in the Wilderness
The life and work of Flannery O'Connor
By Stanley Booth
Gadfly December 1998
Israel, thy prophets are like foxes in the desert.
a bright Savannah day in 1931, in the back yard
of a narrow three-story house that looks across
Lafayette Square to the Cathedral of St. John
the Baptist, a Pathé News cinematographer
films a five-year-old with "an expression
of dignified ferocity" displaying her claim
to fame: a frizzled chicken she has trained to
walk backwards. Years later the bird wrangler,
Miss Mary Flannery O'Connor, would call it "an
experience that marked me for life." As a
first grader, she had become a public figure,
one who would someday be a Standard Author in
the Library of America, her work compared with
that of Sophocles.
symbolism of the scene is appealing to the biographer,
because the two presences, exotic fowls and the
Catholic Church, would be with Flannery, as she
preferred to be called, till her dying day. An
additional irony lies in the three proscriptions
that existed when Savannah was founded: the Georgia
colony was to contain no rum, slaves or Catholics.
It is ironic, I mean, that a Catholic, especially
one who believed, and said in public, "the
average Catholic reader is a Militant Moron,"
should become the state's greatest writer.
attended St. Vincent's Grammar School at the Cathedral,
transferring in 1936 to Sacred Heart School on
Bull Street. With her parents, Edward Francis
and Regina Cline O'Connor, she worshiped at the
Cathedral. Her father owned the Dixie Realty and
Construction Companies, but during the Depression
his businesses foundered, and in 1938 he went
to work as an appraiser in Atlanta for the Federal
Housing Authority. Before long he was stricken
with lupus erythematosus and forced to retire.
Lupus is Latin for wolf, and refers also to a
pike, a pointed metal tool or weapon. Systemic
lupus erythematosus is incurable, causing prolonged
fever and skin eruptions and attacking the body's
tissues, bone marrow and blood. Flannery's father
died on the first day of February 1941. Flannery
turned sixteen on March 25. By then the family
was living in Regina's ancestral abode of Milledgeville,
the antebellum capital of Georgia.
great-grandfather, Hugh Donnelly Treanor, was
the first Catholic resident of Milledgeville.
"Mass was first said here in my great-grandfather's
hotel room, later in his home on the piano,"
Flannery wrote. Treanor donated the land on which
Sacred Heart Catholic Church now stands.
being no Catholic school in Milledgeville, Flannery
attended Peabody High School, an experimental
school run by the Education Department of Georgia
State College for Women (now Georgia College).
"The only good things I read when I was a
child were the Greek and Roman myths which I got
out of a set of child's encyclopedia called The
Book of Knowledge. The rest of what
I read was Slop with a capital S. The Slop period
was followed by the Edgar Allan Poe period which
lasted for years and consisted chiefly in a volume
called The Humerous [sic] Tales
of E.A. Poe," Flannery told a
friend, adding, "I went to a progressive
high school where one did not read unless one
wished to; I did not wish to (except The Humerous
Tales etc.)." Flannery remained
all her life "a very innocent speller,"
believing for example that the word cheese contained
a z. In one letter she tried four times to spell
the word treatise without success.
her graduation from GSCW in 1945, Flannery studied
at Iowa State University's School for Writers.
The director, Paul Engle, was at first unable
to understand a word of her Georgia drawl and
asked her to write down what she wanted to say.
When the time came to read her stories aloud in
class, Engle did it himself. "I didn't start
to read until I went to Graduate School and then
I began to read and write at the same time,"
Flannery said. "When I went to Iowa I had
never heard of Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, much less
received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1947.
For the next three years she lived at the writer's
colony called Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, in New
York City, and in Connecticut with her friends
Robert and Sally Fitzgerald. In December 1950
failing health forced her to return to Georgia,
where she was sure she could never work. There
she would write two novels, two books of short
stories, many essays and lectures, and thousands
of pages of letters to friends and literary colleagues.
teachers at St. Vincent's, Sisters of Mercy from
Ireland, informed Flannery that she had a guardian
angel who never left her side even for a moment.
"From 8 to 12 years it was my habit to seclude
myself in a locked room every so often and with
a fierce (and evil) face, whirl around in a circle
with my fists knotted, socking the angel,"
she told a friend. "My dislike of him was
she grew up to be a devout and orthodox Catholic.
"I am no vague believer," she said,
and it must be true that not even the authors
of the books in the Bible can have had a greater
sense of mission. This was her primary gift and
burden. It is as the Marxists used to say "no
accident" that one of her best-known characters
is called the Misfit, because that's how Flannery
saw herself in the literary world. "I have
found that anything that comes out of the South
is going to be called grotesque by the Northern
reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case
it is going to be called realistic," she
wrote. "Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers
particularly have a penchant for writing about
freaks, I say it is because we are still able
to recognize one."
muckraker Philip Wylie described Catholic writers
as "brain-washed," Flannery responded
by saying, "The Catholic sacramental view
of life is one that sustains and supports at every
turn the vision that the storyteller must have
if he is going to write fiction of any depth."
was one quality her work certainly possessed,
but many readers were unprepared for its combination
of humor and violence. In the milieu of the fifties
and sixties her work appeared to some profoundly
disturbing in much the same fashion that the films
of Quentin Tarantino would in the nineties. However,
Flannery's personal conventionality made her work
seem even more shocking. Evelyn Waugh's blurb
on the dust jacket of her first novel, Wise
Blood, read, "If this is really
the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable
product." To which the "vastly insulted"
Regina responded, "Who is this Evalin Wow?
