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Flannery O'Connor: In Celebration of Genius
A group of writers pay tribute to the author in a series of essays, short stories, and poems that celebrate her creative talents.
123 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
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November 12, 2011The Millennial Gathering of Writers of the New South left undiscussed one important aspect of past and present Southern literature: the Gothic. Perhaps this omission isn’t surprising. Odd characters, macabre events, and moss-haunted landscapes remain so much a part of our region that discussing them seems as beside the point as discussing the influence of humidity—or Wal-Marts—on the Southern character. ”Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks,“ Flannery O’Connor once wrote, ”I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.“
O’Connor, the Georgia master of the Gothic subgenre, would have turned 75 in 2000, and Hill Street Press issued a collection of tributes titled FLANNERY O'CONNOR: IN CELEBRATION OF GENIUS to mark the occasion; the book went out of print, and fortunately for all, the University of South Carolina Press re-issued the volume in 2010, shortly after O’Connor, who died before she reached her 40th birthday, was declared the favorite?/best? of all National Book Award winners and nominees, defeating even the Dixie Express, a/k/a Faulkner. If he sometimes ran out of steam when faced with both the end of a novel and a full bottle of bourbon, O'Connor's active life as a writer was brought to a stop only by lupus, but her work, quite obviously, continues to charge down tracks that are now largely metaphorical, since most people, even Down Here, prefer the ghastliness of current air travel.
Lupus, however, the neurophysical ”wolf“ that ravages the joints, nerves, and bloodstream, has undeniably gruesome, even old-fashioned Gothic, ways. Thus editor Sarah Gordon includes in the tribute volume a particularly suitable work from Mark Jarman’s UNHOLY SONNETS. Readers must either read that book or Gordon's to read the Vanderbilt professor's poem that opens by conjuring the serial killer in one of O’Connor’s best-known stories, ”A Good Man Is Hard to Find,“ as he decides to make his move. ”The Lord God,“ Jarman tells us, watches ”with His seven compound eyes“ as the murderer’s rifle is loaded and aimed: ”[God] sees the horror dreamed and brought to being, / And still maintains His vigil and His power, / Which you and I would squander with a scream.“ Good poems, like good men, are inarguably hard to find, so why did the Vanderbilt professor omit this sonnet, vigilant and powerful indeed, from BONEFIRES: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (Sarabande, 2011).
Jarman’s poem draws a bead on O’Connor’s manipulation of point of view, which is largely responsible for her signature use of the Gothic. Her fiction’s introductory pages are invariably hilarious, their humor usually at the expense of petty, platitudinous bores we’re meant to recognize as far less intelligent and evolved than ourselves. We’re drawn, in other words, into collusion with the sardonic narrator—who has been colluding with God from the get-go and has decided to bring us along for the ride. Paradoxically, as O’Connor’s works arc toward closure, the point of view alters just enough for us to realize something else: very bad things are getting ready to happen to her characters; they no longer look quite so unlike us; and the narrator, as her grip on the action loosens, suddenly becomes merely the action’s observer, thus a stand-in for the reader. No longer empowered by her collusion with God and the godlike power any narrator has to dictate events, O’Connor damns herself along with the rest of us, all salvageable only by the harsh intervention of Christian grace.
Other contributions to FLANNERY O'CONNOR: IN CELEBRATION OF GENIUS are less macabre but still Gothic, if only by their recounting of O’Connor’s various eccentricities—which one suspects were in particular force when company came to call. Miller Williams (yes, Lucinda’s father), the much-honored poet who founded the University of Arkansas Press and was Clinton's second inaugural poet, remembers when he brought his 4-year-old daughter to visit O’Connor at her Milledgeville farm, Andalusia. The writer’s famous peacocks fascinated the young Lucinda, who ”laughed and fell and laughed and fell again“ as she chased the birds. ”When I scolded her for it,“ Williams tells us, ”Flannery told me to let her go. ‘She won’t catch them unless they want her to.’"
Another tribute contains a story about Katherine Anne Porter’s visit to Milledgeville. The several-times-married Texas beauty, whose literary legacy is no less considerable, if more erotically charged, than O’Connor’s, asked her hostess if she ever feared attacks on her peafowl by marauding dogs. ”Not anymore,“ O’Connor allegedly said while lifting a shotgun or rifle from behind a curtain. Apparently Porter was silent as she was driven away from Andalusia, finally turning to her friend at the wheel with a sigh: ”That woman,“ she said of O’Connor, ”scares me to death.“
Gordon, the grande dame of O’Connor studies and editor of THE FLANNERY O'CONNOR REVIEW, appears with Williams, Jarman, Robert Coles, Nancy Mairs, Padgett Powell and various others in this anthology of essays, reminiscences and poems, Gordon was among the pioneers in providing background information to flesh out O’Connor’s fiction, particularly through THE OBEDIENT IMAGINATION (University of Georgia Press, 2000). UGA has more recently published a volume O’Connor would have surely loved, SPIRITS OF THE AIR: BIRDS AND AMERICAN INDIANS IN THE SOUTH, by Shepard Krech, and the single most arresting comparison to be found in Gordon’s editorial labor of love arguably belongs to Powell, at least in my relentlessly associative mind:
"…coming upon Flannery O’Connor at a young and thinking-about-it age would be like coming across Janis Joplin [remember her feather-bedecked hair?] if you were young and thinking about being a rock singer. You see before you a model of someone uttterly mad with passion and consumed by a vision and desperate to execute it. And you see a considerable technician. It is not an exaggeration to say you see someone driven and holy, a goddess of her church. *** What saved Janis Joplin from being merely the loneliest madwoman on earth was that she could sing. What saves Flannery O’Connor from being the holiest mother on earth is that she can write."
