A disheartening, or, perhaps, thrilling (depending upon your perspective), aspect of Flannery O’Connor’s writing is that her short stories and novels are always allegorical in an obvious way. Her characters are not intended as representative of actual human beings; rather, they are ciphers or place-holders for theological concepts. As with John Bunyan and Nathaniel Hawthorne, her narratives must be deciphered: the text must be translated from the ordinary world into a metaphysical landscape. Furthermore, the metaphysical landscape invoked by O’Connor is very distinct, and particular – her writings must be construed in light of the particular species of southern Roman Catholicism to which the writer subscribed. (Since Roman Catholics were distrusted and, even, the victims of discrimination in small-town Georgia, where O’Connor grew up, there is a cryptic element to her literary practice: she conceals with allegory meanings that it might be inconvenient, or, perhaps, dangerous to express outright.)
John Huston, who directed the 1979 adaptation of Wise Blood, was an avowed atheist who despised organized religion. Unwilling to translate the narrative into theological terms that he disdained, Huston thought that he was making a grotesque southern Gothic comedy. Only when the film was cut and edited did Huston acknowledge "I’ve been had!" telling the producer: "I guess Jesus wins."
Theological allegory operates through stereotypical characters, usually figures with only one or two salient attributes – someone who represents faith or charity or despair – who act in a generalized nondescript landscape. In a fundamental sense, allegory can’t be filmed. A flesh and blood human being acting on film always has more dimensions, more possibilities of action, than an integer presented on the page. Similarly, the actor must be presented in some sort of landscape or milieu – there will be buildings, streets, passers-by, road-signs, cars, all the furnishings of reality confounding the simplicity and tight focus of an allegorical presentation. To some degree, Huston and his screenwriter, Benedict Fitzgerald, generalize the landscape temporally – when does the action of Wise Blood take place? The hero has returned from a war with an unspecified wound. But what war? He takes an old-fashioned steam engine that billows smoke and steam to Taukingham. But we see modern cars on the streets of the city and there are several shots of Hazel Motes’ driving on a freeway. And if the period in which the story, which O’Connor would claim as "timeless," is unclear, confounded by inconsistent clues, the city where most of the action occurs is specific and readily identifiable: we are in Macon, Georgia.
Wise Blood embodies the difficulties of transferring a generalizing archetypal allegorical narrative into a medium that is photographically specific: we are never looking at a "city street" in a general or abstract sense; rather, film makes us look at this specific city street, a place located in a specific time and place and occupied by specific people. (Wise Blood was shot entirely on location in Macon; part of the film’s appeal is its dense and realistic evocation of that place. But one must question whether a film like this might not be better produced on a film studio set. Film studios are expert in producing generic locations: "a city street" as opposed to "Jefferson Davis Avenue in Macon, Georgia.")
The Fitzgeralds
Wise Blood was produced by Michael Fitzgerald. The script is credited to Benedict Fitzgerald (with John Huston). Who are these people and how did they become connected with this project?
Michael and Benedict Fitzgerald are the sons of Robert Fitzgerald. Robert Fitzgerald was among the leading classicists in the post-war (what war? WWII) literary scene. Fitzgerald lived in Redding, Connecticut and taught at Yale. Fitzgerald was friends with the great American poet, Robert Lowell. (Fitzgerald was acclaimed for the highly poetic quality of his translations from the Greek – most famously his Iliad and Odyssey.)
Robert Lowell had met Flannery O’Connor, probably at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. (There is a picture of her with Arthur Koestler of all persons touring the Amana Colonies in Iowa.) Lowell knew that O’Connor had written some excellent and disturbing short stories and that she was trying to convert some of those stories into a novel. (O’Connor’s imagination was essentially that of a short story writer – her two novels are comprised of episodes that were previously developed in short stories.) It appears that the young and impressionable O’Connor was in love with Lowell but the older man rejected her advances. O’Connor needed a quiet place to write, remote from family demands in Milledgville, Georgia where she lived. Lowell suggested that O’Connor rent a room from Robert Fitzgerald and his then-wife, Sally, in Redding, Connecticut. He spoke with Fitzgerald who agreed to this plan and Ms. O’Connor spent several months living over the classicist’s garage – on the East Coast, a place like this is called "a mother-in-law apartment." The Fitzgerald’s were devout Catholics and so the relationship between landlord and tenant was close and strong.
