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The Guardian
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Flannery O'Connor at 100: should we still read her?
A month before she died aged 39, on 3 August 1964, of complications from the autoimmune disease lupus, the American writer Flannery O'Connor wrote from her home in Milledgeville, Georgia to a regular correspondent, the academic and nun Sister Mariella Gable: 'The wolf, I'm afraid, is inside tearing up the place.' The 'wolf' that O'Connor refers to is her illness, the name of which derives from the Latin. The disease can be mild, but in its worst form it is systemic, causing not only inflammation, chronic fatigue, muscle weakness and skin rashes, but also permanent tissue damage. In her last years, O'Connor could only move around by means of crutches, tending to her beloved pet peacocks. 'I can write for one hour a day, and my, my, do I like my one hour. I eat it up like it was filet mignon.' Before diagnosis at the age of 25, O'Connor had been a talented graduate student with an MFA from the prestigious University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and had completed a coveted Yaddo artists' colony residency in upstate New York. A draft of her first novel, published as Wise Blood in 1952, and filmed by John Huston in 1979, won a prize; she had become involved in the New York City literary scene, acquired an agent, and was close friends with the poet Robert Lowell and others of his circle. She also lived for a while in Connecticut with the classicist Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally, who would go on to edit of The Habit of Being (1979), a vast volume of O'Connor's correspondence. Venerable publisher Robert Giroux had her in his sights early on: he remained her editor throughout her life. Her illness meant that in 1951 O'Connor moved back to what she termed the 'Christ-haunted' south, to live with and be cared for by her widowed mother, Regina Cline O'Connor. They eventually settled at Andalusia, the O'Connor family summer home, a working farm just outside Milledgeville, Georgia, presided over by a large white classic Southern house straight out of a Tennessee Wiliams play, complete with veranda for rocking chairs. It that is now a museum preserving O'Connor's work and legacy. The land was formerly a cotton plantation; O'Connor satirised her upbringing in the Jim Crow-era segregated south in sardonic stories of hypocritical, racist and godless southerners, while at times revealing unpalatable personal views in her letters – 'the habit of bigotry', as critic Paul Elie wrote, in a 2020 New Yorker essay titled 'How Racist Was Flannery O'Connor?'. Mary Flannery O'Connor was born on 25 March 1925 in Savannah, the oldest city in Georgia, the only child of real estate agent Edward Francis O'Connor and Regina Cline, who was from an old southern family. Of Irish descent, the O'Connors' Catholicism made them a minority in the heavily Protestant south. Her first taste of fame was at five years old, on a Pathé newsreel, featuring a chicken that 'Mary O'Connor' had taught to walk backwards. 'I was just there to assist the chicken, but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax,' she joked. The determined chicken, walking backwards to go forward, is a tempting metaphor for O'Connor's own endurance. It instilled in her a 'love affair' with birds that seemed to transcend most human interactions. Ever self-deprecating, she described herself as a 'pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex', an attitude apparent in her acerbic, droll letters, her wry fiction and the cartoons she drew for her student newspaper at Georgia Women's College (now Georgia State University), where she obtained a BA in sociology and literature in 1945. By this time O'Connor's father had died, in early 1941, of the lupus that his daughter would inherit. Mother and daughter were left to their ambiguous, interdependent relationship. Notably, none of O'Connor's letters to Regina has ever been published. O'Connor's novelistic ambitions would not entirely fold with the progression of her illness, but ironically it was her limited energy that made her into one of the most original short story writers of the 20th century, her acute and disturbing moral vision of humanity driven by a devout, if unconventionally expressed, Catholic faith. 