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‘Flannery: A Life Of Flannery O’Connor’
Literary Spotlight
By LAWRENCE DUGAN, For The Bulletin
Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor fulfills at least one of the goals of modern literary biography, giving a detailed, convincing account of the subject’s life. His chronicle of O’Connor’s days is vivid and well-organized, showing her home and family in central Georgia as the magnet to which she was an astonishing satellite. The second goal of the biographer (and any reader can set as many as he or she chooses) might be a plausible interpretation of the writers’s work as a reflection, however dim, of the writer’s life, making a discussion of the two a useful project. Here Mr. Gooch succeeds also, but with not quite the sureness he does in the first objective, the simple telling of her story.
Part of that story is well-known in a general sense, whether or not it is understood. She was born into an upper middle-class Irish Catholic family in Savannah in 1927, was raised and remained a good Catholic, and died of lupus before she was forty. She wrote two novels and two collections of short stories that were published in the 50s and 60s and attracted the attention of some of the most important critics of that time, their reactions ranging from shock at her grotesque and at times quite violent themes, to the highest admiration for her skill as a literary artist. One of the surprises in Gooch’s book is learning the remarkable extent to which she carefully connected herself to the academic and publishing world. She did not have connections, she made them and somehow used them to make her fiction, the work of a fairly isolated, reserved individual, writing about what was then a remote part of the United States, attractive to people who counted in the literary world of New York, and the English departments around the country where even then many of their advisors were seated.
Her first key step was graduate school. In high school and as an undergraduate she had drawn cartoons, and while still at Georgia Women’s College submitted a good deal of work to the New Yorker that was rejected. This was the first hint of her future determination, for she apparently did not blink at the rejections, but kept working, shifting to writing instead. She was accepted at Iowa to do graduate work in journalism, but in her first week in the program switched to creative writing, with the help of the writing department chairman; within two years she was known and admired by Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and Robert Lowell, among others who came to Iowa for readings and lectures. She won a fiction prize for her thesis collection that included a publishing contract, and was awarded a teaching assistantship; then was quickly accepted at Yadoo writers colony in Saratoga for a term and allowed to stay for another, becoming close friends with Lowell, apparently barely aware of his bad psychological state. Finally, she followed him in an odd revolt against Yadoo’s management before moving to New York.
By the time she is living in Manhattan, being taken by Lowell to meet Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, and then Robert Giroux, the restrained force of her personality almost seems like that of the young Hemingway in Paris, and Gooch’s description o f her has a strange, remarkable reality to it. People liked and admired her and believed she was talented. All of the book is very well-written and organized but these chapters about her early career are the best, showing a young artist who made dramatic career decisions quickly and effectively. This is especially interesting because she was, again like Hemingway, an aesthete at heart who cared more than anything about how each sentence and paragraph she wrote sounded, not about pleasing a literary market.
I said that Gooch’s interpretation of her work is open to criticism. It has been strongly challenged by some reviewers, yet he is excellent at least on the development of her fiction. Perhaps because he has such a good feel for her early career, he also has a sense of the scope and proportion of her stories, how some grew into novels , how discarded material was later refitted into her work. Yet if he is quite good in telling how she wrote them, he is not illuminating in telling us what they mean, how they might be interpreted, what religious undercurrent they have, particularly Catholic. Although he does emphasize her Catholicism very strongly throughout the book, it does not become fully integrated into his criticism of her work ( as it does not into that of most others who have written about her) because she hid her use of it so carefully.
Consider this capsule summary of a short story: a family driving through Georgia while on vacation is stopped and methodically gunned down by escaped convicts while their talkative grandmother barely misses a beat in her commentary on things. There are two popular simplified interpretations of this kind of O’Connor plot, depending, I suppose, on whether one is a religious believer or not. The first is that in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (or “Greenleaf” or “The Displaced Person” ) O’Connor is writing about deluded people who come to utterly pointless violence because they live in a culture that encourages or tolerates it; her point of view may be seen as alternating between grotesque realism, and humor.
The other view claims that the pointless violent acts she sometimes describes occur in the world and must be described. She is a Christian and does so from that perspective. The problem with this is that the grotesque is described but not accounted for, just as it often is not in real life. Both sides agree that she is a wonderful artist who achieves the classic goal of universalizing the ordinary, of making the acts of inconsequential, narrow, uninteresting people in Georgia or Tennessee dramatic to readers far removed. Both of these are unsatisfactory, and Gooch drives between them.
I think It must be understood that she wrote about people who used to be called Bible Christians and are now labeled fundamentalists. Their religion was shaped at the time of the Reformation into a vastly simplified version of Christianity, abandoning most Catholic sacraments, especially the Mass, and also sacramentals such as the rosary, and ancient prayers and hymns. The priesthood and church hierarchy were also discarded, and most of religion reduced to two key practices, a reliance on personal interpretation of the scripture, and preaching as the heart of religious ceremony. A central theme of her fiction, without being at all pedantic, is the consequence of this for the individual who must make what he can of the world from the uprooted, apparently old-fashioned but often quite radical, religion of the deep south. And her goal was to amplify this world so as to make it interesting to the reader who lived outside of it. Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away, her two novels, are about young men obsessed with religion because they completely misunderstand it.
