Of Ultimate Things

EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE by Flannery O'Connor. 268 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.

Mary Flannery O'Connor had the luck of the Irish, or seemed to. At 25 she was pretty, witty, and had published fiction in some of the best little magazines. At 26, she came down with an incurable form of lupus erythematosus, a correlative of arthritis that softened the bones in her legs and lower face, eventually reduced her to crutches and permanent debility. But Author O'Connor had the stubbornness of the Irish, too. During the next 13 years, passed mostly in seclusion on her mother's farm near Milledgeville, Ga., she wrote unremittingly. Before her death last August, she had published two novels (Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away) of rare intensity, and one volume of ten short stories (A Good Man Is Hard to Find) that included four macabre masterpieces.

God on His Back. A lifelong Catholic, Author O'Connor wrote exclusively of ultimate things: sin and salvation, death and rebirth, the old Adam and the new life. But she was a poet of region as well as religion, and in this new collection of nine stories, which belong among the finest examples of American Gothic, she celebrates in Southern guises he old violent dialogue of the demonic and the divine.

Parker's Back, a grotesque but mystically radiant story of salvation, describes what happens to a loose-living redneck who can't seem to get right with his God-fearing wife. The dang-fool frets till he can't drive straight, crashes his tractor into a tree, rises up inspired and rushes off to the tattoo parlor, where a life-size head of Christ is inscribed in the middle of his back.

He looks in one mirror, sees the tattoo in another, turns white. Staring back at him is "a flat, stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes." Under their gaze he feels "as transparent as the wing of a fly." Scared silly, he drinks himself into a stupor. But when his head clears, God is still on his back and dawn is breaking. "A tree of light burst over the skyline. He felt the light pouring through him, turning his spiderweb soul into a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts." In terror and wonder, he presents himself to his wife. She takes one look at his back and drives him out of the house. "Idolatry! Idolatry!" Broken and bewildered but blazoned in bliss, the redneck stands in the widening day and cries like a newborn babe.

Meaning in the Depths. Author O'Connor was a verbal magician whose phrases flamed like matches in the dark, revealing a face in a flash (a child's features contorted with grief into "a puzzle of small red lumps"), a life in a single insight ("a sniveler after the ineffable"). But the motivation of character and the imitation of life did not finally interest Author O'Connor. "The meaning of a story," she once wrote, "begins at a depth where these things have been exhausted."

Meaning in these stories is most often embodied in a common object charged with mysterious and terrible significance. In several of them a supernatural power is represented as a powerful animal. In Greenleaf, the story of an old woman obsessed by hate, a mad bull stands surrogate for divine vengeance--or perhaps for divine love? "The black, heavy shadow tossed its head several times and then bounded forward. Mrs. May remained perfectly still, not in fright, but in a freezing unbelief. She stared at the violent black streak bounding toward her as if she could not decide what his intention was, and the bull had buried his head in her lap, like a wild, tormented lover, before her expression changed. One of his horns sank until it pierced her heart, and the other curved around her side and held her in an unbreakable grip. She continued to stare straight ahead with the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable. Mr. Greenleaf was running toward her, the tree line gaping behind him and nothing under his feet. He shot the bull four times through the eye. She felt the quake in the huge body as it sank, pulling her forward on its head, so that she seemed, when Mr. Greenleaf reached her, to be bent over whispering some last discovery into the animal's ear."

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