A reader of Flannery O’Connor soon becomes aware of her humor—sometimes uproarious and sometimes inward and ironic. When I think of her humor, I am immediately reminded of an observation in one of her letters. She mentioned that a teacher at the local college, Georgia State College in Milledgeville, had told her of a country student who had come to her office and asked for permission to "orbit" her course. In 1956, I was a teacher of English at a small college in Georgia, Wesleyan College in Macon, which is thirty miles from Milledgeville. Father James McCown, a local Jesuit priest, introduced me to Flannery O’Connor. Father McCown used to come to hear the visiting lecturers at Wesleyan, and we became first acquaintances and then friends. He asked me whether I had read the stories of Flannery O’Connor. At the time I had not even heard of her. I secured a copy of her collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and read them. Though I was mystified by some of the stories, I did recognize there was something unusual there, though at the time I don’t think I knew I was reading anything more than the work of a great talent.

Later Father McCown asked me whether I would like to visit Flannery O’Connor and her mother on their farm where they lived a few miles from Milledgeville. When my wife and I went there, we had another friend of Father McCown with us, a Jesuit priest who was also a professor at Spring Hill College, a Catholic institution in Alabama. Father McCown was—and is—a man with great capacity for the enjoyment of life. He was—and is—a big jolly red-faced priest recognizably of Irish ancestry. When we arrived at the farm, it was clear from the beginning that he and Mrs. O’Connor, Flannery’s mother, liked to tease one another.

"Well, Miz O’Connor," Father McCown said to Mrs. O’Connor who was standing on the front porch, "this time I’ve brought a real priest with me."

"Oh, I am so glad to meet a real priest," she replied. "I meet so many of the other kind." Father McCown knew, of course, that the joke was aimed at him. He laughed and said, "Touché!" Mrs. O’Connor didn’t understand what he meant. She though he was introducing me, his other guest, to her and that my name was Touché. "Glad to meet you, Mr. Touché," she said to me and shook

my hand heartily. I was rendered speechless. How could I explain tactfully that she had made a mistake? At this moment I became aware of Flannery O’Connor herself who was standing with the aid of her aluminum crutches just behind her mother. She was absolutely convulsed with laughter. My attention was so taken up with her obvious amusement that I didn’t tell Mrs. O’Connor what my real name was. About half an hour later she realized her mistake and charmingly, I thought, said to me privately by way of explanation. "You mustn’t mind me. Sometimes I’m illiterate."

But it was about two years later that I discovered just how strong a part humor played in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor. I taught a course in the literature of the South at Wesleyan College. A course in Southern literature was rare enough at colleges then that Flannery O’Connor herself professed to be amused by it. "I hear you are teaching a course in southern literature," she wrote to me, and then asked, "What is that?" She invited my class over to Andalusia Farm and, of course, the students were delighted to go. She had read one of her stories at Wesleyan, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and thus they were quite familiar with her. While we were there seated in the country parlor, one of the students earnestly asked Flannery O’Connor if she would read one of her stories to her class. She always preferred to read one of her stories to giving a lecture about literature. "When they ask me to give a lecture," she once said, "I feel like a bald-headed one-eyed old actor who is asked to play the part of Romeo." When the students asked her to read another story rather than "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," Flannery O’Connor first slightly hesitated. "I always read that one to audiences," she said. "because I am afraid if I read one of the others I will get to laughing and won’t be able to stop."

The students reassured her that it would be all right with them if she laughed while she was reading another story. I can’t remember whether it was they or she who chose "Good Country People," but this was the one she read. We knew, of course, that she might laugh now and then when she was reading it, but we were surprised to see how deeply the humor of it affected her. She laughed so much that if she had been at a public meeting her laughter might actually have interfered with the audience’s hearing of the story itself. You may remember the ending of "Good Country People." Joy/Hulga Hopewell, the intellectual Ph.D. with the wooden leg, has enticed the country young man who is a Bible salesman up in the hay loft with the intention of seducing him. Hulga—who is an existentialist philosopher and professes to believe in nothing—explains her position

to the seemingly awed Bible salesman. "‘I don’t have illusions,’" she tells him. "‘I am one of those people who see through to nothing.’" And when he still seemingly fails to understand, she says, "‘We are all damned . . . but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation.’"

