If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will be interested in what we don't understand rather than in what we do.

—Flannery O'Connor¹

Doris Betts's fiction is about crises of character rather than of action. Her characters are grotesques, sometimes physically such as Violet Karl in “The Ugliest Pilgrim,” but more often spiritually like Homer Beam in “The Astronomer” or Mrs. Applewhite in “The Mandarin.” They are trying to solve mysteries of faith, trying to make sense out of their lives and their world. They are seeking answers to unanswerable questions. Their questions are rarely philosophical in any existential sense. They do not ask “Why is there something instead of nothing?” Rather, they are asking, “How do I live in the something that is?” They are asking “What must I do to make sense of it?” They are grotesques not because of what they lack but precisely because they are sensitive to the questions at the expense of the easy answers that lie around them.

This dilemma is clearest in Betts's long story “The Astronomer,” a modern tale of abdication and reacceptance of responsibility. Horton Beam has retired from his job at a weaving mill where he has spent his life doing nothing but passing time. He is alone; his wife has been dead for fifteen years and his sons have died, one in the Korean War and one in a freak accident. Horton has given up trying to make sense out of any of this, and now, without his workday routine, is left to find some way to fill his time. Happening to glance through a copy of Leaves of Grass he comes across the line, “When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer …” and immediately decides to become an astronomer as well. There is no spiritual motivation behind his decision; he only wants to pass time. When a librarian remarks that “The stars are beautiful these summer nights,” the Astronomer (as Beam has become known in the story), does not respond to her sense of the beautiful.

What did he care for that? No use. No purpose. No beauty, either. He was just learning something for its own sake. He had retired from all the parts of that story; he had even … even abdicated.

“I hadn't noticed it,” the Astronomer said aloud.²

For reasons inexplicable to himself he allows a young man, Fred, and a woman who claims to be Fred's wife, Eva, to rent the upstairs of his home. After he finds out that they are not married and that Eva has run away from her husband and two children and is pregnant by Fred, the Astronomer allows them to stay on, telling himself that he needs the money to buy his telescope. Against all his resolution, he becomes interested and involved in Eva's problems. This dissolving of his resolution to become isolated is also reflected in his study of astronomy. He goes from charting the stars to studying the theories behind his science and finally to studying the mythologies behind the naming of the constellations. He moves from the secure position of pure empiricism to the study of the beliefs and faiths of man; by doing so, he loses the distance he had hoped to achieve—the ability to see himself as an unimportant speck in a giant universe.

Eva too has unsuccessfully attempted to abdicate her responsibilities and sensitivities in running away with Fred. In Fred, she believes she has found the sort of unconscious life she is seeking. Fred, a used car salesman, now works the late night shift at a service station, where he spends his evenings reading road maps. Eva remarks, “Everything turns into a map for Fred. There's just one way to travel, one shortest easiest highway. The widest, blackest line on the paper. That's how Fred lives. That's how I'm living” (A, p. 178). But Eva finally cannot live like Fred or in Fred's metaphor—the road map. To her the world is less predictable, less straightforward: “You ever feel,” she asks the Astronomer, “there might be some deed just waiting out there for you to do? Lying ahead somewhere with your name on it? The one you can't excuse? And it might be coming at you, like a ship in the dark …” (A, p. 186).

