By Joy Williams
FLANNERY A Life of Flannery O'Connor. By Brad Gooch. Illustrated. 448 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $30.
In Sunday, March 1, 2009, NYT Book Review, writer Joy Williams writes about the new book on the quirky and amazing Flannery O'Connor.
Here is the lead. What can you learn about writing from reading this?
Flannery. She liked to drink Coca-Cola mixed with coffee. She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother’s Day. She went to bed at 9 and said she was always glad to get there. After Kennedy’s assassination she said: “I am sad about the president. But I like the new one.” As a child she sewed outfits for her chickens and wanted to be a cartoonist.
Here is the ending. What can you learn about writing from reading this?
Flannery. When asked why she wrote, she replied, “Because I’m good at it.” She found sickness “more instructive than a long trip to Europe.” She was buried the day after she died. Robert Giroux sent a copy of “Wise Blood” to Evelyn Waugh hoping for a blurb, and Waugh replied, “The best I can say is: ‘If this really is the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.’ ” One should pretty much ignore her own pronouncements on her art, though in her last years she increasingly endeavored to explain her intentions. She was an anagogical writer, of that there is no doubt. The civil rights movement interested her not at all. When she received a request to stage one of her stories, she wrote, “The only thing I would positively object to would be somebody turning one of my colored idiots into a hero.” Her kinship, she believed, was with Hawthorne. She also described herself as being “13th-century.” She is reported to have had beautiful blue eyes.
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5 comments:
I think the beginning really sets her in her time, and the end shows how complicated she was. Listing those facts like that really reflects a character that's almost indescribable.
Kate,
I am delighted you are reading this blog and thinking deeply and then posting that response. And what Joy Williams, and Brad Gooch show, is that Flannery O'Connor is describable=via specific, telling details that have universal meaning.
BH
I think this shows how carefully reported details can help construct a character on a narrative, even if that character is already dead. Details make a difference.
I agree. The details provided open an insight for the reader to get a glimpse of Flannery that even if they have never read any of her works, they can still receive a sense of who she was as a person and how she looked at her own legacy as a writer.
The complexity of character is outstanding in the ending because it shows aspects of a writer that many outsiders wouldn't think she had.
I used to know Flannery O'Conner as the author of A Good Man is Hard to Find, her collection of short stories. Now thanks to Joy Williams, I know her as a little girl who "taught" her chicken to walk backwards. And now I will think of her as just - Flannery. It is amazing to me that Williams was able to encapsulate so many obscure facts and then have so much fun with it. It makes me wonder how Williams first got to know O'Connor - through history, essays people wrote about her, or through O'Connor's writing?
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