Southern Crosses

Like Flannery O’Connor, I was born in Georgia. I used to have a thick Southern accent, until my momma hired a British nanny to wallop it out of me; Momma reckons that’s why I live in London now. But if I start missing home, I can always dip into O’Connor’s fiction from the Deep South of the 1940s and ’50s. She never lost her accent, and you can hear it on every page of everything she ever wrote.

Wise Blood brings it out best. It’s a novel that might seem stylized and artificial to someone who hasn’t spent an afternoon driving a slow car through rural Georgia, listening to the God-bothered radio preachers with their nasal twang. The novel is full of these creatures. Hoover Shoats tells us he ‘was on the radio for three years with a program that give real religious experiences to the whole family. Didn’t you ever listen to it – called Soulsease, a quarter hour of Mood, Melody, and Mentality. I’m a real preacher, friend.’ Blind Asa Hawks, with his sex-crazed daughter Sabbath, hands out tracts saying ‘Jesus Loves you’, while calling out ‘If you won’t repent, give up a nickel. I can use it as good as you. Wouldn’t you rather have me beg than preach?’ And chief among these cynical grotesques is a fierce enigma of a man named Hazel Motes. Hazel arrives in an unnamed, unreal city, fleeing Christ. He’s been raised by a country preacher and he can’t rid himself of the taint of prophecy, however much he tries. Everything he attempts moves him closer to Jesus, and enrages him further. Even when he was a child, ‘there was already a deep wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin’ – so there really is no escape. Every hat he wears makes him look like a preacher; train travellers and used car salesmen and soda-fountain waitresses all think he’s a preacher; a taxi driver tells him, ‘It ain’t only the hat. It’s a look in your face somewheres.’ The novel follows Hazel’s constant attempts to combat his fate. He finds his way to a brothel: ‘Listen, I come for the usual business. . . I ain’t no goddam preacher’ – to which the lady replies with sleek irony, ‘That’s okay, son. Momma don’t mind if you ain’t a preacher.’ O’Connor explores this theme of the Christian malgré lui in most of her work. In her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1955), Francis Marion Tarwater of Powderhead, Tennessee, is like a younger Hazel Motes, anointed to prophesy by his fiery, dying uncle. Everything that Rises Must Converge (1956) and the posthumous Collected Stories (1971) show precursors and inheritors of these burdened, haunted, intensely comic characters – people fighting to get out from under a yoke. Such freedom, O’Connor observed in a preface to the second edition of Wise Blood, ‘is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen’. Most people in the South know and read O’Connor, even from childhood; she is canonical, a literary icon, a local girl made good. A Roman Catholic in the Protestant Bible Belt, she can be pitched as a religious writer who grapples with obsession and spiritual conflict and the general vertigo of faith within a dismembered modernity. More than this, she’s a comic writer with a fiercely hilarious, gothic aesthetic and a completely unfettered savagery. Much of her fiction also involves hideously ill-behaved children running rings around their elders. My favourites are two little hellions named June Star and John Wesley from a story collection called A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1953). They end up dead, but not before sassing their elders over every minute of a long drive in the country: ‘Let’s go through Georgia fast so we won’t have to look at it much. . . Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground.’ Partly because they’re jumping around so much, the car rolls over into a ditch: ‘“We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” the children screamed in a frenzy of delight. “But nobody’s killed,” June Star said with disappointment as her grandmother limped out of the car.’ Everybody finally does get killed, in a coldly excessive dénouement, by an escaped convict – a spiritually furious villain named ‘The Misfit’ who picks off the family one by one. The grandmother is the last to go, after working herself up into the ecstatic belief that The Misfit is her own son – ‘one of my babies, one of my own children!’ Disturbed by this form of charitable forgiveness, The Misfit kills her brutally and intones a grimly comic backcountry epitaph: ‘She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’ O’Connor’s fictions may start out like fables, or cautionary tales by Belloc, but they end up nearer the spiky moral world of Waugh and Greene and Muriel Spark. Characters in these writers’ novels can become ferociously resentful about being redeemed without having had any choice in the matter; about having to put up with moral restrictions on their behaviour and with generally hideous fellow-Catholics; about being so utterly, thoroughly, eternally under the thumb of a higher power, as if they were children. And it is the children and young people and misfits in O’Connor’s writing who act with viciousness and wit, because this returns to them a momentary measure of power in a universe that claims arbitrary authority over them. The effort generally destroys both them and those around them, but it brings completeness of a sort. Among these is Enoch Emory, the 18-year-old moron who gives Wise Blood its title. Enoch has ‘wise blood like his daddy’. There are no other words for his condition: loose translations like ‘instinct’, or ‘the courage of his convictions’ or ‘obsessive-compulsive mania’ lack the poetry and mystery that give the phrase its power. We see what wise blood does to Enoch, and what it makes him think and do, without ever really knowing what it is. He steals a mummy out of a museum to be a ‘new Jesus’ and beats up a man to get his gorilla costume – all because his blood tells him to. I love Enoch for the spirited parade of simile he provokes in O’Connor. Enoch ‘looked like a hound-dog with light mange’; his ‘heart began to grip him like a little ape clutching at the bars of its cage’; his prattling conversation so vexed Hazel Motes that Motes’s face ‘looked as if it had a shout closed up in it; it looked like one of those closet doors in a gangster picture where someone is tied to a chair behind it with a towel in his mouth’. This sort of hyperbolic simile is certainly very common in the South (‘hotter than Georgia asphalt’, ‘serious as a heart attack’) but in O’Connor’s deft comic hands it takes on a spiritual dimension. Enoch is like a sinner or a prophet – and it’s hard to tell which in this decayed, sub-rational and thoroughly scrambled version of Christian faith. The scene with the gorilla suit is a fabulous allegory of misunderstood faith in redemption: Enoch observes a marketing stunt to promote a movie about a gorilla, involving a man in a costume shaking hands with children: ‘GONGA! Giant Jungle Monarch and a Great Star! HERE IN PERSON!’ He desires the same unconditional respect and even love that he sees the children giving the gorilla. So he steals the costume (deviously and violently) and, having donned this new armour of faith, naturally now repulses everyone he meets. Hazel Motes flees God by founding his own church, the Church Without Christ. He stands on the hood of his car, ‘a high rat-colored Essex’, preaching that there is no sin, no blasphemy, no redemption, no belief. From the start it is clear to all but Hazel himself that he protests too much – he who from the age of 12 ‘saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind’. His Church (like his rickety old car) never gets going; various figures block his way either malevolently or with a faint whiff of salvation about them. When someone pushes Hazel’s car off a cliff, destroying his platform and his means of flight, this nonetheless clears the way for him to live his complicated faith rather than rant about it. He mortifies his flesh, and in doing so at last attracts a real convert, someone who had never listened to him preach nor would ever have been moved by mere words. This woman has had a dull life, ‘without pain and without pleasure’, and now finds both in Hazel. She tells him his self-abnegation is not normal – ‘it’s something that people have quit doing, like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats’ – but nonetheless she is transfigured by it, and begins to perceive the deepening mystery of being. These people have no apparatus for understanding the shattered world they live in; because of this, repellent though most of them are, they seem to me sympathetic. Motes is a monster, Enoch is pitiful, and I’m no Catholic – but Wise Blood is a moving and haunting novel that sounds like home.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 9 © Pegram Harrison 2006