At the recommendation of two very good friends, I have read Flannery O’Connor’s story “The Enduring Chill,” which can be found in the collection of short stories titled “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956, 1993). I had written my MA thesis on Flannery O’Connor (specifically on her short story “The Displaced Person”), so I had some familiarity with the author, but I had never read “The Enduring Chill.” My two friends were talking excitedly about the story, and so immediately upon coming home, I dashed to my little study and opened the book.
The story itself is quite short. The main character, Asbury Fox has just returned home from the big city (presumably New York), where he is faced with his mother and sister, and as a result, himself as well. It is tough to truly characterize this story, just like it is the case with most O’Connor’s stories. She is not concerned with the “moral of the story” nor any kind of most perfect conclusion. This is true in most of her writing. There is no “A-ha!” moment, and if there is something remotely similar to that, then it’s usually followed by a lack of explanation. Strangely enough, I am reminded by the final scene in the film “The Graduate” when Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross look into each other’s eyes, having stopped her wedding to someone else. The look is priceless: “Now that we have done this most brilliant, epiphany-filled thing, what do we do now?” In other words, reality hits. Well, Miss Flannery is the “queen of reality.” She gives you a full serving of reality whether you want it or not.
Asbury Fox, as we learn, is an artist, who it seems, has failed miserably in actualizing himself as an artist. He is not a character that is not easily liked. In fact, you might even hate him. I didn’t love him, but I didn’t hate him either. From his perspective, he is an artist who was failed to be recognized, and now, as the crowning achievement of his life, he has come home to die. At least, that is what he keeps telling his mother, sister, and anybody who tries to reason with him. But as we might suspect, he won’t be able to even die successfully. The story, as much as it is dark, it is also brilliantly funny as only O’Connor could imagine it.
From his mother’s perspective, Asbury may be an artist, but she does not pretend to understand anything about that world. She thinks if he worked a little bit on the dairy farm or fixed fences—“real work, not writing”—that Asbury would be just fine, and he would be safely back from the gloomy artistic prison he has created for himself.
Asbury’s sister, Mary George, however is quite cynical about the whole thing. Upon his return, she says “Well, well, we have the artist with us again. How utterly utterly.” Ah, Mary George: the sister, who mocks Asbury endlessly. This is all coming from a woman-girl, who is 32 years old, still clings to her slightly domineering mother, and as we are informed, wears Girl-Scout shoes! So, yes, there is something seriously wrong with this picture.
Is Asbury really an artist? Is he smart? This really was not as clear to me. If he was smart and artistic, then he didn’t push enough, and most of all did not live in reality. Asbury seems to live outside of life itself, always attempting to manufacture metaphors and epiphanies around his persona. He is, in many ways, perpetually wearing a mask and it is the false self that has been inhabiting him for quite some time now.
Asbury is a Rousseau-ian Romantic. Life he lives, he lives on the surface. His models for life are other writers (he has written a book-length letter to his mother to be opened at the time of his death, and “it was such a letter as Kafka had addressed to his father”) and he feels desperately alone and misunderstood. He is Lord Byron’s Manfred and Goethe’s Werther all rolled into one big American Southern experience of seeming boredom, triviality and dull, dull simplicity. At least, that would be how Asbury would have seen the South.
I think that the highlight of Asbury’s almost farcical existence comes at the moment when he wishes to see a priest. As I mentioned earlier, he is convinced that he is dying. But it’s not Asbury’s faith or even religiosity that compels him to seek priestly advice. Rather, it is the cheap thrill of romanticism. He wants to see a Jesuit preferably because the Jesuits are an educated group of priests and are the only ones capable of discussing serious, intellectual matter and not only the weather.
His mother, oblivious to what a Jesuit is, does manage to find Asbury a priest and that is where O’Connor’s genius is again seen. Asbury prepares his room, and makes it look more like a monk’s cell, convinced that the priest will respond to the aesthetic sensibilities Asbury obviously possesses. This priest (Father Finn from Purrgatory) is nothing that he imagined. The exchange is worth quoting here in full. I laughed heartily when I read it.
Here it is, partially:
“It’s so nice to have you come,” Asbury said. “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?”
This is priceless. Everything goes wrong for Asbury. He can’t even get an intelligent priest!! This is a great, dark comedy. We are tempted to laugh heartily at Asbury Fox, and we may do so. But there is another emotion, which has been evoked, at least within myself: compassion. Asbury is a prisoner of his own mind. He literally lives in his mind but not in life itself, and as a result, he is highly sentimental, anachronistic and unrealistic.
There are many questions of life (both of philosophical and theological nature) that O’Connor covers in this story. I can’t even begin to cover them all in one short essay. But two aspects of the story struck me as quite intriguing. First is the question what is an artist? Is it somebody who simply has an artistic temperament? Is it somebody who is highly unreliable, absent-minded, slightly mad? An artist most certainly has a level of “divine madness” that Plato speaks of but this “madness” cannot be mistaken by the superficial attributes that we attach to ourselves in order to become a particular vocation. These superficial attributes are also known as affectations. Developing a tick won’t make us a genius. No, I’m afraid this is not true for being an artist has to do with the “habit of being” and with the absolute obedience to God. This obedience will in turn manifest itself as holy discipline, and habit and discipline are the ways to create. Asbury, unfortunately lacks these.
Creating art means that we have some awareness of what beauty is. In his About Beauty, Armand Maurer tells us how St. Thomas Aquinas defines an artist. Aquinas connects art and beauty with being, specifically with act or action. Maurer writes: “A painter is actually a painter because he exists and possesses the art of painting. A dancer asleep is still a dancer, but he is completely a dancer when he actually dances. If, as St. Thomas suggests, beauty is found in actuality, the fullness of beauty will be found in action” (Armand Maurer, About Beauty: A Thomistic Interpretation, Houston, TX: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1983).
Asbury Fox has a great deal of desire but this desire is constantly misdirected. This brings me to the second intriguing aspect of the story. Asbury wants so badly to have a feeling of arrival. What I mean by this is that he wants to say to the world “I have arrived, as an artist; my work is done.” At one time or another, in our lives, we want to have a conclusion. We want to say that we, too have arrived and that there is no need for further challenges or growth. But it really isn’t about the destination but about the journey.
Flannery O’Connor leaves, like most of her stories, this story open-ended. I am reminded of the scene in the recent film “The Tree of Life” where Sean Penn’s character is standing at the sparse, wooden threshold in the middle of a rocky terrain. He crosses it and therefore, we are to assume that he integrates some aspects of his fragmentary life. This is not so in “The Enduring Chill.” O’Connor brings Asbury Fox up to a certain point, and then she leaves him be. She makes choices as a writer, to be sure, but she lets her characters have a life of their own. This, of course, makes her a dialogic writer.
Asbury Fox is given room to breathe. What could happen with him, we shall never know. But we don’t need to. Life is a grand Mystery, and what happens with Asbury Fox is between him and his Maker.
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