Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch

Given the recent election and inauguration of Barack Obama, it seems somehow fitting to release a biography of Flannery O’Connor, one of the United States’ greatest writers and most notorious bigots. In Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, however, author Brad Gooch portrays her as more “culturally racist” than small-minded. Her racism is particularly downplayed when Gooch describes her in relation to Faulkner:

“O’Connor’s position basically fell close to William Faulkner’s. Segregation was an evil, Faulkner stated; but if integration were forced upon the South he would resist (in one feverish moment, he even said he would take up arms). In his personal life, his behavior toward African Americans was always cordial and kindly, but as one writer has characterized it, it was also ‘patronizing: he belonged, after all, to a patron class.’”

As much of Gooch’s potential audience turns to Obama, taking up his banner of “Hope” and his “Yes, We Can” slogan, it is a particularly challenging undertaking to present O’Connor as the woman who authored “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” the woman who confessed that when writing said story she “didn’t understand them [African Americans] the way I do white people. I don’t feel capable of entering the mind of a Negro. In my stories they’re seen from the outside,” while still presenting her as a woman who is appealing or even tolerable. Gooch’s biography does, in a limited way, overcome O’Connor’s less appealing qualities?even managing at times to draw her as a character from one of her own stories, a religious zealot, a Southern freak.

O’Connor was an incredibly private person, a woman who frequently made friends through writing letters instead of meeting face to face, and a woman who only ever felt comfortable revealing the personal and heartbreaking details of her life and emotions through her letters to loved ones. When the facts of her life and her lupus, the disease that she succumbed to at age thirty-nine, are revealed to the public in a Time magazine article, “Flannery wrote the Cheneys [close friends] of feeling violated, like ‘having a dirty hand wiped across your face.’” There is no doubt in my mind that this woman would never have wanted a biography written about her.

Flannery respects O’Connor’s desire to never have her life recorded for public consumption. Gooch treats her with the utmost dignity, never mining her life for titillating details or bizarre but pointless facts. Instead, he charts her life in a way that sometimes gets bogged down in the minutiae and gives the greatest emphasis to her religious devotion. Her religion is understated in her childhood, perhaps because as a child, those who surrounded O’Connor were also devout, but as she moved away from the South in her early 20’s, her religious life gains greater depth in Gooch’s account. He says, of her displaced sense of belonging at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, that:

“[S]he found the antidote for her homesickness two blocks away at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, on East Jefferson Street….In the fall of 1945, the church pastor, Monsignor Carl Bernstein, offered daily morning masses at six thirty and seven thirty. As O’Connor told Roslyn Barnes, a young woman enrolled in the Workshop in 1960, ‘I went to St. Mary’s as it was right around the corner and I could get there practically every morning. I went there three years and I never knew a soul in that congregation or any of the priests, but it was not necessary. As soon as I went in the door I was at home.’”

Her zeal for the Roman Catholic Church grew as her life progressed, culminating in a trip to Rome where she saw the Pope and announced, “Whatever the special superaliveness that holiness is, it is very apparent in him.” O’Connor’s fanaticism becomes more and more intriguing as Gooch documents the ways it infiltrated all aspects of her life. However, as when he diminishes her friendship with lesbian Betty Hester, or when he tries to import significance to her relationship with Erik Langkjaer (who apparently spurned her love for him, although the claim Gooch makes seems tenuous), he sometimes missteps by trying to normalize a woman who was perhaps not quite eccentric, but certainly very individual. By the end of Flannery, I felt Gooch had done O’Connor justice by portraying her as a strong and single-minded woman, devoted to religion and writing. Ultimately, despite her ambivalence towards the Civil Rights Movement, O’Connor comes off as a woman empowered just as much by the “Hope” and “Yes, We Can” slogans as any potential reader might be.

Reviewed by Megan Harrington

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch
Little, Brown, & Company, 2009.
Cloth, 464pp., $30.
ISBN-10: 0316000663