O’Connor babysat for the Fitzgerald’s two sons, Michael and Benedict. At that time, they were toddlers. She became close to the Fitzgerald’s, particularly Sally Fitzgerald. Michael Benedict says that his father was translating Oedipus Rex at that time and claims that the self-blinding motif in Wise Blood originates in discussions between Robert Fitzgerald and O’Connor about the Sophocles play.
O’Connor moved back to Georgia and in 1949 was diagnosed with terminal lupus erythematous. She survived 14 years although in an increasingly debilitated condition. She remained very close to the Fitzgerald’s, particularly Sally, and appointed them to be the literary executors of her estate. Michael and Benedict recall her visits to Connecticut after her illness – she walked with a cane and was obviously unwell. O’Connor died in 1964.
Michael and Benedict Fitzgerald were raised in Ireland. (Although this part of the story isn’t clear, it seems, that marital troubles between Robert and Sally required that they live there for extended periods of time.) In the early seventies, they returned to the United States and went to Los Angeles to seek their fortune. They knocked-about Hollywood for a couple of years, trying to peddle film scripts with no success. Benedict decided to write a film adaptation of Wise Blood. (It is probably best not to inquire too closely into the circumstances by which Benedict acquired rights to adapt the novel from his mother, executor of O’Connor’s literary estate. Sally Fitzgerald is named as one of the producers of the film.)
Michael and Benedict Fitzgerald knew John Huston slightly. Huston had a lavish country estate in Ireland and, apparently, had some interactions with the Fitzgerald’s. On the basis of this slight acquaintance, Michael called Huston and asked him if might be interested in directing a film adaptation of Wise Blood. Huston was a figure larger-than-life, very generous, although also tyrannical and self-centered. Huston was intrigued and invited the Fitzgerald boys to discuss the project with him. (This took considerably chutzpah since the script was not even remotely complete at this time.) Huston invited the boys to his home, said that he would make the movie, and, even, took them with him to his compound in Mexico (a souvenir of his work on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) to discuss the project. (There is a wonderful photograph of the bearded and grizzled Huston emerging from the water like the Old Man of the Sea a half-dozen yards from a pristine beach adorned with thatched huts – it looks like a production still from a movie, which, indeed, it probably is.)
It took Benedict three years to complete the script and raise money for the film – the movie was shot nonunion on a budget of $500,000 using mostly unknown actors. Huston, a highly experienced and professional studio film maker, shot only footage that he thought was necessary to be edited into a finished cut. Location camera-work was accomplished between the end of January and St. Patrick’s Day 1979. The film was cut in another two months and ready for the Cannes Film Festival in that same year. Wise Blood was an international success and highly regarded by critics; reviews were unanimous that the film was one of Huston’s best pictures. The picture is often cited as an example of an independently-produced movie that has been exceptionally successful.
(The story has a sequel of sorts. Mel Gibson hired Benedict Fitzgerald to write the script for The Passion of the Christ. That movie, of course, is the most successful independently produced film of all time. Fitzgerald worked for a small stipend because Gibson represented to him, Fitzgerald alleges, that the movie had a tiny budget. In fact, the budget was much larger than was disclosed to Benedict Fitzgerald and, when the film became a juggernaut at the box-office, Fitzgerald sued for a percentage of the profits, alleging that he was defrauded by Gibson. The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed sum of money.)
