MORE ABOUT FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Dr. Mary Ann Wilson

A few months ago, I visited Andalusia, home of Flannery O’Connor, one of the foremost writers in the South. I came home with a thick volume of her work, including some of her “Occasional Prose” and wrote a blog about my visit to this peaceful property in Milledgeville, Georgia where O’Connor once lived and wrote. Since that time, I’ve had an abiding interest in her work and am sorry I missed a lecture last week entitled “Surprising Grace in the Writing of Flannery O’Connor” given by Rt. Reverend Henry Parsley, the retired 10^th Bishop of Alabama and a former Chancellor of the University of the South. The lecture was sponsored by the Academy for Lifelong Learning which meets each month at St. Mary’s Conference Center here at Sewanee, Tennessee.

This week, on the heels of this lecture I received an e-mail from my good friend, Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, an English professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, telling me about her latest connection to Flannery O’Connor’s work. Dr. Wilson was featured in a recent issue of La Louisiane, the magazine of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, in which she was cited for discovering a 50-year old tape of an O’Connor lecture. The tape is a valuable recording of a talk O’Connor presented at Our Lady of Wisdom Catholic Church on the ULL campus just two years before she died of lupus during the 50’s.

Dr. Wilson was cleaning out her office files at the University when she came across a pink box with O’Connor’s tape entitled “The Catholic Writer in the Protestant South” (of which I have a print copy). She took the brittle tape to the University’s Center for Louisiana Studies and they used digitizing equipment to produce a 35-minute recording. The recording inspired Dr. Wilson to organize and coordinate a symposium that featured O’Connor scholars from throughout the U.S., and the audience heard parts of the recording during the sessions. The symposium was hosted by Our Lady of Wisdom’s Jeanmard Center in November, 2012.

Dr. Wilson reports that the tape captured the soft, South Georgia drawl of Flannery O’Connor, and applause and laughter punctuated the lecture O’Connor presented. Wilson teaches courses in Southern literature, many of them centered on Southern women writers, including O'Connor, this distinctive American writer of the twentieth century. She says that a colleague gave the O’Connor reel-to-reel tape to her years ago, and she forgot about it until she did a spring cleaning in her office.

Andalusia

After my visit to Andalusia in May, I read the particular essay which formed the basis for O’Connor’s lecture at ULL, “The Catholic Novelist in the South,” and re-read it after I received the article about Dr. Wilson. In the talk, O’Connor advocated that Catholic novelists in the future would be able to reinforce the vital strength of Southern literature, “for they will know that what has given the South her identity are those beliefs and qualities which she has absorbed from the Scriptures and from her own history of defeat and violation, a distrust of the abstract, a sense of human dependence on the grace of God, and a knowledge that evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured…”

O’Connor was a master at probing the mysteries of divine grace, and as a priest friend of mine said the other day at the breakfast table in St. Mary’s Convent, “We seem to find grace in everything she wrote, despite the depiction of characters who are driven to violence and their sometimes bizarre behavior…”

O’Connor scholars in the South are indebted to Dr. Wilson for rescuing this tape and getting it digitized for a permanent collection in the Edith Garland Dupre Library at ULL. The article about Dr. Wilson’s discovery appears in Volume 23, Number 1 of La Louisiane, a publication published twice a year at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. 

ANDALUSIA

Main House, Andalusia

The gravel and red clay road just off Highway 441 North in Milledgeville, Georgia leads uphill to a white frame house with a spacious screened front porch, its red roof gleaming in the May sunlight. The home, known as the "Main House," is the major residence in the complex that incorporates a smaller farm home, cow barn, equipment shed, calf barn, a water tower, an aging pump house, and a horse stable. It’s the former home of one of my favorite writers, Flannery O'Connor, and is the place where most of her work was completed before her life was shortened by the onset of lupus. The agricultural setting of a dairy farm provided the retreat necessary for O'Connor to depict what she called the "Christ haunted Protestant South" in her arresting fiction that made her one of the most important American writers of the 20^th century.

Home of farm workers
at Andalusia

We toured the 19^th century home, peering into O'Connor's downstairs bedroom/study that held a single bed, covered with a simple blue and white bedspread, set only a few feet away from a desk that held a manual typewriter, flanked by a straight-backed chair sans cushions of any kind. It was a stark room, a setting where O'Connor wrote her novels, short stories, essays, and letters from nine until noon every morning of her writing life. In the afternoons, she tended peafowl – at one time, she had fifty of them – and painted (even her self-portrait), sometimes entertaining people who would drop in to see her.

As we walked around the grounds that included a small pond, a peacock aviary, and a few nature trails, we thought about the mysterious, often violent fiction, that had emerged from the quiet landscape and connected with the words in O'Connor's essay, "The Fiction Writer and His Country:" "When we talk about the writer's country we are liable to forget that no matter what particular country it is, it is inside as well as outside him. Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other. To know oneself is to know one's region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world…"

Diane next to red dirt road
beside Andalusia

As I walked through the grounds, I passed a completely dilapidated garage that seemed strangely incongruous with the well-kept landscape, a large pile of broken wood that mocked the romanticism I had attributed to the scene of a southern writer who had once said people didn't understand her writing about the people and region that surrounded her farm. O'Connor also said her Christian affiliation centered on redemption and what she saw in the world in relation to that redemption, adding that her Christian beliefs freed her to observe and affected her writing "primarily by guaranteeing her respect for mystery."

If you haven’t sampled the work of Flannery O'Connor, you might enjoy the short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) which includes a bizarre baptism in "The River," a one-legged woman's encounter with a Bible salesman in "Good Country People," and other discomfiting stories that bear out her words, "In order to recognize a freak, you have to have a conception of the whole man."

Main house, side view of Andalusia

We had been to deepest south Florida prior to the O'Connor visit, and after sojourning in an environ of Fort Lauderdale and being hustled like most tourists, for me, the visit to O'Connor country seemed to be an occasion of  a "blind sow finding an acorn," to descend to a "countrynism" that might have come out of the mouth of a character in one of O'Connor's stories.

In the small gift shop of the old farmstead, I bought a volume that included all of O'Connor's books, short stories, essays, and letters, published by the Library of America, and began reading it aloud to my friend, Vickie, while traveling home to Sewanee, Tennessee, arriving back on The Mountain after being transported by O'Connor's "The Train."

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan