Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor

By Brad Gooch

Flannery O'Connor: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, by Brad Gooch

I don’t usually read biographies. Like, ever. Memoirs? Yes. Autobiography? Sometimes, but rarely biographies. I was talking to my roommate about this, and she pointed out that biographies aren’t really a story. Most biographies that I have ever read are by someone who has never met their subject. Instead, they construct pieces from public records, private correspondence, and personal accounts, then assemble them to form a whole person. It’s a narrative, certainly, but it lacks the emotional weight of a story.

So, why did I read this? Basically, I had to for class. The course is on Flannery O’Connor and James Baldwin, and this biography is meant to give context to her short stories. For this purpose, this biography did remarkably well. Gooch recounts events in her life from her birth in 1925 to her death in 1964, tracking how her writing developed over her life; how it evolved in her graduate education, shifted when a lupus diagnosis forced her to a family ranch in Georgia, and continued to change as the disease progressed. It also provides an in-depth look at O’Connor’s Catholic faith, which deeply influenced her stories.

Most significantly, Gooch directly connects pieces of her life to a specific story. This aspect demonstrates how her stories and her life are deeply entwined, there by justifying the assignment of this biography in an O’Connor course. For example, Gooch relates Manley Pointer, the Bible salesman of “Good Country People” with Erik Lankjaer, a Danish man to whom O’Connor was attracted, but eventually left her to return to Europe. The resemblance between them is striking, particularly because Erik was a travelling textbook salesman, whose binder of promotional materials was nicknamed “The Bible” (231). But making a connection like this implies that a person must know and understand an author’s life to understand their texts.

This idea is not new, but the abundance of connections suggest that O’Connor’s stories especially cannot be read without a detailed knowledge of her life. This is paradoxical, since many references to her texts assume that the reader has already read The Complete Stories. I’m not saying that O’Connor’s life didn’t influence her stories; certainly her Catholicism and Southern surroundings influenced the recurring themes and settings in her stories. But I am saying that needing to know her life to understand her stories would be a serious blow to the merits of her texts.

Andalusia Farmhouse

Despite everything I've said, it isn’t a bad book. Gooch’s depiction of O’Connor is vivid and interesting, which, as I said, can be a difficult task due to the nature of biographies. O’Connor is a particularly difficult person to grasp. She was secluded for much of her life at Andalusia, her family’s cattle ranch, in Georgia, so her social life was limited. Those who did know her describe her as both polite and sharp, reticent and bold. Gooch captures these seemingly contradictory aspects and forms them into an intelligible portrait.

He does, however, fall into the common trap of biographies, in which the more problematic or questionable views of his subject are downplayed. In this case, it is O’Connor's racism, which comes up in both her stories and personal correspondence. These issues are addressed without seeking to justify them or excuse O’Connor, a choice which would be understandably tempting when writing an entire biography on her. But he also doesn’t condemn her racism, which allows an implicit tolerance for such views.

This is not a book I would have read for its own sake. Both because of the genre, and my fairly l minimal interest in O’Connor. I would recommend this book for people who are already fans of O’Connor and like to read biographies.

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Photo: "Andalusia (farmhouse); Milledgeville, Georgia; January 29, 2011" by Stephen Matthew Milligan is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0