This realistic basis explains why there is nothing fabricated about the atmosphere of her fiction. It might almost be called mundane terror. In fact the word atmosphere can almost be omitted from criticism of her work. If there is anything gothic about it, it is done in broad daylight, although It sometimes has the great problem of gothic fiction, in that drama is replaced by pointless violence.
O’Connor can be enjoyed, admired and studied, but none of those activities will be complete without understanding this about her fiction. She came from people and a culture that had never given up the Catholic faith and she was surrounded by people whose ancestors had cast it aside almost completely, and now had the barest notion of what it was; some of them maintained a sane, stable religious life, but some did not, and they are often her subjects. She carefully disguised her theme; but even when writing about a social worker in the short story “The Lame Shall Enter First,” she shows him utterly, mortally useless when talking to his child about religion, with deadly results. (The father’s competition for the child’s belief is a fourteen year-old preacher. )
Gooch does a fine job of showing O’Connor’s place in American literary life. His account of her friendships with Lowell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon and others makes excellent literary history. Although they were sometimes catty in letters between themselves about her, they were truer friends in many ways than the lesser known, eccentric intellectuals who became her pen pals and are quoted quite a bit toward the end of the book, sometimes making derogatory remarks about her. Her only boyfriend (for a very short time), and a French journalist, both make slighting statements that Gooch reports without comment. A third friend tells Gooch that he believes O’Connor secretly loved him and was disappointed at his marriage to another woman. These might have been omitted altogether, being unimportant, nasty and indiscreet observations about a remarkable person.
In the end her best companion in terms of literary schools may be J.D. Salinger, whom she never met, and who was also of the World War II generation. He has outlived her by almost half a century, but has not published much more than she did, if we include her fascinating essays and lectures on literature and aesthetics. He also is at his best in shorter fiction—the short novel, the novella, and short story—and has managed to mislead critics with his religious themes. He sometimes shocks his readers, yet like O’Connor he often does it on a sunny day, without the benefit of a noir or gothic texture.
Gooch’s biography has a remarkable objectivity to it, which may be a blunt statement but it is one that should be made when it is true. The only error I noticed is his description of the book of Tobias in the Old Testament as apocryphal. It is so regarded by protestant theologians, but in the Catholic Bible, the one his subject read, it is canonical.
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch. Boston: Little Brown, 2009. 464 pp. $30.00
Lawrence Dugan is a librarian at the Free Library of Philadelphia who writes about religion and 20th Century literature. His poetry has appeared most recently in Daedalus, National Review and Poetry East.
Part of that story is well-known in a general sense, whether or not it is understood. She was born into an upper middle-class Irish Catholic family in Savannah in 1927, was raised and remained a good Catholic, and died of lupus before she was forty. She wrote two novels and two collections of short stories that were published in the 50s and 60s and attracted the attention of some of the most important critics of that time, their reactions ranging from shock at her grotesque and at times quite violent themes, to the highest admiration for her skill as a literary artist. One of the surprises in Gooch’s book is learning the remarkable extent to which she carefully connected herself to the academic and publishing world. She did not have connections, she made them and somehow used them to make her fiction, the work of a fairly isolated, reserved individual, writing about what was then a remote part of the United States, attractive to people who counted in the literary world of New York, and the English departments around the country where even then many of their advisors were seated.
Her first key step was graduate school. In high school and as an undergraduate she had drawn cartoons, and while still at Georgia Women’s College submitted a good deal of work to the New Yorker that was rejected. This was the first hint of her future determination, for she apparently did not blink at the rejections, but kept working, shifting to writing instead. She was accepted at Iowa to do graduate work in journalism, but in her first week in the program switched to creative writing, with the help of the writing department chairman; within two years she was known and admired by Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and Robert Lowell, among others who came to Iowa for readings and lectures. She won a fiction prize for her thesis collection that included a publishing contract, and was awarded a teaching assistantship; then was quickly accepted at Yadoo writers colony in Saratoga for a term and allowed to stay for another, becoming close friends with Lowell, apparently barely aware of his bad psychological state. Finally, she followed him in an odd revolt against Yadoo’s management before moving to New York.
By the time she is living in Manhattan, being taken by Lowell to meet Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, and then Robert Giroux, the restrained force of her personality almost seems like that of the young Hemingway in Paris, and Gooch’s description o f her has a strange, remarkable reality to it. People liked and admired her and believed she was talented. All of the book is very well-written and organized but these chapters about her early career are the best, showing a young artist who made dramatic career decisions quickly and effectively. This is especially interesting because she was, again like Hemingway, an aesthete at heart who cared more than anything about how each sentence and paragraph she wrote sounded, not about pleasing a literary market.
