The stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge are the last fruits of Flannery O'Connor's particular genius; and though one or two of them display an uncertainty that must have been the result of her deteriorating health, they are for the most part successful extensions of her earlier fiction. God-ridden and violent—six of the nine end in something like mayhem—they work their own small counter reformation in a faithless world. Flannery O'Connor's limitations were numerous and her range was narrow: she repeated herself frequently and she ignored an impressively large spectrum of human experience. But what she did well, she did with exquisite competence: her ear for dialogue, her eye for human gestures were as good as anybody's ever were: and her vision was as clear and direct and as annoyingly precious as that of an Old Testament prophet or one of the more irascible Christian saints.

Her concern was solely with the vulgarities of this world and the perfections of the other—perfections that had to be taken on faith, for the postulations and descriptions of them in her work are at best somewhat tawdry. She wrote of man separated from the true source of his being, lost, he thinks and often hopes, to God; and of a God whose habits are strange beyond knowing, but Who gets His way in the end. That she was a Southerner and wrote about the South may have been a fortunate coincidence. The South furnished her the kind of flagrant images her theme and her style demanded, and Southern dialogue augmented and perhaps even sharpened her wit. But the South as locale and source was quite peripheral. She once wrote Robert Fitzgerald, "I would like to go to California for about two minutes to further these researches [into the ways of the vulgar]…. Did you see that picture of Roy Rogers' horse attending a church service in Pasadena?" Had she been born in Brooklyn or Los Angeles, the surface agonies of her work would have been altered: perhaps they would have been weakened: but the essential delineations of her fiction, the mythic impulse itself would, I believe, have been essentially unchanged.

As a novelist, she was not successful. She could never fill a booklength canvas: the colors thinned out, the relationships weakened, the images became, before the denouement, rigid and brittle. The weakness obviously was not in her theme, which was big enough to fill the world, powerful enough to shape some of the greatest of all literary careers in the past, and in our own time those of Eliot and Mauriac and Graham Greene and William Golding. What went wrong was technical. Flannery O'Connor used to be fond of saying that the way she wrote a story was "to follow the scent like an old hound dog." At first glance, one might conclude that her novels were written with too little forethought. Wise Blood is full of loose ends: the theme dribbles away through the holes in the structure. According to Fitzgerald, the idea for having Hazel Motes blind himself came to O'Connor when, stuck at the crucial point in her manuscript, she read Oedipus for the first time. Then the earlier parts of the novel had to be reworked to prepare for the ending.

But a lot of novels get written and rewritten this way. And some novels of real power have ends as loose as that left by Enoch Emery who is last seen disappearing into the night in his ape's suit. Except for Haze, all the characters fade off—Hawkes and Sabbath and Hoover Shoates. The land-lady fills the void in the last chapter. But what Motes means to do, and what O'Connor meant for us to understand concerning what he does, seem clear enough. Driven by the Christ he cannot escape from, the "ragged figure" who "moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind," and motions "him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing," he murders his double, the false prophet of his own false religion and therefore kills that part of himself. Then by blinding himself, he exhibits the strength of belief that Hawkes was unable to muster: he redeems Hawkes' failure and turns his vision totally inward away from this world, toward the Christ who exists in the inner darkness.

A better case can be made for The Violent Bear It Away. The beginning is extraordinarily powerful: the old man dies at the breakfast table, the boy abandons the partially dug grave, gets drunk and burns the house down. The lines of the conflict are clearly drawn between the scientific attitude—which is to say, the new gnosticism—of Rayber and the gift of Christian grace which Tarwater has not been able to escape. That Tarwater is a reluctant vessel enhances the drama of the novel: he does the work of God in spite of himself and a part of the resolution of the story is his understanding of his role and his acceptance of it. Having been abused by a homosexual, he has a vision of a burning bush, and a message comes to him: GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY. And in the final scene he is moving toward the darkened city where the "children of God" lie sleeping.

The characters here are fewer than in Wise Blood, which is in itself a kind of virtue: every novelist needs to learn what he can do without. The plot is rounded off neatly. The old man has been buried by some Negroes. The feeble-minded child has been baptized and drowned. The prophet's will has been done: Rayber is defeated. The scent has been true and truly followed and all ought to be well, but the novel remains, for me at least, unsatisfactory. The difficulty does not lie in faulty concept or structure: the scenes balance out nicely and the pace is sure. The trouble, I think, is with the characters: brilliantly drawn and fascinating and symbolically significant as they are, they will not hold up through a long piece of fiction. They are too thin, in the final analysis, and too much alike.

