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Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor

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A very long time ago in a graduate English course I read all the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and have not read her since. Brad Gooch's new biography FLANNERY: A LIFE OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR convinced me that I should reread her, and that is no small compliment for a biographer. Too often a pedestrian account of some favorite writer's life will leave me unmoved--I have yet to finish a biography of Emily Dickinson although I have tried to read several-- although that is certainly not the case with Mr. Gooch. From the opening paragraph of his telling of the five-year-old Mary Flannery's (she was called both names as a child) visit by a Pathe newsreel company camerman for the purpose of filming her bantam chicken walking backwards to the sad account of the death and funeral of one of America's most celebrated writers, the story seldom drags.

Born on March 25, 1925 in Savannah of Irish Catholic parents, Edward and Regina O'Connor, Flannery lived there until she was thirteen when the family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia. Her beloved father died in 1941 at the young age of 45 of lupus, the disease that would eventually kill Flannery. She attended Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, then the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Yaddo, the artists' colony in upstate New York. Stricken with lupus at 25, O'Connor returned to Milledgeville and lived there for the rest of her too short life-- she died at the age of 39--with her mother on a dairy farm surrounded by peacocks and other animals as well as both black and white farmworkers, some of whom would become models for the "freaks" she wrote about in her fiction. O'Connor left the farm on occasion to make speeches and visit friends and would travel out of the country only once, on a trip to Europe and specifically Lourdes, calling herself an accidental pilgrim. She opined about the trip with too many stops in too many places: "By my calculations we should see more airports than shrines."

Mr. Gooch has done exhaustive research; there are voluminous notes at the end of the book that are listed chronologically from page 1 to the end of the biography rather than by starting over with each chapter, making for ease in using the notes. He is seeped in O'Connor's stories as well as he often points out incidents and people in her life that show up in her fiction. Mr. Gooch also quotes liberally from both O'Connor's reviews and essays.

Any biographer worth reading would have to tackle both race and religion and Mr. Gooch does. Describing herself as a Thirteenth Century Catholic, O'Connor was a woman of deep faith and attended mass daily when able and read many Catholic writers including Thomas Merton and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Furthermore, many of her close friends including Robert Lowell and Robert and Sally Fitzgerald were Catholic as well. Unfortunately O'Connor did not share the progressive attitude about race of many in the Catholic Church. She was known to have used the "N" word in private, told racist jokes and once refused to let James Baldwin visit her in Milledgeville although she would have seen him in New York. She said, "I observe the traditions of the society I feed on--it's only fair." Although described by a priest friend as patronizing to blacks, O'Connor, to her credit, did write to a friend in 1963: "I feel good about those changes in the South that have been long overdue--it's only fair." (Alice Walker wrote an eloquent article on the subject of race in O'Connor's fiction in MS. magazine in the 1970's that was later republished in a collection of her essays.)

Flannery O'Connor had strong likes and dislikes of fellow writers. She didn't care for either Emily Dickinson or Robert Browning although she liked Nathaniel Hawthorne from that era. GONE WITH THE WIND "irked" her, and she found TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD a good book for children. She heartily disliked D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Wolfe, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams-- too much sex and the wrong kind in the latter two writers-- and said that Carson McCuller's CLOCK WITHOUT HANDS was the worst book she had ever read although she liked Eudora Welty. It is not surprising that she liked Edgar Allan Poe as well as Nathaniel West's MISS LONELYHEARTS and Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING.

A nonconformist from the cradle, O'Connor was capable of the most unusual acts. Having seen black servants dipping snuff, she showed up with it at school and sometimes brought castor oil sandwiches to school as well so that she wouldn't have to share them with classmates. She once named a pet quail Amelia Earhart following the pilot's disappearance in 1937 and dressed a chicken in gray shorts, white shirt jacket and red bow. In a home economics class, for her sewing project, she outfitted her duckling.