The Astronomer also has been trying to live on the road map—a chart of the stars—but he is no more able than Eva to see the world in straight lines. He is troubled by the notion that in the universe all straight lines are in fact curved (A, p. 183). Like Eva he fears the ship in the dark, the mysteries of iniquity, of love, of faith. Eva, through her self-destructive urge for escape, has an illegal abortion and nearly dies, but in her confrontation with the “one [deed] you can't excuse” she finds the need for love and, just as important, for forgiveness. “Love … I wanted it to drown me” she explains to the Astronomer. “Drown, big ship in the dark, great leaps into chasms” he thinks (A, p. 232). She begins to study the Bible, to ask for forgiveness, and tries to find answers to her questions in religious books, but finally gives up. “They tell you what but they never tell you how!” (A, p. 223). Finally, she learns to live with and in the questions. “No more of this clear direction, thought-through, plain road. … Me, I'll think about all the roads at once” (A, p. 235). Through her experience, Eva finds the courage to face her life and to acknowledge her weaknesses, a religious faith to sustain that courage, and a personal faith in her own ability to live with the tensions of always asking but never receiving answers to her unanswerable questions. She finds in herself the power to re-create her life: “I'm going to make happy. I'm going to call it and look for it and drag it out” (A, p. 233).

The Astronomer, through his association with Eva and her decision to return to her husband, realizes that he has never really allowed himself to love or to face fully the questions which he had previously avoided. He finds himself aching for the faith he denied to himself and, in the final scene of the story, forsakes the security of his science to cast himself into the realm of doubt and faith. It is an act of desperate courage:

The Astronomer hurried—no, ran—from the kitchen and down the back steps into the yard, where he turned his face upward. Pegasus was galloping over the east. From near Capella a small torch skidded down the sky.

Listen! The Astronomer sent his thought desperately beyond those stars. Listen! Say something to me!

(A, p. 242)

In Betts's fiction, the ability to confront doubts, to acknowledge them and find a faith within that acknowledgement is the first and necessary step to becoming fully human. Some of her characters, like Mrs. Applewhite in “The Mandarin” are never quite able to accept the life ungoverned by the “road map.” Others, like the mousy librarian, Miss Parker, in “Miss Parker Possessed,” live in fear of the “dark ships,” the inexplicable impulses they feel within themselves.

Mrs. Applewhite, an aged, rich old woman, surrounded by paid attendants, prides herself on being “realistic about people.” “I live in a big stone house,” she thinks to herself, “but it was never an ivory tower!” (A, p. 26). Her life is fixed, precise, and empty. She gets a small pleasure from confirming her nihilistic views of the world by placing twenty dollar bills in library books and chortling when only a few of the next borrowers seek to return the money to its owner. The essence of existence is contained for her in a parable:

If by pushing a button you could kill some unknown aged mandarin in China and his death would be no loss to anyone and would make you rich beyond your wildest dreams; and no one—including the mandarin himself—would ever know you did it, would you push the button?

(A, pp. 25–26)

Mrs. Applewhite is convinced that most people would, and justifies her life with this knowledge. Even though she wakes from a dream in which she sees the possibility of a different and beautiful world, and screams of her life, “There's not enough of it!”, she willfully rejects any notion that she is dissatisfied with her life and with her attitude toward it (A, p. 33). She ends the story like the flowers of her garden which “grew their lives away, carefully, and with precision” (A, p. 33).

Miss Parker, a forty year-old librarian, falls victim to the dark and “unforgiveable” impulses within herself. The result is a schizophrenic personality in which two identities, the proper Miss Parker and the “devil” fight within her. At the “devil's” urging, she disrupts a meeting of the Ladies' Book Club with her raucous laughter. She begins a library address to the Committee of Councilmen Supervising Library Management by croaking “Sex.” She is given over to sexual fantasies about Mr. Harvey, the banker, and indulges in adventurous daydreams in which she robs Mr. Harvey's bank. In short, to Miss Parker's horror, Miss Parker doesn't think or act like Miss Parker. Her “madness” continues until she finds herself in danger of losing her job; then she is able to exorcise her “devil” and become “safe” Miss Parker again. For all of its comedy and sympathy, “Miss Parker's Possession” is finally a small tragedy—the story of a life that is guided back onto the road map by the librarian's fears of and her inability to come to terms with her own inner thoughts and sexuality.

