Jesus, Stab Me in the Heart! Flannery O’Connor at 100

Flannery O’Connor’s neighbors around Milledgeville, Georgia, knew that she was a writer of some renown, even if they did not always understand the point of her stories. But when the Schlitz Playhouse on March 1, 1957, presented “The Life You Save” as a story by Flannery O’Connor on CBS-TV, O’Connor enjoyed a brief moment of local celebrity. She told Maryat Lee,

For the last ten days I have been sustaining congratulations on “my” television play. Old ladies all over town have told me they thought it was the sweetest play they ever saw. One old lady said it really made her think! I didn’t ask her what. Children now point to me on the street. The city fathers think that I have arrived finally. Most think it is a great improvement on the original but forbear to say so openly.[1]

The Schlitz Playhouse of Stars production featured an all-star cast with Gene Kelly, Agnes Moorhead, and Janice Rule. It was promoted as Flannery O’Connor’s “backwards love story.” Kelly described the story and his role, “It’s a kind of hillbilly thing in which I play a guy who befriends a deaf-mute girl in the hills of Kentucky.”[2]

The show opened with pictures of Kelly, Moorhead, and Rule appearing respectively with words superimposed over their images. Kelly’s picture appeared with the lettering, “this is Tom Triplett—he and his toolbox can fix anything—just about.” Moorhead’s character was next with these words, “this is Ma Crater—a lot needs fixing around her place, but a son-in-law would make it perfect—pretty near.” Rule’s picture followed with these words, “this is Lucynell Crater—she can’t hear or speak and is yearning for love—how do you fix that?”[3]

In O’Connor’s story, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” Mr. Tom T. Shiftlet is a one-armed tramp with a toolbox that can fix anything, but he is also a man disillusioned by what he has experienced. In his travels he is looking for innocence and desiring freedom. Young Lucynell Crater is mute and deaf in both the story and the play, but in O’Connor’s original she is not a slim attractive blond looking for the love of a man. She is a large girl nearly thirty years old who falls on the floor from hanging her head between her knees in trying to spy Mr. Shiftlet through the triangle in her hair. The one character in the story and the play that remains the same is the mother, Lucynell Crater, who in both accounts is ravenous to find a son-in-law for her daughter.

O’Connor was upset with the changes to the story. She sarcastically told Betty Hester in advance, “I think it’s channel 5 and people tell me you can’t get it very good here, so I hope you will absolutely be in front of your set this time at the correct hour, as I must have some representative there to give Kelly a good leer every now and then for me.”[4] After viewing it she said, “I don’t recognize the television version. Gene Kelly played Mr. Shiftlet, and for the idiot daughter they got some young actress who had just been voted one of the ten most beautiful women in the world.” She then added mockingly that the show producers changed the ending “just a bit” by having Mr. Shiftlet suddenly get a conscience and come back for the girl.[5]

In O’Connor’s story, Mr. Shiftlet is enamored with Mrs. Crater’s broken-down car. The mother preys upon his lust for the car by promising to give it to him if he were to marry her daughter. He agrees, but immediately after the marriage driving away with young Lucynell he feels dissatisfied and depressed. He stops at a diner so that they can get something to eat, but Lucynell falls asleep inside. Mr. Shiftlet leaves her there sleeping and takes off in the car. He then picks up a boy by the road, whom he intuits is running away from home. Mr. Shiftlet tells him a story about his mother, but throughout juxtaposes details about Lucynell. The boy declares Mr. Shiftlet as fraudulent, curses him, and jumps out of the car. Mr. Shiftlet then continues driving in a storm to his destination in Mobile, Alabama.

In the Schlitz Playhouse version, however, this pivotal moment is changed so that in hearing Triplett’s words the boy becomes remorseful in running away and gets out of the car tearfully. Triplett then returns to the diner and finds Lucynell being accosted for not paying for the pastries she had eaten. He rescues her and proclaims, “I’m her husband. Everything is going to be alright, Lucynell.” The show ends with the smiling newlyweds driving off together.

