The strange, prickly ways of Flannery O’Connor
Anna Arco on a gripping and long overdue biography

5 June 2009

Flannery O'Connor claimed that her hobby at high school was collecting publishers' rejection slips

Flannery: A life of Flannery O'Connor
By Brad Gooch
Little, Brown, £16

Until recently there has been no major literary biography of Flannery O'Connor. Her quiet life in rural Georgia has long been subject to the curiosity of her readers but not the subject of a book. For a writer as important to 20th-century American letters as O'Connor this is highly unusual, but makes Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor all the more welcome. Forty five years after her death from lupus, O'Connor continues to fascinate, challenge and perplex her readers, both as an author and as a person. Her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away, continue to be read and collections of her short stories have made their way on to the school curriculum as gems of the genre.

Her life, as a devout Catholic living in the Deep South, has also continued to intrigue. Since the 1979 publication of her collected letters, The Habit of Being, edited by her devoted friend and admirer Sally Fitzgerald, very little new biographical material has been made available to the general public. And while the letters are a real aid in better understanding both O'Connor's faith and her writing, their one-sidedness can ultimately only produce a limited picture. One is left, after reading The Habit of Being, wanting to know more about the reclusive but prolific letter writer whose contemporaries included Robert Lowell, Elisabeth Bishop and the publisher Robert Giroux, and whose reading included Aquinas, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, Maritain and Henri de Lubac, as well as Faulkner, Joyce and Hemingway.

Gooch has produced a breezy, well-written biography with a compelling narrative which makes it difficult to put down. He fleshes out the skeletal O'Connor of the edited letters with replies, interviews and texts.

In the foreword we learn of Gooch's struggle to get at new information that Sally Fitzgerald, who alone had access to the O'Connor archives, intended to write about but failed to complete before her death in 2000.

Mary Flannery O'Connor was baptised in Savannah, Georgia, on Easter Sunday 1925 in the cathedral her ancestors built. Her early years were spent in the genteel city, an only child of older parents, surrounded by a large matriarchal family who were members of a cliquey Catholic minority.

Gooch describes her childhood as "sheltered", growing up with devoted parents, Ed and Regina, who indulged her whims. Crayons, we learn, and paper were dearer to her than sweets as rewards. She would make little drawings and write letters and stories to her socially active parents.

Constantly at war with the strict nuns who ran her school, mainly over her refusal to go to the required Sung Mass, preferring to attend an earlier low Mass with her parents, Mary Flannery is described as the kind of girl who would flick rubber bands across the classroom and make mischief. The young O'Connor emerges from Gooch's pages as a singular child: stubborn, shy and eccentric, already developing the passion for birds she would retain until her death 30 years later. She collected chickens and peahens, calling them by the names of famous people (she kept a rooster named Haile Selassie and a crow called Winston).

Gooch uses the shifts in O'Connor's name to distinguish different periods in her development. Mary Flannery then is the girl, M Flannery O'Connor the student and finally there emerges Flannery O'Connor the writer. From the nuns, Mary Flannery moved to a progressive girls' school in Milledgeville, near Atlanta, while her father underwent treatment for the lupus that would kill him - and later strike down Flannery.

Already writing furiously at the time, she said that her hobby while at Peabody High School was collecting publishers' rejection slips.

While at the school she discovered a talent for cartoons which she continued to develop when she moved to Georgia State College for Women a year later. She etched the cartoons for the college magazine - usually of a tall gawky girl and a short fat girl making deadpan comments about the state of women's education - wrote articles and argued with her professors about Aquinas and Descartes. It was here, while discussing the "philosophical modernism that had blinded the western eye", that O'Connor found the encouragement to apply for the graduate journalism programme at the University of Iowa that would change her life.

She joined the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop, where her Georgia accent was so thick that she first communicated with the programme's rector, Paul Engle, by writing down the things she wanted to tell him. Later, however, she was much sought after at Iowa for story readings because of it.

In the creative and supportive atmosphere of the writer's group where she found some of her most loyal mentors, Flannery wrote the short story "The Geranium" and started working on her first novel, Wise Blood. While mixing with the writers like Andrew Lytle and Austin Warren, publishers and thinkers of the Midwest of her day, Flannery also went to Mass every day during her three years in Iowa City.

Flannery's brief periods in the North, first in the artists' community Yaddo in upstate New York, her stays in Connecticut with the Fitzgeralds, a large Catholic literary family with whom she felt at home, and her visit to New York City marked the most lively period in her life. She forged lifelong friendships. Robert Lowell became her protector at Yaddo. Drawn to her Catholicism and her strange, prickly ways, he championed her work in New York's literary circles shortly before suffering a nervous breakdown. She continued a correspondence with him. She also met Robert Giroux, her editor, adviser and friend during this time. Gooch uses these encounters to show Flannery's development as a writer.

Flannery liked the North and had intended to stay there, but she was diagnosed with lupus and returned to the care of her mother, Regina. The two women moved to the family-owned farm, Andalusia, but a constant flow of visitors, letters and books as well as her own work kept Flannery occupied.

Gooch explores Flannery's tense relationship with her mother. It is evident from her letters, as well as the interviews, that the two women struggled to get on. Robert Giroux recalled that Regina once asked him whether he couldn't persuade her daughter to write about nice people. The publication of Wise Blood, with its brutal and strange scenes, shocked Flannery's straitlaced relatives, including her mother.

Gooch also looks at her relationship with the black people working the O'Connor land. He asks whether Flannery was a racist. It is a question that seems to remain unanswered as he gives both sides of the case. She comes out as somewhere in between: racist but only within the context of her time.

The book's two main failings - neither of which its author can really help - are that it is too short and that it has our age's obsession with sexuality. Flannery was a woman of intense relationships with both men and women but only on an intellectual level. She remained celibate all her life. In the biography Gooch seems intent on figuring out whether she had a sexual identity, but admits he is defeated, even while he describes her one recorded kiss. He ultimately decides she is a heterosexual whose Catholicism meant she had a blunted relationship with sex. To my mind, this is irrelevant to the narrative and to better understanding Flannery O'Connor.

Gooch could have focused more on her Catholicism, which informed her work. As a result the book feels thin. Still, it is definitely worth reading as Gooch has access to so much material that hasn't been available before and the book is grippingly written.