angelic artist in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, The

Renascence, Fall 2000 by O'Gorman, Farrell

Unfortunately, "There were so many subjects to write stories about that Miss Willerton never could think of one" (33). In the act of crumbing the table she briefly wonders if baking might make a good subject, and decides it might-but only if she wrote of "foreign bakers," who are very "picturesque" in photos she has seen. She finally decides that a "social problem" would be a better subject:

Sharecroppers! Miss Willerton had never been intimately connected with sharecroppers, but, she reflected, they would make as arty a subject as any, and they would give her an air of social concern which was so valuable to have in the circles she was hoping to travel! (35)

Before she gets out of this town, she thinks, she might be able to "capitalize . . . on the hookworm"(35). Sitting at her typewriter and thinking in terms of jargon she has learned from a creative writing class, she proceeds not to write but rather to fantasize about her story, which will apparently owe something to the Erskine Caldwell school of poor white fiction: "there would have to be some quite violent, naturalistic scenes, the sadistic sort of thing one read about in connection with that class" (36). Finally, however, she grows frustrated with her "subject," and turns to one about which she knows even less than she does about sharecropping: "The Irish!" whom she begins to imagine as "full of spirit-red-haired, with broad shoulders and great, drooping mustaches" (41).

While much of the story is clearly farcical and most obviously points to exactly how not to write, there is at least one moment where O'Connor places Miss Willerton squarely in a scene where she has the smallest glimmer of vision about the depths of the world in which she actually lives. Pulled from her typewriter to go to the grocery store, she wanders through it sulking:

Silly that a grocery should depress one-nothing in it but trifling domestic doings-women buying beans-riding children in those grocery go-carts-higgling about an eighth of a pound more or less of squash-what did they get out of it? Miss Willerton wondered. Where was there any chance for self-expression, for creation, for art? All around her it was the same-sidewalks full of people scurrying about with their hands full of little packages and their minds full of little packages-that woman there with the child on the leash, pulling him, jerking him, dragging him away from a window with a jack-o'-lantern in it; she would probably be pulling and jerking him the rest of her life. (40)

Such is, of course, exactly the sort of scene in which O'Connor herself would have seen the mysterious depths of creation and the setting of a drama with eternal significance for the souls of its participants-all while remaining faithful to the concrete details of place and character. Instead, Miss Willerton worries about "self-expression" and returns to her typewriter to daydream about a place and people she has never seen.

O'Connor would further develop such types of the angelic artist later, most famously in "The Enduring Chill." Asbury Fox is in many respects a more sophisticated Miss Willerton, one whose self-absorption has a clearly religious dimension not developed in "The Crop." Fancying himself a version of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, he has escaped from "the slave's atmosphere of home"-his small town of Timberboro-to "liberate my imagination, to take it like a hawk from its cage in New York" (364); but he has failed to produce anything there, and the story is concerned with his reluctant return home in the face of what he thinks is a deathly illness.' His New York friend Goetz has encouraged him to see both death and life as an "illusion," but Asbury now must confront the horrible "thought of death here," on the all-too-real farm he grew up on (358-59). Out of a concern for his art-which apparently is to have a social dimension like that of Miss Willerton-and a desire to upset his mother, he makes a self-centered attempt to strike up a "friendship" with the two black men who work for her: "Last year he had been writing a play about the Negro and he had wanted to be around them for a while to see how they really felt about their condition, but the two who worked for her had lost their initiative over the years" (368). The "for a while" qualification is highly significant: Asbury is not interested in the lives of these two men, but in the "issue" of "the Negro," and their actual characters prove to be unsatisfactory to his purposes. The story is, of course, ultimately concerned with Asbury's spiritual awakening to the final reality that he will not have to die but rather to live "here." Whether or not this awakening will invigorate his sterile art, however, O'Connor does not suggest.