MovieChat Forums > The Sterile Cuckoo (1969) Discussion > Flannery O'Connor and Sarah and Pookie

Flannery O'Connor and Sarah and Pookie

posted 19 years ago by tbreed3
2 replies | jump to latest

Last summer when I reread O'Connor's short story The Comforts of Home (TCOH) and
TSC I noticed that my emotional reaction towards the the Sarah Ham/Star Drake character was quite similar to that towards Pookie. I now believe that Nichols was heavily influenced by TCOH to the point where Pookie is a re-imagined version of Sarah and is not just a product of Nichols' imagination. I don't know if anybody else here is a Flannery O'Connor fan and
might have similar or differing views.

For anybody who's read TCOH and TSC here are my arguments:

O'Connor was a nationally prominent writer by the time Nichols got to Hamilton.
Nichols of course had literary ambitions along with an interest in bizarre, eccentric
characters and situations that were O'Connor's forte. When TCOH appeared in the
Kenyon Review in the fall of 1960 when Nichols was a junior at Hamilton I think it's probable that he would have read it.

In both works the central female character is a small, slender, young woman with an
eccentric imagination who becomes fixated on the male character. In both the character is a young woman comfortable and confident with her sexuality facing a male who isn't necessarily such. She's a sexual predator who attempts to accost him in a motor vehicle and later enters his bedroom while he's sleeping to accost him. Both characters have transgressive elements. Sarah is bad and dangerous to know and Pookie is at least the latter and with a higher body count.

There are some other details. TSC has doodles in it and O'Connor like to doodle
as well and has them in TCOH in the Kenyon Review version. Also, there's the "p-word" Nichols uses in the merry-go-round scene. I don't think this is a word typically used by a character who's supposed to have grown up in the environs of NYC. I grew up in southern WV in the 50's and 60's and I don't recall hearing it and I was a bit shocked to see it in one of O'Connor's earlier stories.

[–] dasein451 19 years ago

A very interesting thesis... I'd like to look into this O'Connor connection. However, for various reasons I am persuaded that TSC is essentially autobiographical, and that a "Pookie" really existed. Here's why:

1) Where "Jerry" describes his summer job activities which included collecting Gloriosa beetles, Nichols repeats this same information in his autobiography, "An American Child Supreme."

2) Nichols' autobiography further mentions him dividing his time spent at college in upstate NY with frequent trips to visit a particular girlfriend in Connecticut.

3) The detailed, unenthusiastic physical description of Pookie in the novel-- right down to her jutting hipbones, small potbelly and "the acne on her back below either shoulder [which] showed up purple in the cold"-- does not make her appear to be the product of any poetic imagination, but of very prosaic and specific experience.

4) Nichols' Hamilton College classmate Richard Blessing wrote this about TSC in 1973:
Now I think Pookie is a monster, yet I must confess to being a bit in love with her myself. She is, after all, less the original product of Nichols' teeming imagination than she is a caricature, and not a very gross one at that, of the girls we used to date ten years ago. They went to places like Wells and Wellesley, Skidmore and Vassar, and they had names like "Cricket," "Bon-Bon," "Puddles" and "Bunchie" (Ah, Bunchie!). They wrote bad poetry and were obsessed with their childhoods and were very sensitive and swore a lot because of it. Like Pookie, they fought a constant battle to become as little children and we valued them according to their innocence in the midst of our immensely corrupt and fallen selves.
He all but gives us Pookie's phone number!

Now, the similarities between Pookie and Sarah are, I'm sure, just as you describe, and Nichols was almost without doubt familiar with O'Connor's work. But did he pick up the word "pickaninny" from her? Nichols had a very diverse and wide-ranging background, but it may be so, and he may have deliberately or unconsciously nudged the character in the direction of recreating Sarah. Still, I believe a "Pookie" really existed, but was reconfigured for Nichols' literary purposes in numerous ways, not the least of them to protect the "real" Pookie's identity. Only John Nichols could say for sure. Ever thought to ask him? He was still around, last time I looked...

[–] vanityfair_713 16 years ago

I think some things are coincidences only...the doodle thing, for instance. Many other films have doodles and are not necessarily connected to anything else.

Personally, I think I have too much bloom. Maybe that's the trouble with me.