or tractor or automobile. It is up to the vehicle to get out of the way. No peafowl of mine has ever been run over, though one year one of them lost a foot in the mowing machine.
Many people, I have found, are congenitally unable to appreciate the sight of a peac.o.c.k. Once or twice I have been asked what the peac.o.c.k is "good for"-a question which gets no answer from me because it deserves none. The telephone company sent a lineman out one day to repair our telephone. After the job was finished, the man, a large fellow with a suspicious expression half hidden by a yellow helmet, continued to idle about, trying to coax a c.o.c.k that had been watching him to strut. He wished to add this experience to a large number of others he had apparently had. "Come on now, bud," he said, "get the show on the road, upsy-daisy, come on now, snap it up, snap it up."
The peac.o.c.k, of course, paid no attention to this.
"What ails him?" the man asked.
"Nothing ails him," I said. "He"ll put it up terreckly. All you have to do is wait."
The man trailed about after the c.o.c.k for another fifteen minutes or so; then, in disgust, he got back in his truck and started off. The bird shook himself and his tail rose around him.
"He"s doing it!" I screamed. "Hey, wait! He"s doing it!"
The man swerved the truck back around again just as the c.o.c.k turned and faced him with the spread tail. The display was perfect. The bird turned slightly to the right and the little planets above him hung in bronze, then he turned slightly to the left and they were hung in green. I went up to the truck to see how the man was affected by the sight.
He was staring at the peac.o.c.k with rigid concentration, as if he were trying to read fine print at a distance. In a second the c.o.c.k lowered his tail and stalked off.
"Well, what did you think of that?" I asked.
"Never saw such long ugly legs," the man said. "I bet that rascal could outrun a bus."
Some people are genuinely affected by the sight of a peac.o.c.k, even with his tail lowered, but do not care to admit it; others appear to be incensed by it. Perhaps they have the suspicion that the bird has formed some unfavorable opinion of them. The peac.o.c.k himself is a careful and dignified investigator. Visitors to our place, instead of being barked at by dogs rushing from under the porch, are squalled at by peac.o.c.ks whose blue necks and crested heads pop up from behind tufts of gra.s.s, peer out of bushes, and crane downward from the roof of the house, where the bird has flown, perhaps for the view. One of mine stepped from under the shrubbery one day and came forward to inspect a carful of people who had driven up to buy a calf. An old man and five or six white-haired, barefooted children were piling out the back of the automobile as the bird approached. Catching sight of him they stopped in their tracks and stared, plainly hacked to find this superior figure blocking their path. There was silence as the bird regarded them, his head drawn back at its most majestic angle, his folded train glittering behind him in the sunlight.
"Whut is thet thang?" one of the small boys asked finally in a sullen voice.
The old man had got out of the car and was gazing at the peac.o.c.k with an astounded look of recognition. "I ain"t seen one of them since my grandaddy"s day," he said, respectfully removing his hat. "Folks used to have "em, but they don"t no more."
"Whut is it?" the child asked again in the same tone he had used before.
"Churren," the old man said, "that"s the king of the birds!"
The children received this information in silence. After a minute they climbed back into the car and continued from there to stare at the peac.o.c.k, their expressions annoyed, as if they disliked catching the old man in the truth.
The peac.o.c.k does most of his serious strutting in the spring and summer when he has a full tail to do it with. Usually he begins shortly after breakfast, struts for several hours, desists in the heat of the day, and begins again in the late afternoon. Each c.o.c.k has a favorite station where he performs every day in the hope of attracting some pa.s.sing hen; but if I have found anyone indifferent to the peac.o.c.k"s display, besides the telephone lineman, it is the peahen. She seldom casts an eye at it. The c.o.c.k, his tail raised in a shimmering arch around him, will turn this way and that, and with his clay-colored wing feathers touching the ground, will dance forward and backward, his neck curved, his beak parted, his eyes glittering. Meanwhile the hen goes about her business, diligently searching the ground as if any bug in the gra.s.s were of more importance than the unfurled map of the universe which floats nearby.
Some people have the notion that only the peac.o.c.k spreads his tail and that he does it only when the hen is present. This is not so. A peafowl only a few hours hatched will raise what tail he has-it will be about the size of a thumbnail-and will strut and turn and back and bow exactly as if he were three years old and had some reason to be doing it. The hens will raise their tails when they see an object on the ground which alarms them, or sometimes when they have nothing better to do and the air is brisk. Brisk air goes at once to the peafowl"s head and inclines him to be sportive. A group of birds will dance together, or four or five will chase one another around a bush or tree. Sometimes one will chase himself, end his frenzy with a spirited leap into the air, and then stalk off as if he had never been involved in the spectacle.