These kinds of statements would not inevitably strike the reader as funny, but they were to Flannery O’Connor. In fact, she laughed all the time she was reading them. Joy/Hulga begins to discover that the Bible salesman is not the unspoiled innocent she thought he was. He has, in fact, a sinister and psychopathic side and prepares to steal her wooden leg. Even though she says she believes in nothing, Joy/Hulga is completely unconscious that such a belief may have implications of which she is not aware. She does not imagine that a belief in nothingness might immediately destroy a moral basis for conduct. She assumes as a matter of course that people who believe in nothing will go on essentially as they were before. When the evil side of the Bible salesman begins to become apparent to Joy/Hulga, she is intensely surprised and a little alarmed. Her mother had previously described the salesman as a member of that class which she most admired—"‘good country people, . . . the salt of the earth.’"

Now, Joy/Hulga, in her extremity, asks him, almost pleadingly, "‘aren’t you, . . . aren’t you just good country people?’"

"The boy cocked his head. He looked as if he were just beginning to understand that she might be trying to insult him. ‘Yeah,’ he said, curling his lip slightly, ‘but it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day in the week.’" And then he proceeds to steal Joy/Hulga’s wooden leg. He climbs down the ladder from the loft of the barn and just as he leaves, he says, "‘And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga . . . you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!’"

When Flannery O’Connor came to this part of the story, she laughed so long and so heartily that the book she was reading from slid to the floor and had to be retrieved by one of the students before she could finish reading it. The incident is, I think, a beautiful demonstration of how central a place humor plays in many of the stories which might at first glance seem anything but humorous. Here we see that Joy/Hulga, who really is a learned woman, can be, on a central issue, abysmally ignorant.

The proximity of humor and seriousness in her stories is nowhere more apparent in Flannery O’Connor’s stories than at the ending of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." This point is so striking in the story

itself that sometimes I am surprised to reflect that she could read it with the straight face it generally demands. At the end of the story, you may recall, the Georgia family on a vacation has encountered a psychopathic killer when they have had a wreck in their car on a country road. The Misfit prepares to have his gang, equally as pathological as he is, kill the whole family. The grandmother is the member of the family who carries on a debate, partly philosophical and theological, with the Misfit as to why he should not have the members of the family killed. At first, she uses a highly conventional argument. She assures the Misfit that she could see at once that he is not "common" and that therefore she knows that he will not shoot a lady. The argument makes no impression. Soon the discussion gets into deeper issues. For the Misfit, the question is whether the Christian religion is true. "‘Jesus was the only one that ever raised the dead,’" says the Misfit, "‘and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,’ he said, and his voice had become almost a snarl."

Just before this point, the Misfit has rejected a commonly used psychological explanation for the development of a tendency to violence and murder. He obviously has never heard of Sigmund Freud, but we recognize the Oedipus complex of Freud in his reference to the psychiatrist at the state prison, a man whom the Misfit refers to as the "head doctor," who had examined him. "‘It was a head-doctor at the penitentiary said what I had done was to kill my daddy but I known that for a lie. My daddy died in nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never had a thing to do with it. He was buried in the Mount Hopewell Baptist churchyard and you can go there and see for yourself.’" Thus does the Misfit deal with the Oedipus complex theory just before having all the members of the stranded Georgia family, including the grandmother, shot to death. If humor had not been so basic a part of the whole attitude of life of Flannery O’Connor, I doubt that there would be this kind of thought so near the horrifying ending of the story.

Less dramatic but in some way scarcely less shocking is the humor toward the end of Flannery O’Connor’s story, "The Enduring Chill." Asbury, the young failed writer, has come home to rural Georgia from New York City with an unknown and incurable but

presumably fatal disease. He has, he thinks, that sickness unto death of the spirit. The pettiness of his character is seen at once when he tries to fasten the blame for his failure as a writer to the repressions which he suffered as a child from being dominated by his mother. While he was still in New York City he had written a letter to his mother which he intended for her to read after his death. (She, by the way, is not an evil woman but merely a highly limited one.) "‘I came here [to New York City] to escape the slave’s atmosphere of home,’" he had written in his letter to his mother, "‘to find freedom, to liberate my imagination, to take it like a hawk from its cage and set it "whirling off into the widening gyre."’" At this point Asbury explains to his mother that this is a quotation from Yeats. ‘And what did I find?’ "he goes on to say." ‘It was incapable of flight. I was some bird you had domesticated, sitting huffy in its pen, refusing to come out!’ "The next words in the letter were underscored twice. "‘I have no imagination. I have no talent. I can’t create. I have nothing but the desire for these things. Why didn’t you kill that too? Woman, why did you pinion me?’"

