Flannery O’Connor’s View

One of my favorite quotes by a writer trying to explain the drive to write is from Flannery O’Connor: “I write to discover what I know.” I love this quote for its optimism, especially whenever I have writer’s block. I’ll let this quote guide me through a meandering trail of thought about what I might already know in order to get words on the page, clay to mold. (This assumes, of course, that I know anything at all.)

What Flannery O’Connor knew was a lot about humans, redemption, suffering, the grotesque, and the church. She was unflatteringly and unforgivingly honest about her characters, merely putting them on the page in all their ugliness and rudeness and human flaws to allow the reader to make decisions and conclusions about them or their tale.

When I visited her childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, I may have discovered a source of inspiration: her window. Perfectly framed within the window of her bedroom was the Cathedral Basilica of St. John The Baptist on the other side of Lafayette Square. O’Connor had a short walk to her church where she exercised her faith, something she has indicated was a great source of inspiration for her writing. I imagine her peering through this window, contemplating her faith, the nature of humans, and the process of redemption.

Flannery O’Connor was a quirky individual which may have informed her sardonic writing style. When she was just six years old, she taught her pet chicken to walk backward. This caught the attention of the New York-based Pathe News. A reporter from this newspaper traveled to Savannah to photograph her chicken and write a story. This was in 1931, well before Letterman’s Stupid Pet Tricks!

Flannery went on to foster a life-long love affair with another type of bird—the peacock, a foul she wrote about in an essay titled “The King of the Birds.” The bird often showed up in her writing as a symbol for vanity or pride. At her mother’s farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, the birds ruled the roost, so to speak, with unfettered freedom to procreate, at one point reaching a total population of forty.

One of the quirkiest items in her home was her infant bed, an enclosed glass contraption called a Kiddie-Koop (yes, the actual name!) that may have inspired her fascination with birds. In my view, it looked less like a coop and more like a jewelry case for an antique shop. I can’t explain what impact this contraption might have had on her view of the world, but it was clear (ha!) that she was as transparent in her writing as all those windows and glass that surrounded her.

In recent years, the release of Flannery O’Connor’s letters revealed her own bigotry, her disdain for Black writers such as James Baldwin, her dismissal of actor/activist Ossie Davis, and a host of other racist attitudes.*

I’m not a literary scholar, just a reader interested in the lives of writers and how their homes and childhoods shape their views and work. Near the end of her short life, she repeated her racist remarks in a letter to her friend Maryat Lee. Being a fan of Flannery’s work, I was disturbed by her views, and even more disturbed by her lack of redemption as she neared death from a thirteen-year struggle with Lupus. The awareness of her attitude doesn’t make me appreciate her art any less, but it makes me view her and her work differently.

Ironically, a writer so focused on the idea of redemption for her characters had little to spare for herself. Then again, she had never expressed any desire for it herself. It seems Flannery O’Connor had written, in order to find out what she knew, and what she discovered was her own bigotry in all its ugliness. And yet, many of her stories have allowed me to see racism at work on the page with a clear and honest impact.

*Source: Confronting Flannery O’Connor’s Racism | Commonweal Magazine