Frequently the c.o.c.k combines the lifting of his tail with the raising of his voice. He appears to receive through his feet some shock from the center of the earth, which travels upward through him and is released: Eee-ooo-ii! Eee-ooo-ii! To the melancholy this sound is melancholy and to the hysterical it is hysterical. To me it has always sounded like a cheer for an invisible parade.
The hen is not given to these outbursts. She makes a noise like a mule"s bray-heehaw, heehaw, aa-aaw-ww-and makes it only when necessary. In the fall and winter, peafowl are usually silent unless some racket disturbs them; but in the spring and summer, at short intervals during the day and night, the c.o.c.k, lowering his neck and throwing back his head, will give out with seven or eight screams in succession as if this message were the one on earth which needed most urgently to be heard.
At night these calls take on a minor key and the air for miles around is charged with them. It has been a long time since I let my first peafowl out at dusk to roost in the cedar trees behind the house. Now fifteen or twenty still roost there; but the original old c.o.c.k from Eustis, Florida, stations himself on top of the barn, the bird who lost his foot in the mowing machine sits on a flat shed near the horse stall, there are others in the trees by the pond, several in the oaks at the side of the house, and one that cannot be dissuaded from roosting on the water tower. From all these stations calls and answers echo through the night. The peac.o.c.k perhaps has violent dreams. Often he wakes and screams "Help! Help!" and then from the pond and the barn and the trees around the house a chorus of adjuration begins: Lee-yon lee-yon, Mee-yon mee-yon!
Eee-e-yoy eee-e-yoy!
Eee-e-yoy eee-e-yoy!
The restless sleeper may wonder if he wakes or dreams.
It is hard to tell the truth about this bird. The habits of any peachicken left to himself would hardly be noticeable, but multiplied by forty, they become a situation. I was correct that my peachickens would all eat Startena; they also eat everything else. Particularly they eat flowers. My mother"s fears were all borne out. Peac.o.c.ks not only eat flowers, they eat them systematically, beginning at the head of a row and going down it. If they are not hungry, they will pick the flower anyway, if it is attractive, and let it drop. For general eating they prefer chrysanthemums and roses. When they are not eating flowers, they enjoy sitting on top of them, and where the peac.o.c.k sits he will eventually fashion a dusting hole. Any chicken"s dusting hole is out of place in a flower bed, but the peafowl"s hole, being the size of a small crater, is more so. When he dusts he all but obliterates the sight of himself with sand. Usually when someone arrives at full gallop with the leveled broom, he can see nothing through the cloud of dirt and flying flowers but a few green feathers and a beady, pleasure-taking eye.
From the beginning, relations between these birds and my mother were strained. She was forced, at first, to get up early in the morning and go out with her clippers to reach the Lady Bankshire and the Herbert Hoover roses before some peafowl had breakfasted upon them; now she has halfway solved her problem by erecting hundreds of feet of twenty-four-inch-high wire to fence the flower beds. She contends that peachickens do not have enough sense to jump over a low fence. "If it were a high wire," she says, "they would jump onto it and over, but they don"t have sense enough to jump over a low wire."
It is useless to argue with her on this matter. "It"s not a challenge," I say to her; but she has made up her mind.
In addition to eating flowers, peafowl also eat fruit, a habit which has created a lack of cordiality toward them on the part of my uncle, who had the fig trees planted about the place because he has an appet.i.te for figs himself. "Get that scoundrel out of that fig bush!" he will roar, rising from his chair at the sound of a limb breaking, and someone will have to be dispatched with a broom to the fig trees.
Peafowl also enjoy flying into barn lofts and eating peanuts off peanut hay; this has not endeared them to our dairyman. And as they have a taste for fresh garden vegetables, they have often run afoul of the dairyman"s wife.
The peac.o.c.k likes to sit on gates or fence posts and allow his tail to hang down. A peac.o.c.k on a fence post is a superb sight. Six or seven peac.o.c.ks on a gate are beyond description; but it is not very good for the gate. Our fence posts tend to lean in one direction or another and all our gates open diagonally.
In short, I am the only person on the place who is willing to underwrite, with something more than tolerance, the presence of peafowl. In return, I am blessed with their rapid multiplication. The population figure I give out is forty, but for some time now I have not felt it wise to take a census. I had been told before I bought my birds that peafowl are difficult to raise. It is not so, alas. In May the peahen finds a nest in some fence corner and lays five or six large buff-colored eggs. Once a day, thereafter, she gives an abrupt hee-haa-awww! and shoots like a rocket from her nest. Then for half an hour, her neck ruffled and stretched forward, she parades around the premises, announcing what she is about. I listen with mixed emotions.