O’Connor later used the episode as an illustration of the conflict that existed between what she was trying to achieve and how others, like her aunt and the television scriptwriter who changed her story, wanted something different.

I have an aunt who thinks that nothing happens in a story unless somebody gets married or shot at the end of it. I wrote a story about a tramp who marries an old woman’s idiot daughter in order to acquire the old woman’s automobile. After the marriage, he takes the daughter off on a wedding trip in the automobile and abandons her in an eating place and drives on himself. Now that is a complete story. There is nothing more relating to the mystery of that man’s personality that could be shown through that particular dramatization. But I’ve never been able to convince my aunt that it’s a complete story. She wants to know what happened to the idiot daughter after that. Not long ago that story was adapted for a television play, and the adapter, knowing his business, had the tramp have a change of heart and go back and pick up the idiot daughter and the two of them ride away, grinning madly. My aunt believes that the story is complete at last, but I have other sentiments about it—which are not suitable for public utterance.[6]

Mr. Shiftlet, Mrs. Lucynell Crater, and Lucynell Crater

The story opens with a one-armed tramp, Mr. Shiftlet, walking towards an old woman and her daughter sitting on a porch. The older woman, Mrs. Lucynell Crater, is shading her eyes from the piercing sunset, but the daughter, also named Lucynell, deaf and vision impaired, jumped up and down stomping her feet. The man tips his hat to the daughter, as if she were not in the least afflicted, and swung his hat all the way off for the old woman. The old woman said, “good evening,” but the tramp only turned his back and faced the sunset, swinging “both his whole and his short arm up slowly so that they indicated an expanse of sky and his figure formed a crooked cross.”[7] The older woman “watched him with her arms folded across her chest as if she were the owner of the sun, and the daughter watched, her head thrust forward and her fat helpless hands hanging at the wrists.” The man says, “Lady . . . I’d give a fortune to live where I could see me a sun do that every evening.” “Does it every evening,” she replies.[8]

Mr. Shiftlet sees a rusted automobile in a shed and asks if they drive. The older woman responds that the car quit running fifteen years ago when her husband died. “Nothing is like it used to be, lady,” the man said. “The world is almost rotten.” “That’s right,” the old woman said. “You from around here?” “Name Tom T. Shiftlet,” he murmured, looking at the tires. She replies, “What you doing around here, Mr. Shiftlet?”[9] In answering her question, he tells her that surgeons can operate on the human heart, but they do not know any more about the heart, the mysteries of life, than you or me. As Mr. Shiftlet kept talking, Mrs. Crater sat rocking and wondering if he could put a new roof on the garden house.

She then inquires if he is married or single. Mr. Shiftlet answers, “where would you find an innocent woman today? I wouldn’t have any of this trash I could just pick up.”[10] Young Lucynell at that point fell on the ground trying to look between her knees and began to whimper. Mr. Shiftlet helps her up and asks the old woman if the girl is hers. The mother responds positively and declares that she wouldn’t give her daughter up for anything in the world, not even a casket of jewels. As he listens, Mr. Shiftlet’s eye in the darkness focuses on the glittering part of the car bumper.

Mr. Shiftlet then declares that there is nothing on the farm that he couldn’t fix, that he was a man and had “a moral intelligence.” Mrs. Crater was not impressed with the phrase, but she tells him that he could hang around and work for food and sleep in the car. “Why listen, lady,” he said with a grin of delight, “the monks of old slept in their coffins!” She responds, “They wasn’t as advanced as we are.”[11]

In this opening, O’Connor has presented the essence of each character. Mrs. Crater is a materialist who believes that reality is nothing more than what it appears to be. She has no regard for the sun, much less anything spiritual and transcendent. Her kingdom treasure in Matthew 13:45-fashion is her daughter.[12] Mr. Shiftlet appears as a weary searcher looking for a place of innocence and the means for freedom in a world almost rotten.[13] Casting a figure of a crooked cross, claiming to be a carpenter, seeing beyond the material universe, there is a suggestion that he is a savior. [14] In between the two is Lucynell, who reflects transcendence in appearance and innocence in behavior. Her pink-gold hair the color of the sun, her eyes the blue of heaven.