Francine Prose (who wrote the indelible notes to John Huston’s WISE BLOOD) earlier penned an essay, “Scent of a Woman’s Ink,” that somehow manages to be on-topic, avant-garde and especially timely in regard to an ESQUIRE list of "250 Books Men Must Read": http://harpers.org/archive/1998/06/00.... One would think, given the limitations of the opposite sex, the list might omit O'Connor, since as Prose deftly points out, she has received that highest compliment from editors, especially those who are male and work for venues whose "target audiences" are male as well: O'Connor Writes Like A Man.
Nonsense. O'Connor wrote from her primarily interests, theology and birds, as well as the characters--so so speak--who populate the rural Georgia in which she lived. Some criticize O'Connor for being unable to create characters at all, only characters, but 1) she was interested in humankind's relation to God and the idiocy that resulted when none existed, not the concept of gender-based identity; and 2) no such critics, to my knowledge, actually LIVE in rural Georgia.
Regarding ESQUIRE’s recent Hall, not of Fame, but of Thick-Headed Infamy complicated by a clear-cut case of Womb Envy, I began to pluck, purely at random, names of female fiction writers from within the last century (keep in mind that I am a poet and don't even read much fiction, but these are novelists and short story writers whose work remains with me, and three-quarters are relatively young and still abounding in creative energy: Beryl Bainbridge, Djuna Barnes, Sheila Boswell, Kate Braverman, Joan Didion, Jennifer Egan, Elizabeth Hardwick, Amy Hempel, Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, Tayari Jones, Nancy Lemann, Katherine Mansfield, Claire Messud, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Prose herself, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Alice Randall, Mary Robison, Elise Sanguinetti, Elizabeth Smart, Zadie Smith, Jean Stafford, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf; and certainly include, as "suggested reading," Simone de Beauvoir's THE SECOND SEX, Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, Kate Millet's SEXUAL POLITICS, Camille Paglia's SEXUAL PERSONAE, Sylvia Plath's THE BELL JAR, and the brilliant but underrated BITCH: IN PRAISE OF DIFFICULT WOMEN, by Elizabeth Wurtzel. But O'Connor, for reasons one might guess after reading Prose's essay, is the sole female included. And the above list, assembled only from my own mental scan of shelves always in flux, consists, purely by accident, of only thirty-three prose writers. For once Freud and O'Connor would have been in agreement that this was no coincidence; moreover, O'Connor would have been delighted the the number's import itself. (I discarded mentions of Harper Lee and Carson McCuller's names, which also occurred to me instantly, for I am attempting to be respectful of my ostensible subject, and O'Connor complimented TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in terms of its suitability for child readers, and she said, of Carson McCullers, that like Truman Capote and "Mr. Tennessee Williams," her sister Georgian--who had her own share of physical ills--"made her plumb sick."
While the late music writer Ellen Willis doesn’t mention O’Connor in “Janis Joplin,” the most personally memorable essay collected in OUT OF THE VINYL DEEPS (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), re-reading the piece with in mind, so to speak, gives new resonance to a statement about midway through Willis's essay: “Janis sang out of her pain as a woman, and men dug it. Yet it was men who caused the pain, and if they stopped causing it they would not have her to dig.” Willis sees Madonna–-of all people, in this context–-as Joplin’s natural offspring, but if in BITCH, Wurtzel, who is probably least known for being an Hebraic scholar, limns with due harshness the savage backfire that too often follows when women wear their own erotic natures on their sleeves, think of poor Hulga stuck limbless (to make a dreadful rhyme and/or pun) in that hayloft. She wanted only a kiss, after all; why "Manley Pointer" (really, Ms. O'Connor!) wanted her wooden leg, well, I'm still not quite sure.
(some parts of this essay were published in the NASHVILLE SCENE, some in OPTION, and others composed especially for this piece)
O’Connor, the Georgia master of the Gothic subgenre, would have turned 75 in 2000, and Hill Street Press issued a collection of tributes titled FLANNERY O'CONNOR: IN CELEBRATION OF GENIUS to mark the occasion; the book went out of print, and fortunately for all, the University of South Carolina Press re-issued the volume in 2010, shortly after O’Connor, who died before she reached her 40th birthday, was declared the favorite?/best? of all National Book Award winners and nominees, defeating even the Dixie Express, a/k/a Faulkner. If he sometimes ran out of steam when faced with both the end of a novel and a full bottle of bourbon, O'Connor's active life as a writer was brought to a stop only by lupus, but her work, quite obviously, continues to charge down tracks that are now largely metaphorical, since most people, even Down Here, prefer the ghastliness of current air travel.