In twenty-eight days the hen comes off with five or six mothlike, murmuring peachicks. The c.o.c.k ignores these unless one gets under his feet (then he pecks it over the head until it gets elsewhere), but the hen is a watchful mother and every year a good many of the young survive. Those that withstand illnesses and predators (the hawk, the fox, and the opossum) over the winter seem impossible to destroy, except by violence.
A man selling fence posts tarried at our place one day and told me that he had once had eighty peafowl on his farm. He cast a nervous eye at two of mine standing nearby. "In the spring, we couldn"t hear ourselves think," he said. "As soon as you lifted your voice, they lifted their"n, if not before. All our fence posts wobbled. In the summer they ate all the tomatoes off the vines. Scuppernongs went the same way. My wife said she raised her flowers for herself and she was not going to have them eat up by a chicken no matter how long his tail was. And in the fall they shed them feathers all over the place anyway and it was a job to clean up. My old grandmother was living with us then and she was eighty-five. She said, "Either they go, or I go.""
"Who went?" I asked.
"We still got twenty of them in the freezer," he said.
"And how," I asked, looking significantly at the two standing nearby, "did they taste?"
"No better than any other chicken," he said, "but I"d a heap rather eat them than hear them."
I have tried imagining that the single peac.o.c.k I see before me is the only one I have, but then one comes to join him; another flies off the roof, four or five crash out of the crpe-myrtle hedge; from the pond one screams and from the barn I hear the dairyman denouncing another that has got into the cowfeed. My kin are given to such phrases as, "Let"s face it."
I do not like to let my thoughts linger in morbid channels, but there are times when such facts as the price of wire fencing and the price of Startena and the yearly gain in peafowl all run uncontrolled through my head. Lately I have had a recurrent dream: I am five years old and a peac.o.c.k. A photographer has been sent from New York and a long table is laid in celebration. The meal is to be an exceptional one: myself. I scream, "Help! Help!" and awaken. Then from the pond and the barn and the trees around the house, I hear that chorus of jubilation begin: Lee-yon lee-yon, Mee-yon mee-yon!
Eee-e-yoy eee-e-yoy!
Eee-e-yoy eee-e-yoy!
I intend to stand firm and let the peac.o.c.ks multiply, for I am sure that, in the end, the last word will be theirs.
II.
The Fiction Writer & His Country.
Among the many complaints made about the modern American novelist, the loudest, if not the most intelligent, has been the charge that he is not speaking for his country. A few seasons back an editorial in Life magazine asked grandly, "Who speaks for America today?" and was not able to conclude that our novelists, or at least our most gifted ones, did.
The gist of the editorial was that in the last ten years this country had enjoyed an unparalleled prosperity, that it had come nearer to producing a cla.s.sless society than any other nation, and that it was the most powerful country in the world, but that our novelists were writing as if they lived in packing boxes on the edge of the dump while they awaited admission to the poorhouse. Instead of this, the editorial requested that they give us something that really represented this country, and it ended with a very smooth and slick shift into a higher key and demanded further that the novelist show us the redeeming quality of spiritual purpose, for it said that "what is most missing from our hothouse literature" is "the joy of life itself."
This was irritating enough to provoke answers from many critics, but I do not know that any of those who answered considered the question specifically from the standpoint of the novelist with Christian concerns, who, presumably, would have an interest at least equal to that of the editors of Life in "the redeeming quality of spiritual purpose."*
What is such a writer going to take his "country" to be The word usually used by literary folk in this connection would be "world," but the word "country" will do; in fact, being homely, it will do better, for it suggests more. It suggests everything from the actual countryside that the novelist describes, on to and through the peculiar characteristics of his region and his nation, and on, through, and under all of these to his true country, which the writer with Christian convictions will consider to be what is eternal and absolute. This covers considerable territory, and if one were talking of any other kind of writing than the writing of fiction, one would perhaps have to say "countries," but it is the peculiar burden of the fiction writer that he has to make one country do for all and that he has to evoke that one country through the concrete particulars of a life that he can make believable.
This is first of all a matter of vocation, and a vocation is a limiting factor which extends even to the kind of material that the writer is able to apprehend imaginatively. The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live, and so far as he is concerned, a living deformed character is acceptable and a dead whole one is not. The Christian writer particularly will feel that whatever his initial gift is, it comes from G.o.d; and no matter how minor a gift it is, he will not be willing to destroy it by trying to use it outside its proper limits.
The country that the writer is concerned with in the most objective way is, of course, the region that most immediately surrounds him, or simply the country, with its body of manners, that he knows well enough to employ. It"s generally suggested that the Southern writer has some advantage here. Most readers these days must be sufficiently sick of hearing about Southern writers and Southern writing and what so many reviewers insist upon calling the "Southern school." No one has ever made plain just what the Southern school is or which writers belong to it. Sometimes, when it is most respectable, it seems to mean the little group of Agrarians that flourished at Vanderbilt in the twenties; but more often the term conjures up an image of Gothic monstrosities and the idea of a preoccupation with everything deformed and grotesque. Most of us are considered, I believe, to be unhappy combinations of Poe and Erskine Caldwell.