Asbury assumes as a matter of course that all Catholic priests must be intellectuals. His Protestant mother is horrified when he insists that the local Jesuit priest must be called in. This priest is an old man who obviously has not kept up with modern imaginative literature. "‘It’s nice to have you come,’" Asbury says to the priest when he first comes to the house. "‘This place is incredibly dreary. There’s no one here an intelligent person can talk to. I wonder what you think of Joyce, Father?’" "The priest lifted his chair and pushed closer. ‘You’ll have to shout,’ he said. ‘Blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.’

"‘What do you think of Joyce?’ Asbury said louder.

"‘Joyce? Joyce who?’ asked the priest.

"‘James Joyce,’ Asbury said and laughed.

"The priest brushed his huge hand in the air as if he were bothered by gnats. "‘I haven’t met him,’ he said. ‘Now. Do you say your morning and night prayers?’"

Perhaps the most jolting fact that Asbury discovers is that instead of being incurably ill, he has a quite common disease, undulant fever, one for which a cure is readily available. "‘You ain’t going to die,’" says the country doctor who treats him, a man for whom Asbury has monumental contempt. ‘"Undulant fever ain’t so bad, Azzberry,’ he murmured. ‘It’s the same as Bang’s in a cow.’" Thus,

all of Asbury’s solemnly intellectual preparations for death turn out to be ridiculous and all totally unnecessary.

So important a part of Flannery O’Connor was her humor that perhaps, either intentionally or unintentionally, she may have misled some of her acquaintances and friends in the last year of her life. Did she know how serious her condition was? The answer is probably yes. The evidence is, so far as I know, indirect.

Flannery O’Connor died on August 2,1964. In the early 1960s, my wife and I lived in San Antonio but spent our summers in West Virginia. On our way to and from San Antonio in June and August of each year we would make a detour through Georgia so as to be able to visit Flannery O’Connor and her mother. We missed her in June of 1963, however, because she was at the time off at Smith College receiving an honorary degree. "We were awful sorry to miss you in June," she wrote to us, "and that doctors degree don’t do me a bit of good either. They gave away six of them—bargain day at Smith. Most of them were Smith graduates and scientists, buggy or social, but when they start looking for somebody in literature, they have to go South, naturally."

Something came up in August of 1963 which made it difficult for us to make our usual detour through Georgia on our way back to Texas from West Virginia, and we wrote to her that we wouldn’t be coming through Milledgeville this time. By return mail we received a letter, and most of it was just as humorous and casual as her letters frequently were, but in the last short paragraph there was a curious statement. "We wish you all would take this way back," Flannery O’Connor wrote. "I might even attempt to speak on the subject of angels in fiery furnaces or artificial niggers and mercy if you were here in person." "Angels in fiery furnaces" refers, I think, to her short story, "Circle in the Fire," and the other reference is even more obviously to her short story, "The Artificial Nigger." Luckily, my wife had enough perception to know that we must make the detour through Georgia and see Flannery O’Connor on our way to Texas. I have always been deeply glad that we did so.

In many writers, humor is associated with a skeptical attitude toward life, but in Flannery O’Connor humor sprang not from skepticism but from faith. I do not mean a generalized faith but faith specifically in the Christian religion. This faith was obvious and the fact that it was often not obvious to other people she saw sometimes as a mistaken judgment but more often as a willful perversity. This perversity was, in her writings and in her life, associated with the

idea of comedy. Its most frequent form occurs in the life and philosophy of a person who has raised up some idea to an importance which it does not deserve but which nonetheless prevents a person from seeing life with what she regarded as the wholeness of Christian faith. The fact that the person who makes this mistake is often an intellectual was, for her, one of the chief sources of her comedy. In her fiction, a person can know a great deal and still fail to recognize a truth so obvious that it is instantly apparent, sometimes, to persons who are not blessed with either much intellect or much education. "We are all ignorant," Will Rogers once said, "except about different things." It is this ignorance that can occur in the most surprising places and in the most surprising people which is a chief source of the humor of Flannery O’Connor.