Compassion in Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor

At the conclusion of the first part of Hemingway’s posthumously published Islands in the Stream, the protagonist, Thomas Hudson, has just discovered that his two sons and his ex-wife have been killed in a car accident. The boys had previously spent the summer with him, and the whole of the preceding chapters had been devoted to their adventures. Although there was an inevitability about their deaths – portents were everywhere – it comes as a shock. This being Hemingway, of course, the men are men, so you do not expect wailing and uncontrolled lamentation. This is how Thomas Hudson’s emotions are described:

“I’ll do everything,” Eddy [Thomas Hudson’s cook] said. “But I don’t give a shit about anything any more.”

“I don’t either,” said Thomas Hudson.

“We’ve got young Tom.”

“For the time being,” Thomas Hudson said and for the first time he looked straight down the long and perfect perspective of the blankness ahead.

That last line is beautiful. It is unself-pitying, undramatic, raw and honest. It suggests the terrible ache that now and forever will surround this man. In the next few pages Thomas Hudson tries to react as you would expect of a Hemingway character. He tells himself time will heal, so he must simply count down the days until the pain ends; he drinks, he reads; he finds ways to cope. But this single sentence has cut to the core of the man and we know as well as he does that the brave front he is presenting is nothing more than that. That line is a magical moment in prose, because it somehow creates an invisible link between the reader and the character. I understand, you want to say. Sorry is irrelevant, implicit.

It seems to me genuinely to capture that most elusive of human emotions, compassion. Compassion has many vulgar cousins which are often mistaken for it – the ‘I feel your pain’ school of emoting – and because of this genuine compassion is sometimes frowned upon by people who should know better. Compassion is a wonderful and, I think, uniquely human trait. It is the ability to see events from the perspective of someone else, but with a vision that encompasses their views of the past, present and future; that is, to understand, even to share their hopes, and to see how those hopes are helplessly shaped by events, to see the bifurcation in the road that represents the radiant hope and the blank actuality, the diversion from the dream into the true life that unfolds. Thomas Hudson had anticipated his boys becoming men; now, he – and we – must look forward only to blankness.

I am reminded of a quote from Flannery O’Connor which, to me, reflects an indifference bordering on cruelty. She wrote:

It’s considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion. Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody’s mouth and which no book jacket can do without. It is a quality which no one can put his finger on in any exact critical sense, so it is always safe for anybody to use. Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human. The kind of hazy compassion demanded of the writer now makes it difficult for him to be anti-anything.

I have always found that quote repugnant. That a Christian writer should write of compassion in a pejorative sense, or to consider it a weakness, seems entirely at odds with the tenets of her religion. That aside, I think her argument is unsound. It would be difficult to argue a case for Ernest Hemingway, of all people, being weak or hazy, or not being definite about his views, and yet here is a clear example of compassion – an O’Connor indicator, remember, of weakness and haziness – in his writing. Moreover, I have demonstrated that it is possible to ‘put my finger’ on exactly where and how that compassion is projected, and the effect that it has on the reader. There is no mawkish sentimentalism in the Hemingway passage, and the reader is not being invited to see the protagonist in anything other than the stark terms of the loss that he is enduring. Hemingway then goes on to portray the human weakness that undoubtedly resides in Thomas Hudson and never, at any stage, seeks to ‘excuse’ it, or to use the deaths and our reaction to them to change our views of him. His weakness remains and we, the readers, accept it, and yet we still feel compassion for this lonely man at this most solitary of moments. There is a beauty about that which is almost entirely absent in the works of Flannery O’Connor.

Death, of course, surrounds Flannery O’Connor’s work: for a Roman Catholic, death is the stuff of life. And yet, throughout her ouevre, throughout the death and destruction, there is almost never any consideration of the human – as opposed to metaphysical – cost of all that loss. In her attempt to understand the unknowable, to play in God’s sandpit, there is a wilful inability to comprehend the dynamics of the human psyche on a human level. Thus, although there is death all around, there is precious little sorrow. Because she sees this mortal coil as only the anteroom to God’s Life Everlasting, O’Connor stubbornly refuses to consider her characters – or to allow us to – from the shifting perspective of time: there is no fork in the road for literalists like O’Connor, there is only the road and it only leads to one place.

From memory, I can think of only one O’Connor story in which there is some sense of change in the human emotions wrought by death. A Late Encounter With The Enemy is a remarkable story. It retains all the bite of a typical O’Connor piece, and yet the reader is drawn into the emotional scene more fully than is usual for her. There is a poignancy to the death from a stroke of the General as he watches his granddaughter’s graduation. His memory, as it slowly slides into darkness, conflates his Civil War past and the procession of modern-day graduands, and thus we are being presented with the past – and its defeated disappointments – the present, and the future, in the form of the graduating students.

Ironically, as O’Connor beautifully portrays the disintegration of this man’s mind, we are drawn irrevocably into it, and he becomes more real than any other O’Connor character. Remembering Hemingway’s line – ‘for the first time he looked straight down the long and perfect perspective of the blankness ahead’ – I can recall few other instances in O’Connor’s work where I have been similarly drawn into the consciousness of a character and felt so deeply moved.