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.
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K. Barnacle
An excellent account of one of the world’s most talented writers
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 27, 2020P. J. Ohara
Price and condition of book.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 2, 2019Steve Cranley
Well researched.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 31, 2019
