THE AUTHENTIC LIFE AND WORDS OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR
by linda m. young

I was introduced to the works of Flannery O’Connor by chance.

I loved our small local library and had decided at an early age to read every book of fiction in it. I had planned to begin backwards and start with writers whose names began with the letter Z. There were only four books in the Z section and I was a sensible child. It was a hot summer morning when I finally returned the last of the Z books; I had loved one but forced myself to finish three. As I headed for the Y books, I stopped to check out the library display for the month. Our librarian, whose name I no longer remember, but who had black hair and wore very red lipstick, put up monthly displays urging everybody and anybody to read. She was known to carry books out to the quarters for black children who were not allowed in the library. The month before, her display was about the enduring insect. How she had hoped to capture just a few imaginative children in her web! The new display, announced on white poster board with large black letters, was Writers from the South. Besides the books by Mark Twain, Harper Lee and William Faulkner, there was a book by an author named Flannery O’Connor. I was mostly curious as to whether the author was a man or a woman, for I had never heard of the name Flannery.

The book I checked out that day and read long into the night, after the lights were turned out and I sat on the side of my bed with a flashlight, was a collection of O’Connor’s stories. The one that left me breathless was “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” It is not a story of a woman looking for a good man to settle down with or swoop down like prince charming. It is a story about chance, evil, and redemption, about how the ordinary decisions we make can simply end our lives. From then on, I became more selective in my reading, for in choosing Flannery O’Connor, I knew I had made a unique and important decision. She was great writer, a Southerner, and a woman.

Flannery O’Connor was only thirty-eight when she died from complications arising from a long battle with lupus. Those who knew her, both as a writer and personally, have conveyed to the world a portrait of a woman plagued by physical pain during most of her productive literary years, but who rarely complained and who made it a habit to buoy the spirits of others. She lived well, was deeply religious, never married and never had children. She lived a life dedicated to her craft and nowhere in works about her life are there intimations of drinking or sex that so often marks and mars the lives of many great writers. O’Connor loved God’s world, saw the deep flaws that ran through it, and through each of us, and knew that redemption, though a natural human desire, was not always possible.

O’Connor’s work is often referred to as Southern gothic or grotesque. The words that come from the mouths of her characters are on the one hand demented, but on the other strangely true and prophetic. She is equaled only by Faulkner in her ability to infuse her works with the lifeblood that is the South, but that transcends time and place to describe in authentic detail the tragic and uplifting parts of the human drama. I think that is called genius.

There are no moonlight walks or magnolias or moss hanging from ancient oaks to stir the romantic imagination. O’Connor’s work is too real, too genuine for that. The character in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” is named Misfit, and he is what we would call an evil human being. He says, after murdering an entire family, that “Jesus thrown everything off balance.” He is speaking of his own loss of redemption, for he killed of his own free will and knew it. How then, asks O’Connor, do we as individuals decide to do good? Again, listen to words of another character in her first novel, Wise Blood: “Her first plan had been to marry him and then have him committed to the state institution for the insane, but gradually her plan became to marry him and keep him.”

Flannery O’Connor always wrote for a purpose. She wanted readers to understand the world through literature and that is why she made her characters so dark, so grotesque, so outrageous. She said of her writing: “to the hard of hearing you have to shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” She made us to hear, she made us to see. This momentum in her writing is best seen in her works during the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. In Everything That Rises Must Converge, a white mother and son are riding on a city bus with a black family. The comments between them starkly speak to the times. The mother says: “They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence.”

It is this reader’s opinion, formed at an early age and confirmed over many years, that Flannery O’Connor was one of the greatest women writers of the twentieth century. She died on August 3, 1964, leaving us some of the most profound, telling and authentic works of her times, our times, and future times.

You may want to read her novels, The Violent Bear it Away, Everything That Rises Must Converge, and Wise Blood. Her 31 stories have been published by Noonday Press as Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Short Stories.

Linda M. Young is the author of The Train to Port Arthur and Other Stories and Michael’s Journal. She can be reached through the website peonypress.net or WNC-WOMAN.