Yet, the characters, the clothes they wear, the gestures they make, the lines they speak, the thoughts they think are what make Flannery O'Connor's work so magnificently vivid and so totally memorable. The dialogue ranges from the outrageous to the absolutely predictable, the latter done so well that it never fails to delight. For example, in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," Mr. Shiftlet says, "There's one of these here doctors in Atlanta that's taken a knife and cut the human heart—the human heart … out of a man's chest and held it in his hand … and studied it like it was a day old chicken, and lady … he don't know no more about it than you or me."

Or take this passage from "The Displaced Person."

"They came from over the water," Mrs. Shortley said with a wave of her arm. "They're what is called Displaced Persons."

"Displaced Persons," he said. "Well now. I declare. What do that mean?"

"It means they ain't where they were born at and there's nowhere for them to go—like if you was run out of here and wouldn't nobody have you."

"It seems like they here, though," the old man said in a reflective voice.

"If they here, they somewhere."

"Sho is," the other agreed. "They here."

The illogic of Negro thinking always irked Mrs. Shortley. "They ain't where they belong to be at," she said.

Again in "The Life You Save," Shiftlet offers the old woman a stick of chewing gum, "but she only raised her upper lip to indicate she had no teeth." In The Violent Bear It Away, Tarwater makes a face suitable for an idiot to fool the truant officer, the old man lies down in his coffin to try it out—his fat stomach protrudes over the top—and the wire to Rayber's hearing aid characterizes the quality of his intelligence. All this is very fine, supported as it is with O'Connor's keen sense of the world in its various aspects: the buildings and sidewalks and trolley cars of the city, the fields and trees and clouds—many clouds—and barns and houses and pigs and cows and peacocks. Her people function richly as images and frequently they evolve into symbols.

In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the Misfit represents the plight of man from the beginning of Christian history to the modern age, and he sets forth the dilemma with such blunt clarity that it cannot be misread. Jesus was truly God or he was not: between being God and not being God there is no middle ground. If He were, then He must be followed. If He were not, then all men are free to work out their own destinies and the terms of their own happiness for themselves. The Misfit is aware of his own helplessness. Life is a mystery to him: the ways of fate are inscrutable: he denies flatly that he is a good man, and he expects neither human charity nor the mercy of God. He knows only that he does not know, and his awareness is the beginning of all wisdom, the first step toward faith.

It is an awareness that the grandmother and the other characters in the story do not share. "You're a good man!" she says to Red Sammy Butts, owner of the roadside restaurant, and he readily agrees. But he is not: nor is she a good woman: nor are Bailey or his wife or his children good. Their belief in their own virtue is a sign of their moral blindness. In pride they have separated themselves from God, putting their trust in modern technology: in paved roads and automobiles (Red Sammy gave two men credit because they were driving a Chrysler); in advertising messages along the highway and tapdancing lessons for children and in motels and pampered cats. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" makes clear—as does Wise Blood—that the characters in Flannery O'Connor's work may not be distinguished as good or bad, or as guilty or innocent. All are guilty; all are evil. The distinctions are between those who know of God's mercy and those who do not, between those who think they can save themselves, either for this life or for the next, and those who are driven, in spite of their own failings, to do God's purpose. In the general retreat from piety, man and the conditions under which he lives have been perverted.

It was Flannery O'Connor's contention that the strange characters who populate her world are essentially no different from you and me. That they are drawn more extravagantly, she would admit, but she claimed that this was necessary because of our depravity: for the morally blind, the message of redemption must be writ large. This is not to say that she conceived of her art as a didactic enterprise: but rather that like all writers of all persuasions, she wrote out of her own ontological view which remained orthodox and Catholic, while the society in which she lived and for which she wrote became more profane and more heretical every day. She could no sooner have stopped writing about God than Camus could have ceased being an existentialist. She was committed and she had to shout to be heard.

But in writing, as in all other human endeavors, one pays his money and makes his choice. He gives up something to get something, and to get the outrageously drawn, spiritually tormented character, it is necessary to sacrifice the subtlety that long fiction demands. Complex characterization is the sine qua non of the novel: the characters must not only have epiphanies: they must change and develop in terms of what they have done and seen. It was the nature of Flannery O'Connor's fictional vision that discovery on the part of her people was all. When one has witnessed the flaming bush or the tongues of fire or the descending dove, the change is final and absolute and whatever happens thereafter is anticlimax. This is why the characters in O'Connor's novels fade and become static and often bore us with their sameness before we are done with the book. But fulfilling their proper roles—that is of revelation, discovery—in the short stories, they are not boring and they do what they were conceived to do.