'When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little … when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures,' she wrote. O'Connor's frequently brutal fiction, with its distorted, unnatural characters, is usually categorised as 'southern gothic', a term initially coined dismissively by the novelist Ellen Glasgow in 1935 to describe the 'backwoods' and 'eccentric' fiction of writers such as William Faulkner. Faulkner was undoubtedly a great influence on O'Connor (and he admired Wise Blood), as was master of the grotesque Edgar Allan Poe, the Catholic French novelist François Mauriac, and her near-contemporary Katherine Anne Porter. O'Connor's own influence can be traced in later writers such as Shirley Jackson, CE Morgan and Joyce Carol Oates. Her characters hover somewhere between victim and villain: their fates are ordained; they do not appear to have free will. In what is probably her best known and most anthologised story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1953), a prattling, controlling grandmother meets her appalling match in the Misfit, the homicidal leader of an escaped convict gang. The elderly woman and her son's young family – each objectionable in their own way – are shot dead in turn by the gang when they crash their car on a road trip through Georgia – all because the grandmother insisted on having one last look at a house she remembers from her past. 'The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee … Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion 'It should elicit from you a degree of pity and terror, even though its way of being serious is a comic one,' O'Connor said of that story, urging readers to ignore the 'dead bodies' and focus on the transformative 'action of grace' when the grandmother reaches out, fatally as it turns out, to the Misfit. What should we make of O'Connor now, unfashionable in her time and hardly less so in ours, 100 years after her birth? Her reputation has been clouded since that 2020 New Yorker essay, although it has been argued that Elie's disclosures were not new; the letters have been in the public domain since the late 70s. Hilton Als wrote of her Black characters in 2001: 'She didn't use them as vessels of sympathy or scorn; she simply – and complexly – drew from life.' Yet a major biography by Brad Gooch (Flannery O'Connor: A Life, 2009) admits her to be, in private, as Joy Williams put it in a New York Times review, 'a connoisseur of racial jokes'. O'Connor could be perversely contradictory, arguing both for and against integration, while lampooning racist white characters in stories like Revelation and Everything That Rises Must Converge. It was this deeply problematic aspect that caused director Ethan Hawke to hesitate over filming recent biopic Wildcat, which stars his actor daughter Maya as Flannery, alongside Laura Linney as Regina. Hawke and Linney also play most of the roles in the dramatisation of a selection of the stories. The performances are compelling, and Hawke ably transforms into O'Connor – bushy hair and eyebrows, steely spectacles, tell-tale lupus 'butterfly' rash blazing across her cheeks. Disappointingly Wildcat sidesteps the question of the author's racism, while delving into the mystery and conflict of her religious belief. In a 1959 letter she wrote: 'What people don't realise is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.' O'Connor defiantly carried that cross to the end.
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Sprung From the Attic, Flannery O'Connor's Artworks See the Light
'I don't know how to write,' Mary Flannery O'Connor once said. 'But I can draw.' She had just become a cartoonist for her high school newspaper, at Peabody High School in Milledgeville, Ga. There, and later at Georgia State College for Women, she hoped to place her linoleum-block-print satires of campus life in The New Yorker. Instead, she left for the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Yaddo residency in New York State, shed 'Mary' from her name and published two finely tuned novels about religious belief, the perversely funny 'Wise Blood' (1952) and her grave 'The Violent Bear it Away' (1960), then a collection of short stories, 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' (1955), whose staring contest with belief and tradition in the modernizing South placed her at the front of new regional literature until her death from lupus in 1964, at age 39. Since the republication of those newspaper cartoons, in 2012 — and a deeply researched biography in 2009 — an academic scavenger hunt for the true Flannery O'Connor has taken off. Her prayer journal and unfinished third novel were recently published, a documentary and biopic released. On March 25, for the centenary of her birth, her alma mater, now the Georgia College & State University, will exhibit 70 newly acquired artworks of a different sort, which some O'Connor scholars have heard about but far fewer have seen. Then on March 27, the exhibition moves to the Andalusia Interpretive Center, an