Lupus, however, the neurophysical ”wolf“ that ravages the joints, nerves, and bloodstream, has undeniably gruesome, even old-fashioned Gothic, ways. Thus editor Sarah Gordon includes in the tribute volume a particularly suitable work from Mark Jarman’s UNHOLY SONNETS. Readers must either read that book or Gordon's to read the Vanderbilt professor's poem that opens by conjuring the serial killer in one of O’Connor’s best-known stories, ”A Good Man Is Hard to Find,“ as he decides to make his move. ”The Lord God,“ Jarman tells us, watches ”with His seven compound eyes“ as the murderer’s rifle is loaded and aimed: ”[God] sees the horror dreamed and brought to being, / And still maintains His vigil and His power, / Which you and I would squander with a scream.“ Good poems, like good men, are inarguably hard to find, so why did the Vanderbilt professor omit this sonnet, vigilant and powerful indeed, from BONEFIRES: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (Sarabande, 2011).
Jarman’s poem draws a bead on O’Connor’s manipulation of point of view, which is largely responsible for her signature use of the Gothic. Her fiction’s introductory pages are invariably hilarious, their humor usually at the expense of petty, platitudinous bores we’re meant to recognize as far less intelligent and evolved than ourselves. We’re drawn, in other words, into collusion with the sardonic narrator—who has been colluding with God from the get-go and has decided to bring us along for the ride. Paradoxically, as O’Connor’s works arc toward closure, the point of view alters just enough for us to realize something else: very bad things are getting ready to happen to her characters; they no longer look quite so unlike us; and the narrator, as her grip on the action loosens, suddenly becomes merely the action’s observer, thus a stand-in for the reader. No longer empowered by her collusion with God and the godlike power any narrator has to dictate events, O’Connor damns herself along with the rest of us, all salvageable only by the harsh intervention of Christian grace.
Other contributions to FLANNERY O'CONNOR: IN CELEBRATION OF GENIUS are less macabre but still Gothic, if only by their recounting of O’Connor’s various eccentricities—which one suspects were in particular force when company came to call. Miller Williams (yes, Lucinda’s father), the much-honored poet who founded the University of Arkansas Press and was Clinton's second inaugural poet, remembers when he brought his 4-year-old daughter to visit O’Connor at her Milledgeville farm, Andalusia. The writer’s famous peacocks fascinated the young Lucinda, who ”laughed and fell and laughed and fell again“ as she chased the birds. ”When I scolded her for it,“ Williams tells us, ”Flannery told me to let her go. ‘She won’t catch them unless they want her to.’"
Another tribute contains a story about Katherine Anne Porter’s visit to Milledgeville. The several-times-married Texas beauty, whose literary legacy is no less considerable, if more erotically charged, than O’Connor’s, asked her hostess if she ever feared attacks on her peafowl by marauding dogs. ”Not anymore,“ O’Connor allegedly said while lifting a shotgun or rifle from behind a curtain. Apparently Porter was silent as she was driven away from Andalusia, finally turning to her friend at the wheel with a sigh: ”That woman,“ she said of O’Connor, ”scares me to death.“
Gordon, the grande dame of O’Connor studies and editor of THE FLANNERY O'CONNOR REVIEW, appears with Williams, Jarman, Robert Coles, Nancy Mairs, Padgett Powell and various others in this anthology of essays, reminiscences and poems, Gordon was among the pioneers in providing background information to flesh out O’Connor’s fiction, particularly through THE OBEDIENT IMAGINATION (University of Georgia Press, 2000). UGA has more recently published a volume O’Connor would have surely loved, SPIRITS OF THE AIR: BIRDS AND AMERICAN INDIANS IN THE SOUTH, by Shepard Krech, and the single most arresting comparison to be found in Gordon’s editorial labor of love arguably belongs to Powell, at least in my relentlessly associative mind:
"…coming upon Flannery O’Connor at a young and thinking-about-it age would be like coming across Janis Joplin [remember her feather-bedecked hair?] if you were young and thinking about being a rock singer. You see before you a model of someone uttterly mad with passion and consumed by a vision and desperate to execute it. And you see a considerable technician. It is not an exaggeration to say you see someone driven and holy, a goddess of her church. *** What saved Janis Joplin from being merely the loneliest madwoman on earth was that she could sing. What saves Flannery O’Connor from being the holiest mother on earth is that she can write."
Francine Prose (who wrote the indelible notes to John Huston’s WISE BLOOD) earlier penned an essay, “Scent of a Woman’s Ink,” that somehow manages to be on-topic, avant-garde and especially timely in regard to an ESQUIRE list of "250 Books Men Must Read": http://harpers.org/archive/1998/06/00.... One would think, given the limitations of the opposite sex, the list might omit O'Connor, since as Prose deftly points out, she has received that highest compliment from editors, especially those who are male and work for venues whose "target audiences" are male as well: O'Connor Writes Like A Man.