At least, however, we are all known to be anguished. The writers of the editorial in question suggest that our anguish is a result of our isolation from the rest of the country. I feel that this would be news to most Southern writers. The anguish that most of us have observed for some time now has been caused not by the fact that the South is alienated from the rest of the country, but by the fact that it is not alienated enough, that every day we are getting more and more like the rest of the country, that we are being forced out not only of our many sins, but of our few virtues. This may be unholy anguish but it is anguish nevertheless.
Manners are of such great 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. In the South there are more amateur authors than there are rivers and streams. It"s not an activity that waits upon talent. In almost every hamlet you"ll find at least one lady writing epics in Negro dialect and probably two or three old gentlemen who have impossible historical novels on the way. The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.
The writer himself will probably feel that the only way for him to keep from becoming one of them is to examine his conscience and to observe our fierce but fading manners in the light of an ultimate concern; others would say that the way to escape being a regional writer is to widen the region. Don"t be a Southern writer; be an American writer. Express this great country-which is "enjoying an unparalleled prosperity," which is "the strongest nation in the world," and which has "almost produced a cla.s.sless society." How, with all this prosperity and strength and cla.s.slessness staring you in the face, can you honestly produce a literature which doesn"t make plain the joy of life?
The writer whose position is Christian, and probably also the writer whose position is not, will begin to wonder at this point if there could not be some ugly correlation between our unparalleled prosperity and the stridency of these demands for a literature that shows us the joy of life. He may at least be permitted to ask if these screams for joy would be quite so piercing if joy were really more abundant in our prosperous society.
The Christian writer will feel that in the greatest depth of vision, moral judgment will be implicit, and that when we are invited to represent the country according to survey, what we are asked to do is to separate mystery from manners and judgment from vision, in order to produce something a little more palatable to the modern temper. We are asked to form our consciences in the light of statistics, which is to establish the relative as absolute. For many this may be a convenience, since we don"t live in an age of settled belief; but it cannot be a convenience, it cannot even be possible, for the writer who is a Catholic. He will feel that any long-continued service to it will produce a soggy, formless, and sentimental literature, one that will provide a sense of spiritual purpose for those who connect the spirit with romanticism and a sense of joy for those who confuse that virtue with satisfaction. The storyteller is concerned with what is; but if what is is what can be determined by survey, then the disciples of Dr. Kinsey and Dr. Gallup are sufficient for the day thereof.
In the greatest fiction, the writer"s moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgment is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.
In the introduction to a collection of his stories called Rotting Hill, Wyndham Lewis has written, "If I write about a hill that is rotting, it is because I despise rot." The general accusation pa.s.sed against writers now is that they write about rot because they love it. Some do, and their works may betray them, but it is impossible not to believe that some write about rot because they see it and recognize it for what it is.
It may well be asked, however, why so much of our literature is apparently lacking in a sense of spiritual purpose and in the joy of life, and if stories lacking such are actually credible. The only conscience I have to examine in this matter is my own, and when I look at stories I have written I find that they are, for the most part, about people who are poor, who are afflicted in both mind and body, who have little-or at best a distorted-sense of spiritual purpose, and whose actions do not apparently give the reader a great a.s.surance of the joy of life.
Yet how is this? For I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that. I don"t think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction.
Some may blame preoccupation with the grotesque on the fact that here we have a Southern writer and that this is just the type of imagination that Southern life fosters. I have written several stories which did not seem to me to have any grotesque characters in them at all, but which have immediately been labeled grotesque by non-Southern readers. I find it hard to believe that what is observable behavior in one section can be entirely without parallel in another. At least, of late, Southern writers have had the opportunity of pointing out that none of us invented Elvis Presley and that that youth is himself probably less an occasion for concern than his popularity, which is not restricted to the Southern part of the country. The problem may well become one of finding something that is not grotesque and of deciding what standards we would use in looking.
My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. In some cases, these writers may be unconsciously infected with the Manichean spirit of the times and suffer the much-discussed disjunction between sensibility and belief, but I think that more often the reason for this attention to the perverse is the difference between their beliefs and the beliefs of their audience. Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.
The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can a.s.sume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to a.s.sume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock-to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
Unless we are willing to accept our artists as they are, the answer to the question, "Who speaks for America today?" will have to be: the advertising agencies. They are entirely capable of showing us our unparalleled prosperity and our almost cla.s.sless society, and no one has ever accused them of not being affirmative. Where the artist is still trusted, he will not be looked to for a.s.surance. Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circ.u.mstances; that is, as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.