Mystery and Manners

by Flannery O'Connor

  Bad children are harder to endure than good ones, but they are easier to read about, and I congratulated myself on having minimized the possibility of a book about Mary Ann by suggesting that the Sisters do it themselves. Although I heard from Sister Evangelist that they were about it, I felt that a few attempts to capture Mary Ann in writing would lead them to think better of the project. It was doubtful that any of them had the literary gifts of their foundress. Moreover, they were busy nurses and had their hands full following a strenuous vocation.

  * * *

  Their manuscript arrived the first of August. After I had gathered myself together, I sat down and began to read it. There was everything about the writing to make the professional writer groan. Most of it was reported, very little was rendered; at the dramatic moment—where there was one—the observer seemed to fade away, and where an exact word or phrase was needed, a vague one was usually supplied. Yet when I had finished reading, I remained for some time, the imperfections of the writing forgotten, thinking about the mystery of Mary Ann. They had managed to convey it.

  The story was as unfinished as the child’s face. Both seemed to have been left, like creation on the seventh day, to be finished by others. The reader would have to make something of the story as Mary Ann had made something of her face.

  She and the Sisters who had taught her had fashioned from her unfinished face the material of her death. The creative action of the Christian’s life is to prepare his death in Christ. It is a continuous action in which this world’s goods are utilized to the fullest, both positive gifts and what Père Teilhard de Char-din calls “passive diminishments.” Mary Ann’s diminishment was extreme, but she was equipped by natural intelligence and by a suitable education, not simply to endure it, but to build upon it. She was an extraordinarily rich little girl.

  Death is the theme of much modern literature. There is Death in Venice, Death of a Salesman, Death in the Afternoon, Death of a Man. Mary Ann’s was the death of a child. It was simpler than any of these, yet infinitely more knowing. When she entered the door of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home in Atlanta, she fell into the hands of women who were shocked at nothing and who love life so much that they spend their own lives making comfortable those who have been pronounced incurable of cancer. Her own prognosis was six months, but she lived twelve years, long enough for the Sisters to teach her what alone could have been of importance to her. Hers was an education for death, but not one carried on obtrusively. Her days were full of dogs and party dresses, of Sisters and sisters, of Coca-Colas and Dagwood sandwiches, and of her many and varied friends—from Mr. Slack and Mr. Connolly to Lucius, the yard man; from patients afflicted the way she was to children who were brought to the Home to visit her and were perhaps told when they left to think how thankful they should be that God had made their faces straight. It is doubtful if any of them were as fortunate as Mary Ann.

  The Sisters had set all this down artlessly and had devoted a good deal of their space to detailing Mary Ann’s many pious deeds. I was tempted to edit away a good many of these. They had willingly given me the right to cut, and I could have laid about me with satisfaction but for the fact that there was nothing with which to fill in any gaps I created. I felt too that while their style had been affected by traditional hagiography and even a little by Parson Weems, what they had set down was what had happened and there was no way to get around it. This was a child brought up by seventeen nuns; she was what she was, and the itchy hand of the fiction writer would have to be stayed. I was only capable of dealing with another Willie.

  I later suggested to Sister Evangelist, on an occasion when some of the Sisters came down to spend the afternoon with me to discuss the manuscript, that Mary Ann could not have been much but good, considering her environment. Sister Evangelist leaned over the arm of her chair and gave me a look. Her eyes were blue and unpredictable behind spectacles that unmoored them slightly. “We’ve had some demons!” she said, and a gesture of her hand dismissed my ignorance.

  After an afternoon with them, I decided that they had had about everything and flinched before nothing, even though one of them asked me during the course of the visit why I wrote about such grotesque characters, why the grotesque (of all things) was my vocation. They had in the meantime inspected some of my writing. I was struggling to get off the hook she had me on when another of our guests supplied the one answer that would make it immediately plain to all of them. “It’s your vocation too,” he said to her.

  This opened up for me also a new perspective on the grotesque. Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept the fact that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliché or a smoothing-down that will soften their real look. When we look into the face of good, we are liable to see a face like Mary Ann’s, full of promise.

  Bishop Hyland preached Mary Ann’s funeral sermon. He said that the world would ask why Mary Ann should die. He was thinking undoubtedly of those who had known her and knew that she loved life, knew that her grip on a hamburger had once been so strong that she had fallen through the back of a chair without dropping it, or that some months before her death, she and Sister Loretta had got a real baby to nurse. The Bishop was speaking to her family and friends. He could not have been thinking of that world, much farther removed yet everywhere, which would not ask why Mary Ann should die, but why she should be born in the first place.

