Happy Birthday, Flannery O’Connor

“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”

– Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor was born today, in Savannah, Georgia in 1925.

I think she’s one of our greatest American authors. Not just a great Southern writer, although she is that, one of the all-time best in that tradition – but one of the greatest American writers. No other country in the world could have produced a Flannery O’Connor. With all her darkness, madness, and terror, she is so OF this nation, her voice is quintessential American, in the same way that Fitzgerald’s is, although the style is totally different. Mostly known for her short stories, although she did write a couple novels.

I also, personally, feel that her TITLES are beyond fantastic. She’s not afraid to GO THERE in her titles. I don’t know how else to describe it. Her titles are not “safe”. They have a Biblical feel to them. The Violent Bear It Away. The Life You Save May Be Your Own. Everything That Rises Must Converge. I looooove her titles.

I didn’t know that her first published efforts were actually cartoons, in her high school newspaper. She tried to get her cartoons published in The New Yorker – and that went nowhere, none of them were accepted – so she started to focus on writing. She applied to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop – and got in. Once there, though, she was kind of on the outside of things – she hadn’t read “the big authors” who were in vogue at the time. Her writing idols were Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe – seen as ‘old-fashioned’, and perhaps too Gothic or melodramatic. Classic, sure, but way out of style in this new modern era of Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, and Fitzgerald. So she wasn’t really born “in the right time”, if you think about it – but she turned that to her advantage. She didn’t try to change her influences, or write like other people – and while she was at the workshop, her short stories pretty much blew everyone away. I love that her idols were Hawthorne and Poe – those dark dark writers, those masters of small-town pain and paranoia and religious persecution … You can so feel it in her writing, although her style is very much her own. Her style is so distinctive that you could recognize a paragraph of her prose without knowing who wrote it. She’s like Hemingway in that respect. So – she was a shy girl, the only one in the workshop with a Southern accent, whose writing was so good that she got a contract to write her first novel (Wise Blood – now that is one HELL of a first novel!!)

Here’s the post I wrote about Wise Blood.

Right around this time, she got very very ill with lupus (that’s why she has the crutches in the photo above). Her father had died from lupus. She was always tired, always dragging through her days – but she had good discipline, and kept up a writing schedule, despite her exhaustion.

She was a Catholic, and she wrote:

“I feel that if I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified or even to enjoy anything.

Here she describes a literary evening – an anecdote I find really moving, coming as I do from a family chock-full of nuns, where such things are discussed at the dinner table, basically:

“Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

A raw nerve, Flannery O’Connor had guts, man. True guts. She was one of those writers who were not easily understood at the time. If you read her stuff, and you try to think like a publisher in that era, you can see their point (short-sighted though their views are). Who was this crazy Gothic Southerner, who walked with a crutch, who didn’t seem to line up with the style of the day?

There is a famous story about Flannery O’Connor, and as a writer – starting to deal with publishers and editors myself – the story takes my breath away. It stands alone in the annals of publishing anecdotes, and remains a touchstone for writers who perhaps are not understood by the powers-that-be, who can sense that what they are is NOT what the publisher is looking for. Now there is such a thing as constructive criticism, and you must be able to deal with people mucking about with your work. The constructive criticism I got from my agent about my manuscript was absolutely invaluable. She saved me from myself, a couple of times, and she also helped me strip away that which was extraneous, or lessening the impact I wanted. HOWEVER: if someone gives you criticism and it seems like they are actually trying to alter the INTENT of what you have done … it is important to recognize that, and to say, gently but firmly, “Thanks for your comments, but what you are saying is not at all what I am TRYING to do … so it is irrelevant.”

In 1949, Flannery O’Connor was in correspondence with Rinehart Publishers, who were interested in publishing Wise Blood, her first novel. Flannery O’Connor did not have a name yet. She had nothing. She was completely anonymous. Now yes, Wise Blood was a tough sell, but so was Ulysses. It would take someone with courage to say, “Yes. I will publish this as it stands. It may sell only two copies, but to alter its form, to iron it out, would be WRONG.” An editor at Rinehart had written to her, asking her to re-write the whole thing.

