Flannery (49 page)
When
Everything That Rises Must Converge
was published the following April 1965, the response was more powerful, and uniform, than for any of O’Connor’s other books. Playing into the fascination, of course, was the tragedy, as the simple white book cover carried only an epitaph on the back from Thomas Merton, “I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor.” Flap copy described the book as a “worthy memorial,” and began with a factual error, “The death of Flannery O’Connor at 38 marked the loss of one of America’s most gifted contemporary writers at the height of her powers.” Yet such public relations were backed up by general recognition of a vision that now looked full and coherent. The critic Charles Poore in the
Times
judged “her promise . . . fulfilled”; “the work of a master,” said the
Newsweek
critic; and so on.
Attuned enough to O’Connor to have recognized her potential without reading a word, when she first walked into his office with Lowell, on a wintry afternoon in 1949, Giroux now wished to secure her literary rank. So he next put together a chronologically arranged collection of her short fiction, from her first published story, “The Geranium,” through to its final, mature rendition, “Judgment Day.” The strategy succeeded; many readers and critics recognized the sort of underlying pattern that Henry James once described as “the figure in the carpet.” And
The Complete Stories
was awarded the 1972 National Book Award in Fiction, the prize she had lost to John O’Hara in 1956. Backstage at the awards ceremony, Giroux had a bit of a contretemps with a celebrated author who complained, “Do you really think Flannery O’Connor was a great writer? She’s such a Roman Catholic.” But Giroux said, “You can’t pigeonhole her. That’s just the point. I’m surprised at you, to misjudge her so completely. If she were here, she’d set you straight. She’d impress you. You’d have a hard time outtalking her.”
Onstage, Giroux proved quite capable of advocating for her in a convincing way, setting the audience straight. The awards of 1972 were highly politicized, as the Vietnam War dragged on with no end in sight. Accepting the posthumous thousand-dollar prize, on behalf of Regina O’Connor, who was ill at home in Milledgeville, Giroux, “the soft-spoken vice president and editor of Farrar, Straus & Giroux,” gave what the
Times
called “the sharpest indictment of literary and moral standards”: “In an age of mendacity, duplicity and document-shredders, the clear vision of Flannery O’Connor not only burns brighter than ever but it burns through the masks of what she called ‘blind wills and low dodges of the heart.’ She once said, ‘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.’”
Yet such full-throated acclaim, and all the interest following, would have been impossible had Flannery not kept her eye, during her last six months, on “the pin point of light” that Mrs. Flood kept trying to make out at the end of
Wise Blood.
As O’Connor took pains to correct the galleys of “Revelation” the night before her operation in Baldwin County Hospital; or hid under her pillow, at Piedmont, the notebook in which she was scratching out “Parker’s Back”; or worked, back home, making changes to “Judgment Day,” on a bedside desk Maryat Lee remembered as “one of those flimsy tables from Woolworth’s,” she was intent on “going home,” closing the circle, making a book, rigging the peacock’s tail to unfurl. It was no accident that Haze had been stuck in a train berth, “like a coffin,” or, O’Connor was anxious to conclude, that Tanner pops up from his, shouting, “Judgment Day!”
Flannery had spent her life making literary chickens walk backward. But she had also spent much of her adult writing life looking down the barrel of the Misfit’s shotgun. Just as her friends had to discern the contours of true suffering between the lines of her funny vignettes of invalidism, so her stories included a coded spiritual autobiography. In her front room at Andalusia, rewriting some final words while “the grim reaper” waited, she stuck in a last wink and a smirk, not just to Caroline Gordon and Robert Giroux, but to that one reader she claimed she would be happy with “in a hundred years.” After old Tanner’s daughter fulfills her father’s wish to ship his body home to Georgia, Flannery — in the story’s closing line, written mostly in quavering blue ink — endowed her with the hint of a resurrected body:
Now she rests well at night and her good looks have mostly returned.
I
first stepped into the world of Flannery O’Connor in the late 1970s. She was my favorite fiction writer, and I would often read a few paragraphs of “The Artificial Nigger” or “Revelation” for inspiration while trying my hand at writing stories completely unlike hers. I was a graduate student at Columbia University at the time, too, with a concentration in Medieval and Renaissance Literature and, between the lines of her stories, I imagined that I detected qualities that struck me as “thirteenth-century” — ribald humor, gargoyled faces and bodies, frontal action, threats of violence, and, most of all, the subtle tug of a spiritual quest in a dark universe animated by grace and significance.
