The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [5]
The final story, “Judgement Day,” was mailed to me in early July. It is a revised and expanded version of “The Geranium,” which appears to have been a favorite of hers, for letters to Miss McKee reveal that in 1955 she had also worked on an intermediate version under the title “An Exile in the East.” As “Judgement Day” it became the ninth story in the collection published posthumously in 1965. What turned out to be my last letter to Flannery was dated July 7, 1964. I knew of the recurrence of her illness, of course, but I did not know that the lupus was now uncontrolled. I enclosed with my letter an advance proof of our catalogue description of Everything That Rises Must Converge as it was then conceived. She never replied and in late July she was taken to the Baldwin County hospital at Milledgeville, where she died in a coma on August 3. There are thirty-one stories in this volume. Nineteen are taken from Flannery’s two collections and twelve appear for the first time in book form. For this edition we have followed the author’s original manuscripts for “The Partridge Festival,”
“Why Do the Heathen Rage?” and the first six stories. For the latter group we have also retained the order she followed in her thesis. The order of the other stories is chronological according to date of composition and does not duplicate the arrangement the author worked out for the two collections, which are of course available as she wanted them.
Nor is it implied that all the stories here are of equal merit. It simply seems desirable to preserve as complete a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction as possible.
Elizabeth Bishop, who with her poet’s eye sees more than most of us, wrote at the time of Flannery’s death: “I am sure her few books will live on and on in American literature. They are narrow, possibly, but they are clear, hard, vivid, and full of bits of description, phrases, and an odd insight that contains more real poetry than a dozen books of poems.” She added a bit of testimony that Flannery herself would have relished: “Critics who accuse her of exaggeration are quite wrong, I think. I lived in Florida for several years next to a flourishing ‘Church of God’ (both white and black congregation), where every Wednesday night Sister Mary and her husband spoke in tongues.’ After those Wednesday nights, nothing Flannery O’Connor ever wrote could seem at all exaggerated to me.”
The Geranium (1946)
OLD DUDLEY folded into the chair he was gradually molding to his own shape and looked out the window fifteen feet away into another window framed by blackened red brick. He was waiting for the geranium. They put it out every morning about ten and they took it in at five-thirty. Mrs. Carson back home had a geranium in her window. There were plenty of geraniums at home, better-looking geraniums. Ours are sho nuff geraniums, Old Dudley thought, not any er this pale pink business with green, paper bows.
The geranium they would put in the window reminded him of the Grisby boy at home who had polio and had to be wheeled out every morning and left in the sun to blink. Lutisha could have taken that geranium and stuck it in the ground and had something worth looking at in a few weeks. Those people across the alley had no business with one. They set it out and let the hot sun bake it all day and they put it so near the ledge the wind could almost knock it over.