Flannery

In his splendid biography of Flannery O'Connor, titled simply Flannery, Brad Gooch chooses as an epigram one of O'Connor's statements: "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." Indeed, on the surface, O'Connor's life was not exactly a thrill a minute. She spent most of her life living with her family in Milledgeville, Georgia. She never married, and appeared not to have any serious romances. She spent half of her short life suffering from the effects of lupus, which killed her at the age of 39.

But in her short life she wrote two novels and 31 short stories that are searing portraits of the Southern grotesque, snapshots of the freaks of society and those who live just outside the edges, many of them dealing with abrupt and cruel violence. O'Connor was also a devoted Catholic, and well read on the various aspects of theology, which permeates her work as it etched by lightning.

O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, and moved to Milledgeville when she was a young girl. She began writing early, but was interested in cartooning while in high school and then college. Gooch describes one her collegiate drawings: "portraying a 'wall-flower' of a girl in a long striped skirt, with glasses, sitting alone, watching other couples dance. The caption: 'Oh well, I can always be a Ph.D.'"

O'Connor then went on to study at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and then spent some time at the Yaddo Artist's Colony near Saratoga Springs, New York, where she spent time with some of the great writers of the era, such as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Accounts like these are always heady to me, and I can quite envious of people who can live like this, writing full-time and seemingly without worrying about money.

Her first great success was her novel, Wise Blood, but she also at about the time of the publication of that book learned she had lupus, the same disease that had killed her father. She became debilitated by it, spending much of her time on crutches. She continued to write, though, living on her mother's farm, tending to her chickens and her growing collection of peafowl. She was socially awkward, but by no means a recluse, having many friends and giving many speeches. She died in 1964.

Inspired by reading this book, I addressed a gap in my education by reading some of her stories. I have a dear friend who is an English professor that teaches O'Connor, and I asked her which stories I should read. I read about ten of them, and they are all amazing, the kind of stories that widen your eyes and make the hairs on your arms stand on end. I think her greatest story is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which depicts a family driving to Florida. The grandmother brings along her cat, who gets out of its carrier and jumps on the driver, leading them to turn over into a ditch. Some people stop to help, but it turns out they are escaped criminals. Things do not end well for this family. Then there's "Good Country People," which involves a Bible salesman who seduces a one-legged woman. They end up in a hayloft, and he steals her wooden leg. Or "The Lame Shall Enter First," about a do-gooding social worker who is determined to save a wayward youth with tragic consequences, or "The Artificial Nigger," about a grandfather and grandson who take a train trip to Atlanta and get lost in the black section of town. As indicated by the title of that story, O'Connor did not shy away from the incendiary racial relations of the time. Another story of this type is "Everything That Rises Must Converge," in which a woman and her son board an integrated bus, and things will change forever.

These stories are so bracing they are like slaps to the face. But her language is also supple and incredibly expressive, with similes that break the heart. From "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," she describes a woman's face: "as broad and innocent as a cabbage." From "The Life You Save May Be Your Own": "The ugly words settled in Mr. Shiftlet's head like a group of buzzards in the top of a tree."

Like any late convert to a cause, I'll be urging any of my literate friends who haven't already discovered O'Connor's words to rush right out and read whatever they can their hands on of hers. She may have spent most of her life between the house and the chicken yard, but the rest was spent at a typewriter, spinning gold.