It’s jarring, maybe, to think of Flannery O’Connor as an old lady. Then again, to our eyes, in photographs from the last years of her life, maybe she looks already old. In our imagination, she stands forever on the front porch steps of Andalusia, the Georgia farm where she lived with her mother, in her cat-eyed glasses, staid housedresses, puffs of hair either side of her face. I was born in November 1964, three months and three days after O’Connor’s death. My bookish grandmother, married in 1925, the year O’Connor was born, looked in her 60s an awful lot like those photos. Women in their 30s don’t look like that anymore.
And then there’s the fact of her illness. On the steps of Andalusia, she stands on crutches. The lupus that eventually killed her, and the various treatments for it, aged her body, if not her spirit. Sally Fitzgerald, who edited the 1979 collection of O’Connor’s letters under the title The Habit of Being, remembered the rumblings of something wrong in the period before her friend’s diagnosis with the autoimmune disease. “When, in December 1950, I had put Flannery on the train for Georgia she was smiling perhaps a little wanly but wearing her beret at a jaunty angle. … By the time she arrived she looked, her uncle later said, ‘like a shriveled little old woman.’” The lupus savaged her organs while the steroids swelled her face and disintegrated her hips. In her 20s and 30s, she could manage two hours of writing every morning after the daily 8 a.m. Mass at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Milledgeville.
The rest of the time, she recuperated, raised peafowl, wrote letters, and received visitors. She traveled rarely, though she was persuaded, not without reluctance, in 1958, to undertake an arduous pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in search of a physical healing that did not occur. Although she also made a remarkable number of appearances to read her work and talk to university audiences about fiction—because she needed money, and those events paid—her adult life, from the time of her diagnosis, was marked by the constricted routines of someone many decades older than she was.
But how youthful, in any conventional sense, had her spirit ever been? Even as a child in Savannah, Georgia, Mary Flannery O’Connor seems to have exuded an air that was not exactly childlike. The only child of Edward Francis O’Connor, who would die of lupus when his daughter was 15, and Regina Cline O’Connor, with whom she lived out the last 12 years of her life at Andalusia, Flannery O’Connor would grow up to write child characters who were perhaps only slightly exaggerated caricatures of her young self. The little girl in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”—who famously thinks she could be a martyr “if they killed her quick”—is the sort of betwixt-and-between character, awkwardly juvenile in her humor and preternaturally sharp in her observations, that we might picture as the young Mary Flannery herself.
The nationally distributed short film of her, at six, demonstrating how she had taught a chicken to walk backward, reinforces this image of the child eccentric, whom we also see in photographs scowling at books, or simply looking fierce. I have known old ladies with that affect. One belligerent old lady of my own Southern childhood used to smoke in church; nobody had the nerve to make her stop. It’s not hard to imagine that she had been always that way, even as a tiny, cherished girl in dresses with lace insertion: set in her ways and slightly terrifying. So it is not precisely the case that Flannery O’Connor, dying at 39, remains in our imaginations forever young. What’s more true is that she remainsherself, never conventionally young among the young women of her day, though she did not live to grow old. She seems to have been the same person always. For us, 60 years after her death, she remains the writer of startling range, the writer who could begin a short story—“Greenleaf,” say—with a transcendently gorgeous moonlit scene, in crystalline prose, depicting a bull eating roses, and end it with the same bull goring the protagonist to death, and call that story’s trajectory “the action of grace.”
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On the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952, the British novelist Evelyn Waugh remarked, in what amounts to a master class in dubiousness, that “if this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” Her mother was outraged by the supposed implication that Mary Flannery wasn’t a lady—“WHO is he?”—but again, it’s that young that strikes me now. Not yet 30, O’Connor had blown right past girlish idealism to land on the protagonist blinds himself with lye square. She seems, herself, in the free country of her own imagination, to have been a remarkable product.
