BIOGRAPHY: Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'ConnorBy Brad Gooch Little, Brown, 374pp. €20
AS AN EPIGRAPH to his biography of Flannery O’Connor, Brad Gooch uses the writer’s own assessment of her chances for posthumous celebrity: “As for biographies, there won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and chicken yard do not make exciting copy”. O’Connor’s life, indeed, was outwardly uneventful. While her fiction was classic Southern Gothic – satiric, violent and grotesque (though with an unswerving Catholic moralism underlying all) – her daily existence was disciplined, devout and abstemious.
Born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, Mary Flannery O’Connor was a shy, introverted girl, “self-reliant but remote”. After an undramatic childhood, her life took a complicated turn in her early teens, when her father was diagnosed with lupus and the family uprooted to Milledgeville, Georgia. When she was 15, her father died of the auto-immune disease, as she would herself 24 years later, at the age of 39.
After graduating from the Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, O’Connor went to the University of Iowa on a journalism scholarship, but soon switched to the MFA graduate writing programme, the first in the country, then under the directorship of Paul Engle.
Having begun work on her first novel, Wise Blood, she conducted herself at Iowa with a pious austerity not generally associated with campus living. Her habit of regular Mass attendance prevailed even at Yaddo, the artists' colony to which she decamped after Iowa, where she eschewed the breakfast table talk of seconal and marijuana. To Elizabeth Hardwick, O'Connor seemed like "some quiet, puritanical convent girl".
At Yaddo, she met Robert Lowell, who introduced her to Robert Giroux, then a junior editor at Harcourt Brace. Without having read a word of her work, Giroux was convinced on meeting her of both the intensity of her commitment and her literary future. He was to become a lifelong champion of her fiction.
O'Connor's life at that point looked set to blossom between Manhattan and the rural enclaves of the literary northeast, but changed course abruptly when she experienced her first attack of lupus at the age of 25. By 1952, when Wise Bloodwas published, she was back in Milledgeville, living with her mother at Andalusia, the family's 550-acre dairy farm. The two women would remain there in a kind of fraught symbiosis until the writer's death in 1964.
O’Connor valued routine above all and at Andalusia her days began with morning Mass, followed by a few hours at her typewriter. In the afternoons, she painted and raised her peacocks. Nights, she read theology – Aquinas and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – as well as her contemporaries. Her existence, while not socially cloistered (numerous admirers and fellow writers visited Andalusia, and O’Connor frequently took on speaking engagements), was emotionally so. As one friend put it, “There was a quality in Flannery that forbade intimacy”. The closest she came to romance was with a young Dane (a textbook salesman for Harcourt Brace), who described his one attempt to kiss her as like “kissing a skeleton”, a feeling of “a sort of momento mori”.
Critical reaction to Wise Blood– which concerns Hazel Motes, a self-described prophet of the "Church without Christ" who eventually blinds himself in an act of atonement – was mixed. Some recognised a writer of considerable power while others found the book monotonous and insane. Fellow writers were similarly divided. Andrew Lytle, an early supporter as editor of the Sewanee Review, worried that O'Connor's "extraneous zeal" might be confusing her artistry. Though taken aback by the nastier criticism, O'Connor produced one more novel and two books of stories in the same vein. Everything That Rises Must Converge, published in 1965, the year after her death, was greeted with near-unanimous acclaim. Her reputation since has solidified.
Given the accuracy of O’Connor’s comment on the excitement quotient of her life, the challenge for Brad Gooch, who has previously written a biography of the poet Frank O’Hara, is to bring to life both his subject’s inner world and the work itself. In the case of O’Connor, it is also to explore what it is that continues to captivate in work that in certain key respects goes against the grain of contemporary sensibilities.
O’Connor took Catholicism and its doctrines with a seriousness that can cause secularised modern readers to cringe, and yet she manages – in the best of her fiction – to transcend the limits of, as the critic Frederick Crews has put it, “a perspective that narrows all social problems to the abiding question of whether an individual can believe that Jesus died for his sake”. She was also a product of the Deep South and a witness to the Civil Rights movement. Her depictions of “the Negro” have been lauded (by Alice Walker, among others) for their refusal to demonise or sentimentalise, but others have charged that she failed to confront the realities of the race issue, taking refuge instead in an insistence that “the Negro” has equal access to salvation.
Gooch notes that O’Connor was perhaps a “cultural racist”: she rejected an invitation to meet James Baldwin in Milledgeville, saying it would be nice to meet him in New York, but not in Georgia. “I observe the traditions of the society I feed on – it’s only fair.”
Gooch offers a thoroughly researched record of O’Connor’s life, tracing correspondences between her fiction and her real-world environment, and detailing her relationships with other writers and mentors. But Gooch seems possessed of an unfailing politeness towards his subject which prevents him from really sinking his teeth into the matters at hand. For all his obvious affection for O’Connor, he has produced a curiously detached piece of writing that steers mostly clear of critical interrogation of the rich tensions that informed her writing – namely faith, race and illness – in favour of a more workmanlike detailing of her activities and environments. However, if the book does not plumb new critical depths, it is certainly an addition to the study of this single-minded, challenging and talented writer.
When O’Connor died, Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop: “I think the cards seemed heavily stacked against her, and her fates must have felt that they had so thoroughly hemmed her in that they could forget, and all would [have] happened as planned, but really she did what she had decided on and was less passive and dependent than anyone I can think of”. Robert Giroux’s first impression had been borne out.
Molly McCloskey is the author of two collections of short stories, and a novel,
Protection
. With her short story
This Isn’t Heaven
, she is one of the six writers shortlisted for the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009. The winner will be announced on June 22nd.