Mr. Shiftlet and the Automobile

Mr. Shiftlet proves immediately that he has the ability to save the farm from decay. He also brings new life to Lucynell, teaching her to say her first word, “bird.” Mrs. Crater, watching from a distance, is secretly pleased. She requests that Mr. Shiftlet teach Lucynell to say another word, teach her to say “sugarpie.” He already knew what was on the old woman’s mind, and so the next day he began to tinker with the broken down car. He believed that the car, a 1928 or 1929 Ford, was a real gem because, unlike modern mass production, someone had taken a personal interest in it.

Taking a personal interest in the Ford in order to bring it to life, Mr. Shiftlet informs the old woman that it needs a new fan belt to run. After she gives him the money for the part, he casually asks how old Lucynell is. “Fifteen, sixteen, the old woman said. The girl was nearly thirty but because of her innocence it was impossible to guess.”[15]

When the car starts, Lucynell accompanies it, the deaf speaking, with her alleluia chorus of “Burrddtt! Bddirrddttt!”[16] Mr. Shiftlet, sitting erect and triumphant in the driver’s seat, “had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he had just raised the dead.” Once the old woman sees that Mr. Shiftlet has what he wants, she tells him that Saturday “you and her and me” can drive into town to get married.[17]

Mr. Shiftlet objects to the timing since he has no money for a proper honeymoon, but the old woman replies that Lucynell does not even know what a hotel is. The old woman tells him that he would be getting a permanent home with a deep well and the most innocent girl in the world. She then adds, “You don’t need no money. Lemme tell you something: there ain’t a place in the world for a poor disabled friendless drifting man.” “The ugly words settled in Mr. Shiftlet’s head like a group of buzzards in the top of a tree.”[18]

He takes his time, and then he tells her that man is divided in two parts, the body, which like a house does not go anywhere, and the spirit, which like an automobile is always on the move. Mrs. Crater, however, knows what bait to use to catch him. She tells him that she’ll pay so that he can have the car painted by Saturday. “In the darkness, Mr. Shiftlet’s smile stretched like a weary snake waking up by a fire.”[19]

Mr. Shiftlet and Lucynell

Up to this point, Mr. Shiftlet has been evenly divided in his view of nature and spirit and the moral choices before him. Now he begins in serpent-like fashion to treasure the car and his freedom above all else. Lucynell might be innocent, but he believes that her mother’s actions are a total denial of his spirit.[20]

After the marriage as they come out of the courthouse, Mr. Shiftlet looks morose and bitter, as if he has been insulted while someone held him. When he laments that the marriage did not satisfy him none, the old woman sharply replies that it satisfied the law. Mr. Shiftlet spits and then replies that it is the law that does not satisfy him.

The mother does not want to let go of her girl, but Mr. Shiftlet eases the car forward so that she has to move her hands. Driving as fast as possible to make it to Mobile by nightfall, he occasionally looks at Lucynell picking the cherries off her hat and throwing them out the window. Depressed in spite of the car, Mr. Shiftlet stops at a diner to eat. Before the food comes, Lucynell is asleep and snoring on the counter. Mr. Shiftlet pays and tells the boy behind the counter to give her the food when she wakes up. The boy looks at her and then stares at Mr. Shiftlet and declares, “she looks an angel of Gawd.” Shiftlet came to the farm looking for innocence, and Lucynell is the embodiment of innocence. It is his opportunity to die to the almost rotten world and care for another, but he values his freedom more than her. “‘Hitchhiker,’ Mr. Shiftlet explained. ‘I can’t wait. I got to make Tuscaloosa.’”[21]

On the road, Mr. Shiftlet is more depressed than ever. He no longer perceives the transcendent as he should, and O’Connor has the sun descend in a reddening ball over the car to dramatize divine displeasure.[22] He stops to pick up a boy and starts talking sentimentally about the value of mothers, but in doing so he transfers the diner clerk’s phrase about Lucynell to his mother in what amounts to a confession,

“My mother was an angel of Gawd,” Mr. Shiftlet said in a very strained voice. “He took her from heaven and giver to me and I left her.” His eyes were instantly clouded over with a midst of tears. The car was barely moving.

