Author doesn’t overanalyze O’Connor

By LIZ BROWN

“Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor” by Brad Gooch (Little Brown, $30)

“The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” is the title of a talk Flannery O’Connor gave in 1962, one year before she died of lupus at 39. It’s as straightforward an observation as one might make of the writer born in 1925 on the Feast of the Annunciation in Savannah, Ga.

It’s also a variation of a position that appears throughout Brad Gooch’s biography of the woman who wrote “Wise Blood,” “The Violent Bear It Away” and many now canonical short stories: the one who is within the group but somehow not of it. The Southerner who said, “I sure am sick of the Civil War.” The Yaddo resident who did not sleep with anyone else at the writers’ colony. The woman who did not marry and procreate; the celibate who did not enter an order but still arranged her daily life as strictly as a monk.

“I am very glad that you have decided not to be a lady-journalist,” she once wrote to a friend, “because I am deathly afraid of the tribe,” and it seems she felt recoil from almost any clan — at times even her own, Catholics. “She got her wish to be liberated from the nuns,” Gooch writes of her early parochial schooling, “only to be equally disdainful of their polar opposites, the freethinkers.”

From the beginning, she was the only child in an extended though close-knit family of adults. She called her parents by their first names, and by all accounts Edward and Regina doted on the precocious girl. Or, more accurately, Regina smothered — selecting Flannery’s friends until she attended college — while Edward doted, collaborating with his daughter.

Flannery was 15 when her adored father died of the disease that later claimed her, and though she spoke little of it, the loss, of course, weighed greatly. Gooch notes not only the prevalence of widows and orphans in her fiction but also the implied absences, “the eraser marks of all these dead fathers.”

It’s striking, too, that in her early 20s, the years that O’Connor spent away from Andalusia, the family farm in Milledgeville, Ga., her primary relationships were reconfigurations of that elemental unit: father, mother, only child. At the Iowa Writers Workshop she met Robert Lowell, who had recently converted to Catholicism and with whom she quickly developed an intense friendship that was expanded (as opposed to endangered) during their co-residency at Yaddo by the arrival of Elizabeth Hardwick, Lowell’s soon-to-be wife.

“Indeed for the young lady who wished to remain on the prepubescent side of 12,” Gooch writes, “and with Lowell who saw her as ‘our Yaddo child,’ the development may have been tolerable, even comfortable.”

But O’Connor’s deepest surrogate family bonds were with translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally, who, like Lowell, was “an intense convert.” The writer moved in with the couple and their children in Connecticut, and if O’Connor did belong to a tribe, perhaps it was this loose confederation of nonbelongers, of stray and straying Catholics that also included her staunch advocate, editor Robert Giroux.

Not long after the publication of “Wise Blood” in 1952, O’Connor learned she had lupus and returned to her mother at Andalusia, where she kept peacocks, received random visitors and took cortisone treatments that turned her, in her words, “‘practically bald-headed on top’ with ‘a watermelon face.”’ As oppressive as life with Regina appeared, Flannery remained clear-eyed about her work: “The best of my writing has been done here.”

While Gooch, who has written an acclaimed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, does point to the details of her life that likely gave rise to her fiction, he does not overstate these parallels.