The timing of this literary infatuation proved lucky. While I was still under the sway of O’Connor’s fiction,
The Habit of Being,
a collection of her letters, edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald, appeared in 1979, accompanied by much press attention. I apparently wasn’t the only one with a deep fascination with the mysterious woman behind the striking fiction. I did have an “aha!” experience while reading in the letters of the impact of the theology of Thomas Aquinas on her fiction. But such heady theories quickly became grounded in the even more compelling daily gossip. I would read a few letters and then turn to the back cover to study again the Joe McTyre 1962 photograph of O’Connor on her front steps, seemingly engaged in dialogue with a preening peacock.
Seized with the bright idea that I, and no one else, should attempt a biography of Flannery O’Connor — though I had so far published only a chapbook of poetry — I wrote to Sally Fitzgerald. I had heard somewhere that she was writing a memoir of O’Connor, and I wondered if she would approve my going forward. She responded on February 26, 1980, from the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, where she was a fellow, with the leveling news that she was writing a literary biography and that I would do well to find another subject. “In short,” she wrote, “I am afraid that our projects
would
overlap in important ways.” She let me down politely, though, kindly adding, “Should I ever feel the need of an assistant, I will certainly think of you and your proposal.”
I awaited the appearance of Fitzgerald’s book for over two decades. Early in 2003, an editor asked me if I had ever considered writing another biography, because I had since written about the poet Frank O’Hara. My first thought: Whatever happened to the biography of Flannery O’Connor? Sally Fitzgerald had died in June 2000, at the age of eighty-three, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript that has yet to appear. As my personal test for deciding on projects has always been to write the book that I want to read but cannot find on the shelf, I could think of no better choice. So I simply began with an exploratory trip to O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia.
Of course the Flannery O’Connor of 2003 was a far more canonic figure than the Flannery O’Connor of 1980. With each passing year, her status as “minor” has been adjusted upward, as her stories have been anthologized, and more high school and college students discover her work. Among their professors, she has become a one-woman academic industry: as of 2008, the Modern Language Association catalogued 1,340 entries under O’Connor, including 195 doctoral dissertations and seventy book-length studies. The annual
Flannery O’Connor Bulletin
— now
Flannery O’Connor Review
— begun in 1972, is entirely devoted to critical reevaluations of her work. An important indicator of this shifting assessment was her inclusion as the first postwar woman writer in the Library of America series; her 1988 volume widely outsold Faulkner’s, published three years earlier.
Most startling during my six years of writing this book has been the accompanying spike in interest in O’Connor in popular culture — formerly the domain, according to her, of Miss Watermelon of 1955. John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of
Wise Blood
is a Netflix staple. Bruce Springsteen has credited O’Connor as the inspiration for his album
Nebraska.
On
The Charlie Rose Show,
Conan O’Brien, who wrote his senior thesis at Harvard on O’Connor, spoke of her as “one of the funniest, darkest writers in American history . . . I was drawn to her.” (The actor Tommy Lee Jones, too, wrote a senior paper at Harvard on O’Connor.) Andalusia Farm is now a literary shrine, open to the public. O’Connor’s books have been published in translation in more than forty countries: her fame has become global. My daily “Google Alert” for “Flannery O’Connor” attests that the phrase “like something out of Flannery O’Connor” is now accepted shorthand, like “Kafkaesque” before it, for nailing many a funny, dark, askew moment.
G
IVING THE LIE
to the stereotype of Flannery O’Connor as an eccentric recluse is the number of her friends, classmates, and relatives who shared anecdotes and lively memories with me throughout my research and writing. I found their voices touching, funny, and full of insight, and this book would have lacked much vital spirit without them. Making the following “list of credits” even longer is the inclusion of all the librarians, archivists, curators, scholars, experts, and admirers of various kinds who have devoted so much energy to further understanding, often without having ever met O’Connor, but having been drawn into her force field by stories read early on and never forgotten. To anyone I inadvertently left out, my apologies, and thanks.