The boy turned angrily in the seat. “You go to the devil!” he cried. “My old woman is a flea bag and yours is a stinking pole cat!” and with that he flung the door open and jumped out with his suitcase into a ditch.[23]

The boy’s words ring true as Mr. Shiftlet hears his judgment ex ore infantibus: “You go to the devil!”[24] Mr. Shiflet is the bridegroom who abandons his bride and absconds with that which he ultimately prizes, the car. However, the car is just a car. There is no lasting transformation found with it despite his attempts to make it into a medium of grace.[25] The car doesn’t bring meaning to his life; it does not enable him to escape the feeling of “the rottenness of the world that is about to engulf him.”[26]A cloud, the same color as the boy’s hat, shaped like a turnip covered the sun, and another cloud, worse looking, crouched behind the car. Mr. Shiftlet beat his breast and cried out to the Lord, but his self-pitying prayer that the “slime” be removed from the earth only results in God’s derisive laughter of judgment, “the guffawing peal of thunder.”[27]

“Personal Interest” and “The World is Almost Rotten”

O’Connor’s working title in writing the story was “Personal Interest.” When she submitted the manuscript to John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon Review, she entitled it “The World is Almost Rotten.”[28] O’Connor’s friend Robert Fitzgerald, however, shared with her shortly thereafter that while he was driving on vacation, he had noticed a billboard with the slogan “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

The three titles together are revealing of O’Connor’s intention with the story. Mr. Shiftlet’s potential redemption, his seeking to find innocence in a world that was almost rotten, is the concern of the tale. Her first title, “Personal Interest,” put the focus on the choice that Mr. Shiftlet has before him. Her second title, “The World is Almost Rotten,” testified to the reality of original sin in a fallen creation. The third title, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” combined the crucial elements of the first two titles, but added an eschatological cast.

The fascination of O’Connor’s aunt with what happened to Lucynell after she is left at the diner speaks to the power of the real situation that the story reflected. But O’Connor presents Lucynell throughout as angelic. In O’Connor’s judgment, Lucynell is a baptized innocent who is not in need of redemption. The prime literary concern is in bringing Mr. Shiftlet to the point where he is confronted with an action of grace.

In her correspondence with John Hawkes, O’Connor left no doubt about how Mr. Shiftlet was to be considered. She told Hawkes that Mr. Shiftlet is “of the Devil.”[29] Mr. Shiftlet might not literally be a murderer like The Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” but he shares The Misfit’s demonic nihilism in a willingness to destroy others in seeking to satisfy his own self-interest.

Mr. Shiftlet seeks freedom, not freedom from slavery to sin, but freedom as autonomous self-construction, the essential American heresy.[30] But Mr. Shiftlet’s sentimentality concerning his earthly treasure, the car, does not lead to joy and freedom but rather slavery to self and depression. O’Connor wrote,

We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our return to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ’s death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and its early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite.[31]

For O’Connor, when a culture turns its back on original sin and the reality of living before Almighty God, as Europe had done in World War II, and America was doing post-World War II, sentimentality becomes diabolical.[32] The questions raised at the end of the story as Mr. Shiftlet flees are questions that must be answered by the modern individual who treasures personal freedom and possessions over God and others. Where are you going? What have you become?[33]

Endnotes

[1] Maryat Lee, “Flannery, 1957,” Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, vol. 5 (Autumn 1976), 51.