Does he suppose you're not a lady?"
a Catholic novelist of surpassing greatness like
Waugh was unsure what to make of Flannery; it's
not surprising that such secular journals as the
New Yorker, the Nation
and Time would find her, as they
did, unpleasantly baffling. "One of the awful
things about writing when you are a Christian,"
she wrote, "is that for you the ultimate
reality is the Incarnation, the present reality
is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the
Incarnation, that is, nobody in your audience.
My audience are the people who think God is dead."
Flannery's father died, her mother asked the doctor
whether lupus was hereditary and was assured that
he had never known two cases to occur in one family.
Flannery's illness, like her father's, was initially
misdiagnosed as arthritis, but was soon discovered
to be lupus. Fortunately, by the time she contracted
the disease, techniques for controlling it had
year her father died, Flannery's uncle, Dr. Bernard
Cline, had purchased a 1500-acre farm called Andalusia,
about four miles outside Milledgeville. She and
her mother moved there in 1951, and with hired
help, Regina started a dairy. Much to Flannery's
surprise, once her disease was quiescent, she
began writing again. On the farm she was also
able to indulge her penchant for birds, acquiring
chickens, ducks, geese, pheasants, swans, and,
most significantly, peacocks. At one point her
peacocks numbered forty. She wrote to a friend
that the eyes in a peacock's tail "stand
for the eyes of the Church," but that was
incidental, lagniappe; the truth is, she just
loved strange birds, the stranger the better.
Her books were filled with odd ducks, most of
novel Wise Blood, published in 1952,
concerns a tormented backwoods prophet named Hazel
Motes who blinds and punishes himself in other
ways but in the end achieves the victory he seeks.
Flannery spoke of the South as being "Christ-haunted."
Certainly many of her characters were. Her radical
vision, identical to that of the Church, was that
no one is past saving. Flannery's protagonist,
her reasonable man, was not "the legal one"
but "God's reasonable man, the prototype
of whom must be Abraham, willing to sacrifice
his son and thereby show that he is in the image
of God Who sacrifices His Son. All H. Motes had
to sacrifice was his sight but ... he was a mystic
and he did it."
a materialist, utilitarian world, many readers
found such things incomprehensible. History, Flannery
believed, made this inevitable: "Since the
eighteenth century, the popular spirit of each
succeeding age has tended more and more to the
view that the ills and mysteries of life will
eventually fall before the scientific advances
of man, a belief that is still going strong even
though this is the first generation to face total
extinction because of these advances." Such
a statement must be seen in the light of the Cold
War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and other contemporary
horrors. If she were still alive, Flannery might
say that it should also be seen in relation to
the continuing annual starvation of at least six
million children, while each year billions are
spent on bombers, nuclear submarines, battleships
and sheer misguided waste.
funny thing is, there are those who, never having
had a fatal disease, never having had their hair
fall out from anything but natural causes, consider
Flannery's point of view somehow sentimental.
Hardly anything could be further from the truth.
Christianity, in her view, was not for sissies,
not unless they were ready for change. "All
human nature vigorously resists grace," she
wrote, "because grace changes us and the
change is painful."
truth is shown in the title story of A Good
Man Is Hard to Find, her first short-story
collection, published in 1955. The story climaxes
with an encounter between a foolish old woman
and a violent escaped criminal. The woman, in
a moment of clarity, reaches out to the criminal,
who is known as the Misfit, with love, and he,
recoiling in horror, shoots her. Various interpreters
of the story have seen the woman as a witch and
the Misfit as the Devil. "I prefer to think,"
Flannery said, "that however unlikely this
may seem, the old lady's gesture, like the mustard-seed,
will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the
Misfit's heart, and will be enough of a pain to
him there to turn him into the prophet he was
meant to become." Traditional Christianity
teaches that everyone is called to be a saint
and a prophet, but few there are who go around
spreading this doctrine these days.
passionate faith led some, even among her friends,
to assume that she was immune to such human proclivities
as the desire for romantic love. This was not
the case. In 1953 she met Erik Langkjaer, a Danish-born
textbook representative from Harcourt, Brace,
fell in love with him, and was heartbroken by
his decision the next year to return to Denmark,
where he married another woman. Flannery wanted
a normal, healthy life; she wanted to love and
be loved, but that was not to be.