In addition to O'Connor's wondrously unique stories, you also have to love anyone who describes the three education courses she took in college-- in case her fate was to teach ninth-graders in Podunk, Georgia-- "Pure Wasted Time." Or at a luncheon in Milledgeville in honor of the publication of WISE BLOOD, when members of the Milledgeville Book Club were asked what childhood book impressed them, O'Connor deadpanned "the Sears-Roebuck Catalog." Or when an NBC television interviewer in New York mentioned that she was from the farm, O'Connor responded: "I don't see much of it, I'm a writer, and I farm from the rocking chair." And finally one of her most famous lines: "When I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it's because we are still able to recognize one."

While it must be difficult to illuminate the life of a writer who lived so privately and quietly as O'Connor, Mr. Gooch is able-- at least at times-- to let us catch glimpses of who this most enigmatic of writers was. Clearly the most poignant passage in the entire biography has to be when O'Connor's good friend Sally Fitzgerald tells her that she does not have rheumatoid arthritis, as Flannery's controlling mother had told her, but rather lupus. In that sad, frightening moment for her, we can forgive this wonderful writer anything as our hearts go out to her.

I've loved Flannery O'Connor since I was in college; back then, I read a story a night before I went to bed. I tried to turn my friends onto her but to no avail, even despite my overenthusiastic description of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" as the worst family vacation story ever. It was then that I found an essay on O'Connor by Alice Walker that had originally been published in "Ms." magazine in the 70s. It made me curious about who O'Connor was but despite the descriptions of her as a Southern Catholic writer who had lupus and loved peacocks, I knew very little.

Only last summer I was looking through the holdings at the local library and was disappointed at the lack of biographical works on O'Connor. And six months later, here we are with Brad Gooch's brand new biography. It's astonishing to me that this is the first major biography for such a major and influential twentieth-century writer. (As compared to the few biographies that were part of a series on major authors that were best used as references for students - but what about the rest of us?) O'Connor died in 1964 so this book has been a long time coming and it's been worth the wait.

Gooch, whose biography of the poet Frank O'Hara (another subject with a life cut short) was a great achievement, has written an accessible and thoroughly entertaining work on the short life but indelible career of one of my favorite authors. The background on O'Connor and her writing is invaluable as is the insight into how many characters in her stories were inspired by her own mother, Regina including the memorable, doomed Mrs. May from "Greenleaf." Gooch gives us more insight into the "Southern Catholic writer," showing us the fascinating woman whose knowledge of her impending fate spurred her into producing some amazing fiction. Has O'Connor's unique style ever, EVER been matched?

While this is a small thing to note, the book has a beautifully designed dust jacket. I am grateful to Gooch for writing this book, and for doing it so well.

Brad Gooch's "Flannery" passes the test fundamental test for excellence in a biography: when the book is finished the reader fundamentally understands the subject of the book in a way he or she did not before.

Like many readers of my generation (graduated high school 1978), I had a good introduction to Miss O'Connor's short stories - sprung on us with relish by an English teacher from the South. Compared with most of the other materials we were covering those stories were shocking to say the least. Over the years I wondered what kind of life the author must have led to produce those stories - both the hard edges and the evident spirtuality they contained. We (those outside the literary world) did not know much about O'Connor in that era - only that she was a serious Roman Catholic and had died young after a long fight with Lupus.

Brad Gooch's exhaustive research surely paid off as he fills in the details - about her family life, her medical conditions, her spirtual life and both the joys and difficulties of her writing. Perhaps what surprised me the most were the legion of friends and fans this very unusual women attracted living, as she did, a rather quiet life in a generally quiet place.

Professor Gooch provides his readers with a very vivid portrait of Miss O'Connor's struggles - and how her faith and her sickness found their way into her works. As a Roman Catholic myself, reflecting on Miss O'Connor's strong faith in the face of her difficulties through this biography seemed very fitting for Lent.

I suspect, based upon the lengthy acknowledgements and sources cited (these should certainly be read) that Professor Gooch could have written a far longer book. I am glad he did not. The size, scope and pacing were all excellent.

I commend this biography to any one who ever wondered about Flannery O'Connor or, indeed, the American literary scene after the War.