  One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him. The Alymers whom Hawthorne saw as a menace have multiplied. Busy cutting down human imperfection, they are making headway also on the raw material of good. Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

  These reflections seem a long way from the simplicity and innocence of Mary Ann; but they are not so far removed. Hawthorne could have put them in a fable and shown us what to fear. In the end, I cannot think of Mary Ann without thinking also of that fastidious, skeptical New Englander who feared the ice in his blood. There is a direct line between the incident in the Liverpool workhouse, the work of Hawthorne’s daughter, and Mary Ann—who stands not only for herself but for all the other examples of human imperfection and grotesquerie which the Sisters of Rose Hawthorne’s order spend their lives caring for. Their work is the tree sprung from Hawthorne’s small act of Christlikeness and Mary Ann is its flower. By reason of the fear, the search, and the charity that marked his life and influenced his daughter’s, Mary Ann inherited, a century later, the wealth of Catholic wisdom that taught her what to make of her death. Hawthorne gave what he did not have himself.

  This action by which charity grows invisibly among us, entwining the living and the dead, is called by the Church the Communion of Saints. It is a communion created upon human imperfection, created from what we make of our grotesque state. Of hers Mary Ann made what, like all good things, would have escaped notice had not the Sisters and many others been affected by it and wished it written down. The Sisters who composed the memoir have told me that they feel they have failed to create her as she was, that she was more lively than they managed t
o make her, more gay, more gracious, but I think that they have done enough and done it well. I think that for the reader this story will illuminate the lines that join the most diverse lives and that hold us fast in Christ.

  APPENDIX & NOTES

  APPENDIX

  [Besides drafts of talks, the O’Connor papers included two minor classes of manuscripts: brief book reviews done mainly for the Georgia Bulletin, the diocesan newspaper; and copies of remarks that Miss O’Connor wrote out in reply to the questions of interviewers. Here and there in each, of course, were passages of good sense and savor that seemed to deserve republication. But on repeated review these things appeared to add less and less to what the longer pieces had to say. Ultimately we were left with a very few examples indeed, of which it will be sufficient and just to quote two. The first is from a review of J. F. Powers’ book of stories, The Presence of Grace.]

  According to Mr. Evelyn Waugh on the book jacket, “Mr. Powers is almost unique in his country as a lay writer who is at ease in the Church; whose whole art, moreover, is everywhere infused and directed by his Faith.” Indeed, if it were not directed by his Faith, Mr. Powers would not have been able to survive what his eye and ear have revealed to him, but he is equipped with an inner eye which can discern the good as well as the evil which may lurk behind the surface which to ordinary eyes has long been dead of staleness, so that his work, however much directed by his Faith, seems more directed by his charity. But the explanation for any good writer is first that he knows how to write and that writing is his vocation. This is eminently true of Mr. Powers and it is for this reason that one may be allowed to wonder why, in two stories in this collection, he has seen fit to use a cat for the Central Intelligence. The cat in question is admirable, in his way. He has Mr. Powers’ wit and sensibility, his Faith and enough of his charity to serve, but he is a cat notwithstanding, and in both cases he lowers the tone and restricts the scope of what should otherwise have been a major story. It is the hope of the reviewer that this animal will prove to have only one life left and that some Minneapolis motorist, wishing to serve literature, will dispatch him as soon as possible.

  [The second example is from an interview with C. Ross Mullins that appeared in Jubilee for June, 1963.]