In the society which is defined by the grandmother and the Misfit, the central conflict is between those who are driven by God and those who believe in their own self-sufficiency. This idea was put forth in Wise Blood, but the struggle took place too much inside the mind of Motes, and O'Connor's efforts at finding images for her values were not entirely successful. In the heavily ironic "Good Country People," the conflict is between two of the godless. Hulga, the Ph.D. in philosophy, is deprived of her wooden leg by Pointer, the Bible salesman, when she will not submit to his advances. But more than this, she is robbed forever of her belief in the final efficacy of the rational process. This issue is fully joined, as I indicated earlier, in The Violent Bear It Away: Rayber believes in the social sciences, their theories, their statistics. To him, all mysticism is superstition, nothing is finally unexplainable, and man is the product of his environment. That the latter may not be quite true is made clear from the outset by the presence of Rayber's idiot son. But Rayber sees Bishop as the kind of mistake of nature that will ultimately be eradicated in the course of scientific advancement. All things will sooner or later be subject to the control of man. Tarwater, the unwilling instrument of grace, represents the super-rational quality of the Christian impulse. Determined not to do what his uncle, the prophet, had set for him to do, he does so anyway. Every step he takes away from the task of baptising Bishop takes him closer to that very act. All his bad temper, his country cunning and his determination to be and to act to suit himself avail no more than Rayber's educated scheming. God snatches whom He will and sets His will in motion.

One of the most successful stories in Everything That Rises, and in my judgment one of the best pieces Flannery O'Connor ever wrote, is a shorter and somewhat more realistic reworking of The Violent Bear It Away. The characters in "The Lame Shall Enter First" are three: Sheppard, city recreational director and volunteer counselor at the reformatory; Norton, his son who still grieves over the death of his mother; and Rufus Johnson, a fourteen-year-old, Bible reading criminal with a club foot. Like Rayber, Sheppard knows the answers to everything. When he discovers, during his ministrations at the reformatory, that Rufus has an I.Q. of 140, he determines to rehabilitate him, hard nut that he is. "Where there was intelligence, anything was possible." Immediately on seeing the boy, Sheppard discovers the source of Rufus' delinquency. "The case was clear to Sheppard instantly. His mischief was compensation for the foot."

To know everything is to be able to solve everything, and therefore Sheppard sets out to rearrange life for the mutual benefit of Rufus and Norton, who, being an only child, is selfish and needs to learn to share. Reluctantly, Rufus comes to live with Sheppard, but he does nothing to make himself pleasant. Where Sheppard is kind, Rufus is surly. He betrays Sheppard's trust in many ways, the most important of which is by corrupting Norton. He disputes Sheppard's claim that when one is dead he is simply gone, that the entry into the grave is final. Rufus knows himself to be evil, and if he does not repent he will go to hell, but the good go to heaven and everybody—including Norton's mother—goes somewhere.

Sheppard points out that a belief in God or Satan is incompatible with the "space age," and in order to turn the minds of the boys from superstition to healthy reality, he installs a telescope at the attic window. Sheppard tells the boys to look at the moon: they may go there someday: they may become astronauts. But Rufus is more interested in what will happen to the soul after death, and Norton thinks what he sees in the sky is his mother. Norton kills himself in the end, preferring death to life—or rather, preferring the life to come that he has learned about from Rufus to the drab logical existence he has lived with Sheppard. The victory here belongs to Rufus, who is lame and evil and conscious of both. He takes pride in his club foot, not because it explains his character or causes him to be forgiven his trespasses, but because it represents to him something of the burden of being human, the lameness of soul, the weight of sinfulness that we all must endure.

In spite of its typical O'Connor grimness, "The Lame Shall Enter First" comes to a more optimistic conclusion than does The Violent Bear It Away. Sheppard has his epiphany. When Johnson has finally been carried off to the police station, Sheppard reflects that he has nothing to reproach himself with. "I did more for him [Johnson] than I did for my own child."

Slowly his face drained of color. It became almost grey beneath the white halo of his hair. The sentence echoed in his mind, each syllable like a dull blow. His mouth twisted and he closed his eyes against the revelation. Norton's face rose before him, empty, forlorn, his left eye listing almost imperceptibly toward the outer rim as if it could not bear a full view of grief. His heart constricted with a repulsion for himself so clear and intense that he gasped for breath. He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton. He had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself. He saw the clear-eyed Devil, the sounder of hearts, leering at him from the eyes of Johnson. His image of himself shrivelled until everything was black before him. He sat there paralyzed, aghast.