Mary Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) published only two novels--Wise Blood in 1952, and The Violent Bear It Away in 1960, and two collections of short stories--A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories in 1955 and the posthumous Everything That Rises Must Converge in 1965. That output was more than enough for her short life to cast a long shadow across the literary landscape, evidenced by the 195 doctoral dissertations and seventy book length studies of her work. Gooch has written the first major biography of O'Connor since she died, adding to our fund of knowledge from letters that were newly released in 2007 and countless interviews with O'Connor's friends, classmates, colleagues, publishers, and critics.

O'Connor cut an odd figure. From her earliest years as an only child, she was always socially awkward, deeply introverted, and colorfully eccentric. She laced her coffee with coke, enjoyed racist jokes, never married, and collected exotic birds (especially her beloved peacocks). A deeply pious Catholic, she lived in the Baptist south. When she entered college she intended to be a political cartoonist but found her calling at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. After leaving Georgia for Iowa, New York City and Connecticut, her diagnosis of lupus at age twenty-six (the same disease that killed her father when he was forty-five) returned her back to isolation on the 550-acre working dairy farm in rural Georgia run by her widowed mother, from which isolation she wrote powerfully disturbing fiction about human nature. O'Connor was also an exceptionally disciplined writer, establishing early on an inviolable and lifelong regimen of writing three pages a day every morning.

Most of all, O'Connor was one of the most important Christian writers of the last century or more. She attended daily mass most of her adult life, and described herself as "a thirteenth century Christian" and "hermit novelist." Indeed, she read broadly and deeply in Aquinas and other theologians. For her, the craft of her art--good stories well told--was an end in itself and a sign of God's grace. The content of her fiction was also her confession of faith: "My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil." To those who complained about her grotesque and deeply flawed characters, she insisted that "there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism," and that "to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures."

For the most part Gooch connects the events of O'Connor's life with what he perceives as the autobiographical aspects of her fiction. He acknowledges but does not treat in depth O'Connor's cultural racism (she once refused a visit by James Baldwin) or tense relationship with her overbearing mother who ran the farm as a savvy business woman. I also wish that Gooch had included some of O'Connor's extensive art work among the 16 black and white photos. At the end of this biography, though, I was left with a keen sense of awe and gratitude for a woman who, despite her significant suffering and "passive diminishments" (a concept from Teilhard de Chardin that she liked), stayed true to her call and her God.

For those who want a basic outline of Miss O'Connor's life, with enough detail to feel like you get to know her story a bit, this isn't a bad book. Surprisingly though, considering its subject, it comes off without that spark that appears in the best biographies; unfortunately, it's a tad pedestrian. I felt that while I learned a fair amount ABOUT her, I didn't really get to know O'Connor all that well in these pages as either a person or a writer.

In consequence, I'd recommend that interested folks read her collection of letters, "The Habit of Being," and a good study of her fiction like Ralph Wood's "Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South" before looking at Gooch's biography. The latter can serve as an informative supplement to the former couple books, but it's not a replacement.

This work is truly a labor of love and respect for Flannery O'Connor, and the Mr. Gooch has aimed attempting to construct a definitive biography.

While I would highly recommend this book to both new and experienced readers of O'Connor, I would tell them of my experience of reading the book:

- It's a book "about" O'Connor which mainly reconstructs her via quotations, interviews, hearsay, .. reported speech.

- The amount of data, quotations and names are at times overwhelming. Very long sentences with endless commas make this bumpy reading in some parts while there is plenty of beautiful prose in other parts (The first and last 100 pages are particularly nice ).

- The book reads best when not reconstructing particular places and steps back to describe and even evaluate in the author's own words. There is no overlying interpretation however.. the book functions as an assemblage of documented places, happenings, statements.

-Some information and insinuations perhaps seem gratuitous .. others are fascinating. It documents O'Connor.. but doesn't reveal a new perspective or insight other than her frustrations with her mother, her frustrated affections for Erik, and the frustrated affections two women seem to have had for her.

-The book downplays the religiously-driven qualities of her work, and secularizes, humanizes and reveals a very complex woman of immense intelligence, vision, physical stamina and determination, with little if any self-pity. Her biting sense of humour and self-deprecation were refreshing.