This was part of Flannery O’Connors response to that request:

Thank you for your letter of the 16th. I plan to come down next week and I have asked Elizabeth McKee to make an appointment with you for me on Thursday. I think, however, that before I talk to you my position on the novel and on your criticism in the letter should be made plain.

I can only hope that in the finished novel the direction will be clearer, but I can tell you that I would not like at all to work with you as do other writers on your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. I do not think there is any lack of objectivity in the writing, however, if this is what your criticism implies; and also I do not feel that rewriting has obscured the direction. I feel it has given whatever direction is now present.

In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now. The question is: is Rinehart interested in publishing this kind of novel?

Wow. Just wow.

It is hard to imagine I would have the cajones to write such a letter, but I remind myself of that letter in my darkest moments, when it seems I am not being understood, or that someone’s response to my work is, basically, “Wouldn’t it be great, though, if you wrote the next Twilight-level smash?” Yeah, it would be great, but that’s not what I have written. You have completely not heard what I have done, you don’t get it, you are in this to make a buck, and I must withdraw my manuscript completely from you, because you are actually dangerous to what I have already created. A couple years ago, I had a series of conversations with an agent at William Morris who was interested in representing me. I sent him a huge packet of my writing – essays, short stories, and a novella. He was lukewarm in response. He thought the writing was good, but it soon became clear, over our conversations, that he actually was not interested in representing ME, as I am now, but a “new hot novelist” that would make him a million bucks. I have nothing against making a million bucks, but it became clear that it was not a good fit – that what I had already created – and it was a LOT – I have a huge backlog of material – was not what he was looking for. So moving on now. To find an agent who wants to represent ME, and what I have already done. Not an easy choice, but I am convinced it was the right one.

But my God, look at O’Connor’s confidence there, the belief she had in what she had done. And she was writing that letter, not from a position of being FLANNERY O’CONNOR (TM) … but an unknown author, struggling to protect her creation.

Unbelievable. She is my idol, for that letter alone.

As a coda to that story, not surprisingly – Rinehart DIDN’T publish Wise Blood, but Harcourt Brace did. The book was not a success, but time has vindicated everyone involved. Wise Blood is now seen as one of the great American novels. It took a publisher with some … well … FAITH … to publish it as it was, to not try to neaten her up, tone her down … I am sure there were small corrections to be made, but they left her INTENT alone.

Wise Blood is shocking to read even NOW. Her writing reminds me of Diane Arbus’ photographs. Her books are filled with grotesque characters – blinded crazy preachers, child brides, women with wooden legs, outcasts from society – But her tone is never sensational or sentimental. She’s a cool cool character.

If you haven’t read her stuff, I really can’t recommend her highly enough. I came to her late – and it was really at the pressure of Maria, and my sister Jean, that made me finally give her a go. After reading the first two or three paragraphs of Wise Blood, I was hooked. I knew: Okay. I must now plow thru this entire book RIGHT NOW. She’s that good.

Here’s the beginning of that novel:

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods. Nearer, the plowed fields curved and faded and the few hogs nosing in the furrows looked like large spotted stones. Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock, who was facing Motes in this section, said that she thought the early evening like this was the prettiest time of day and she asked him if he didn’t think so, too. She was a fat woman with pink collars and cuffs and pear-shaped legs that slanted off the train seat and didn’t reach the floor.

He looked at her a second and, without answering, leaned forward and stared down the length of the car again. She turned to see what was back there but all she saw was a child peering around one of the sections and, farther up at the end of the car, the porter opening the closet where the sheets were kept.

“I guess you’re going home,” she said, turning back to him again. He didn’t look, to her, much over twenty, but he had a stiff black broad-brimmed hat on his lap, a hat that an elderly country preacher would wear. His suit was a glaring blue and the price tag was still stapled on the sleeve of it.

There’s something really … WRONG … here. You can tell … something is OFF with Hazel Motes … but Flannery doesn’t let us inside his head. It’s all in what she doesn’t say, and what she chooses to share with us. It’s a fantastic opening scene.

Check her out if you haven’t read any of her stuff – her short story collections are all well worth reading. She’s an American classic.

Flannery O’Connor died at the age of 39.