Happy birthday to Flannery O’Connor

She was born today, in Savannah, Georgia in 1925.

Man, what to say, what to say … 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 the pantheon!! – but one of the greatest American writers. Phenomenal. 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: A Novel. The Life You Save May Be Your Own. Everything That Rises Must Converge.

Here is a great site devoted to her. 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 … 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 it was. She’s like Hemingway. 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!!)

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.

I just read her first novel Wise Blood: A Novel … and it’s shocking to read even NOW. I can’t even imagine the impact it had when it came out. Her writing reminds me of Diane Arbus’ photographs. Her books are filled with grotesque Gothic characters – blinded crazy preachers, child brides, women with wooden legs, outcasts from society – But her tone is never sensational or sentimental.

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 feckin’ 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 40.

I came across this quote from Flannery O’Connor, and I just loooove it, it makes me laugh. I’ll close this post with it:

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

Happy birthday, Flannery!!