- Petty references to sublimation of her sexuality to religion, Erik's description of his stolen kiss, and repeated mention of her supposed patronizing attitudes to race( similar to Faulkner's ) only weaken the book and distract from her real contributions.

When I think of definitive biography, I think of Ellman's timeless and impeccably written biography of James Joyce. I was hoping for something as broad and deep. This was an enjoyable, beautiful, informative yet sometimes bumpy read, written by a man who truly respects and and loves O'Connor.The inclusion or focus on gender, sexuality and race issues however I'm sure would send O'Connor herself into a major hussy.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) is one of the giants of American literature. So it's surprising that, though we have seen many critical interpretations of her works, `Flannery' is the first major biography of the woman who shook up the literary world and changed the landscape of literature with her dark, comic, and theologically dense work. And Gooch has done a good job with it.

Most of O'Connor's biography is well-known to fans. She was born in Savannah and moved to Milledgeville at 13. Outside of a brief and unhappy stay in Atlanta in her mid-teens that culminated in her father's death from lupus, she stayed in Milledgeville through her time at Georgia College for Women. After graduation there, she went off to Iowa for graduate school. She dabbled in drawing cartoons and journalism, but eventually ended up in the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where her emerging talents, as well as her literary idiosyncrasies and ability to shock, were first discovered. After a few years in the Northeast, where she lived at the Yaddo Artist's Colony and with friends in Connecticut- and completed most of the work on her first novel `Wise Blood'- she became ill and was diagnosed with lupus. Her bad health brought her back to Milledgeville, where she lived until she died of kidney failure, the result of complications of her lupus, at the age of thirty-nine. In between, she wrote another novel and some of the best short-stories ever written.

All of this is laid out competently by Gooch, a result of some twenty-plus years of research. He also sheds some new light, at least for me, with his research into Betty Hester, the infamous A. of O'Connor's collected letters, a fan who wrote Flannery (many fans wrote her and often times she would write back) and struck up a deep friendship, and Erik Langjaer, a traveling salesman from Holland whose presence allows us to see one of the few glimpses of Flannery in love.

From a literary perspective, Gooch shows us the many influences of O'Connor's work. Though her work was certainly more grotesque than her life (she thought the grotesque was needed to adequately get her points across), it is filled with her. It is filled with people struggling for grace, a reflection of her life as a Catholic in the Deep Protestant South. It is filled with damaged and deformed people, a reflection of her illness. A farmhouse just like the one she lived in and mistresses resembling her mother inhabit a number of her stories.

Gooch explores her literary tastes as a window to her mind. As a devout Catholic, she read much Catholic philosophy, from Aquinas to de Chardin. She seemed to struggle to `prove' her faith, (her whole body of work can be viewed as an attempt to show others the grace of her faith) to herself and her intellectual friends, taking great pride in having converted the poet Robert Lowell and Hester. (Neither conversion stuck.) There isn't much from Gooch on her craft other than that she wrote religiously for a few hours each morning at a typewriter set-up next to her bed. This is ok because of the numerous aforementioned studies of her work. Also, I found her letters to be a great source of information on her literary ideas. In fact, attempts to read her letters before were always abandoned because they just didn't breathe to me. I decided to try her letters again while reading Gooch's biography and the added context brought them to life. For anyone really interested in learning as much as possible of Flannery's mind, I recommend trying this.

Others have written that Gooch's prose is not good, and that he hasn't struck any new ground. As far as the prose, I found it competent: it never called attention to itself, but nor was I ever distracted by it As far as striking new ground, perhaps if you're an O'Connor scholar you won't learn anything new here (If you were an O'Connor scholar, you would have read it immediately upon its release and probably would not be reading this review.) But if you're not a scholar but a fan, my guess is that you would appreciate this book. Biography is supposed to present the facts in such a way that we both know more about the subject and care about them as well. For me, he succeeded. He brought out all of her quirks, lovable and not-so-lovable. He humanized her for me, which is not easy given her unique personality and life. I felt pangs of remorse at the end- as if a friend had died- at the thought of another creative genius gone too soon.