Nonsense. O'Connor wrote from her primarily interests, theology and birds, as well as the characters--so so speak--who populate the rural Georgia in which she lived. Some criticize O'Connor for being unable to create characters at all, only characters, but 1) she was interested in humankind's relation to God and the idiocy that resulted when none existed, not the concept of gender-based identity; and 2) no such critics, to my knowledge, actually LIVE in rural Georgia.
Regarding ESQUIRE’s recent Hall, not of Fame, but of Thick-Headed Infamy complicated by a clear-cut case of Womb Envy, I began to pluck, purely at random, names of female fiction writers from within the last century (keep in mind that I am a poet and don't even read much fiction, but these are novelists and short story writers whose work remains with me, and three-quarters are relatively young and still abounding in creative energy: Beryl Bainbridge, Djuna Barnes, Sheila Boswell, Kate Braverman, Joan Didion, Jennifer Egan, Elizabeth Hardwick, Amy Hempel, Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, Tayari Jones, Nancy Lemann, Katherine Mansfield, Claire Messud, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Prose herself, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Alice Randall, Mary Robison, Elise Sanguinetti, Elizabeth Smart, Zadie Smith, Jean Stafford, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf; and certainly include, as "suggested reading," Simone de Beauvoir's THE SECOND SEX, Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, Kate Millet's SEXUAL POLITICS, Camille Paglia's SEXUAL PERSONAE, Sylvia Plath's THE BELL JAR, and the brilliant but underrated BITCH: IN PRAISE OF DIFFICULT WOMEN, by Elizabeth Wurtzel. But O'Connor, for reasons one might guess after reading Prose's essay, is the sole female included. And the above list, assembled only from my own mental scan of shelves always in flux, consists, purely by accident, of only thirty-three prose writers. For once Freud and O'Connor would have been in agreement that this was no coincidence; moreover, O'Connor would have been delighted the the number's import itself. (I discarded mentions of Harper Lee and Carson McCuller's names, which also occurred to me instantly, for I am attempting to be respectful of my ostensible subject, and O'Connor complimented TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in terms of its suitability for child readers, and she said, of Carson McCullers, that like Truman Capote and "Mr. Tennessee Williams," her sister Georgian--who had her own share of physical ills--"made her plumb sick."
While the late music writer Ellen Willis doesn’t mention O’Connor in “Janis Joplin,” the most personally memorable essay collected in OUT OF THE VINYL DEEPS (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), re-reading the piece with in mind, so to speak, gives new resonance to a statement about midway through Willis's essay: “Janis sang out of her pain as a woman, and men dug it. Yet it was men who caused the pain, and if they stopped causing it they would not have her to dig.” Willis sees Madonna–-of all people, in this context–-as Joplin’s natural offspring, but if in BITCH, Wurtzel, who is probably least known for being an Hebraic scholar, limns with due harshness the savage backfire that too often follows when women wear their own erotic natures on their sleeves, think of poor Hulga stuck limbless (to make a dreadful rhyme and/or pun) in that hayloft. She wanted only a kiss, after all; why "Manley Pointer" (really, Ms. O'Connor!) wanted her wooden leg, well, I'm still not quite sure.
(some parts of this essay were published in the NASHVILLE SCENE, some in OPTION, and others composed especially for this piece)
Read
November 12, 2011Vanderbilt's Millennial Gathering of Writers of the New South left undiscussed one important aspect of past and present Southern literature: the Gothic. Perhaps this omission isn’t surprising. Odd characters, macabre events, and moss-haunted landscapes remain so much a part of our region that discussing them seems as beside the point as discussing the influence of humidity—or Wal-Marts—on the Southern character. ”Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks,“ Flannery O’Connor once wrote, ”I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.“
O’Connor, the Georgia master of the Gothic subgenre, would have turned 75 in 2000, and Hill Street Press issued a collection of tributes titled FLANNERY O'CONNOR: IN CELEBRATION OF GENIUS to mark the occasion; the book went out of print, and fortunately for all, the University of South Carolina Press re-issued the volume in 2010, shortly after O’Connor, who died before she reached her 40th birthday, was declared the favorite?/best? of all National Book Award winners and nominees, defeating even the Dixie Express, a/k/a Faulkner. If he sometimes ran out of steam when faced with both the end of a novel and a full bottle of bourbon, O'Connor's active life as a writer was brought to a stop only by lupus, but her work, quite obviously, continues to charge down tracks that are now largely metaphorical, since most people, even Down Here, prefer the ghastliness of current air travel.
Lupus, however, the neurophysical ”wolf“ that ravages the joints, nerves, and bloodstream, has undeniably gruesome, even old-fashioned Gothic, ways. Thus editor Sarah Gordon includes in the tribute volume a particularly suitable work from Mark Jarman’s UNHOLY SONNETS. Readers must either read that book or Gordon's to read the Vanderbilt professor's poem that opens by conjuring the serial killer in one of O’Connor’s best-known stories, ”A Good Man Is Hard to Find,“ as he decides to make his move. ”The Lord God,“ Jarman tells us, watches ”with His seven compound eyes“ as the murderer’s rifle is loaded and aimed: ”[God] sees the horror dreamed and brought to being, / And still maintains His vigil and His power, / Which you and I would squander with a scream.“ Good poems, like good men, are inarguably hard to find, so why did the Vanderbilt professor omit this sonnet, vigilant and powerful indeed, from BONEFIRES: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (Sarabande, 2011).
