Flannery by William Klein

Mary Flannery O’Connor is the quintessential southern gothic writer and one of the greatest American writers our country has ever produced. Although her life was cut short at the age of 39, she left us two novels, thirty-two stories, essays and reviews.

Her stories evoke horror, surprise and thought-provoking insights all while inspiring laughter and theological insight. From a Bible salesman who sets his sights on courting and stealing a young girl’s artificial leg to a child who gives himself to the power of a rushing river, to a family that is killed by a misfit, and a young woman who cannot tolerate the racism of an old woman in a doctor’s officer, her literature captures it all – “freaks,” geeks and ne’er do wells. The racism, the hard-boiled no nonsense verite of American idealism and the gravity of indecency and the stubborn willful ignorance of citizens, her depiction of America is all too relevant still today.

She’s mesmerizing in her psychological understanding and her undaunted perceptions of our limitations and unwillingness to recognize grace and sacredness. She is uncompromising in relaying truth. She is also relentless in showing “the pin point of light” open to us all that points to something beautiful and beyond comprehension.

While others like Graham Greene refused to call himself a Catholic writer, O’Connor made no apologies about her faith and wore the title as a badge of honor. A daily communicant, the symbols she uses in her work, the allusions to Catholic ideas and her themes depicting the power of grace in an otherwise dark and brutal world that beats its people into submission is prevalent. Her precise eye for painting characters is inspiring.

O’Connor was writing in a heavily Protestant south during Post WWII and identified the problematic southern racism of a country that was unwilling to compromise against an all-important Civil Rights Movement. In a sense, O’Connor did her part for the movement. Although there have been claims she was a racist, her writing depicts a woman who was willing to support the movement as much as she could.

She refused to meet James Baldwin, the great black American writer/activist, in Georgia, as she thought “it would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion.” But she said “she would like to meet him in New York.” My sense is that although she was keenly aware of the power of ostracism in the south and may have declined meeting him to keep peace for her mother’s sake, her Christian values overrode thoughts of racism. White priviledge is another matter of discussion.

One of the titles of her major collections comes from Jesuit Pierre Teilhard deChardin’s quote, “Everything that rises must converge.” De Chardin was talking about the power of love to overcome any adversity and this was not lost on O’Connor, especially in that story where she calls out racism. Julian, a young white man, brings his racist mother to a class at the YMCA, and he judges her racism as delusional and living in a bubble of the past.

I recently paid a visit to her birthplace in Savannah, Georgia and her home “Andalusia,” in Milledgeville, Georgia where she wrote most of her fiction from 1952 to 1964. Having perused her short stories and recently finished one of her two novels “Wise Blood,” I decided to visit the places she lived in the South.

Sometimes visiting an author’s home brings clarity to stories and can create a pallet for the mind and inspire the imagination to see the world from an author’s lens with newfound understanding. Things make sense. As I walked the property, the images and allusions from stories came rushing back to me in full focus and presented themselves like a 3-D movie. Standing on the porch of some tenant farmers who worked the farm under her mother Regina’s watchful eye, there is a sentimentality and dynamic of class at work here. There’s a real sense of what life was like in the post war era and being a working farm for so many years, the relics that made work life easier still remain.

The pens that held her beloved peacocks, the dwellings like the cow barn, milk house, the water tower and the small lake and woods that created ambiance for her imagination elicits romantic musings for a woman who was forced to stay here due to a diagnosis of Lupus in 1954; the same disease that killed her father when she was just 15.

In the main house guest bedrooms upstairs, there were two etchings. One of the etchings stood out to me. It depicted women holding each other up in grief and tremendous hardship. In the distance there were three crosses on a hill indicating that this was a depiction of the “wailing women” who keened while Jesus traveled the road to his crucifixion. My sense is that although she had a troubled relationship with her mother, these two women relied on one another to make it through, and leaned on each other for support. Regina, her mother, who was responsible for running the farm, ran it like a tough businesswoman.

The tour guide said that 95 percent of the artifacts in the home are from the home itself, as it was abandoned at one point but the family bookshelves, refrigerator, and family belongings all remained with the family. Her mother Regina died in 1994 at the age of 99.

In an elegy after she died in 1964, Thomas Merton called Flannery O’Connor a “modern-day Sophocles.” This is truly a fitting tag to bestow on her, considering that Haze Motes, the protagonist in her novel “Wise Blood,” like Oedipus, literally blinds himself due to his shame and unwillingness to continue to look at an all too brutal, callous world where injustice is the order of the day.

Flannery O’Connor’s influence spans the globe and she is still being read today. Her broad scope and visionary perceptions continue to open many an eye to powers of a transcendent destiny.