Flannery O'Connor, as Brad Gooch's new biography makes clear, was one of a kind. His descriptions of Depression era Georgia remind us just how far the rural South, where she grew up, was from the American mainstream, and how rich the minefield for eccentric characters.

O'Connor herself might have been one. An only child, born to landed Irish Catholics in Savannah, she developed an early liking for domestic fowl and became famous for teaching a chicken to walk backwards. If you're a fan of her work, and I am, the only thing startling about the story is that when the chicken balked she didn't attack to Pathe newsmen come to record this feat. In a milieu where girls of her social class were expected to be well-mannered and lady-like above all, O'Connor struggled to be herself. Largely, she succeeded, but she realized her need to get away to develop what some people recognized early on as artistic genius.

Gooch, an English professor and author, is a disciplined biographer, careful in his research and in his interpretations of it. He's also a competent guide to the Catholic theology that informed O'Connor's work and comforted her throughout her short, brutal life. O'Connor's faith was a link to many of her literary contemporaries--Robert Lowell, Walker Percy, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, Katherine Ann Porter among them. Sadly, it also restrained her ideas about social justice; she rejected Dorothy Day, for example, and declined to entertain James Baldwin in Georgia. But she did embrace Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Merton.

Two tricky subjects emerge--O'Connor's sexuality and her attitudes about race. Gooch, who has written about his emergence as a gay man, handles the ambiguity around O'Connor's sexual preferences and behavior well, sharing what intimates have said but resisting categorizing O'Connor, something she refused to do. Her racial attitudes are more troubling, and this reader wished he had interviewed African-Americans in the communities where she grew up. Savannah, Atlanta and Milledgeville may have been segregated, but blacks were acutely aware of their white neighbors and could have offered insights Gooch neglects. Instead we learn of her more liberal friends' horror at her racist speech, which was, at least, more moderate than her mother's.

O'Connor,who died in 1965, has been dead longer than the 39 years she lived. She always said she wasn't trying to be "topical," and that she'd trade 100 contemporary readers for just one a hundred years in the future. Gooch's book is a step toward making that wish come true.

When one reads a biography, he hopes for insight into the influences and life experiences, especially in the subject's formative years, that led to that remarkable life. It is the duty of the biographer to uncover and present this information to the reader, and it was with this intent I read Brad Gooch's "Flannery: A life of Flannery O'Connor."

I had read an O'Connor novel and several short stories years ago and was curious to learn what kind of person could create the bizarre character Hazel Motes, a psychotic fanatic, who in a bout of religious frenzy swaddles his torso in barbed wire, a "Crown of Thorns" about his midriff ("Wise Blood"). What experience in a writer's past prompted the amputee Hulga (at age ten her leg was shot off in a hunting accident), who in her devious naivete tries to seduce a young drummer selling Bibles and ends up herself abandoned in a hayloft while her artificial leg winds up in the likewise devious young man's satchel ("Good Country People")? What writer would have her character Asbury ("The Enduring Chill") take such cruel delight "that she [his mother[ should see death in his face at once?" While I can't see how Gooch--or anyone else,for that matter--could entirely bring to light the woman behind those skewed tales and damaged characters ("freaks" Gooch calls them), I believe his biography comes as close as possible.

In "Flannery: A Life..." Gooch's exhaustive inquiry into the writer's life points to three prominent influences on her work, the first of which is her strong Catholic upbringing, deep faith, and extensive reading in theology which enable her to play devil's advocate to religion and create characters who are atheists, agnostics, blasphemers, and fundamentalist zealots.

A second influence at work in O'Connor's fiction is the debilitating disease Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) with which she was diagnosed at the age of twenty-five (and which had killed her father ten years earlier). Recurring bouts of SLE restrained Flannery from physical activity (crutches assisted her in the latter years)and forced her to alter her work routines. (In the months before her death in 1964 at the age of thirty-nine, Flannery was able to work only two hours daily.) That she was able to complete two novels and most of her thirty-one short stories in the fourteen years she battled lupus is not just amazing, but a true testimony to her dedication and love of her craft. The heavy doses of corticosteroids used to treat her disease also led to periods of creative fire that Flannery feared would burn up her brain.

