Perspectives (3)

O'Connor, "The Partridge Festival"

[Image: “Azaleas” by D. Stanley, licensed under Creative Commons BY 2.0. The photo is of Portugal, not Appalachia, but its looming fog felt apposite.]

“I agree that I must be seen as a writer and not just a Catholic writer, and I wish somebody would do it.” -Flannery O’Connor to Cecil Dawkins, Jan. 26, 1962, in The Habit of Being

This story fascinates me not only because it’s one of Flannery O’Connor’s least discussed works. It’s also one in which she reaches out toward some themes she rarely addressed—with good reason, as we will see. I also think it represents a transition point, a moment when she fell short of all she might have hoped to do: when her usual tricks failed her and she was left staring at the shape of her gift’s limitations.

O’Connor wrote “The Partridge Festival” after The Violent Bear It Away, which was also around the time she began to feel, as she said [somewhere, I’m paraphrasing] in her letters, “I cannot do again what I already know I can do well.” So it’s reasonable to surmise that the piece arose in the context of that dissatisfaction. It wasn’t included in her collection Everything That Rises Must Converge, a decision I wonder about: Did she feel it wasn’t up to the quality of the other pieces in that set?

She also referred to it offhand as “that farce” in several letters around the time of its publication. It is a farce in a way: cross the movie His Girl Friday with Mauriac’s Therese Desqueyroux and you might get something like “The Partridge Festival.”

The story’s point-of-view protagonist Calhoun closely resembles Asbury from “The Enduring Chill,” Julian from “Everything That Rises,” Thomas from “The Comforts of Home,” and Joy Hulga from “Good Country People”: all, like O’Connor herself, self-righteous intellectuals with roots in the South. All sail back from their formal educations in colder states, planning to act as self-appointed prophets to their own country. All aspire to accurately depict, and thereby implicitly to judge, their native place. All promptly run aground against the sandbar of their own pride, as they discover that their judgment retorts back on the judger with at least equal force.

There is already a lesson for ambitious Southern writers here, but the lesson gets richer. Calhoun wants to write a novel about the residents of his hometown, Partridge, showing “how primary injustice operated” and exposing the town’s yearly Azalea Festival as an engine of materialist greed and exploitation (“Beauty Is Our Money Crop;” “They prostitute azaleas!”). It’s true enough that the town’s celebrated beauty makes itself an easy companion to its low-minded cruelty: We find out that, before the story’s main action opens, townspeople have ganged up on the local misfit, Singleton.

The town scorns Singleton partially due to his poverty—which in predictable prosperity-theology fashion they surmise must be his own fault—and partially on the suspicion that he might be biracial (Faulkner’s Joe Christmas springs immediately to mind), though neither basis nor evidence for this is ever clearly established. A cadre of pompous rednecks has forced Singleton through a mock trial, which ends with his overnight imprisonment with a goat in a privy. Singleton’s public crime?: Refusing to buy an Azalea Festival badge.

Later, purportedly motivated by revenge for his public pillorying, Singleton commits a real crime: he goes on a shooting spree that kills five town leaders and the local inebriate. Singleton is then taken to the state mental hospital, where he is at the story’s start; Calhoun, reading the news, becomes convinced that Singleton is an innocent scapegoat, suffering for his community’s sins, and as such the ideal central figure for a tragedy.

This would be a rich enough comic situation on its own, but Calhoun also has a Girardian monstrous double in the supposed romantic interest his coy great-aunts present to him: the bespectacled giant Mary Elizabeth. Disgusted with the aunts’ expectation that Calhoun will find her “sweeter than sugar,” Mary Elizabeth briskly lets Calhoun know not to expect any funny business. She also aspires to cover the Singleton case for the reading public and thereby to “finish off” her hometown “with one swift literary kick.”

Because she works as a journalist who considers fiction “beneath her,” Mary Elizabeth believes she can get the idea across to her readers without ever meeting or speaking to Singleton. On learning this, Calhoun the fictionist cannot help goading her: “You are probably … afraid to look at him. The novelist is never afraid to look at the real object.”

Mary Elizabeth is having none of this. Anything Calhoun can do, she can do better. From this point forward the engine of the narrative is driven by the odd couple’s unity of purpose plus their differences on how to achieve it. Throughout, Calhoun painfully knows and can perceive Mary Elizabeth’s “essential shallowness”—what he does not yet know is that he can do so because her shallowness mirrors his own.

They determine to visit Singleton in the mental hospital, but are turned back by what they find there, in a manner which for all its limitations is still high comedy:

They drove to the fifth building and parked. It was a low red brick structure with barred windows, like all the others except that the outside of it was streaked with black stains. In one window two hands hung out, palms downward. Mary Elizabeth opened the paper sack she had brought and began to take out presents for Singleton. She had brought a box of candy, a carton of cigarettes and three books—a Modern Library Thus Spake Zarathustra, a paperback Revolt of the Masses, and a thin decorated volume of Housman. … She started forward, but halfway to the door she stopped and put her hand to her mouth. “I can’t take it,” she murmured.

They do go in, however, and they do meet Singleton, who is not at all what they expect—I will leave the manner of the discovery to your innocence or experience, as the case may be—and who successfully runs them off, though whether he really means to or not isn’t clear.

As they flee, Calhoun looks over at Mary Elizabeth. They flinch from each other, each first seeing in the other the likeness of “their kinsman” (they have lied about being Singleton’s relatives to get into the mental hospital). Reflected in her glasses Calhoun finds the face of Christ, which is now not the face of Singleton but is somehow his own face.