Jarman’s poem draws a bead on O’Connor’s manipulation of point of view, which is largely responsible for her signature use of the Gothic. Her fiction’s introductory pages are invariably hilarious, their humor usually at the expense of petty, platitudinous bores we’re meant to recognize as far less intelligent and evolved than ourselves. We’re drawn, in other words, into collusion with the sardonic narrator—who has been colluding with God from the get-go and has decided to bring us along for the ride. Paradoxically, as O’Connor’s works arc toward closure, the point of view alters just enough for us to realize something else: very bad things are getting ready to happen to her characters; they no longer look quite so unlike us; and the narrator, as her grip on the action loosens, suddenly becomes merely the action’s observer, thus a stand-in for the reader. No longer empowered by her collusion with God and the godlike power any narrator has to dictate events, O’Connor damns herself along with the rest of us, all salvageable only by the harsh intervention of Christian grace.
Other contributions to FLANNERY O'CONNOR: IN CELEBRATION OF GENIUS are less macabre but still Gothic, if only by their recounting of O’Connor’s various eccentricities—which one suspects were in particular force when company came to call. Miller Williams (yes, Lucinda’s father), the much-honored poet who founded the University of Arkansas Press and was Clinton's second inaugural poet, remembers when he brought his 4-year-old daughter to visit O’Connor at her Milledgeville farm, Andalusia. The writer’s famous peacocks fascinated the young Lucinda, who ”laughed and fell and laughed and fell again“ as she chased the birds. ”When I scolded her for it,“ Williams tells us, ”Flannery told me to let her go. ‘She won’t catch them unless they want her to.’"
Another tribute contains a story about Katherine Anne Porter’s visit to Milledgeville. The several-times-married Texas beauty, whose literary legacy is no less considerable, if more erotically charged, than O’Connor’s, asked her hostess if she ever feared attacks on her peafowl by marauding dogs. ”Not anymore,“ O’Connor allegedly said while lifting a shotgun or rifle from behind a curtain. Apparently Porter was silent as she was driven away from Andalusia, finally turning to her friend at the wheel with a sigh: ”That woman,“ she said of O’Connor, ”scares me to death.“
Gordon, the grande dame of O’Connor studies and editor of THE FLANNERY O'CONNOR REVIEW, appears with Williams, Jarman, Robert Coles, Nancy Mairs, Padgett Powell and various others in this anthology of essays, reminiscences and poems, Gordon was among the pioneers in providing background information to flesh out O’Connor’s fiction, particularly through THE OBEDIENT IMAGINATION (University of Georgia Press, 2000). UGA has more recently published a volume O’Connor would have surely loved, SPIRITS OF THE AIR: BIRDS AND AMERICAN INDIANS IN THE SOUTH, by Shepard Krech, and the single most arresting comparison to be found in Gordon’s editorial labor of love arguably belongs to Powell, at least in my relentlessly associative mind:
"…coming upon Flannery O’Connor at a young and thinking-about-it age would be like coming across Janis Joplin [remember her feather-bedecked hair?] if you were young and thinking about being a rock singer. You see before you a model of someone uttterly mad with passion and consumed by a vision and desperate to execute it. And you see a considerable technician. It is not an exaggeration to say you see someone driven and holy, a goddess of her church. *** What saved Janis Joplin from being merely the loneliest madwoman on earth was that she could sing. What saves Flannery O’Connor from being the holiest mother on earth is that she can write."
Francine Prose (who wrote the indelible notes to John Huston’s WISE BLOOD) earlier penned an essay, “Scent of a Woman’s Ink,” that somehow manages to be on-topic, avant-garde and especially timely in regard to an ESQUIRE list of "250 Books Men Must Read": http://harpers.org/archive/1998/06/00.... One would think, given the limitations of the opposite sex, the list might omit O'Connor, since as Prose deftly points out, she has received that highest compliment from editors, especially those who are male and work for venues whose "target audiences" are male as well: O'Connor Writes Like A Man.
Nonsense. O'Connor wrote from her primarily interests, theology and birds, as well as the characters--so so speak--who populate the rural Georgia in which she lived. Some criticize O'Connor for being unable to create characters at all, only characters, but 1) she was interested in humankind's relation to God and the idiocy that resulted when none existed, not the concept of gender-based identity; and 2) no such critics, to my knowledge, actually LIVE in rural Georgia.