exhibition space nearby run by the college. Comprising painted woodcut caricatures from her childhood along with regional oil paintings from the peak of her writing career, the artworks might shed new light on a literary vision cut far too short, a Roman Catholic theology that scholars have debated for 70 years and infamously protective gatekeepers — her mother and cousin — who may have resisted access to O'Connor's artwork. On a balmy afternoon during Lent, Seth Walker, the college's vice president of advancement, led me up two flights of stairs of a peeling Federal-style foursquare house in downtown Milledgeville, where O'Connor, age 13 and a self-described 'pigeon-toed' only child 'with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex,' moved from Savannah with her parents, and where she would reside until age 20. Sun burst in when he creaked open the door to the attic, which is lit by a large skylight. 'This is where she escaped to do her art,' Walker said. When his team accepted the house from the family in 2023, they discovered among 'tons of stuff' two barrels full of paintings on wood tile. In the exhibition, these works on wood panel are cartoony like O'Connor's school newspaper prints, but much more individualized. She drew her figures in pencil, and grooved over them with deep trenches of a wood-burner and, in some cases, a hacksaw. Here are pipe-smoking crones, socialites in feather headgear, potato noses, clown mouths: O'Connor cut, then illuminated them in lime, red and orange paints still bright today. One tile depicts an oval-faced man with a top hat, head cocked. Beside him an ice cream cone-faced woman scowls through a monocle. In these cartoon aristocrats, Cassie Munnell, the curator at Andalusia, sees Flannery's parents. Her father, Munnell said, did have a 'toothbrush sort of straight mustache.' Robert Donahoo, an O'Connor specialist who is writing on the newly discovered artwork, suggests that the young painter may have been influenced by the revolving cast of very Catholic, mainly female relatives, on her maternal Cline side, who inhabited the large house with O'Connor's family. 'Growing up calling her parents by their first names, in that big house full of rules, there was no shortage of material,' Donahoo explained. 'But in the end it's a guessing game' he said of attempts to identify the sources. What seems clearer is how these drawings presage her sense of slapstick in the fiction. In 'Wise Blood,' a doomed allegory of personal religion, she gives her country preacher 'a nose like a shrike's bill,' and makes his first victim 'a fat woman with pink collars and cuffs and pear-shaped legs.' O'Connor, a high formalist writer, justified exaggeration in her essay 'The Grotesque in Southern Fiction.' For a market full of 'tired' and desensitized readers, she writes, today's novelist must 'know how far he can distort without destroying.' Cartoon writing for a cartoon world. O'Connor was 20 when she left Milledgeville for graduate school in Iowa and a literary career up north. By 25, she was forced back home, having been diagnosed with the autoimmune disease that also killed her father at age 45. She moved with her mother to Andalusia, a family farmhouse north of town, because it had fewer stairs. Daily until her death, she rose for 7 a.m. mass, wrote for four hours in the bedroom she kept darkened like a cell, corresponded with multiplying admirers and journalists and tended her dozens of peafowl as her body stiffened. And she returned to painting. Twenty-five oils on canvas board are also in the exhibition. After O'Connor's death her executors, her mother, Regina Cline O'Connor, and later O'Connor's cousin Louise Florencourt, moved back to the Milledgeville townhouse. Before Florencourt's death in 2023, at 99, she willed the townhouse, a time capsule of 150 years of Clines (including Flannery), to the college's Flannery O'Connor Institute for the Humanities. Its use remains to be determined. The painted caricatures were found in the attic around this time; the oil paintings had been crammed into a storage unit behind the drive-through of Cook Out, a fast-food restaurant. Must an artist be known in full? Farrell O'Gorman, one of the O'Connor estate's new trustees, explained by phone that her 'mother and early trustees, in the 1960s, '70s, '80s, weren't sure if she would be rightly recognized as what she is: one of the greatest short story writers. I think they were worried that the paintings might somehow distract from her achievements as a writer.' At first, these later paintings seem diversions: barns, fruit bowls, birds. But they are also visibly aware of the legacy of impressionism. In her picture of the painting class where she studied with the watercolorist Frank Stanley Herring, her dabs of bright impasto call to mind the domestic mysticism of Raoul Dufy. 