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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
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Lacey, WA 98503-4903
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Endings : Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Flannery O’Connor’s collected essays, Mystery and Manners, and letters, The Habit of Being, are brimming with practical insights into the art. In both works she addressed the issue of offering readers some departing summation. In a letter, dated May 4, 1955, to Ben Griffith, a writer and teacher and fellow Georgian, she wrote, "I frequently send my stories to Mrs. Gordon [her close friend, the novelist, Caroline Gordon] and she is always telling me that the endings are too flat and that at the end I must gain some altitude and get a larger view."
That’s a wonderful phrase, an ending needing to "gain some altitude," suggesting the narrative lifting off at the end and looking down on the characters and events so that it can get some needed distance, see the forest of story and not just the trees, in order to make some definitive sense of things.
The first time I read this formulation of O’Connor’s, via Caroline Gordon, I thought immediately of Joyce’s ending of "The Dead," where the narrative leaves Gabriel Conroy’s consciousness and rises lyrically, in the form of falling snow, into the white Dublin night and then continues on, above graveyards and open water until it’s finally high enough to see first "the universe" and after that the landscape of immortality as well, the snow "faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." Altitude indeed.
In her letter, O’Connor was referring specifically to her story, "The Artificial Nigger," which she’d, typically, rewritten many times, finding particular frustration in trying to write an ending that satisfied her. She goes on, to Griffith, "...the end of "The Artificial Nigger" was a very definite attempt to do that [i.e., gain some altitude] and in those last two paragraphs I have practically gone from the Garden of Eden to the Gates of Paradise."
And so she did. At the close of the story, Mr. Head and Nelson, the grandson he is raising in the backwoods of Georgia, have returned home on the train from a day trip to Atlanta. In O’Connor’s inimitable blending of comedy and schematic Christian rigor, theirs was an adventure hilarious to readers and harrowing for the participants, during which the hapless Mr. Head, a prideful fool, gets them lost while insisting he knows exactly where they are and in a moment of cowardly panic denies knowing his impudent young grandson, who, it seems, is about to be arrested for running into a woman and knocking her to the sidewalk.
Mr. Head’s betrayal leaves Nelson stunned and furious, until his grandfather, finally undone by stress and shame and fear, sees a man walking his dogs and cries out, "I’m lost and can’t find my way and me and this boy have got to catch this train . . . Oh hep me Gawd I’m lost!"
Told where they can board the train, the old man and Nelson head toward the nearby station, suddenly confronting on their way a piece of racist statuary extending from the wall of a wide suburban lawn. It’s the encountering of this figure – "One of his eyes was entirely white and he held a piece of brown watermelon" – which mystically reunites, indeed spiritually fuses, grandfather and grandson.
Here are the final two paragraphs, which O’Connor refers to in her letter, describing Mr. Head and Nelson as they’ve gotten off the train at their moonlit rural junction:
Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.
Nelson, composing his expression under the shadow of his hat brim, watched him with a mixture of fatigue and suspicion, but as the train glided past them and disappeared like a frightened serpent into the woods, even his face lightened and he muttered, "I’m glad I’ve went once, but I’ll never go back again!"
