Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge
[In the following review, Kane discusses the distinctive qualities of three stories from O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge—"The Lame Shall Enter First," "A View of the Woods," and "Everything That Rises Must Converge."]
Reviewing the last book of the talented Flannery O'Connor is an awesome task. It seems fitting to praise the quality of her life, the extraordinary spirit that animated Miss O'Connor through her long and painful illness. Such is Robert Fitzgerald's splendid introduction to Everything That Rises Must Converge. Fitzgerald movingly evokes the woman who wrote the stories and suggests a continuity in the totality of her work. I shall attempt neither. It requires a personal acquaintance like Fitzgerald's to convey all Miss O'Connor's gifts for living as well as for writing. But the stories here collected can be confronted, admired, and recommended.
The nine stories, all but one of which have previously appeared in various journals, have some common concerns. There are similarities in theme, method, and characterization among them, as there are resemblances to earlier works. But the similarities strike me less than the distinctive qualities of each story as an entity. A conflict may resemble that between generations in other stories, a character's style of language or of life may remind one of other O'Connor characters, but each story has its internal logic and special interest apart from the patterns in the total work. Thus I shall focus primarily on three especially fine stories.
"The Lame Shall Enter First" dissects a smug social worker who neglects his son in order to try to restore a delinquent boy whose intelligence he admires. He fails with the delinquent boy just as he fails with his son because his self-image as a noble selfless agent of truth and goodness conceals from him his failure to love until a blinding recognition comes too late to help either boy.
As the story opens, Sheppard watches his ten-year old son Norton and contemplates with distaste a face that he believes reveals the mediocrity of a person who will never learn to be good or unselfish. Sheppard tells Norton about a boy he has counseled at the reformatory, a volunteer job that Sheppard performs for "the satisfaction of knowing that he was helping boys that no one else cared about." Sheppard's failure to recognize that no one cares about his son is one of several ironies implicit in the scene. He sympathizes with the boy, named Rufus, because his mother is in prison, but when Norton cries in grief for his dead mother, Sheppard feels disgust for a grief that he sees as selfish. Sheppard speaks feelingly about Rufus's deformed foot, but remains oblivious to his son's needs, as one word tellingly suggests. To one of his father's sermons about Rufus's needs, Norton replies "lamely." Sheppard, who prides himself on his understanding of the debilitating effects of physical lameness, cannot recognize how his rejection has maimed his son.
Rufus comes to live with Sheppard and Norton, but he opposes Sheppard's efforts to help him. Their conflict focuses on Rufus's insistence that he is bad because Satan has him in his power. Sheppard grows angry at the persistence of a belief that he considers unintelligent. He tries to encourage Rufus's intellectual gifts by buying a telescope that he mounts in the attic. Rufus shows less interest in it than Norton does, but Sheppard ignores his son's attempts to please him. When Norton eagerly listens to Rufus's religious beliefs, Sheppard feels that it is Rufus's "way of trying to annoy him," but decides not to feel annoyed since "Norton was not bright enough to be damaged much" and "Heaven and hell were for the mediocre, and he was that if he was anything." Sheppard's concern about what he considers a stupid belief centers on Rufus's tenacious clinging to it; he abandons his son to error. In this, as in other episodes, Sheppard's expressed liking for goodness is revealed as less a factor than his attraction to intelligence that he can direct. To the person of neither boy does Sheppard respond.
Rufus opposes Sheppard by continuing his vandalism. After he apparently erred in thinking Rufus guilty in one incident, Sheppard resolutely insists on Rufus's innocence. So intent is he on winning Rufus's trust that he continues to neglect his son. In one such instance, after the boys have gone to bed, Sheppard talks with Rufus and leaves him, saying "good night, son." Across the hall, Norton lies in his bed and beckons his father to come in. Sheppard ignores his son because he fears that Rufus will feel that he does not trust him and is consulting Norton about his story. He walks away, thinking happily about the next day when he will take Rufus to get a new corrective shoe. Meanwhile, Norton "sat for some time looking at the spot where his father had stood." The next day, Sheppard continues to neglect Norton so that his attention to Rufus and his shoe will not be divided. But Rufus refuses the shoe and tells Sheppard that he has committed the crimes that the police suspect him of. Confronted with this betrayal, Sheppard is chilled by hatred.
The next evening, Rufus defies Sheppard by reading the Bible at the table, by jubilantly shouting at Sheppard, "the devil has you in his power," and by leaving his house deliberately to be caught at a crime. Norton goes to the attic to look through the telescope. When he tells his father that he sees his mother among the stars, Sheppard orders him to stop being foolish and leaves him. Confronted with Rufus, whom the police bring and who says that he prefers prison to Sheppard's home because Sheppard is not a Christian, Sheppard tells the police: "I did more for him than I did for my own child." He makes a last attempt to reason with Rufus, telling him that he is not evil, that he need not compensate for his foot with crime. Rufus snarls that his foot has nothing to do with his crime and that only Jesus can save him, not a "lying stinking atheist."
