Each day the news gets grimmer – “cuts to the bone”, the return to 1950s’ Grammars, a near Victorian destitution, and now a threatened Happiness Module. Ha! Ha! Ha! We are left raging spectators.
So this week I’d prefer to remind myself why I joined up for this lark in the first place – the sheer pleasure of being in a classroom, especially an inner city sixth form classroom. The pupils were open, enthusiastic, thrilling and passionate. We were fortunate with the syllabus, we could chose most of our set texts.
Nothing worked better than Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. If you don’t know her, just get a copy. Start with A Good Man is Hard To Find. Sheer bliss. Do it with your sixth form. It goes down a treat. It ought not to, but it does. She’s fiercely Catholic and lays waste to the more tender sensibilities. She has no time for mimsy notions of “creativity”.
“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”
She is murderously funny, very disturbing, and always pretty difficult. There is nothing like her.
Begin by listening to Flannery herself reading the story on tape in her fabulous, withering, thick Southern drawl.
“The Grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida,” goes the first sentence. We don’t fancy her chances. Not in a Flannery O’Connor story. What is going on here? Is this a Fairy tale? Southern Gothic? Biblical Parable? Cartoon Comedy? She is travelling by car with her family on a jaunt. There’s a husband who’s just dozy, a wife who’s deeply stupid, “whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage”, and two insufferable children and a cat. They don’t pay attention to the fierce presence of the world.
“Trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled. The children were reading comic magazines.”
They get lost. Of course they do. They wind up in “Toombsboro”. Of course they do. They meet The Misfit, an ex-con, in the woods. Not good. He’s seriously bonkers or a religious mystic or an existential nihilist or the angel of death. You decide.
The little children get a bullet through their tiny skulls. Fair enough. They’ve got it coming. Grandma cops it too. Her slaying is more nuanced. She might even be saved by The Misfit.
“She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” he observes. So would we all. Suddenly it’s not funny at all. It’s shock and awe. Sixth forms love it. The Misfit could perhaps be unleashed on those Happiness plans.
- Ian Whitwham is a former inner city London teacher.