initial treatment for her illness was a salt-free
diet, blood transfusions, and injections of adrenocorticotropic
hormone (ACTH). By the end of 1954, persistent
hip pain, thought at first to be caused by rheumatism,
forced Flannery to walk with a cane. Though she
switched from ACTH to a new drug called Meticorten,
the condition became worse, and in the fall of
1955 she began using aluminum crutches. "They
change the whole tempo of everything," she
told a friend. "I no longer am going to cross
the room without making a major decision to do
it began to appear that Flannery would have to
remain on crutches, her Savannah aunt Mrs. Raphael
Semmes offered to send her to Lourdes. She and
Regina went there in the Spring of 1958. "Lourdes
was not as bad as I expected," she said on
her return. Though she had insisted that "I
am going as a pilgrim, not a patient. I will not
be taking any bath," she took the bath. Even
so, she said, "I prayed for my book, not
my bones." Her aunt died in late November,
but not before Flannery was able to tell her that
an x-ray taken in mid-month showed recalcification
in Flannery's hips that allowed her to walk without
crutches indoors. "Maybe this is Lourdes,"
book for which she prayed, The Violent Bear
It Away, was published in January of
1960. It concerned another backwoods prophet,
this one named Francis Marion Tarwater. "I
have the feeling," she said shortly after
the novel came out, "that while many people
will read this book in some fashion or other,
only a few will really read it,
or see anything in it. The reviews prove this,
even the favorable ones. The favorable ones are
sometimes the worst."
improvement in her health did not endure. Discovering
near the end of the year that the disintegration
in her bones was due to the steroid drugs used
to restrain the lupus, Flannery's doctors reduced
her dosage. Still the problem continued. Over
the next two years, Flannery proposed implant
or bone-graft surgery for her hips, but the danger
of stirring up the lupus ruled it out. Because
her energy was severely limited, Flannery bought
an electric typewriter, then found herself unable
to use it for anything except copying what she'd
already written. "You can't compose on it
because it don't wait for you," she said.
Working on the stories that would appear in Everything
That Rises Must Converge, Flannery
likened turning from a novel to short stories
to having "just left a dark wood to be set
upon by wolves."
with severe anemia in 1963, Flannery started taking
iron treatments, and x-rays showed her hip bones
improving. In February of 1964, the cause of her
anemia was discovered to be a fibroid tumor; in
spite of the danger of reactivating the lupus,
the tumor had to be removed. Though she had been
given large doses of cortisone as a preventive
measure, the lupus did awake and start to devour
her. In May, before going to Peidmont Hospital
in Atlanta, she signed a contract for Everything
That Rises. In the hospital she hid
her stories under her pillow so she would not
be forbidden to work on them. On July 7, back
at home, she requested and received the Sacrament
of the Sick, which used to be called Extreme Unction.
At the end of July she entered Baldwin County
Hospital in Milledgeville. She slipped into a
coma on August 2, died of kidney failure a little
past midnight of August 3, and was buried August
4 beside her father in Memory Hill Cemetery following
a Requiem Mass at Sacred Heart Church.
most of her contemporaries, Flannery saw the work
of the fiction writer as a kind of prophecy. After
her death, Thomas Merton said, "...when I
read Flannery I don't think of Hemingway, or Katherine
Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone
April of 1960, Flannery had received a letter
from the Sister Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual
Help Cancer Home in Atlanta asking her to write
a book about a little girl who had died of cancer
after being with the sisters for the last nine
of her twelve years of life. Flannery declined
to write the book, feeling that the sisters should
do it themselves, but offered to help edit the
book and get it published. It was typical of her
that she bet the sisters a pair of peacocks that
publication day for the book would never come.
Farrar, Straus accepted the book in January of
1961. Flannery forked over the peacocks, and the
sisters reciprocated by giving her a television
set. Flannery unexpectedly discovered she enjoyed
watching such things as commercials and the films
of W.C. Fields. "I think I might have written
a picture that would be good for him," she
said. "My talent lies in a kind of intellectual
visiting Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery
in Conyers, Georgia, in 1959, Flannery had determined
to give them some peacocks "when they get
ready for them." Upon her death the peacocks
were divided between the monastery, the cancer
home, and Stone Mountain Park near Atlanta. The
ones at the cancer home were later given to the
monastery. Predators killed the ones at Stone
Mountain. In the early 1980s the ones at the monastery
were given to a Mr. and Mrs. Frank Reindl of Lake
Lorelei, Ohio. The last of the peacocks were eaten
than three weeks before she died, Flannery sent
the following to a friend, saying, "It's
a prayer I've said every day for many years."
to Saint Raphael
Raphael, lead us toward those we are waiting for,
those who are waiting for us: Raphael, Angel of
happy meeting, lead us by the hand toward those
we are looking for. May all our movements be guided
by your Light and transfigured with your joy.
guide of Tobias, lay the request we now address
to you at the feet of Him on whose unveiled Face
you are privileged to gaze. Lonely and tired,
crushed by the separations and sorrows of life,
we feel the need of calling you and of pleading
for the protection of your wings, so that we may
not be as strangers in the province of joy, all
ignorant of the concerns of our country. Remember
the weak, you who are strong, you whose home lies
beyond the region of thunder, in a land that is
always peaceful, always serene and bright with
the resplendent glory of God.