Regarding ESQUIRE’s recent Hall, not of Fame, but of Thick-Headed Infamy complicated by a clear-cut case of Womb Envy, I began to pluck, purely at random, names of female fiction writers from within the last century (keep in mind that I am a poet and don't even read much fiction, but these are novelists and short story writers whose work remains with me, and three-quarters are relatively young and still abounding in creative energy: Beryl Bainbridge, Djuna Barnes, Sheila Boswell, Kate Braverman, Joan Didion, Jennifer Egan, Elizabeth Hardwick, Amy Hempel, Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, Tayari Jones, Nancy Lemann, Katherine Mansfield, Claire Messud, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Prose herself, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Alice Randall, Elise Sanguinetti, Elizabeth Smart, Zadie Smith, Jean Stafford, Donna Tartt, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf; and certainly include, as "suggested reading," Simone de Beauvoir's THE SECOND SEX, Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, Kate Millet's SEXUAL POLITICS, Camille Paglia's SEXUAL PERSONAE, Sylvia Plath's THE BELL JAR, and the brilliant but underrated BITCH: IN PRAISE OF DIFFICULT WOMEN, by Elizabeth Wurtzel. But O'Connor, for reasons one might guess after reading Prose's essay, is the sole female included. And the above list, assembled only from my own mental scan of shelves always in flux, consists, purely by accident, of only thirty-three prose writers. For once Freud and O'Connor would have been in agreement that this was no coincidence; moreover, O'Connor would have been delighted the the number's import itself. (I discarded mentions of Harper Lee and Carson McCuller's names, which also occurred to me instantly, for I am attempting to be respectful of my ostensible subject, and O'Connor complimented TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in terms of its suitability for child readers, and she said, of Carson McCullers, that like Truman Capote and "Mr. Tennessee Williams," her sister Georgian--who had her own share of physical ills--"made her plumb sick."
While the late music writer Ellen Willis doesn’t mention O’Connor in “Janis Joplin,” the most personally memorable essay collected in OUT OF THE VINYL DEEPS (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), re-reading the piece with in mind, so to speak, gives new resonance to a statement about midway through Willis's essay: “Janis sang out of her pain as a woman, and men dug it. Yet it was men who caused the pain, and if they stopped causing it they would not have her to dig.” Willis sees Madonna–-of all people, in this context–-as Joplin’s natural offspring, but if in BITCH, Wurtzel, who is probably least known for being an Hebraic scholar, limns with due harshness the savage backfire that too often follows when women wear their own erotic natures on their sleeves, think of poor Hulga stuck limbless (to make a dreadful rhyme and/or pun) in that hayloft. She wanted only a kiss, after all; why "Manley Pointer" (really, Ms. O'Connor!) wanted her wooden leg, well, I'm still not quite sure.
(some parts of this essay were published in the NASHVILLE SCENE, some in OPTION, and others composed especially for this piece)
O’Connor, the Georgia master of the Gothic subgenre, would have turned 75 in 2000, and Hill Street Press issued a collection of tributes titled FLANNERY O'CONNOR: IN CELEBRATION OF GENIUS to mark the occasion; the book went out of print, and fortunately for all, the University of South Carolina Press re-issued the volume in 2010, shortly after O’Connor, who died before she reached her 40th birthday, was declared the favorite?/best? of all National Book Award winners and nominees, defeating even the Dixie Express, a/k/a Faulkner. If he sometimes ran out of steam when faced with both the end of a novel and a full bottle of bourbon, O'Connor's active life as a writer was brought to a stop only by lupus, but her work, quite obviously, continues to charge down tracks that are now largely metaphorical, since most people, even Down Here, prefer the ghastliness of current air travel.
Lupus, however, the neurophysical ”wolf“ that ravages the joints, nerves, and bloodstream, has undeniably gruesome, even old-fashioned Gothic, ways. Thus editor Sarah Gordon includes in the tribute volume a particularly suitable work from Mark Jarman’s UNHOLY SONNETS. Readers must either read that book or Gordon's to read the Vanderbilt professor's poem that opens by conjuring the serial killer in one of O’Connor’s best-known stories, ”A Good Man Is Hard to Find,“ as he decides to make his move. ”The Lord God,“ Jarman tells us, watches ”with His seven compound eyes“ as the murderer’s rifle is loaded and aimed: ”[God] sees the horror dreamed and brought to being, / And still maintains His vigil and His power, / Which you and I would squander with a scream.“ Good poems, like good men, are inarguably hard to find, so why did the Vanderbilt professor omit this sonnet, vigilant and powerful indeed, from BONEFIRES: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (Sarabande, 2011).
Jarman’s poem draws a bead on O’Connor’s manipulation of point of view, which is largely responsible for her signature use of the Gothic. Her fiction’s introductory pages are invariably hilarious, their humor usually at the expense of petty, platitudinous bores we’re meant to recognize as far less intelligent and evolved than ourselves. We’re drawn, in other words, into collusion with the sardonic narrator—who has been colluding with God from the get-go and has decided to bring us along for the ride. Paradoxically, as O’Connor’s works arc toward closure, the point of view alters just enough for us to realize something else: very bad things are getting ready to happen to her characters; they no longer look quite so unlike us; and the narrator, as her grip on the action loosens, suddenly becomes merely the action’s observer, thus a stand-in for the reader. No longer empowered by her collusion with God and the godlike power any narrator has to dictate events, O’Connor damns herself along with the rest of us, all salvageable only by the harsh intervention of Christian grace.
