Flannery O’Connor wrote “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” the eighth story in her first collection entitled A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in the summer of 1952. In December 1950, O’Connor suffered from her first lupus-related attack, marking the beginning of the struggles with her health that would eventually lead to her premature death in 1964. As a result of her declining health, O’Connor and her mother moved to Andalusia, their farm in Milledgeville, in the spring of 1951. Shortly thereafter, in June, O’Connor received word confirming the acceptance of her first novel, Wise Blood, for publication. As O’Connor’s writing continued, she gleaned inspiration for her stories from the local newspapers she read regularly, including the Union-Recorder and the Farmer’s Market Bulletin. In August 1951, according to biographer Brad Gooch, O’Connor stumbled across a feature about a “106-year-old Confederate veteran [named] General William J. Bush, photographed in a ‘dashing’ full-dress uniform and military hat, attending the graduation of his 62-year-old wife” (202) from Georgia State College for Women. O’Connor ultimately used this article as inspiration for the main characters of “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” which she penned the following summer. In August 1952, Harper’s Bazaar accepted O’Connor’s story for publication in its September 1953 issue.
In 1939, when O’Connor was just fifteen years old, the movie premier of Margaret Mitchell’s widely popular Civil War novel, Gone with the Wind, took place in Atlanta. The movie premier provides some social and historical context for “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” as certain sections of the story satirize the premier. O’Connor’s aunt and uncle, John and Cleo Tarleton, were friends of Mitchell and her husband, and “the family rumor was that the novel’s Tarleton twins owed their name to O’Connor’s aunt and uncle” (Gooch 67-68). As a result, the novel and movie premier dominated O’Connor’s social circle. Already irritated by the popularity of Gone with the Wind, particularly because of the natural parallels drawn between O’Connor and Scarlett O’Hara, a young Irish Catholic woman living in Georgia, O’Connor’s irritation intensified as her writing career blossomed, and her relatives “needled her for not writing a popular moneymaker like her fellow Georgian woman author” (Gooch 68). Irately, O’Connor wrote “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” which features General George Poker “Tennessee Flintrock” Sash, whose name mocks that of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, O’Connor highlights Sash’s presence at the premier of Gone with the Wind as the “one event in the past that had any significance for him and that he cared to talk about” (O’Connor 136). Throughout the rest of her career, O’Connor continued to ridicule Gone with the Wind, making additional satirical references to it in her other stories, including “The Enduring Chill” and “The Partridge Festival.”
Few literary scholars have written about “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” and the minimal source material that does consider the story generally asserts that its themes have little to do with religion and Christianity, additionally supported by the absence of Biblical allusions. Sash ultimately embodies the aspects of the premier of Gone with the Wind that O’Connor despised, thus establishing the story as a satirical representation of the event. For example, Sash, whose memory deteriorates in his old age, remarks that the only “event in the past that had any significance to him” is “when he received the general’s uniform and had been in the premiere” (O’Connor 136). The vain Sash, who “stood immoveable in the exact center of the spotlight, his neck thrust forward, his mouth slightly open, and his voracious gray eyes drinking in the glare and the applause” (138), thrives at the ostentatious event, the excessive glamor articulating O’Connor’s critique of it. At the premier depicted in “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” O’Connor notes the “usherette in Confederate cap,” “a group of UDC members,” and the orchestra playing the Confederate Battle Hymn (137). Also, the announcer introduces Sash “as General Tennessee Flintrock Sash of the Confederacy, though Sally Poker had told Mr. Govisky that his name was George Poker Sash and that he had only been a major” (137), thus drawing further attention to the southern sectionalism defining the premier. As Gooch explains in his biography, many “Confederate-themed festivities stretched out over the entire week, enacted along a fault line of Jim Crow tension” (68), as the African American actress who played Mammy, Hattie McDaniel, was not invited to the real premier. As a result, in addition to using Sash’s character to satirize the pageantry at the premier of Gone with the Wind, O’Connor may also use Sash to condemn the premier’s outward signs of distasteful racial tension, which O’Connor certainly opposed later in her life.