I said that Gooch’s interpretation of her work is open to criticism. It has been strongly challenged by some reviewers, yet he is excellent at least on the development of her fiction. Perhaps because he has such a good feel for her early career, he also has a sense of the scope and proportion of her stories, how some grew into novels , how discarded material was later refitted into her work. Yet if he is quite good in telling how she wrote them, he is not illuminating in telling us what they mean, how they might be interpreted, what religious undercurrent they have, particularly Catholic. Although he does emphasize her Catholicism very strongly throughout the book, it does not become fully integrated into his criticism of her work ( as it does not into that of most others who have written about her) because she hid her use of it so carefully.
Consider this capsule summary of a short story: a family driving through Georgia while on vacation is stopped and methodically gunned down by escaped convicts while their talkative grandmother barely misses a beat in her commentary on things. There are two popular simplified interpretations of this kind of O’Connor plot, depending, I suppose, on whether one is a religious believer or not. The first is that in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (or “Greenleaf” or “The Displaced Person” ) O’Connor is writing about deluded people who come to utterly pointless violence because they live in a culture that encourages or tolerates it; her point of view may be seen as alternating between grotesque realism, and humor.
The other view claims that the pointless violent acts she sometimes describes occur in the world and must be described. She is a Christian and does so from that perspective. The problem with this is that the grotesque is described but not accounted for, just as it often is not in real life. Both sides agree that she is a wonderful artist who achieves the classic goal of universalizing the ordinary, of making the acts of inconsequential, narrow, uninteresting people in Georgia or Tennessee dramatic to readers far removed. Both of these are unsatisfactory, and Gooch drives between them.
I think It must be understood that she wrote about people who used to be called Bible Christians and are now labeled fundamentalists. Their religion was shaped at the time of the Reformation into a vastly simplified version of Christianity, abandoning most Catholic sacraments, especially the Mass, and also sacramentals such as the rosary, and ancient prayers and hymns. The priesthood and church hierarchy were also discarded, and most of religion reduced to two key practices, a reliance on personal interpretation of the scripture, and preaching as the heart of religious ceremony. A central theme of her fiction, without being at all pedantic, is the consequence of this for the individual who must make what he can of the world from the uprooted, apparently old-fashioned but often quite radical, religion of the deep south. And her goal was to amplify this world so as to make it interesting to the reader who lived outside of it. Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away, her two novels, are about young men obsessed with religion because they completely misunderstand it.
This realistic basis explains why there is nothing fabricated about the atmosphere of her fiction. It might almost be called mundane terror. In fact the word atmosphere can almost be omitted from criticism of her work. If there is anything gothic about it, it is done in broad daylight, although It sometimes has the great problem of gothic fiction, in that drama is replaced by pointless violence.
O’Connor can be enjoyed, admired and studied, but none of those activities will be complete without understanding this about her fiction. She came from people and a culture that had never given up the Catholic faith and she was surrounded by people whose ancestors had cast it aside almost completely, and now had the barest notion of what it was; some of them maintained a sane, stable religious life, but some did not, and they are often her subjects. She carefully disguised her theme; but even when writing about a social worker in the short story “The Lame Shall Enter First,” she shows him utterly, mortally useless when talking to his child about religion, with deadly results. (The father’s competition for the child’s belief is a fourteen year-old preacher. )
Gooch does a fine job of showing O’Connor’s place in American literary life. His account of her friendships with Lowell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon and others makes excellent literary history. Although they were sometimes catty in letters between themselves about her, they were truer friends in many ways than the lesser known, eccentric intellectuals who became her pen pals and are quoted quite a bit toward the end of the book, sometimes making derogatory remarks about her. Her only boyfriend (for a very short time), and a French journalist, both make slighting statements that Gooch reports without comment. A third friend tells Gooch that he believes O’Connor secretly loved him and was disappointed at his marriage to another woman. These might have been omitted altogether, being unimportant, nasty and indiscreet observations about a remarkable person.
In the end her best companion in terms of literary schools may be J.D. Salinger, whom she never met, and who was also of the World War II generation. He has outlived her by almost half a century, but has not published much more than she did, if we include her fascinating essays and lectures on literature and aesthetics. He also is at his best in shorter fiction—the short novel, the novella, and short story—and has managed to mislead critics with his religious themes. He sometimes shocks his readers, yet like O’Connor he often does it on a sunny day, without the benefit of a noir or gothic texture.
Gooch’s biography has a remarkable objectivity to it, which may be a blunt statement but it is one that should be made when it is true. The only error I noticed is his description of the book of Tobias in the Old Testament as apocryphal. It is so regarded by protestant theologians, but in the Catholic Bible, the one his subject read, it is canonical.
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch. Boston: Little Brown, 2009. 464 pp. $30.00
Lawrence Dugan is a librarian at the Free Library of Philadelphia who writes about religion and 20th Century literature. His poetry has appeared most recently in Daedalus, National Review and Poetry East.
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