'She's not a rube in the middle of nowhere, even though she sometimes cultivated that image of herself,' Donahoo said. In her letters, O'Connor praises Matisse, Rouault, Chagall and Rousseau. Though a poster child for Southern literature on television and radio, she read her Joyce and Eric Auerbach. Her forays into impressionism reflect the same worldly metabolism. In recent years, O'Connor has come under question for using racial slurs in her work and her letters, and for not enthusiastically embracing the civil rights movement. (She turned down an invitation to meet James Baldwin in Georgia, writing in 1959 that this 'would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on – it's only fair.') Two devotedly detailed portraits of Black sitters complicate the pigeonholing of her politics. Munnell suspects the sitters were her neighbors. One is a girl seated in a blue dress, with copper smears glinting in her kneecaps and knuckles. Her lips are parted, half smiling. The other is an elderly woman bent over quiltwork. Up close, O'Connor has defined the fabric squares with steeply peaked ridges of yellow, as if embroidering. The chair sits on a coiled scrap rug in similarly sculpted pigment; the woman surely sewed that, too. We can almost feel the texture of this quilter's craft. Tactile vividness also makes her stories of this period taut and memorable. 'You have got to learn to paint with words,' O'Connor urged an aspiring writer in 1955. In her bleak parable of grace, 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,' a murder victim wears 'a yellow sport shirt with bright blue parrots designed on it and his face was as yellow as the shirt.' It's enough to convey his foppery and cowardice. Though O'Connor claimed to be a 'thirteenth-century' Catholic and resented attempts to modernize the Latin mass, she was also unpredictably progressive, even appearing to accept homosexuality in a much-discussed 1956 letter. That letter, and 'Wise Blood,' brought one current senior at the college, Charlotte Aexel, to a Catholic conversion of her own. 'O'Connor thought Catholicism was the way to live,' Aexel told me at a coffee shop downtown. 'But her story is more about being spiritual. She understands that piety can be beautiful, but that sometimes piety steps on life, and Jesus is life.' The star of the exhibition is a painting from around 1952 that may reflect O'Connor's offbeat orthodoxy. In a magnificent self-portrait created during a lupus attack, O'Connor stares at us with the deadpan of a Byzantine saint, a golden sun hat engulfing her head like a halo. The brushstrokes are flat, more illustration than expression. Evoking St. John with his eagle, she cradles a pheasant, which glares through angry red eyes and feathered horns. (The painting is still owned by her estate.) O'Connor wrote of the pheasant in that picture as 'the Devil,' but also as her 'Muse,' as if at home with the forces of evil. (The show also contains a companionable red Satan puppet she made in youth.) O'Connor mailed photos of this portrait to friends and to her publisher for a dust jacket (never used) with the proviso: 'Nobody admires my painting much but me.' All regional artists might be iconographers of a sort, making images that stand in both for themselves and for some outside truth. Rocking in the screened porch of Andalusia, where she drank her final coffee-Cokes, I gazed down the gravel driveway. In O'Connor's time, the yard surrounding the house would have been cleared. Today it's thick with pecan trees and Bradford pears. She made universal this pocket of Georgia to which she was forced to return. 'The longer you look at one object,' she wrote in an essay discussing Cézanne's apples, 'the more of the world you see in it.' In Milledgeville, with pilgrims visiting daily to her house, now a museum, O'Connor is all but beatified. But there is a lesser-known relic at the college that fewer get to see: the novelist's church kneeler, which was recently gifted to the society of Campus Catholics. Aexel took me inside its small carpeted chapel, where she dotted holy water onto her forehead from a reservoir in the door jamb. She genuflected toward the crucifix that had been hung above Flannery's kneeler, a thumb-browned copy of the complete O'Connor under her arm. Flannery at 100: Hidden Treasures The exhibition opens March 25 at Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville, Ga., for the community. It moves on March 27, through Dec. 22, to the Andalusia Interpretive Center, 2628 North Columbia Street, Milledgeville; (478) 445-8722,