Sheppard's phrase "I did more for him than I did for my own child" repeats itself in his mind, at first as consolation, then as "the voice of his accuser." When he realizes that "he had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself," his self-image "shrivelled until everything was black before him." He thinks of the light of his son's face as his salvation and races to tell him that he loves him and will not fail him again. But he finds Norton in the attic "hung in the jungle of shadows, just below the beam from which he had launched his flight into space."
Sheppard's failure is thus explicit at the end. The consequence is shocking in its horror, but it has been prepared for by the texture of the story. For example, descriptions of the dullness or brightness of Norton's eyes suggest his condition and, in retrospect, prepare for his end. In the opening scene, his eyes look forward but are not engaged by what his father says. His eyes are a pale blue, "as if they might have faded" like a shirt, and one of them "listed, almost imperceptibly, toward the outer rim." After his father tells him about Rufus, Norton's eyes brighten slightly when he hopes that Rufus will not come. In his tearful grief for his mother, his eyes become slits. After his grief leads to vomiting and his father speaks kindly about it, he looks blindly at him. When he first listens to Rufus's account of heaven and hell, Norton's eyes "appeared to grow hollow" as he thinks of his mother. His response to Sheppard's explanation that his mother exists only as her spirit lives in others is to harden his pale eyes in disbelief. But to Rufus's comment that his mother is in the sky somewhere, Norton soon responds by looking intently through the telescope. Norton's sense that he has lost his father is poignantly evoked in the episode in which he looks at the space where Sheppard has stood and ignored him, until "his gaze became aimless." The void is filled with Rufus's religion. As Rufus tells Sheppard that he has stolen a Bible, Norton's eyes have an excited sheen, he looks alert, and his eyes are brighter. Norton's eyes glitter with pleasure as he announces that he plans to be a space man. He looks intently through the telescope and with "an unnatural brightness about his eyes," tells his father that he sees his mother. That brightness is the last description of Norton's eyes, but in his moment of revelation, Sheppard realizes that Norton's eye lists "as if it could not bear a full view of grief." Sheppard then sees "the clear-eyed devil, the sounder of hearts, leering at him" with Rufus's eyes. He understands his son's eyes too late.
Sheppard's final awareness comes through a do-gooder cliche: I did more for Rufus than I did for my own son. That this should introduce an understanding too late is ironically appropriate for a person whose language frequently sounds like a bad text book in social work. He hides his neglect of his child behind a platitudinous wish that the child would cease to be selfish. He is opposed by the cliches of revival religion. Through the two sets of language he comes to understand, with simple, concrete immediacy, that he "had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton." But when this insight comes he can only stand in the shadows of his attic "like a man on the edge of a pit."
Less complex understandings come to characters in other stories in this collection, but the consequences frequently are as devastating and as irreversible. "A View of the Woods" brings an old man and his granddaughter who have been apparent allies against her parents to an opposition that ends in death for both. The grandfather's final vision reveals that the progress he has believed in cannot save him.
Mr. Fortune and his double, his nine-year old granddaughter Mary Fortune Pitts, spend most of their time together, usually watching building taking place on land that once was part of Fortune's farm. Fortune sells parts of his land for two reasons: he believes in progress, and he enjoys annoying his son-in-law, who is farming the land. Fortune dislikes his son-in-law generally and particularly because he sees him as the kind of "fool that would let a cow pasture interfere with progress," whereas Fortune is "a man of advanced vision." A rift comes between Fortune and the child when he decides to sell that part of the farm used as a lawn and pasture. Mary Fortune wants to keep it so that they can continue to have a view of the woods. After Fortune sells it, she defies him. He decides that he will have to beat her. When he does, she fights back, saying that she will kill anyone who beats her. Angered, he kills her by pounding her head on a rock. Then he dies of a heart attack.
The conflict between Fortune and the child is not a simple conflict of age and youth: it reflects a difference in values. The two share a liking for watching bulldozers and other machinery, but they differ utterly on the matter of the beauty of woods. In a reversal of a stereotyped assignment of roles, the child stands for the agrarian past, for the beauty of nature, the grandfather for the urban present, for the utility of stores and gasoline stations. The man who buys the land intends to put a gasoline station on the road that probably will soon be paved. Fortune considers how handy it will be to have such services near-by. He sees nothing ugly in the buyer's present site of business, which is replete with junked cars, roadside billboards, and a dance hall. When Mary Fortune surprises him with regard for the view of the woods, Fortune is honestly bewildered. All he sees is a profusion of weeds and "the sullen line of black pine woods,… the gray-blue line of more distant woods and beyond that nothing but the sky, entirely blank except for one of two threadbare clouds." The child, on the other hand, looks at this scene "as if it were a person that she preferred to him." Fortune is shaken enough by her response to look at the view several times that afternoon. But he can see only woods, not beauty. He hopes to win over the child who, as the double he has taught his tricks and to whom he has willed the farm, is his future—a future that has no room for sentimental attachment to anything so common as pine woods. But she is his double in stubborn opposition as well as looks. Each kills the other in defense of his integrity, his values.