Jacques Maritain says, in Art and Scholasticism, "A reign of the heart which is not first of all a reign of truth, a revival of Christianity which is not first of all theological, disguises suicide as love." This is to say, in a more complex and sophisticated fashion, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And who in Flannery O'Connor's work is without his good intentions? Only those who are conscious of their own evil. Only those who are driven by the grace of God. Julian in the title story of Everything That Rises is charity itself in his view toward the world at large; but his mother, in whose house he lives, is the object of his scorn and hatred. He despises her for her stupidity which is real and for her narrowness: she is against integration. On the bus, Julian sits beside Negroes and makes conversation with them, not because he loves his fellow man, but to annoy his mother. Later, she patronizingly offers a penny to a little Negro boy, is knocked down by the boy's mother and Julian is delighted. But like Sheppard, he too in the end is forced to see his own guilt.

Once more, in the same volume, the same theme is introduced in "The Enduring Chill." The story opens with Asbury's return from New York where he has been living and trying to write, to his mother's farm in Georgia where he thinks he will die. He has come because illness has forced him to come, and he has in his possession the only piece of writing he was ever able successfully to finish: a long statement of his grievances, an indictment blaming his mother for all his failures, his weaknesses, his unfulfilled desires: he holds her accountable for every miserable thing that has ever happened to him. The source of his present misery, however, is his previous disobedience of one of her rules for conduct in the dairy. Earlier he was home to do research on a play he was writing about "The Negro." To get close to his subject matter, he worked in the dairy with his mother's hired men, and here to prove his solidarity with the other race, he suggested that they all drink milk together. The Negroes would not, but Asbury did, and now he has undulant fever.

The end of "The Enduring Chill" and the end of life as Asbury has heretofore led it are marked by the descent of the Holy Ghost, the sign of God's mercy. But until this point all of Asbury's affection for mankind has been as vague and directionless in his mind as are the outlines of the lecture on Zen Buddhism he attended in New York. Negroes for him are not human beings, but "The Negro," and he shows kindness to those on the farm that he may learn more about them for the advancement of his own projects. He abhors his mother and his sister, the priest and the doctor who try to help him. But God snatches him away. Of such is our hope.

Of the nineteen stories by Flannery O'Connor so far published—I am told that at least one has not yet been printed—nine end in the violent deaths of one or more persons. Three others end in or present near the end physical assaults that result in a greater or less degree of bodily injury. Of the remaining seven, one ends in arson, another in the theft of a wooden leg, another in car theft and wife abandonment. The other four leave their characters considerably shaken but in reasonable case. Each of the novels contains a murder and taken together, they portray a wide range of lesser offences, including sexual immorality, ordinary and otherwise, voyeurism, mummy stealing, self-mutilation, assault with a deadly weapon, moonshining, vandalism and police brutality. All this, performed by characters who are for the most part neither bright nor beautiful, is the stuff of Flannery O'Connor's comic view.

Her apparent preoccupation with death and violence, her laughter at the bloated and sinful ignorance of mankind informed her continuing argument with the majority view. Believing as she did in a hereafter, she did not think, as most of us do, that death is the worst thing that can happen to a human being. I do not mean that she held life cheap, but rather that she saw it in its grandest perspective. Nor did she conceive of earthly happiness and comfort as the ends of man. The old lady in "The Comforts of Home" brings a whore into the house with her own son because she believes that nobody deserves punishment. This is the other kind of sentimental, self-serving charity, the obverse of that practiced by Sheppard and Asbury. Both kinds result from a misunderstanding of ultimate truth. But so much of even the apparent worst of O'Connor is funny, because, as Kierkegaard made clear, under the omniscience of God, the position of all men is ironic: measured against eternity, the world is but a dream.

In her work the strain of hope is strong. "Revelation" stands not necessarily as the best story she ever wrote, but as a kind of final statement, a rounding off of her fiction taken as a whole. O'Connor's version of the ship of mankind is a doctor's office and here sits Mrs. Turpin surrounded by the various types of humanity: the old and the young, the white and, briefly, the black, the educated and the uneducated, trash and aristocrat and good country people. Mrs. Turpin's thoughts are mostly on differences, on how, if Jesus has asked her to choose, she would have come to earth as a Negro of the right sort before she would have come as a trashy white person. The conversation is of human distinctions and of the race question, and from the beginning a silent girl with a bad complexion and a Wellesley degree regards her with loathing from behind a book. Finally, while Mrs. Turpin is in the act of thanking Jesus for making her who she is and putting her where she is, the girl attacks her and calls her an old wart hog from hell.

Mrs. Turpin's satisfaction with herself is broken: for her the scuffle in the doctor's office has shaken the scheme of things: her concept of herself and her relationships with both God and man have been called into question. She has a vision at the end.

She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extended upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right…. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

So no one escapes the need for grace: even the virtues of this world, being worldly, are corrupt. But it is easy to guess what Mrs. Turpin sees. Passing before her is that gallery of rogues and lunatics who are the personae of Flannery O'Connor's work—all of them loved from the beginning, and all of them saved now by God's mercy, terrible and sure.