As Mrs. Applewhite hides behind her nihilism, and Miss Parker behind her proprieties, others of Betts's characters, like Mildred Allen of The Scarlet Thread, attempt to escape confronting life and its necessary doubts through religion. Mildred, through her unerring allegiance to the Hereafter, is never fully able to confront or to live within the present, and remains an ineffectual character whom life eventually passes by. Because of her undeviating adherence to the letter of her fundamentalist faith, she is unable to understand fully or to give support to the problems of her husband and children. Religious faith that does not live in and confront the present is only another means of escape—another road map. As Mr. Shawn teaches Father Scott in “Mr. Shawn and Father Scott,” religion must “believe / in / something / now.”³

In “The Ugliest Pilgrim,” Betts examines how religious faith is strengthened by the admittance of realities. Violet Karl, whose face has been terribly disfigured by a childhood accident, goes on a pilgrimage to Oklahoma to be made beautiful by an evangelical faith healer. When Violet discovers the inability of the minister to transform her defects into beauty, she does not lose her faith, but rather that faith is paradoxically strengthened by the doubts she confronts. She is able finally to accept herself and then to accept the love proffered her by a fellow traveler. Like Eva, she learns to live within a world of doubts and to find a faith and love within that world.

Doris Betts's fiction is enigmatic; it involves the interior stories of characters who are desperately trying to make sense out of a modern world which consistently thwarts their understanding. These inhabitants of small Southern towns live in a world drawn on a small scale. Their situations are personal, but their dilemmas are large and universal. In “The Spider Gardens of Madagascar,” a young boy's study of spiders for a fifth grade science project opens for him a world of patterns and understandings, but this world is overshadowed by the death of his father and the emotional instability of his mother. At the end of the story, the boy has collected a jar of black widows and is contemplating turning them loose upon himself or upon his mother. In “Hitchhiker,” a young woman on her way to her typist job gives in to an inexplicable urge to drive her car into the river. In another story, a small town Chamber of Commerce President watches his town's festival turn into an egg fight and is shocked at his own participation and the participation of other citizens in the comic riot. He is confused and frightened by the repressed anger he has seen.

Yet others, like Mama Bower in “The Very Old Are Beautiful,” through faith and through the confrontation of doubts, live fulfilled lives. Mama Bower has lost a son in the war and is an aged widow; she knows that the world is “disorderly,” but through her faith in her self and in God she is sustained and happy. She knows there is no road map and she does not look for one. “Despite her religious bedrock, she was convinced that this life was absolutely all a man was entitled to, and she could grow enraged at the sight of anyone who trickled out his days as if there were an eternity more where these came from” (GI, p. 235). Her relationship with the world is like her love for her strange apple tree. The tree is at times perverse—it blooms out of season, it often bears ugly, inedible fruit and sometimes no fruit at all, and its seeds do not grow. Yet, sometimes this same tree bears perfect, sweet apples and, even when out of season, its blossoms are beautiful. Mama Bower cherishes her tree, tends it carefully, and refuses the well-intended gifts of apples from her neighbors. “Is a good tree” she declares (GI, p. 241).

Mama Bower's speech with its impatience for pronouns, her hardness and stubbornness characterized by her jutting jaw, her fastidious cleaning which drives her daughter-in-law to tears, all contribute to Betts's portrait of a remarkable woman at home in the world. She has no time for evasion and pretentiousness; glancing at a drawing of reproductive organs in her grandchildren's sex education book, she remarks “Is not a very good likeness” (GI, p. 245). She dies undaunted and unafraid, and on the morning of her death, her apple tree, which “for once—had known just the right time,” blooms (GI, p. 251).

The worlds of Doris Betts's stories are microcosms, but the view is not microscopic. Her characters wrestle with large questions and cannot find their answers more easily or less painfully in the larger world. In each of Betts's novels, the protagonists must finally return home to test the knowledge they have gained. In Tall Houses in Winter, Ryan Godwin finds that he cannot run away from his past and must return home to face it. Esther Allen, the beautiful daughter in The Scarlet Thread, cannot totally forsake the world of Greenway, North Carolina, which she had fled years before, and must return to make her peace silently and to understand where she has come from. Bebe Sellars of The River to Pickle Beach returns to visit her family in an effort to measure her life with theirs. In Heading West, Nancy Finch feels compelled to return home to test out her newly-found sense of self to see if it can withstand the forces which made her somehow the psychologically willing accomplice in her own kidnapping.