Through Sash, O’Connor also grapples with the importance of remembering history, which potentially allows for a religious reading of “A Late Encounter with the Enemy.” Sash’s initial characterization reveals that he does not remember fighting in the Spanish-American War or the Civil War, as “he didn’t have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again. To his mind, history was connected with processions and life with parades and he liked parades. People were always asking him if he remembered this or that – a dreary black procession of questions about the past” (O’Connor 135-136). O’Connor critiques Sash’s nonchalance toward history, thus indicating, as scholar Margaret Earley Whitt asserts, that his “literal enemy is history and his stubborn refusal to understand its importance” (72). This story’s haunting racial tension, which Sash’s involvement in the premier illuminates, clarifies O’Connor’s emphasis on the importance of accurately remembering history. Scholar Ralph C. Wood speculates that O’Connor believed that “the central quandary for our time is whether secular history constitutes the beginning and end and sum of human experience, or whether there is another history, a history that the elites of literary and academic culture have ignored because it has been enacted by” (82) non-whites. O’Connor’s awareness of the detriment of inaccurate history, which the story’s underlying racial tones reveal, intensifies O’Connor’s critique of Sash’s nonchalance toward history. The stroke that kills Sash begins with memories of his life flashing through his mind, such as “a succession of places – Chickamauga, Shiloh, Marthasville – [that] rushed at him as if the past were the only future now and he had to endure it” (O’Connor 143). In his death, Sash encounters his enemy, his ignorance of history, for the last time as the memories of the past flashing through his mind cause him such frustration to the point that “he said, Stop dammit! I can’t do but one thing at a time! He couldn’t protect himself from the words and attend to the procession too and the words were coming at him fast” (143). O’Connor may therefore use Sash’s death, his last encounter with his ignorance toward history, to demonstrate her view of death as the ultimate punishment for historical ignorance.
Building upon Sash’s death as O’Connor’s critique of ignorance toward history, Biblical support for death as the punishment for theological ignorance provides a religious interpretation of O’Connor’s story. For example, the apostle Paul explains in his letter to the Romans that death awaits the spiritually ignorant, saying that “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6.24 NLT), thus revealing that those who sin and lack faith in and knowledge of Jesus will die. 1 John 3:4 clarifies this by stating that “everyone who sins is breaking God’s law, for all sin is contrary to the law of God” (NLT), so that those who ignorantly sin “will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life” (Matt. 25.46 NLT). Therefore, based on the Bible’s support of death as the punishment for theological ignorance in the form of sin, O’Connor’s condemnation of Sash to death for his historical ignorance profoundly warns readers against all kinds of ignorance. However, literary scholar Bryan Giemza explains O’Connor’s division from the “Lost Cause-variety nationalism” embodied in the people at the Gone with the Wind premier and her alternative devotion to her faith, which confirms her emphasis on spiritual ignorance. Giemza explains that, contrary to Sash’s rejection of history due to his fondness for pomp, O’Connor’s “fealty was tied instead to a faith that was bigger than” the southern society in which she lived (184). As a result, O’Connor foregrounds her theological message warning readers against death as the result of spiritual ignorance with a presentation of the consequences of an elderly Confederate’s historical ignorance.
Works Cited
Giemza, Bryan. Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State UP, 2013.
Gooch, Brad. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. New York, Little, Brown, 2009.
Holy Bible: New Living Translation. Translated by Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Tyndale House Publishers, 2015.
Whitt, Margaret Earley. Understanding Flannery O'Connor. Columbia, U of South Carolina P, 1997.
Wood, Ralph C. Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. Grand Rapids (Michigan), W.B. Eerdmans Publ., 2005.
O'Connor, Flannery. “A Late Encounter with the Enemy.” The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, pp. 134-44.