[2] Flannery O’Connor to “A”, December 28, 1956, Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 191.

[3] The show can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku6JwCcfyt0. The television production changed the name of the protagonist. In O’Connor’s story, he is named “Mr. Shiftlet.” In the television show, he is named “Mr. Triplett.”

[4] O’Connor to “A,” December 28, 1956, Habit of Being, 191.

[5] “Off the Cuff,” Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, ed. Rosemary M. Magee (University of Mississippi Press, 1987), 8.

[6] Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,” in Mystery and Manners, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 94–95.

[7] Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories (Noonday, 1995), 146.

[8] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 146.

[9] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 146–47.

[10] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 149.

[11] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 149.

[12] Carter W. Martin, The True Country (Vanderbilt University, 1994), 87.

[13] John F. Desmond, “The Shifting of Mr. Shiftlet: Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own,’” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1 (Winter 1974–75), 56.

[14] Rebecca Sharp, “Flannery O’Connor and Poe’s ‘Angel of the Odd,’” Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, vol. 7 (Autumn 1978), 120.

[15] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 151.

[16] John R. May, The Pruning Word (Notre Dame, 1976), 68.

[17] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 151.

[18] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 152.

[19] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 152. Desmond equates Mr. Shiftlet’s turn with Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown. “[Shiftlet’s] shift, and this is a central point of the story, is precisely that which Young Goodman Brown undergoes at the end of Hawthorne’s tale: once his abstract belief in innocence has been pulverized, he reverts to the opposite hardened extreme of viewing all the world as corrupt, an inversion of his sentimental belief in innocence.” Desmond, “Shifting of Mr. Shiftlet,” 57.

[20] Desmond argues that “behind O’Connor’s analysis of this malaise, illuminating it, is the fact of Christ’s Incarnation and Redemption as the perfect analogue of spirit interpenetrating and redeeming material categories.” Desmond, “Shifting of Mr. Shiftlet,” 57.

[21] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 155.

[22] Stuart Burns, “Torn by the Lord’s Eye: Flannery O’Connor’s Use of Sun Imagery,” Twentieth Century Literature, no. 3 (Oct. 1967), 156.

[23] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 155. O’Connor revised the original publication in the Kenyon Review and added the sentence “The car was barely moving” when the story appeared in A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

[24] May, Pruning Word, 33. In correspondence with John Hawkes, O’Connor declared that Mr. Shiftlet is of the devil. Flannery O’Connor to John Hawkes, December 26, 1959, Habit of Being, 367.

[25] John F. Desmond, Risen Sons (Univ. of Georgia, 1987), 48.

[26] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 156.

[27] When an English textbook altered “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” by omitting the final paragraph, O’Connor wrote Elizabeth McKee to inform Harcourt Brace of her protest. She said, “I suppose there is nothing that can be done about it now but I certainly don’t like the idea of my story being in a textbook and the last paragraph omitted.” Flannery O’Connor to Elizabeth McKee, October 28, 1960, Habit of Being, 415.

[28] Flannery O’Connor to Elizabeth McKee, October 15, 1952, Habit of Being, 44.

[29] Flannery O’Connor to John Hawkes, December 26, 1959, Habit of Being, 367.

[30] Email correspondence, Ralph C. Wood to Danny Olinger, January 2, 2025.

[31] Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 148.

[32] Brian Regan argues that O’Connor attacked the American literature “tradition that grew from Emerson because it denies Original Sin and thus the need for Redemption, which to her were basic facts about the universe. She also saw that, in reality, an Adamic man would not in fact keep his innocence long, but would instead become diabolical, like Mr. Shiftlet.” Brian Abel Ragen, A Wreck on the Road to Damascus (Loyola University, 1989), 199.

[33] Doug Davis, “Shiftlet’s Choice: O’Connor’s Fordist Love Story,” in Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism, eds. Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo (Univ. of Tennessee, 2010), 171.

Danny E. Olinger is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and serves as the general secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ordained Servant Online, February, 2025.