Other contributions to FLANNERY O'CONNOR: IN CELEBRATION OF GENIUS are less macabre but still Gothic, if only by their recounting of O’Connor’s various eccentricities—which one suspects were in particular force when company came to call. Miller Williams (yes, Lucinda’s father), the much-honored poet who founded the University of Arkansas Press and was Clinton's second inaugural poet, remembers when he brought his 4-year-old daughter to visit O’Connor at her Milledgeville farm, Andalusia. The writer’s famous peacocks fascinated the young Lucinda, who ”laughed and fell and laughed and fell again“ as she chased the birds. ”When I scolded her for it,“ Williams tells us, ”Flannery told me to let her go. ‘She won’t catch them unless they want her to.’"
Another tribute contains a story about Katherine Anne Porter’s visit to Milledgeville. The several-times-married Texas beauty, whose literary legacy is no less considerable, if more erotically charged, than O’Connor’s, asked her hostess if she ever feared attacks on her peafowl by marauding dogs. ”Not anymore,“ O’Connor allegedly said while lifting a shotgun or rifle from behind a curtain. Apparently Porter was silent as she was driven away from Andalusia, finally turning to her friend at the wheel with a sigh: ”That woman,“ she said of O’Connor, ”scares me to death.“
Gordon, the grande dame of O’Connor studies and editor of THE FLANNERY O'CONNOR REVIEW, appears with Williams, Jarman, Robert Coles, Nancy Mairs, Padgett Powell and various others in this anthology of essays, reminiscences and poems, Gordon was among the pioneers in providing background information to flesh out O’Connor’s fiction, particularly through THE OBEDIENT IMAGINATION (University of Georgia Press, 2000). UGA has more recently published a volume O’Connor would have surely loved, SPIRITS OF THE AIR: BIRDS AND AMERICAN INDIANS IN THE SOUTH, by Shepard Krech, and the single most arresting comparison to be found in Gordon’s editorial labor of love arguably belongs to Powell, at least in my relentlessly associative mind:
"…coming upon Flannery O’Connor at a young and thinking-about-it age would be like coming across Janis Joplin [remember her feather-bedecked hair?] if you were young and thinking about being a rock singer. You see before you a model of someone uttterly mad with passion and consumed by a vision and desperate to execute it. And you see a considerable technician. It is not an exaggeration to say you see someone driven and holy, a goddess of her church. *** What saved Janis Joplin from being merely the loneliest madwoman on earth was that she could sing. What saves Flannery O’Connor from being the holiest mother on earth is that she can write."
Francine Prose (who wrote the indelible notes to John Huston’s WISE BLOOD) earlier penned an essay, “Scent of a Woman’s Ink,” that somehow manages to be on-topic, avant-garde and especially timely in regard to an ESQUIRE list of "250 Books Men Must Read": http://harpers.org/archive/1998/06/00.... One would think, given the limitations of the opposite sex, the list might omit O'Connor, since as Prose deftly points out, she has received that highest compliment from editors, especially those who are male and work for venues whose "target audiences" are male as well: O'Connor Writes Like A Man.
Nonsense. O'Connor wrote from her primarily interests, theology and birds, as well as the characters--so so speak--who populate the rural Georgia in which she lived. Some criticize O'Connor for being unable to create characters at all, only characters, but 1) she was interested in humankind's relation to God and the idiocy that resulted when none existed, not the concept of gender-based identity; and 2) no such critics, to my knowledge, actually LIVE in rural Georgia.
Regarding ESQUIRE’s recent Hall, not of Fame, but of Thick-Headed Infamy complicated by a clear-cut case of Womb Envy, I began to pluck, purely at random, names of female fiction writers from within the last century (keep in mind that I am a poet and don't even read much fiction, but these are novelists and short story writers whose work remains with me, and three-quarters are relatively young and still abounding in creative energy: Beryl Bainbridge, Djuna Barnes, Sheila Boswell, Kate Braverman, Joan Didion, Jennifer Egan, Elizabeth Hardwick, Amy Hempel, Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, Tayari Jones, Nancy Lemann, Katherine Mansfield, Claire Messud, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Prose herself, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Alice Randall, Elise Sanguinetti, Elizabeth Smart, Zadie Smith, Jean Stafford, Donna Tartt, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf; and certainly include, as "suggested reading," Simone de Beauvoir's THE SECOND SEX, Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, Kate Millet's SEXUAL POLITICS, Camille Paglia's SEXUAL PERSONAE, Sylvia Plath's THE BELL JAR, and the brilliant but underrated BITCH: IN PRAISE OF DIFFICULT WOMEN, by Elizabeth Wurtzel. But O'Connor, for reasons one might guess after reading Prose's essay, is the sole female included. And the above list, assembled only from my own mental scan of shelves always in flux, consists, purely by accident, of only thirty-three prose writers. For once Freud and O'Connor would have been in agreement that this was no coincidence; moreover, O'Connor would have been delighted the the number's import itself. (I discarded mentions of Harper Lee and Carson McCuller's names, which also occurred to me instantly, for I am attempting to be respectful of my ostensible subject, and O'Connor complimented TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in terms of its suitability for child readers, and she said, of Carson McCullers, that like Truman Capote and "Mr. Tennessee Williams," her sister Georgian--who had her own share of physical ills--"made her plumb sick."
