Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor by Brad Gooch Reviewed by Wayne F. Burke ISBN-10: 0316000663
Flannery O'Connor's publication of A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955), was the most impressive debut story collection since publication of Richard Wright's Uncle Tom’s Children (1938). O'Connor was hailed by one critic as another Kafka, acclaimed by others as the most distinctive voice of what some called a “Southern Renascence” in mid-century American writing. Little was known, publicly, of the life of the 30-year-old author of A Good Man is Hard to Find, other than she lived with her mother on a dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Why she lived in such a provincial backwater town was unknown: only a few knew that conditions made such a life a necessity for Flannery rather than a choice. Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925, and spent her first 13 years in the city. Her father, a real estate broker, and mother, member of a prominently-placed Irish Catholic family ("lace-curtain" not "shanty" Irish) provided their only child with a comfortable upbringing. Little Mary Flannery—she became "Flannery" when she moved north to college—attended a parochial school run by the Sisters of Mercy, who as teachers, "were competent at most to wash dishes," she later wrote. Reportedly shy but self-reliant, Mary Flannery established her independence by calling her parents by their first names. She also, at age 10, wrote a series of sketches about her relatives (who were not amused), which her father made into a book he had printed. Edward O'Connor was a World War I vet who wrote speeches he delivered to audiences of Legionnaires. At age 42, he was diagnosed with lupus erythematosus, an inheritable autoimmune disease. The disease killed him within 3 years; Flannery was 15 at the time, and attending a progressive high school in Atlanta, where she lived before moving, with her mother, to the farm in Milledgeville, home of Georgia State College for Women—where Flannery matriculated. During school years Flannery showed more inclination for art than literature. One of her professors at GSCW, a transplanted New Yorker, steered Flannery to the University of Iowa for graduate studies. Arriving in Iowa City in the fall of l945, Flannery was accepted into the Iowa Writers Workshop, and at age 21 had her first publication—a short story placed in Accent magazine. The following year she won the college's Rinehart Award, good for $1500 and a book contract. To work on her book, she left Iowa for Yaddo, an artist's colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she met Robert Lowell, whom she reportedly became enamored of. The poet introduced Flannery to people in New York City, some of whom became life-long friends, like the Fitzgeralds, at whose home in Redding, Connecticut, Flannery completed her first novel, Wise Blood—her "opus nauseous," she called it (and later disparaged as a book about "freaks"). Bouncing between New York and Georgia (while Lowell, meanwhile, went off his rocker and was institutionalized), and intending to make the city her home, life intervened and Flannery, aged 26 and newly diagnosed with lupus, retuned to the farm, where she would spend the remaining 14 years of her life. Corticosteroids kept her alive significantly longer than her father, but the treatment caused osteoarthritis and necessitated use of crutches. Her life on the farm—which her mother Regina managed—consisted of writing every morning, all morning; painting with oils; reading theology and fiction; and tending her flock of collected birds. Visitors to the farm, noted locals as well as the more or less distinguished (Katherine Anne Porter, James Dickey) and regular correspondence kept Flannery attached to the greater world. Though Gooch finds no evidence that Flannery was ever intimate sexually with anyone, she had her admirers—men and women. One romance ended after the suitor, a traveling textbook salesman, likened his attempt to kiss Flannery—his only attempt—to "kissing a skeleton." It is possible that O'Connor, a practicing and orthodox Catholic, viewed sexual passion as antithetical to the spiritual life. Critic and fiction writer, O'Connor was a sought-after speaker on the lecture circuit and accepted such invitations, health permitting. She spoke on "The Freak in Literature" and other topics; admitted to admiring the surrealist novels of John Hawkes; compared the poetry of Emily Dickinson to the froth on a glass of Alka-Seltzer; intensely disliked the work of fellow "Southern-writer" Carson McCullers; thought To Kill A Mockingbird a "good children's book"; and tried, she said, to "steer clear of Faulkner so (her) own little boat won't get swamped." Although her work has parallels to Faulkner's—particularly the highlighting of the grotesque, even the diabolic—O'Connor's sense of the macabre links her work more to the Gothicism of Poe, and even Hawthorne (with whom she claimed a kinship). Gooch refrains, for the most part, from literary criticism and analysis of O'Connor's work and from psychoanalyzing his subject. The result is a straight-forward biographical account, as seamlessly constructed as a tapestry, that allows readers to interpret the facts for themselves. As such, Flannery is an admirable work—as admirable as O'Connor herself, who was devoid of self-pity, full of humor, and inexhaustible in the perfecting of her art.
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Wayne F. Burke lives in Barre City, Vermont. His book reviews and essays have appeared in The Caribbean Writer, BIBLIOPHILOS, Rain Taxi Review of Books, 63 Channels, Projected Letters.com, VIETNAM Magazine, the Burlington Free Press newspaper (Burlington. VT), and elsewhere.
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