In The River to Pickle Beach, particularly, the microcosm and the macrocosm merge. The story of Bebe and Jack Sellars, which ends with the inexplicable murder of two mongoloid idiots on the beach by a deranged ex-marine, is framed by the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the national memories of the murders of Jack Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The national tragedy is replicated in the local one. For Bebe, the world has become senseless, and Bebe tests out and rejects the options for escape offered by other characters—the Christianity of Pauline Buncombe, the materialism of Bebe's brother Earl, the eternal Peter Pan youthfulness and irresponsibility of her other brother, Troy, the survivalist mentality of Mickey McCane, and finally the intellectual nihilism of the hippy Foley Dickinson who is literally and figuratively going blind. Foley's option is the hardest for Bebe to reject until she comes to see that that young man is as scared and perhaps as insensitive as the others. She finally confronts him:

You know what's wrong with you, little stuck-up boy? You don't think you'll ever do anything dumb or mean or ugly. You don't think you'll fail or be ashamed or have something in your past you can't stand to look at! You think taxes and laws will solve everything.⁴

Bebe comes through her own tragedy (the loss of her baby and her subsequent sterility), her husband's tragedy (his mother's murder of his father and her suicide in a mental institution), the local tragedy, and the national tragedy with the realization that the world must be faced, even if not accepted; she sees that the terms of that facing are honesty, courage and love—all of which she finds in her relationship with Jack Sellars.

In her latest novel, Heading West, Betts explores another form of road map escapism—that of the victim. Nancy Finch has relinquished her own life to take care of an invalid mother and a retarded brother, and to protect them from a sister and brother-in-law whom she sees as uncaring and self-interested. She is a self-made martyr, working a dull job at the library and refusing commitments in her relationships with men. When she is kidnapped by psychopathic Dwight Anderson, and passes up numerous opportunities to escape, she begins to recognize her own complicity in her situation. When she realizes that Dwight will not rape her and examines her own perverse latent disappointment at not being this ultimate victim, she is horrified by what she sees herself becoming. Nancy escapes Dwight and hikes into the Grand Canyon, where for the first time in her life, she must take control in order to survive. Dwight pursues her into the canyon, but she does not submit to his control and causes him to fall to his death. She has reversed the roles and must accept the responsibility. She narrowly escapes death from exhaustion, and after an emotional and psychological battle with herself, finds the courage within herself to accept responsibility for her life and to commit herself to a deep relationship with a man who loves her. She faces up to what she had been so willing to flee from and returns home, no longer a victim, ready to face the doubts within herself.

Yet behind all the unanswered questions in her characters' struggles, there is inherent in Doris Betts's fiction an undefined but implied order in the world. The way in which Betts's characters are so often drawn in opposition to this order might remind the reader of Flannery O'Connor's South, but in Betts's fiction any such order is less definable, more ineffable. Perhaps the difference can be attributed to Betts's Calvinistic, as opposed to O'Connor's Catholic, way of viewing such matters, but it is also reasonable, I would suggest, to say that Betts's world is more modern, more complexly confused. The questions, the mysteries of faith and iniquity may be the same, but in Betts's fictional world the unanswerable questions are perhaps harder to articulate, and the absence of answers even harder to take on faith.

Notes

1. Flannery O'Connor, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961), p. 41.

2. The Astronomer and Other Stories (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 38. All further references to this volume appear parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation A.

3. The Gentle Insurrection and Other Stories (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1954), p. 72. All further references to this volume will appear parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation Gl.

4. The River to Pickle Beach (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 381.