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Flannery O'Connor: A Life
Jean W. Cash
Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2002.
$30.00, 364 pages, ISBN 1-57233-192-5.
Georges-Claude Guilbert
Université de Rouen
Jean W. Cash is professor of English at James Madison University. She has
taught the works of Flannery O'Connor for many years, and published various articles
on Flannery O'Connor, notably in the invaluable Flannery O'Connor Bulletin.
I met her at a conference in Albuquerque and could tell she was a woman with
a passion. But unlike some academics who sometimes let themselves be carried
away, she puts her passion in the service of her rigorous research, disciplining
it so as to retain its stamina without allowing it to diminish her scientific
thoroughness.
Flannery O'Connor: A Life is quite simply one of the best literary
biographies I have ever readand I have read many. The book consists of 364 pages packed
with information, with a few well-chosen photographs and a lovely cover with
peacocksof course. It deals with the life, but also of course the writing,
and the cartoon work (O'Connor as talented satirical artist). The information
has been very carefully selected by Cash, checked and double-checked and triple-checked.
What facts are
available are presented as such, but the multitude of impressions that
O'Connor left on people who crossed her path are impressively treated. I know
that Cash got little cooperation from O'Connor's reluctant relatives and heirs,
but she compensated for this rather well (what's happened to the late Sally
Fitzgerald's project?). In other words, the work is of the kind any self-respecting
academic
biographer should undertake and would in an ideal world. Cash has spoken to
and read the work or letters of tons of contemporaries, and when recollections
diverge
she presents them side by side, as it were, helping the reader contrast them
and form an opinion. As far as the childhood years are concerned Cash has used
the memories of friends and neighbors, and as far as the university years are
concerned she has used the memories of both faculty and students, including
the occasional roommate. Roommate Martha Bell Spreiser remembers O'Connor "as
a quiet, unassuming girl, very much introverted, with deep religious convictions
and a delightful sense of humor." (92) Crucially, Cash has used the letters
contained in The Habit of Being (1979), like everybody else, but she
has also used several other letters, equally if
not more revealing.
Mary Flannery O'Connor the child in Savannah comes alive without the least
cheap semi-novelization effect nor the least element of sentimentalism, complete
with
peacocks and celebrated Pathé News filmed backward-walking chicken.
Cash also spares the reader the tacky Freudianism of many a would-be literary
biography.
There is just the right amount of data about the novelist's ancestors, the
Catholicism and the matriarchal aspects of her upbringing. Mary Flannery O'Connor
the anti-teenager
teenager in Milledgeville, "partly deprived of a normal girlhood," is
just as efficiently portrayed, with her distant figure of a father and her
precocious interest in reading and writing. Milledgeville itself is interestingly
researched,
and gender problematics are occasionally called upon.
[In] "Mistaken
Identity",
[a] piece of juvenilia, [Mary Flannery] writes of a duck named Herman who
becomes Henrietta after presenting its owner
with
an egg. [The story] stimulates fascinating speculations about Mary Flannery's
questioning of her own sexual identity. Alienated by her superior intelligence
and talent from other young Georgia women of her era, she experienced great
difficulty conforming to the conventional roles offered them. When she has
her goose tell
three eligible females, "You gals can go to Hades," she is no doubt
expressing her own disdain for boys and dating. Decidedly not a Southern
belle, she probably would have preferred to be a male like Herman: in the
early 1940s
men were the thinkers, questioners, and writerswhat she herself wanted
to become. (40)
Flannery
O'Connor the studentwho always knew she was
going to be a writeris
presented with neither complacency nor sensationalism: the reader does feel
that here is talent blooming, but that like some plants it needs a lot of
sun and
watering and occasional replanting. It is fascinating to read about the way
O'Connor as a novelist and short story writer evolved, taking into account
or not the
opinions of her teachers and peers, sometimes changing a line or two in her
fiction and acknowledging her debt to this or that commentator, sometimes
not. The young
O'Connor is shown as the oddball she was, perceived as "different" by
everyone who came across her, but she is not stigmatized as a caricatured
Southern freak as she has been elsewhere, although her physical awkwardness
and "afflicted" appearance,
unique personality and superior intelligence are not downplayed in the least.
Of course, the temptation is strong, as it is when one deals with Carson
McCullers, to establish rapprochements between the author and her creation
and see in
the fictional freaks the reflection of the freakish author. But Cash resists
it well.
Yes, O'Connor often sat quietly in her corner, did not quite participate
in campus social life the same way other women her age did and sometimes
came
up with pronouncements
that sounded odd. Yes, she dressed a bit differently in her trademark O'Connor
style. Yes she was a Southerner speaking a Southern language in Iowa during
creative writing workshops, but she was not a freak. Unless being capable
of writing such
literary jewels as Wise Blood (1952) and having strong religious
convictions at an early age makes you one. While I am on the subject of
McCullers, I
have always found it interesting that "those writers who troubled [O'Connor]
most were people like Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams,
whose works were so mired (she felt) in the secular world that they displayed
no transcendent vision." (xvi) I myself moved quite naturally from the
teaching ofpreciselyMcCullers, Capote and Williams to the teaching
of O'Connor, feeling that after years of Southern freakishness, Gothic, gender
and sex,
it would make a nice (small) change to undertake Southern freakishness, Gothic,
gender and religion.
Cash speaks of O'Connor's "deliberate rejection of sexuality," (43)
and quotes many contemporaries who all seem to remember that O'Connor "never
seemed interested in the opposite sex," (57) but never makes too
much of that aspect of the author. She is not one of those researchers
who persistently
strive to read O'Connor as a more or less repressed lesbian. She also
describes her church-going habits and shows that O'Connor never lost
faith, which is evidently
paramount to the understanding of the novels and short stories. She writes
about all the geographical moves, the family links (especially O'Connor's
relationship
with her domineering mother), the friendships, the lectures, the travels,
the book reviewing, and finally the illness, in a short but strong final
chapter
entitled "Illness, Death, and Legacy."
Although
she never overemphasized her suffering, Flannery O'Connor clearly
had to accommodate to the illness
that dramatically changed her life
after 1951.
When she returned to Milledgeville, O'Connor had to accept chronic
illness as an indisputable fact of her existence, particularly
after she realized
that lupus
erythematosus was the disease from which she was suffering. (311)
Her
father, of course, had died of lupus. To conclude, Cash mentions
O'Connor's influence on today's culture, notably the amusing fact
that "she
has become something of an icon to pop musicians and movie stars." (320)
She also influences painters. But what would she make of what many
see as the lack of
spirituality
of the early twenty-first century, or of New Age pursuits? And what
would she make of today's Southern novelists?
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