Two visions of the old man link his granddaughter to the woods. He has thought of her as "thoroughly of his clay" and her face as "a little red mirror." Thus when he sees red in the woods, he is seeing her death although he fails to realize it. In that first vision, "the gaunt trunks appeared to be raised in a pool of red light that gushed from the almost hidden sun setting behind them." Fortune feels briefly that he is "out of the rattle of everything that led to the future … and held there in the midst of an uncomfortable mystery." It seems "as if someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathed in blood." Fortune closes his eyes against the vision, but he still sees "hellish red trunks … in a black wood." The trees are figuratively bathed with blood when he kills Mary Fortune in "an ugly red bald spot" surrounded by pine trees. As he lies dying, Fortune feels as if he is running toward the lake to escape the ugly pines. But at the lake, he realizes that he cannot swim and escape the gaunt trees that "had thickened into mysterious files." When he looks for help, all he sees is a machine, a "huge yellow monster that sat to the side, as stationary as he was, gorging itself on clay." Fortune cannot escape the pines, as he could not escape Mary Fortune's fury. His refuge, a place that he has welcomed as part of the progressive future, offers only another image of himself as a machine gorging itself on clay—just as Fortune has destroyed "his clay," i.e., his double, and thus himself and his future.
A new awareness comes also to the central character in "Everything That Rises Must Converge." The conflict in this story, between an adult son and his mother, resembles the conflict in other stories in this collection ("Greenleaf," "The Comforts of Home," and "The Enduring Chill"); there are also resemblances in its wry comment about a futile reaching out toward Negroes ("The Enduring Chill" and "Judgment Day"), and in its depiction of a character who wants another to face what he thinks of as reality ("Parker's Back," "The Enduring Chill," and "Revelation"). The story abounds in the humor that often characterizes Miss O'Connor's work. The several strands are apparent as the story opens. Julian resentfully contemplates accompanying his mother on the bus, which she will not ride alone since they have been desegregated. She is going to a reducing class "designed for working girls over fifty, who weighed from 165 to 200 pounds," but Julian's mother says that "ladies did not tell their age or weight." As she prepares to go, she talks about her new hat, wondering if she should have bought such an expensive one. She concludes with trite expressions characteristic of her, "you only live once and paying a little more for it, I at least won't meet myself coming and going."
She meets herself, or rather a Negro woman wearing a hat exactly like hers, on the bus trip to her class. The hats the two women wear are hideous: "A purple velvet flap down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out." Julian's mother has been wearing her hat "like a banner of her imaginary dignity;" the Negro woman has her own dignity. Julian hopes that the episode will teach his mother something about reality, but to his dismay, his mother only finds it funny. The lesson will have more finality for both of them. After they leave the bus, Julian's mother offers the Negro woman's child a penny, as is her custom. The Negro expresses her outrage at what she considers condescension by hitting the white woman with such force that she falls. The preposterous hat falls off; Julian's mother struggles to her feet and dies within the hour. Too late Julian realizes his love for his mother and enters "the world of guilt and sorrow."
Before he suspects that his mother is dying, Julian taunts her by calling her attacker her black double and insisting that she must face a reality in which her manners and graciousness are valueless. But Julian himself is his mother's double and begins to learn that his own defenses may be inadequate. Julian has felt smugly satisfied with his values and resentful of his mother's sense of identity. He believes that only he understands their family heritage and would suit the decayed mansion that had belonged to the family during his mother's girlhood. He congratulates himself because "in spite of growing up dominated by a small mind, he had ended up with a large one." As proof of his superiority, he tries to start a conversation with a Negro man who boards the bus. When the Negro ignores him, he daydreams about confronting his mother with a cultivated Negro. To his discomfort, his mother establishes contact with the Negro child, whom she finds attractive. As his mother dies, killed by a Negro far different from the polished ones of Julian's daydreams, he can only run futilely for help, but his feet are numb and seem to carry him nowhere. He feels a tide of darkness sweeping him back to his mother. Although the Negro woman who unknowingly killed Julian's mother may be suggested by the title, converge also has the sense of uniting in a common interest: it is Julian who must converge. Perhaps he will in the world of sorrow and guilt that is his heritage at the end of the story.
The stories of Everything That Rises Must Converge will bear comparison with the high standard set in Miss O'Connor's earlier work. Much might be said of the ways in which these stories, like the earlier ones, show Miss O'Connor to be the Catholic and Southern writer that she called herself. While not denying the importance of such matters, I feel that they can obscure other qualities and that the stories can and should be seen in the particular before useful generalizations emerge. Everything That Rises Must Converge deserves scrutiny as a document in Flannery O'Connor's life and work, but it also merits praise for the sheer pleasure of good reading that it offers us.
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