While the late music writer Ellen Willis doesn’t mention O’Connor in “Janis Joplin,” the most personally memorable essay collected in OUT OF THE VINYL DEEPS (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), re-reading the piece with in mind, so to speak, gives new resonance to a statement about midway through Willis's essay: “Janis sang out of her pain as a woman, and men dug it. Yet it was men who caused the pain, and if they stopped causing it they would not have her to dig.” Willis sees Madonna–-of all people, in this context–-as Joplin’s natural offspring, but if in BITCH, Wurtzel, who is probably least known for being an Hebraic scholar, limns with due harshness the savage backfire that too often follows when women wear their own erotic natures on their sleeves, think of poor Hulga stuck limbless (to make a dreadful rhyme and/or pun) in that hayloft. She wanted only a kiss, after all; why "Manley Pointer" (really, Ms. O'Connor!) wanted her wooden leg, well, I'm still not quite sure.
(some parts of this essay were published in the NASHVILLE SCENE, some in OPTION, and others composed especially for this piece)
October 28, 2018
Unlike most of the likely readers of this book, I am not (yet) deeply familiar with the writing of Flannery O'Connor. To be sure, I have read a fair amount about her, especially as she is a writer who comes up often in recommendations for literature by those who have either a Catholic or a Southern background, both of which are familiar to me. And there is no question that the life of the subject of this work is worthy of being remembered--she is noted most often for her short fiction and she died young and was unable to write in the prolific manner that others do, and besides all of this she is certainly a writer with a great deal of quirkiness and a fair amount of irony in her approach. All of this makes her easy for someone like me to appreciate her, even if from what I am aware she populated her novels with some pretty unpleasant people and was known to be a somewhat sour person herself, although admittedly having had a beloved father suffer with lupus and then suffering from it herself for many years before her death likely did not inspire the sort of easygoing feelings that some writers have.
This particular book is a short one, consisting of twenty selections that take up a bit more than 100 pages in total. As is common in this sort of festschrift, this book is a bit of a mixed bag. Some of the shorter selections are poems written in honor of O'Connor, which are pretty enjoyable and thoughtful poems. Many of the poems show a sense of profound respect but some ambivalence about the writer, some of them show the personal acquaintance they had or the missed opportunities they had for knowing the author better. One of the worse selections, from a leftist activist who calls herself Guerrilla Girl Alma Thomas, there is a speculation that the author would have relished transgressive attitudes and a realization that the author's openness was in direct contradiction to the essayist's deliberately dishonest approach. At least one of the selections is an essay that reminds one of the sort of dark fiction about somewhat unpleasant people that O'Connor herself may have written. The result is a book that does not take long to read and often looks at the same few stories over and over again (like "A Good Man Is Hard To Find") but that is generally enjoyable at least.
Will you enjoy this book? Maybe. As someone who likes reading about other authors, even those whose oeuvres are obscure to me, there was much for me to enjoy here, and I could see myself participating in this sort of exercise with authors I am more familiar with and whose work has helped to inspire and shape my own writing. That said, O'Connor is most known today as a writer of Southern regional fiction as well as being a writer of profoundly Catholic religious identity, and if you are interested in either of those you will in general be more likely to enjoy this book. Likewise, if this book and the approach of the essayists and their comments about Flannery O'Connor strike you as interesting and worthwhile, then there is likely little more that could be done to further one's interest in this sort of material than to take the step of reading what O'Connor has to say for yourself, which is something that I am likely to get around to at some point. After all, there is little of worth in reading about an author without reading the author's own unmediated text for oneself.
This particular book is a short one, consisting of twenty selections that take up a bit more than 100 pages in total. As is common in this sort of festschrift, this book is a bit of a mixed bag. Some of the shorter selections are poems written in honor of O'Connor, which are pretty enjoyable and thoughtful poems. Many of the poems show a sense of profound respect but some ambivalence about the writer, some of them show the personal acquaintance they had or the missed opportunities they had for knowing the author better. One of the worse selections, from a leftist activist who calls herself Guerrilla Girl Alma Thomas, there is a speculation that the author would have relished transgressive attitudes and a realization that the author's openness was in direct contradiction to the essayist's deliberately dishonest approach. At least one of the selections is an essay that reminds one of the sort of dark fiction about somewhat unpleasant people that O'Connor herself may have written. The result is a book that does not take long to read and often looks at the same few stories over and over again (like "A Good Man Is Hard To Find") but that is generally enjoyable at least.
Will you enjoy this book? Maybe. As someone who likes reading about other authors, even those whose oeuvres are obscure to me, there was much for me to enjoy here, and I could see myself participating in this sort of exercise with authors I am more familiar with and whose work has helped to inspire and shape my own writing. That said, O'Connor is most known today as a writer of Southern regional fiction as well as being a writer of profoundly Catholic religious identity, and if you are interested in either of those you will in general be more likely to enjoy this book. Likewise, if this book and the approach of the essayists and their comments about Flannery O'Connor strike you as interesting and worthwhile, then there is likely little more that could be done to further one's interest in this sort of material than to take the step of reading what O'Connor has to say for yourself, which is something that I am likely to get around to at some point. After all, there is little of worth in reading about an author without reading the author's own unmediated text for oneself.
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