I remember reading this story years ago and feeling then the usual disappointment I tend to get when reading a story about a writer. Those years back I tried to read as many short stories as I could. I often couldn’t. Still, I tried to follow any leads, discover new writers and get some of their collections as soon as I heard about them. O’Connor was one such I discovered after getting some collection in Scab City library which contained a story about a woman with a wooden leg being somehow left stranded by an errant bible seller in a hay loft. It was something like that, and appealed to me at the time, I think, because it seemed , like some stories by Maupassant, unstintingly realistic in its portrayal of human cruelty, something I had come to see a lot.It was only later I found out that O’Connor was a strict catholic. Perhaps that dimmed my interest. In any case I didn’t get much further through her Collected Stories than the excellent The Barber, a story about an intelligent moderate liberal, a supporter of an anti-segregationist candidate in O’Connor’s South, who is ostracised and ridiculed to the point of inarticulacy as he recounts his views and defends them in the Barber’s chair. It was a story that resonated with me at university stuck on a corridor surrounded by a bunch of public school fascists who referred to MTV as “Minority Television” because it showed hip hop videos and who loved Starship Troopers, the film which became a satirical interpretation of Robert Heinlein’s militaristic novel which anticipated the Neocons in its propagation of the virtues of aggression, endlessly quoting passages about how history abounds with examples of problems violence has solved, like Hiroshima, oblivious to the irony. That was a story I later discussed in my doomed essay about the looming Iraq War, Finite Injustice, when I saw, once again, that I was being ostracised for my beliefs by people who knew so much less than me, but that, nonetheless, outnumbered by these people so sure in their tabloid-inspired beliefs that, like tabloid leaders, were as peremptory as they were perfunctory, I was inarticulate in defending them.
The Crop is, as I say, about a writer. I wasn’t sure on reading it whether it was autobiographical or if it was intended rather as a joke at the expense of a lesser writer - there seems to be a subgenre of writers asserting their own artistic maturity and integrity by displaying the obvious errors of lesser writers. There seems to be evidence of both takes on things in the story. Finding some discussion of the story on the internet just now, though, it seems that the story might be a joke at O’Connor’s own expense.
Mrs Willerton is the writer in question, a lady in her forties living with another couple of harried women and a man, Garner, who completes a crossword as they tidy after breakfast. Mrs Willerton’s task is to crumb the table, and she enjoys it, having a little time to herself to think and prepare a subject for her next story.
It is ignorance on my part that I don’t know the relation of each of these characters to the next. The story is so compressed that it would demand a deal of knowledge about social relations in the South in the Forties to put the thing together, and unfortunately I have next to none - a smattering of impressions gleaned from the Faulkner I have read and scarcely understood, a little Tennessee Williams, and that’s about it. Willie, though, is the key, and though she picks her subject, sharecroppers, one I also know nothing about - to my shame I had to look up the word on Wikipedia to even know what it was - I could quickly get the picture of a poor rough and ready sort. She settles down at her typewriter and summons him from what little she herself knows of the life of sharecroppers - a scandalous half-read book serving as material.
Soon enough she has a first line, but from that she falls into reverie. Her hero, Lot, who may or may not roll in the mud with his yet-to-be-named dog, has a no-good woman too idle to even cook for him right. Soon enough, in frustration, Willie steps into the picture herself, seeing to her love rival and spending some quality time with Lot before Lucia came in making demands on her time.
The story remains unwritten. Settling down at the typewriter once again after an invidious shopping trip, Mrs Willerton goes on to choose another subject, the Irish.
And yet Flannery wrote these stories at twenty one.
* * *
For years every time I read a book, I would take a look at the About the Author, and then take a look at the publishing date and calculate the writer’s age when it was first printed. I would look too if there was any information about any previous books. It dismayed me then, when at university I was yet 21, 22. I’m 29 now and in writing this bog and confronting old stories and novels that never got written, and confronting too even my own difficulty in reading short stories, drifting off at every paragraph and missing elementary details, I can see how far away my goal is, even as these worlds continue to grow in my head.