July 12, 2010
Monday

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
    — Flannery O’Connor, 1925-1964
         American fiction writer

Flannery O’Connor was an American fiction writer and essayist whose life and, thus, her writing career, were all too brief. Born in Georgia in 1925, she studied political science at the Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College and State University), and then went on to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she intended to train as a journalist but turned instead to fiction. Diagnosed with lupus about the time her first novel was published, she died before she was 40. Despite her illness, she produced two novels, two story collections, and a large body of occasional nonfiction. Deeply religious and committed to the Catholic faith, her work is informed by the idea that the created world is charged with God, and it often treats the difficult truths of what it means to live as a Christian. Yet her work is neither apologetic nor didactic. She died at Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, in 1964. Her second story collection, her letters, and her collected nonfiction were published posthumously.

I was a junior in high school when Flannery O’Connor died, and despite a four-year pursuit of a degree in English, I never heard of her until 1970, at the beginning of my second year of teaching. This is not surprising. Although she is recognized now as an important voice in American literature, the curriculum I studied under favored male writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and others who may have lived well into the second half of the twentieth century, but whose important work was done in the first half, and most of that before the war.

At the beginning of the summer in 1970 I found myself part of the team that was completely overhauling the English curriculum for Lower Dauphin High School. We were given carte blanche to design nine-week mini-courses, to order whatever materials we thought appropriate, to shape the presentation of the instruction in literary history, appreciation of literature, and composition in whatever way we found useful. Gone were the lockstep marches through the history of literature in Great Britain and the United States, taught through hardbound anthologies of pictureless pages. Relevance was the watchword. As the course selection guide said, “These courses will really blow your mind.”

I was assigned to write courses in the short story, creative writing, and “black literature.” (Yes, folks, a course in works by African-Americans would be written and taught by a 23-year-old white girl in a school where there were, at that time, no black students. Maybe that was appropriate — I was probably the faculty member most qualified to teach the course, since I actually knew an authentic black person.)

For the short story course, I found a snazzy series of paperbacks published by McDougal Littell called Man in the Fictional Mode. (There was also Man in the Poetic Mode, Man in the Nonfiction Mode, and, I think, Man in the Dramatic Mode.) I ordered two grade levels, and we were set.

Two Flannery O’Connor stories appeared in those books: “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and “The Artificial Nigger.” * I don’t know if the course blew anyone’s mind, but those two stories certainly (in a phrase I prefer) pulled the top of my head off. When O’Connor’s The Complete Stories was published in 1971, I bought it.

When The Habit of Being, a collection of her letters, came out in 1979, I bought that, too. I had read a review of it that talked about O’Connor’s deep religious faith and how it was made manifest in both her fiction and, more overtly, in her letters. The 23-year-old almost rookie teacher who had never heard of Flannery O’Connor had no faith and had rejected the doctrine she had learned, and so could not read the work from that point of view. The 32-year-old had matured some, and delved into the correspondence. I would learn that O’Connor held that the Eucharist “is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

I read O’Connor’s fiction again that summer. I was at a peculiar crossroads in my life, and there is not a doubt in my mind that the somewhat Peculiar Providence that has always watched over me had some hand in leading me back to O’Connor. I would have my conversion experience, my turning back to reclaim the amazing grace that had always been available to me but which I had been unable to accept, the next summer. It would take ten more years for me to understand how central the Eucharist is to my life.

The novel I have been writing for lo these six years (or eight, depending on how you reckon it) has at its core matters of faith. What was described by the first writing mentor I ever discussed it with as “the story of a stressful week in Brenda’s life” has become an examination of the various ways we understand the divine, the gifts differing that help us navigate our way through this hard and sometimes cruel world on our way back to the heart of God, from where we came.

So I have been reading O’Connor again. And reading about O’Connor. This morning I visited Andalusia, the farm where she lived with her mother for the last thirteen years of her life. Pictured at left is the front of the house. The dust jacket of The Habit of Being shows O’Connor on the second step down from the door, supporting herself on the crutches she needed to help her stand and walk, gazing at one of her beloved peacocks.

There are still peafowl on the property. They are kept in a special enclosure (in O’Connor’s time they ran free), and it is always carefully noted that they are a new flock, not descendants of any bird that lived there when O’Connor did. The property is a magnificent 500 acres with a lake and walking trails, but the humidity, even at ten in the morning when I was there, defeated any desire I might have had to roam it.

I was downtown in time to attend Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church on Jefferson, O’Connor’s parish. And what Gallivant is complete without a side trip to a cemetery?  O’Connor is buried at Memory Hill, a splendid example of a two-centuries-old city cemetery that alone is worth another visit.

I left knowing a little more about Flannery O’Connor, but not enough. I have never read her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. I have them now, and the well-regarded biography by Brad Gooch. I have a new muse who will journey with me to my own peculiar crossroads of time and place and eternity, and help me know what to do when I get there.

*Please don’t be put off by the title. It is the way the main character refers to a lawn jockey statue that he comes upon in Atlanta, the dangerous big city that he is introducing his grandson to. It’s a wonderful story. It has been challenged and removed from reading lists by people who have not read it and do not know how it uses the problematic word ironically. The word is used only in dialogue. In the exposition, the authorial voice uses “Negro.” The story was first published in 1955.

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