Professor Ashley Brown

The Hawkes and Flannery O’Connor

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Thursday night, our friend David Boatwright met Caroline and me at the Terrace Theater to check out the Ethan Hawke Flannery O’Connor biopic Wildcat.[1]  It’s gotten mixed reviews—hovers around 5 on the Rotten Tomato ten point scale— but I wonder if to fully appreciate the film you need to be familiar with O’Connor’s work. Throughout the action, Hawke and fellow screenwriter Shelby Gaines intersperse fiction from O’Connor’s canon into the story of her adulthood, but if you’re unfamiliar with her stories — e.g., “Parker’s Back” or “Revelation”— you very well may find the film quilt-like, a series of narratives stitched together that don’t create a comprehensive or unified overview. Brandon Yu, who reviewed the movie for New York Times, complains, “Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.” However, if you’ve read the stories, this is not the case. You see how they came to be via her daily interactions with others and understand how the stories embody her Catholic vision.

I don’t think the Hawkes (Ethan’s daughter Maya plays O’Connor and his wife Rachel is credited as a producer) necessarily set out to produce a fully integrated masterpiece like Citizen Kane but rather made the movie as an homage to Flannery, an artist of the highest caliber who simultaneously can make you laugh out loud and feel pathos. Maya Hawke discovered O’Connor in high school, used O’Connor’s Prayer Journal for her audition monologue at Julliard, and essentially became obsessed with the writer. 

I can empathize. I’ve learned a lot from Flannery O’Connor about writing fiction. Not only that, but her stories are so fun to teach, are so well crafted with each element of the plot — name selection, physical description, characterization, symbolism, and tone—linked to a common central theme: in a Catholic universe underserving people can be granted grace, even in the seemingly godforsaken Southern Gothic world of rural Georgia. 

Take the story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” for example, which dramatizes a family vacation where a mother, father, two bratty children, an infant, and a grandmother are murdered by an escaped convict called the Misfit. Yet I’d classify the story as a comedy, both in the literary sense and also in the Medieval sense of “The Divine Comedy” where a soul moves from darkness to light. The grandmother in the story is a self-centered pain-in-the-ass who essentially causes the wreck that allows the Misfit to murder the family and steal their car. However, at the very end of the story, grace descends upon the old woman when she sees how miserable the Misfit is and tries to comfort him:

[The Misfit’s] voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them. 

Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky. 

illustration by Jeffrey Smith

Note that her “legs are crossed,” an obvious Christian symbol, “under her like a child,” which suggests innocence regained, and that she is “smiling up at a cloudless sky.” In O’Connor’s Catholic universe, this amounts to a happy ending for the Grandmother’s death comes at a moment of redemption. This message is no doubt alien to most contemporary US citizens; however, as the movie makes abundantly clear, she wasn’t writing for the materialistic middle class. 

“Either one is serious about salvation or one is not,” O’Connor writes in Mystery and Manners. “And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.”

For me a movie is a successful if I think about it a lot after seeing it. In the wee hours this morning, as I wandered the barren moors of my insomnia, I thought about how the subdued colors of the film in general and threadbare genteel shabbiness of her home in specific underscore the profound melancholy of Flannery O’Connor’s life. She had studied at the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop, hung out with Robert Lowell and Katherine Anne Porter, but after developing lupus was exiled from a literacy life in the North to a suffocatingly provincial existence on a farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, There she worked in pain and physical decline until her death at 39, all the while being totally unappreciated by her homefolk who found her fiction to be inaccessible and life-negating.

My only gripe is that the Hawkes’ depiction of O’Connor lacks the dry humor that she demonstrated in her letters. Maya Hawkes’ acting is superb, but she portrays O’Connor as sort of a rigid, humorless young woman on the spectrum whereas in reality O’Connor was fun to be with. I once had dinner with the late Ashley Brown, a professor at the University of South Carolina, who was close friends with Flannery and who appears often in her collected letters. I asked him if she were as severe a Catholic as the stories suggested, and he said, “Oh, no, not at all. She was delightful, very witty, fun to be with.” Then he whipped out photo albums featuring pictures he had taken of her with her peacocks. She was often beaming in those photos.

Nevertheless, by external standards, her life was bleak, and the film’s underscoring of that fact has made me appreciate her achievement even more. To see her alchemizing on screen the characters from her daily life into the immortals of her stories is very satisfying indeed. I also appreciate the way she didn’t outline her stories but had them unspool spontaneously from her subconscious, which is the way I also write fiction.