Flannery O’Connor’s Theology
These propositions are embodied in O’Connor’s writing:
2. Unlike the lower animals, human beings have an instinct for the divine and an appetite for salvation (I will call this "the religious impulse");
3. Since human beings have this religious impulse, they ceaselessly manufacture idols and false gods; similarly, our religious impulse causes us to ceaselessly devise systems for our salvation that are not only false but wicked – "no man with a good car needs to be justified," as Hazel Motes says;
4. The religious impulse can be truly satisfied only by the exercise of devotion consistent with the revelations of the Old and New Testaments and the teachings of the Holy Mother Church (that is, the Roman Catholic Church);
5. Human beings often repress their religious impulse and, even, inauthentically pretend that it doesn’t exist. But in extremis, when people are facing death, mutilation, or catastrophetheir religious impulse surfaces and they seek salvation;
– they may pretend it doesn’t exist and go about cloaked in their animal nature;
– they may follow a false savior;
– they may subscribe to, and follow, the teachings the Roman Catholic Church.
This is a summary of the doctrine that underlies Flannery O’Connors’ writings. She is a near-great writer. Had she lived longer, she might have become a great writer on the model of Dostoevsky. As a near-great writer, O’Connor works out the implications of her creed in her fiction, reviews, and criticism. A great writer would question her creed and work out the implications of her skepticism and doubt as to whether doctrines that she holds true and necessary are, in fact, worthy of belief. (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Faulkner, and Melville have this trait of greatness: that is, believing with all their heart and soul that a certain doctrine is true and, yet, at the same time doubting whether that doctrine is consistent with human nature.)
Both Enoch and Hazel Motes in Wise Blood exemplify O’Connor’s views as to the fate of human beings who have not received the doctrines of the Holy Roman Church. Enoch, in fact, is a parody of Hazel Motes just as the character of played by Ned Beatty also caricatures Motes. Enoch elects a shriveled mummy that he has stolen from a museum to be his savior. He is a "natural man" who works in the zoo tending to the creaturely needs of animals. When Hazel Motes destroys Enoch’s savior – the withered mummy – Enoch decides that he will become an animal. He murders the inhabitant of the Gorgo ape-suit and hides his humanity under the gorilla costume. He denies God by trying to become a mere animal. Hazel Motes puts his hopes in his car, the literal vehicle of his salvation. He defies God by founding the Church of Jesus Christ without Jesus Christ, a "Protestant sect" as Flannery O’Connor pointedly observes. As far as O’Connor is concerned, religious piety without the ordinances of the Catholic Church, always devolves into Protestant schism and heresy. She makes this clear by showing that Hazel Motes’ religiosity decays into fanaticism, self-mutilation, and madness when the secular vehicle for his salvation (his car) is destroyed. With an evangelical directness, O’Connor further drives the point home by showing that Hazel Motes’ Protestant church simply engenders heretical imitations – that is, heresies of heresies. (O’Connor would have regarded the Methodist and Baptist Churches as quack parodies of Lutheranism, itself a damnable heresy.)
O’Connor viewed most organized religion and piety with disgust. Her faith was pure, austere, and hopelessly inhuman in the demands that it placed on mere men and women. She wrote:
Nonetheless, O’Connor regarded the deep South as "Christ-haunted" – that is, at least, close enough to the Truth to recognize what had been lost.
The fate of human beings, intrinsically and instinctively religious, yet lacking the true revelation offered by the Catholic church is grotesque. Hence, the quality of the grotesque characteristic of O’Connor’s writing. The interesting difficulty that O’Connor’s allegories pose is that she shows every possible and grotesque variant of deformed religiosity, but is uninterested in displaying true faith and true religion. In other words, she provides her readers with negative exemplars of her doctrines but never produces anything like a positive depiction of what it might be like to be truly saved. There is no Father Zosima (as in The Brothers Karamazov in her work).
Philology
What is a "chifforobe?" Recall that in the first few minutes of Wise Blood, Hazel Motes returns to the rotting home where he was raised, discovers the "chifforobe," and posts a note on that piece of furniture claiming it.