If it’s difficult to pinpoint true literary heirs to Flannery O’Connor—and it is—that she was, in fact, suis generis is part of the problem. While in the beginning there were basics of craft she had to master, as any fledgling writer does, the vision was there, more or less in its completeness. As her eventual mentor and friend Caroline Gordon remarked in an early letter to O’Connor’s publisher: “This girl is a real novelist. … At any rate, she is already a rare phenomenon: a Catholic novelist with a real dramatic sense, one who relies more on her technique than her piety.” Famously, however, and inseparably from her “technique,” O’Connor read a bit of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa every night before bed. In her writing she worked out, on the surreal stage of the 1950s rural South, the reality that Thomas articulated, in a way that nobody before or since has quite been able to do.
Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is a writer from whom a disciple might learn much, but it’s impossible to write like that without being too obviously an imitator. “Grit lit” Southern writers, such as Larry Brown, Harry Crews, and Dorothy Allison, take up O’Connor’s interest in the sometimes violent dramas of rough rural people but lack the vision of faith that makes her work transcendent, and not merely dark. Such contemporary Southern Catholic writers as Katy Carl embrace O’Connor’s instinct for eucatastrophe as part of a religious understanding of how the universe works. Yet no writer today really has quite matched O’Connor in her uncompromising strangeness, inseparable from her particular holistic artistic and theological intellect.
Part of the problem, too, is that the context in which O’Connor flowered no longer exists. The publisher Robert Giroux—godfather to much of the best mid-20th-century American writing—is dead. Caroline Gordon is dead. There are no mentors anymore on the landscape of American letters who will tell a young writer, with absolute iron-clad conviction, that “the omniscient narrator speaks Johnsonian English.” I wonder sometimes how many people remember that the phrase “Johnsonian English”—if they’ve ever heard it—actually means something, that there was a Dr. Johnson who wrote English, which they, too, could read.
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But lest we feel too complacent about the superiority of the past and its more comprehensive knowledge, let’s also recall that the particular troubled world that O’Connor inhabited has passed away, and that there are things we don’t miss about it. I miss the eccentric Southern ladies of my childhood and the way they spoke, always in marveling tones, calling you “dahlin.” I do not miss what I very well remember, from as late as the mid-1970s, a decade after O’Connor’s death in the year of the Civil Rights Act: that the black maid who worked all day in a white person’s house rode in the back seat of the car when her employer drove her home.
How O’Connor herself navigated the racially segregated South has been a matter of some debate in recent years. Letters to Maryat Lee, written late in her life, confide disturbing revelations about her reflexive distaste for the black people who shared her daily existence, and her inability, in fiction, to penetrate their inner lives. In 2020, in a reaction to complaints regarding these revelations, Loyola University Maryland removed O’Connor’s name from one of its residence halls. Contemporary readers, unsettled by these frank admissions of racial prejudice, perhaps especially because they are the admissions of a writer of religious faith, have asked whether they should—or even can, as moral people—read Flannery O’Connor anymore.
Only the reader can answer this question for him- or herself. But it’s worth considering that as a writer of religious faith, Flannery O’Connor believed in, and understood, sin. She believed in, and understood, original sin as a corruption of the whole weft of the universe, and as a corruption of the individual human soul. She understood racial prejudice, including her own, not as the original sin, but as a manifestation of it. When she writes to Maryat Lee, a Milledgeville, Georgia, native living in New York City, of disliking black people, it’s in the nature of a confidence to a trusted friend, and one who would not nod and affirm her admission.
Which is to say, her words have the quality of a confession: a confession of shortcoming. No one in O’Connor’s fictional universe comes under more moral scrutiny than she does herself. Her short story self-portraits—the child in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” Asbury in her late story “The Enduring Chill”—are hardly flattering. If, as Jessica Hooten Wilson has speculated in her treatment of O’Connor’s unfinished third novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage, O’Connor was planning to confront racial issues more directly in the project she was working on when she died, it was because she saw the civil rights struggle in the South as a dramatic figure for the larger theme of sin and conversion. And she would have been driven to this artistic confrontation because, above all, she recognized herself as a sinner.
It’s strange to think of Flannery O’Connor as growing old, because she never did. Time has moved on, even in the traditionally slow-moving South, and we might be tempted to say that it has left her behind. Still, today, on her hundredth birthday, we recognize her utter singularity of personality and intellect, the severe timelessness of her art.