  We’re all grotesque and I don’t think the Southerner is any more grotesque than anyone else; but his social situation demands more of him than that elsewhere in this country. It requires considerable grace for two races to live together, particularly when the population is divided about 50-50 between them and when they have our particular history. It can’t be done without a code of manners based on mutual charity. I remember a sentence from an essay of Marshall McLuhan’s. I forget the exact words, but the gist of it was, as I recollect it, that after the Civil War, formality became a condition of survival. This doesn’t seem to me any less true today. Formality preserves that individual privacy which everyone needs and, in these times, is always in danger of losing. It’s particularly necessary to have in order to protect the rights of both races. When you have a code of manners based on charity, then when the charity fails—as it is going to do constantly—you’ve got those manners there to preserve each race from small intrusions upon the other. The uneducated Southern Negro is not the clown he’s made out to be. He’s a man of very elaborate manners and great formality, which he uses superbly for his own protection and to insure his own privacy. All this may not be ideal, but the Southerner has enough sense not to ask for the ideal but only for the possible, the workable. The South has survived in the past because its manners, however lopsided or inadequate they may have been, provided enough social discipline to hold us together and give us an identity. Now those old manners are obsolete, but the new manners will have to be based on what was best in the old ones—in their real basis of charity and necessity. In practice, the Southerner seldom underestimates his own capacity for evil. For the rest of the country, the race problem is settled when the Negro has his rights, but for the Southerner, whether he’s white or colored, that’s only the beginning. The South has to evolve a way of life in which the two races can live together with mutual forbearance. You don’t form a committee to do this or pass a resolution: both races have to work it out the hard way. In parts of the South these new manners are evolving in a very satisfactory way, but good manners seldom make the papers.

  NOTES

  “The King of the Birds.” This piece bears the title that Flannery O’Connor gave it. Entitled “Living with a Peacock,” it appeared in Holiday, September, 1961.

  “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” This was contributed in the spring of 1957 to a book of statements by novelists on their art, edited by Granville Hicks and published in the same year under the title The Living Novel: A Symposium.

  “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” This paper was read by the author in the fall of 1960 at Wesleyan College for Women in Macon, Georgia. At that time she asked that it be given only local distribution as she might “sooner or later revise it for publication.” This she never did. After her death her literary executor permitted its publication in 1965 in Cluster Review of Macon University in Macon and in The Added Dimension, a book mainly devoted to critical studies of Miss O’Connor’s work, edited by Melville J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson, published in 1966. In the latter case, at least, the text as published appeared to contain a number of misreadings. We print her own manuscript version.

  “The Regional Writer” was contributed by the author to Esprit, the literary magazine of the University of Scranton, Scranton, Pennsylvania, where it appeared in Winter, 1963.

  “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” and “Writing Short Stories” are composites for which the editors bear the kind of responsibility explained in the Foreword. We do not know the dates of the talks from which these texts were derived; the nucleus of “Writing Short Stories” was delivered at a Southern Writers’ Conference neither located nor dated on the manuscript. “On Her Own Work” consists of fairly late observations, as noted in the footnotes.

  “The Teaching of Literature” is a composite. The main part or nucleus was a single talk to an unidentified group of English teachers. “Total Effect and the Eighth Grade” was published in the Georgia Bulletin, March 21, 1963, under the title “Fiction Is a Subject with a History; It Should Be Taught That Way.” We use the manuscript title.

  “The Church and the Fiction Writer” was published in America, March 30, 1957.

  “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers” and “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” are composites of relatively late material. The former includes passages from a paper read at the College of St. Teresa, Winona, Minnesota, and published under the title “The Role of the Catholic Novelist” in Greyfriar, Siena Studies in Literature, Vol. VII, 1964, at Siena College, Loudonville, N.Y. The latter essay embodies much of a lecture delivered at Georgetown University during 175th-anniversary ceremonies in 1963 and published in the Georgetown magazine, Viewpoint, in Spring, 1966.

  The manuscript of her “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann” bears Miss O’Connor’s inscription, “December 8, 1960, Milledgeville, Georgia.” It was first published in 1961.

  Books by FLANNERY O’CONNOR

  Wise Blood

  A Good Man Is Hard to Find

  The Violent Bear It Away

  Everything That Rises Must Converge

  Mystery and Manners

  The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor

  The Habit of Being

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 1957, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1966, 1967, 1969

  by the Estate of Mary Flannery O’Connor

  Copyright © 1962 by Flannery O’Connor

  Copyright © 1961 by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy

  (now Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

  All rights reserved

  Published in 1969 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  First paperback edition,
1970

  Library of Congress catalog card number: 69-15409

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-50804-3

  Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-50804-6

  www.fsgbooks.com

  eISBN 9781466829046

  First eBook edition: September 2012

  * In talks here and there Flannery O’Connor often alluded to this challenge on the part of the Life editorial. Once she said: “What these editorial writers fail to realize is that the writer who emphasizes spiritual values is very likely to take the darkest view of all of what he sees in this country today. For him, the fact that we are the most powerful and the wealthiest nation in the world doesn’t mean a thing in any positive sense. The sharper the light of faith, the more glaring are apt to be the distortions the writer sees in the life around him.”