In Savannah, I was greatly helped from the outset by the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home Foundation, especially its directors and officers Rena Patton, Robert Strozier, Carl Weeks, and Bill Dawers, my trusty guide to contemporary Savannah. Mrs. Hugh R. Brown, diocesan archivist, opened to me the O’Connor family church records, and gave me access to an informative essay and panel interviews conducted by her late husband, Hugh R. Brown. I was pleased to speak with O’Connor’s second cousin Patricia Persse and other Savannah childhood friends and acquaintances: Jane Harty Abbott, Alice Carr, Angela Dowling, Dan O’Leary, Newell Turner Parr, and Sister Jude Walsh. For historical background, I was given many materials by the Georgia Historical Society, and by Mark MacDonald at the Historic Savannah Foundation. I am grateful to Dale and Lila Critz, the current owners of Katie Semmes’s home, for allowing me to visit; and for their hospitality, to Bobby Zarem, John and Ginger Duncan, Robert E. Jones, Walter and Connie Hart-ridge, and the Savannah College of Art and Design.
In each of many visits to Atlanta, I was shown extraordinary hospitality by the Emory University Professor of English Richard Rambuss and his partner, Charles O’Boyle, as well as by Virginia Spencer Carr. At Emory Special Collections, I received expert guidance to the Betty Hester letters, unsealed in 2007 after twenty years, from Director Steve Enniss, as well as from the O’Connor scholar and University Vice President and Secretary Rosemary Magee and University Archivist Virginia Cain, who led me on a tour of Emory University Hospital, where O’Connor was hospitalized in 1951. For background on Piedmont Hospital, where O’Connor was hospitalized in 1960, and again in 1964, I was given detailed information by the historian and archivist Diane Erdeljac. I was aided on many occasions by the Atlanta Historical Society, and for information on Peachtree Heights in the 1930s, I am indebted to Bill Bell. I was honored to be able to speak with two of O’Connor’s Atlanta first cousins, Dr. Peter Cline and Jack Tarleton.
All roads in O’Connor research lead to Milledgeville, where Flannery lived most of her years, and where the bulk of her papers are deposited. Most knowledgeable in all things having to do with O’Connor’s letters, manuscripts, and memorabilia is Nancy Davis-Bray, associate director for Special Collections at Georgia College and State University. My special thanks to the good-natured Marshall Bruce Gentry, professor of English at GSCU and editor of the
Flannery O’Connor Review,
for inviting me as keynote speaker at the 2006 “O’Connor and Other Georgia Writers” conference, and for publishing my talk in the journal in 2007; and to his predecessor, a walking repository of O’Connoriana, Sarah Gordon. For allowing me to remain as a guest in his rambling ranch house during stays that could go on for months, I am indebted to Dan Bauer, assistant professor of English; and for his friendship, to Michael Riley, associate professor of English. Robert J. Wilson III, professor of History, shared valuable historical information about Milledgeville, as did Craig Amason, executive director of the Andalusia Foundation, who facilitated, as well, my 2005
Travel and Leisure
article, “House of Stories,” on the opening of the farm to the public. My introduction to Milledgeville was a lovely picnic with Louise Florencourt, executor of Regina O’Connor’s estate and cotrustee of the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust, on the front porch of Andalusia. I was also a luncheon guest in Milledgeville of O’Connor’s friend and biographer William Sessions.
For memories of Mary Flannery O’Connor during her childhood years in Milledgeville, I relied on conversations with Charlotte Conn Ferris, Dr. Floride Gardner, Martha Marion Kingery, Elizabeth Shreve Ryan, Frances Powell Binion Sibley, and John Thornton. I twice visited O’Connor’s cousin Frances Florencourt at her home in Arlington, Massachusetts, where she shared clippings, photographs, and letters from the family archive; and I was pleased to be a guest speaker in March 2007 at her course on O’Connor at the Regis College Learning in Retirement program. I spoke, too, with her late brother-in-law, Dr. Robert Mann, husband of the late Margaret Florencourt, at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts. Many shared anecdotes about the adult O’Connor in Milledgeville: Dr. Zeb Burrell, Pete Dexter, Mary More Jones, Mary Dean Lee, Dr. Robert E. Lee, Kitty Martin, Alfred Matysiak, Sr., Catherine Morai, Dorrie Neligan, Carol Sirmans, Mary Barbara Tate, Mary Jo Thompson, and Margaret Uhler.