The ante-bellum South, its attitudes and values, was the third influence on Ms. O'Connor's works. Her upbringing and residence in a household governed by her mother, the southern belle Regina, and constant intercourse with relatives and numerous family friends who visited and took meals with the O'Connors gave Flannery a rich pool of experience from which to draw her characters. Her sharp eye and ear for character and story found fertile ground in the Georgia family farm at Andalusia and the small town of Milledgeville; both sites contributed to the gothic dark and twisted "Deliverance" nature of her tales.

"Flannery: A Life..." is a book well-researched. Gooch interviewed O'Connor's classmates, close personal friends, fans and colleagues (the biography reads like a literary Who's Who of early 20th Century American Lit: poets Bishop, Lowell, Tate, Jarrell; authors Porter, Welty, McCullers, Faulkner and the publisher Robert Giroux, a few of many). Gooch's well-chosen excerpts from the letters of close friends Sally Fitzgerald and Betty Hester highlight Flannery's caustic wit and tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. His quest for information also led him to visit O'Connor's haunts: Iowa City (Iowa Writers' Workshop) the artists' colony Yaddo, New York City, Savannah and Milledgeville--even Lourdes which Flannery visited in 1958 (and took "the cure"--to no avail--in its healing waters).

A note of interest to me were references to O'Connor's fascination with the stories of Hawthorne (his "romances"). I could see that Hawthorne's sense of the sinister in stories like "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil" was likewise pervasive in Flannery's own works, the short story "The Displaced Person," for instance.

The six years Brad Gooch spent researching and writing "Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor" yielded helpful chapter notes. The index was adequate ( I couldn't find "Lourdes," however, a significant omission seems to me). The author's generous, perhaps to a fault, use of quotes from the multitude of people in Flannery's life led to some ambiguity: I found myself wandering back up the page from time to time looking for who said what to whom. The two photo sections I enjoyed, especially those of Flannery and her beloved peafowl. Given the attention the author devoted to O'Connor's sometime aspiration of becoming a cartoonist, I was curious why Gooch failed to include any samples of her cartooning and other artwork (only one photo shows a Flannery self-portrait in the background).

In his O'Connor biography Gooch reveals a talented, though eccentric writer, a woman of great bravery and true dedication to her craft, who though plagued with illness most of her adult life, revealed to her readers her own personal South with a gothic twist. In his "Acknowledgments" the author states his test for writing a book "...was to write one I wanted to read but could not find on the shelf." Thanks to Mr. Gooch this book is on the shelf today, and the fans of Ms. O'Connor who read it will have a better understanding and appreciation of her fiction.

After having read and been much disappointeded by Ralph Wood's attempted biography of Flannery O'Connor, I was a little afraid to pick up Gooch's book. I didn't want to be burnt again. Finally, I screwed up my courage and read the thing. I'm glad I did. I would have missed a lot by not doing so. Gooch presented some material on Miss O'Connor that was entirely new to me, and gave me some glimpses into her early years that were most illuminating. I would recommend this book to any O'Connorphile I chance to meet -- without hesitation.
Why then the missing two stars? It seems to me that Flannery O'Connor's Catholic Faith must loom large in a study of her life. It is impossible, I would think, to talk about Flannery O'Connor without heavy and accurate reference to the Catholic Faith which seemed to inform her every action. While Gooch did not betray any active hostility to Catholicism, it was evident on almost every page that he was pretty much ignorant of that Faith and the ethos which surrounds it. (I exaggerate, it was not "almost every page", but it was a frequently occurring bug.) To be off target on this important aspect of O'Connor's being is to make an important error.
It's too bad this review dwells on the one deficiency in an otherwise fine effort. But I needed to explain the missing two stars. I hope that someday some caring and knowledgeable person will gather Sally Fitzgerald's notes and construct another attempt at telling the story of Flannery O'Connor.