I’ll leave you with this delightful seduction scene from “Good Country People” where in a hayloft Manly Pointer, a door-to-door Bible salesman, demands that one-legged hot-to-trot nihilist Hulga Joy Hopewell say the words “I love you” to satisfy a mechanical formula he insists must be followed as a prerequisite for sex:

The boy’s look was irritated but dogged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care a thing about what all you done. I just want to know if you love me or don’tcher?” and he caught her to him and wildly planted her face with kisses until she said, “Yes, yes.”

“Okay then,” he said, letting her go. “Prove it.”

She smiled, looking dreamily out on the shifty landscape. She had seduced him without even making up her mind to try. “How?” she asked, feeling that he should be delayed a little.

He leaned over and put his lips to her ear. “Show me where your wooden leg joins on,” he whispered.

I often say that my novel Today, Oh Boy has the most unerotic sex scene in all of American literature, but now, rereading the above, I take it back.

[1] Although better known in Charleston a muralist and a painter, David is also a filmmaker, and sitting next to a filmmaker made me pay closer attention to technique, which is a good thing. 

America, Good Luck by David Boatwright

In Memory of Seamus Heaney

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When you get to be my age, i.e., the ol’ “three score and ten” of Psalm 90, the years can seem like a blur, so when I opened Facebook this morning, I was surprised that already nine years have passed since the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s death at 74. Although it is commonplace now to hear somebody call 70-something sort young for death, Heaney’s mortal dress was more than a little tattered – he looked frail, every bit of three score and fourteen – and it appears that a mere fall did him in. 

among school children

I first became enamored with Heaney in 1978.  Ashley Brown, a former professor, invited me to dinner at his house on Barnwell Street not long after he had garnered a bit of fame for appearing frequently in The Habit of Being, a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s letters.  It was a memorable evening with Dr. Brown as he hauled out personal photographs of him and O’Connor and also of his dear friend Elizabeth Bishop, whom he had brought to South Carolina for a reading when I was still in graduate school.[1]  During the evening, he asked me if I had heard of Heaney, and when I admitted I hadn’t, he whipped out a couple of poems, so as soon as I returned to Charleston, I purchased Heaney’s second collection, A Door into the Dark.

Of course, the 60’s were the decade of confessional poets like Plath and Lowell, poets whom my teacher James Dickey once referred to in class as “scab pickers,” poets who more often than not wrote in free verse and who demanded from the reader – at least in Lowell’s case – the patience to unravel seemingly random associations, many of which pertained to his private life.[2]  

Heaney’s verse was different – musical, earthy – its subject matter a mixture of the mundane and the political strife of Northern Ireland.   Here he is in “The Outlaw” describing in loose iambic couplets a bull mating with a cow:

Unhurried as an old steam engine shunting.

He circled, snored, and nosed. No hectic panting,

Just the unfussy ease of a good tradesman;

Then an awkward unexpected jump, and

His knobbled forelegs straddling her flank,

He slammed life home, impassive as a tank.

Dropping off like a tipped-up load of sand.

“She‟ll do,‟ said Kelly and tapped his ash-plant

Across her hindquarters. “If not, bring her back.‟

I walked ahead of her, the rope now slack

While Kelly whooped and prodded his outlaw

Who, in his own time, resumed the dark, the straw.

Heaney, standing, fourth from the left

Many of his poems deal with childhood experiences on the family farm right outside of Castledawson in County Londonderry.  Here’s a segment from the title poem of his first collection, “The Death of a Naturalist”:

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Of course, Yeats is the standard for any Irish poet and an impossible one at that, but it’s certain that Heaney was the greatest Irish poet since Yeats and one who belongs in the same pantheon with the postwar English master Philip Larkin. Heaney is one of the four Irishmen to receive a Nobel prize in literature along with Yeats, Shaw, and Beckett – rare company indeed.   His loss is a great one for poetry and for Ireland – for all of us really – but old men are destined to die as Yeats reminds us on his very tombstone.  

Nevertheless, like his hero Beowulf, Heaney will live on in his verse.

Personal Helicon

for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells 

And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. 

I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells 

Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. 

***

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. 

I savoured the rich crash when a bucket 

Plummeted down at the end of a rope. 

So deep you saw no reflection in it. 

***

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch 

Fructified like any aquarium. 

When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch 

A white face hovered over the bottom. 

***

Others had echoes, gave back your own call 

With a clean new music in it. And one 

Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall 

Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection. 

***

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, 

To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring 

Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme 

To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

[1] Brown had also in his youth visited Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, so being in Brown’s presence put me a mere two degrees of separation from my heroes Joyce, Eliot, and Hemingway. You can read about Elizabeth Bishop’s visit to USC HERE.

[2] I witnessed a dual reading featuring Dickey and Lowell in 1974. Afterwards, I learned that Lowell detested Dickey, so there’s that.