Recent Reading: A Good Man Is Hard To Find

 

Having watched a good documentary about O"Connor on television recently, I spent the last couple of days reading her story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find. This was the only story anthology published in her lifetime; later, after she died Everything That Rises Must Converge, and The Complete Stories were published. That makes for a total of 66 published stories -- that plus her novel, Wise Blood -- is all the fiction she ever wrote. But when you consider that she died at age 39 and was in sick, weak, and in pain for much of her adult life, that is a lot.

I thought I might quote a few passages from two of the stories. 

The first quotes come from the title story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." I am reminded of a line that one of O'Connor's friends had in the PBS documentary about social expectations in the Deep South. (I am paraphrasing). "You can lie, you can cheat, you can steal, you can even murder someone. But you can't not go to church."

"No, lady," The Misfit said while he was buttoning it up, "I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it."

Let me also include a few other quotes from the story that I liked:

"Yes'm," The Misfit said as if he agreed. "Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course," he said, "they never shown me my papers. That's why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you'll have something to prove you ain't been treated right. I call myself The Misfit," he said, "because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."

As well as this one:

"Lady," The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, "there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip."

And, finally, this one:

"She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

The other story I wanted to quote from is called "Good Country People." It is a story about a highly educated woman with a prosthetic leg who meets an uneducated Bible salesman who tries to seduce her after trying unsuccessfully to sell her mother a Bible. The story, while not, strictly autobiographical, has a number of elements connected to O'Connor's personal experiences. One thought I had when watching the documentary is that O'Connor was a very shy person who spent a lot of time thinking. She also was very sick for much of her adult life and viewed the corporeal body differently than, I think, most of us.

The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenaline in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain. Even before he released her, her mind, clear and detached and ironic anyway, was regarding him from a great distance, with amusement but with pity. She had never been kissed before and she was pleased to discover that it was an unexceptional experience and all a matter of the mind's control. Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka. When the boy, looking expectant but uncertain, pushed her gently away, she turned and walked on, saying nothing as if such business, for her, were common enough.

The description of the event continues:

The girl at first did not return any of the kisses but presently she began to and after she had put several on his cheek, she reached his lips and remained there, kissing him again and again as if she were trying to draw all the breath out of him. His breath was clear and sweet like a child's. He mumbled about loving her and about knowing when he first seen her that he loved her, but the mumbling was like the sleepy fretting of a child  being put to sleep by his mother. Her mind, throughout this, never stopped or lost itself for a second to her feelings. "You ain't said you loved me none," he whispered finally, pulling back from her. "You got to say that." 

She looked away from him off into the hollow sky and men down at a black ridge and then down farther into what appeared to be two green swelling lakes. She didn't realize he had taken her glasses but this landscape could not seem exceptional to her surroundings. 

"You got to say it," he repeated. "You got to say you love me." 

She was always careful about how she committed herself. "In a sense," she began, "if you use the word loosely, you might say that. But it's not a word I use. I don't have illusions. I'm one of those people who see through to nothing." 

The boy was frowning. "You got to say it. I said it and you got to say it," he said. 

The girl looked at him almost tenderly. "You poor baby," she murmured. "It's just as well you don't understand," and she pulled him by the neck, face-down, against her. "We are all damned," she said, "but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there's nothing to see. It's a kind of salvation."

If you have read the story recently you will recognize the irony of the story. The girl thinks she has no illusions, but she is the one who is fooled by the Bible salesman at the end of the story. Her education does not make her invincible.