These are not good excuses, I’m well aware. But it’s my blog, so I make the rules. A vacation was necessary, and may be again.
I mentioned in an earlier post about the biography I’ve been reading and have become completely engrossed in—Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch. For those interested, this is the fully-loaded guide to everything and ANYTHING you may want to know about the 20th-century southern fiction writer. Gooch covers it all: her sheltered childhood under the regime of her overbearing mother, Regina (also my mother’s name), her struggles with her voice in writing at Georgia College and State University, her steadfast commitment to Catholicism, which lasted her whole life, and the slow and devastating destruction of her young body by a mysterious disease—lupus. His detail is meticulous, and sometimes frustrating, but completely necessary to understanding the making of the writer and the woman simultaneously. You are literally watching the rise and fall of a precious being who leaves a few jewels of literature—and then ceases to create. Having died so young with such a limited amount of work, her writing is that much more potent and important to the realm of American literature.I’m getting ahead of myself (plus a little misty, dammit). To be honest, I (haha) am actually not done with the book. I’m a little more than halfway through, and kind of hoping it will last forever. But as Flannery has taught us, this is never the case.
I’m currently working through what you could call the Golden Age of her career: it’s 1955 and
she’s published her novel, Wise Blood (1952), settling into her disease and its crippling effects, and creating some of the most important short fiction of our time. Her southern-based stories of human connection (“A Good Man Is Hard To Find”), isolation, deceit (“Good Country People”), race (“The Artificial Nigger”) and violence (“Greenleaf”) are electrifying. She’s publishing in literary magazines and enduring the lashings of narrow-minded book reviewers that refer to her work as “un-ladylike” and “intense, erratic, and strange”. You could also say they just weren’t ready for it.The most important discovery I found, while reading Flannery’s life, is her organic ability to put words on paper and tell a story. With such calm and decisiveness, she had decided to be a writer, and she wrote, and became an author, and then a literary figure. Before now, I’ve always been a firm believer in turmoil as the fruit of good writing (or art for that matter). I started my college career reading the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva and believing in her message: only pain and destruction breed creation (she had it a lot tougher than Flannery, living through the Bolshevik revolution and whatnot). Long before the onset of her disease, Flannery was writing the grotesque, because she was born with it.
When I was a senior in high-school I once wrote a short story for my English class that my teacher read aloud to the other classes (not mine). It was about a teenage girl anticipating the results of a pregnancy test. She cried, punched herself in the stomach, and mused about breaking the news to her mother. She regretted ever letting her boyfriend put his un-condomed penis in her. She estimated the costs for an abortion based on locker room hearsay. The story ends without revealing the results (if I remember correctly, if so, nice ending!). That was the last time I felt right about my writing. I needed that experience to write that story (though I don’t know how I would find a copy of it now). And although I wish no real turmoil upon myself, if it will get me to write something that good again, bring it on.
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