It pains me to say it, because I see what she is after, and I love the idea that you could achieve an effect like this. Yet this execution of the ending falls flat for me: there is, yes, a visionary glimpse into deep reality, of the kind we’ve come to expect from O’Connor, but it does not seem to me to arise from within Calhoun’s depths as the story has taught me to see them but instead to have been imposed somewhat autocratically from outside. Now this could be perfectly well justified on the view that imposition from outside is the desired effect. The vision could be seen as an act of grace, not grace in the literary but in the theological sense, and as such not something Calhoun could himself have originated. Yet having shown no glimmer of religious questioning on Calhoun’s part—he is “stunned” when Mary Elizabeth suggests Singleton might be “a Christ-figure,” a hope on her part which the story deliberately dashes—the story we have read up to this point has not tended to lend itself toward any religious interpretation.

So a reader could very well conclude that the face Calhoun sees, the one capable of raising “festival after festival,” who has “been waiting there from all time to claim him,” is nothing divine but is merely his disowned yet authentic “true” psychological self. I don’t think this is the intended reading, but the text for once leaves us an escape hatch where we can slide out of the theology if it makes us squirm. If we take the Christological reading here, we do it on our own cognizance, at least as much as on any textual basis. To my mind the story ends not in true apocalypse—that is, unveiling of mystery—but rather in a hollow Nietzschean unmasking, where illusion is stripped away but we cannot say that we see much to hope for in its place.

But why this hitch or apparent hesitation in a writer who, elsewhere, so confidently lifts the veil between human and divine things? Why is our beloved hillbilly Thomist suddenly telegraphing as the hillbilly nihilist she disavowed? Call it projection if you want, but I can’t help but feel O’Connor is up against the edge of her capacity here because she is wrangling to see through the obscurity occasioned by her own inner Mary Elizabeth, her own fragile sheltered hothouse-orchid summer-child swathed in its baby-blue raincoat: this violently disowned part of herself, which represents how her community would have liked to cast her at one stage but which she successfully managed to dodge; this burden of objectification which she not unwisely refused to bear in life; this mask she can scarcely bear to be seen wearing, even in fictional guise, but which somehow corresponds to one possible personal reality that could have come about, had conditions been different.

This is speculation and as such maybe not very responsible. But since we’re among friends here, in a casual context, I’ll offer it: Maybe O’Connor has to hate the Mary Elizabeth part of herself in order to survive as she is. Yet, just maybe, hating it also shuts her off from the thing she wants most: full clarity of vision.

Maybe, through Mary Elizabeth, Mary Flannery O’Connor is running up against the South's inequitable treatment of women (at least those women who don’t find themselves capable of clawing out a space for survival by becoming in some aspect just as cruel as the cruelty that bids to deface and outface them). Maybe she is running up against Partridge’s unjust treatment of its black citizens, who don’t explicitly appear at all in the story but whose presence is only implied or suggested through Singleton in a coy way that could be as easily denied as affirmed: nothing in his rendered appearance or in the narration indicates for sure either way (Faulkner, notably, uses this same ambiguous dodge with Joe Christmas). The color of Singleton’s skin is not ever revealed in the narration. Maybe this means O’Connor doesn’t think it’s relevant to the content of his character. Or is it simply one more fact of the many that Calhoun and Mary Elizabeth can’t fully face? I genuinely don’t know. That we are left with so much latitude to wonder may be fruitful in its way. It is also perplexing.

Though in a comic mode, “The Partridge Festival” seems to be edging up to Light in August territory, Sula and Beloved territory. I wonder if the formidable O’Connor was scared off this territory by her sense of what had already been done and what had not yet been, maybe could not yet be, attempted—at least not by her (“one doesn’t want one’s own little mule cart on the rails when the Sunset Limited comes roaring down the track,” she said of Faulkner, or words to this effect anyway [paraphrasing again]). This was not yet the O’Connor of “Revelation,” who could at last clearly see and name the full offensiveness and turpitude of Mrs. Turpin; this was an O’Connor who had to name the fear that prevented that vision, so she could get ready to do battle with it. There is something lurking here, too, about how comedy that isn’t rooted in caritative love has to be rooted in cruelty: though this thought is less clear to me, it seems not entirely separable from the story’s questions of justice.

“The Partridge Festival” deals more directly with the fear of suffering than it does with the clear perception of “how primary injustice operates.” It edges up to the latter theme, then turns away, seemingly blinded more like Oedipus than like Tiresias by what the characters stare and stare at but cannot see. Found in the work of an artist so obsessed with the question of vision—vision’s clarity, vision’s purity—this blindness should strike us as strange.

We must notice, too, that in a story so filled with physical detail and so obsessed with its most absent character, Singleton's appearance is scarcely drawn on the page at all. Calhoun and Mary Elizabeth can scarcely take it in, for if they did they would be forced to admit its meaning: Their own consciences have been badly formed. They’ve been following a false savior, one who cannot help them. They’ve been obsessing over questions of right and wrong, never a totally fruitless thing to do, but all the time they’ve been defending the wrong right: Rather than accomplishing any solid good, even for themselves let alone for the undoubtedly suffering Singleton, they’ve been more concerned with idealizing, polishing, and displaying themselves to themselves and each other as the kinds of people who think the right thoughts, say the right words, and therefore must be acknowledged to care deeply about justice. They’ve failed to see that Singleton’s humanity, like their own, is of such great worth they have not even suspected its profundity. Yet it is also not idealizable, because it is as yet unhealed from the wounds of sin. When Singleton starts to rip off the hospital gown, stripping the wounds and common humanity they cannot face, both deuteragonists flee the room.

So all we really ever see of Singleton, the image we are left with of the Partridge he at once opposes and embodies, is his Misfit hat, ugly shoes, and haunting pair of green eyes: mean, keen, mad, jealous—and horribly, horribly amused.