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[percy-l] Flannery on tenderness

From: Jim Forest <jhforest AT gmail.com>
To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [percy-l] Flannery on tenderness
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2012 11:03:06 +0200

Re Flannery's comments, here's the text referred to... see the highlighted paragraph.

Jim Forest

* * *

Flannery O’Connor’s Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann

The Death of a Child

The creative action of the Christian’s life is to prepare his death in Christ. It is a continuous action in which this world’s goods are utilized to the fullest, both positive gifts and what Père Teilhard de Chardin calls 'passive diminishments.' Mary Ann’s diminishment was extreme, but she was equipped by natural intelligence and by a suitable education, not simply to endure it, but to build upon it. She was an extraordinarily rich little girl.

Death is the theme of much modern literature. There is Death in Venice, Death of a Salesman, Death in the Afternoon, Death of a Man. Mary Ann’s was the death of a child. It was simpler than any of these, yet infinitely more knowing. When she entered the door of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home in Atlanta, she fell into the hands of women who were shocked at nothing and who love life so much that they spend their own lives making comfortable those who have been pronounced incurable of cancer. Her own prognosis was six months, but she lived twelve years, long enough for the Sisters to teach her what alone could have been of importance to her. Hers was an education for death, but not one carried on obtrusively. Her days were full of dogs and party dresses, of Sisters and sisters, of Coca-Colas and Dagwood sandwiches, and of her many and various friends . . . ; from patients afflicted the way she was to children who were brought to the Home to visit her and were perhaps told when they left to think how thankful they should be that God had made their faces straight. It is doubtful if any of them were as fortunate as Mary Ann. . . .

Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept the fact that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy _expression_. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliché or a smoothing-down that will soften their real look. When we look into the face of good, we are liable to see a face like Mary Ann’s, full of promise.

Bishop Hyland preached Mary Ann’s funeral sermon. He said that the world would ask why Mary Ann should die. He was thinking undoubtedly of those who had known her and knew that she loved life, knew that her grip on a hamburger had once been so strong that she has fallen through the back of a chair without dropping it, or that some months before her death, she and Sister Loretta had got a real baby to nurse. The Bishop was speaking to her family and friends. He could not have been thinking of that world, much farther removed yet everywhere, which would not ask why Mary Ann should die, but why she should be born in the first place.

One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him . . . . Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness. Its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chambers . . .

This action by which charity grows invisibly among us, entwining the living and the death, is called by the Church the Communion of Saints. It is a communion created upon human imperfection, created from what we make of our grotesque state. Of hers Mary Ann made what, like all good things, would have escaped notice had not the Sisters and many others been affected by it and wished it written down. The Sisters who composed the memoir have told me that they feel they have failed to create her as she was, that she was more lively than they managed to make her, more gay, more gracious, but I think that they have done enough and done it well. I think that for the reader this story will illuminate the lines that join the most diverse lives and that hold us fast in Christ.

* * *

On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 7:31 PM, <marcus AT loyno.edu> wrote:

Janet Cantor writes, "On page 128 Father Smith asks, "Do you know where
tenderness leads?" And he answers,..." to the gas chamber"."

I think Percy told somone he was paraphasing a remark by Flannery O'Connor.

I argued with Percy about this epigraph more than once. My reply was that
tenderness (romantic secular sentimentality, kitsch, etc.) may have been
involved in the cultural roots of the Holocaust, but plain old nasty
anti-semitism burrowing through centuries of the "Christian West" was the
primary agent driving the catastrophe. I don't recall that we ever
concluded our discussion.

By the way, the original title of Lady Chatterly's Lover was, of course,
"Tenderness."

Marcus Smith