A chifforobe or chifferobe is a free-standing armoire that contains a tall space for hanging garments and a chest of drawers. These items of furniture were first marketed to the masses in 1908 in the Sears and Roebuck catalog. The word chifforobe is used in the American south, but has been attested in rural environs as far north as Vermont. By some confusion, the word has also come to mean "water closet" or "potty" in some places – although this is by no means common.
John Huston
John Huston was sort of director whose personal charisma and adventures threaten to eclipse the films that he made – his biography is more colorful and interesting than some of his films. (Another "man’s man," Clint Eastwood directed an excellent film about Huston, White Hunter, Black Heart, a 1990 picture lightly fictionalizing events that occurred during the shooting of The African Queen on the dark continent). People who aren’t interested in film as an art-form admire Huston: he made vigorous, sinewy no-nonsense pictures and was a master narrator. Watching his movies sometimes is a little like attending to the words of a marvelous half-drunk raconteur in an Irish tavern. And like many such raconteurs, Huston’s vice, on occasion, is mistaking his passionate interest in things like soldiering and skirt-chasing for an interest always shared by his audience: like many great barroom story-tellers, he is sometimes too full of himself and a bit of a bore.
Huston was the product of a broken family, devoted to a domineering mother whose influence he sought to conceal by displays of machismo. His father, Walter Huston, was a great Broadway and Hollywood actor and figures in an important role in one of the director’s most indelible films, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1949). Huston wrote many famous scripts for the studios in the thirties and first directed in 1941; his maiden film was The Maltese Falcon. It would be tedious to list Huston’s many movies, most of them highly regarded. Highlights are The African Queen and The Red Badge of Courage, both made in 1951, Moby Dick (1956), The Man Who Would be King (1974), Prizzi’s Honor (1979), and The Dead, his last picture and a distinguished adaptation of Joyce’s novella, released to much acclaim in 1987. He also made the eccentric Beat the Devil (1953) and a two remarkable documentaries about the effects of World War Two combat, The Battle of San Pietro (1944) and Let there be Light (1945) about shell-shock. Both movies commissioned by the United States Army were so powerful and truthful that they were promptly censored and not shown for twenty-five years. (The luster of The Battle of San Pietro, long regarded as the most authentic portrayal of infantry combat ever filmed, has been tarnished a bit by revelations that many of the film’s harrowing battle scenes were filmed on maneuvers or were staged.)
John Huston was a film maker particularly favored by my father and I recall seeing many of his movies on TV when I was a small boy. I thought The Maltese Falcon dull, perhaps, because I didn’t understand the erotic byplay between Bogart and the nefarious Mary Astor – I still think the picture is over-complicated and tedious. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was too long for a child, particularly when shown on TV with many commercial interruptions, but, of course, once seen the madness of Fred C. Dobbs is something that will stay with you the rest of your life. Moby Dick astounded me: I saw it when I was eight or nine and it changed my life. I immediately sought out Melville’s novel, read the book with voracious appetite and, then, re-read the book with critical notes. The second reading interested me so much that I developed a lifelong avocation for literature. Huston was also a great, if wildly flamboyant, actor: his monstrous Noah Cross is one of the best things in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1971).
For Huston, film is storytelling. The medium is transparent: in a Huston film, you aren’t supposed to notice camera work or editing. Acting is foremost and all effects serve the story. Huston didn’t care about art and he subordinated style to narrative. By the time, he was 15, Huston was a well-known semi-professional boxer in California. He rode with the Mexican cavalry and, once, when he made love to a beautiful socialite in a borrowed bed, they broke the bed. He hunted big game, played high-stakes poker, collected art, and once co-wrote a film-script with Jean-Paul Sartre. He was the Master of the Fox Hounds in County Galway, Ireland and directed Marilyn Monroe twice – in her debut picture, The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and a decade later in her last film, The Misfits with Montgomery Clift.
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