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Beverly Willett on Flannery O’Connor: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
By
Published: May 19, 2020
Category:
Fiction
BEVERLY WILLETT wrote “Disassembly Required: A Memoir of Midlife Resurrection,” the best memoir I read last year. [For my review and an excerpt, click here.] She lives in Savannah, where she is President of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home Foundation.
When I get sad and frustrated these days, I think of Flannery O’Connor.
In 1950, she came down with lupus. Doctors gave her five years. She lived another 14, pumped up on steroids until she died in 1964 at 39.
If she were alive today, she’d undoubtedly cope with the threat of Covid-19 as she did with lupus and go on about her life.
Pre-lupus, she grew up in Savannah, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and hobnobbed with Robert Penn Warren and Katherine Anne Porter. She spent time at Yaddo and in NYC. After lupus struck, she returned to the family farm in rural Georgia and lived out her days with her mother and a collection of chickens and peacocks.
Driven by an intense Catholic faith that sustained her – while sick with lupus – she wrote two novels, “Wise Blood” (also a film by John Huston) and “The Violent Bear It Away,” and two books of short stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” She won the O. Henry Award three times and the National Book Award for Fiction posthumously in 1972 for her “Complete Stories.”
Pat Conroy called her the best short story writer –– ever.
Her childhood home is now a museum and hub of literary life in Savannah, with guest appearances by the likes of Michael Cunningham and Roxanne Gay.
In college, probably because I wasn’t ready for it yet in my own life, I considered her writing too complicated to be worth the bother. Amidst the bizarre and grotesque which pervade her stories, I’d missed the telltale moment when grace arrived — and it always arrives in a Flannery O’Connor story.
I reacquainted myself with Flannery six years ago. I’d left Brooklyn and was looking for a writing community in my new hometown. A good place to begin: reading Flannery O’Connor. I started with “A Prayer Journal,” her diary while at Iowa.
“Maybe I’m mediocre,” she wrote. “Nothing can be possessed but the struggle. All our lives are consumed in possessing struggle, but only when the struggle is cherished….” After her diagnosis, Flannery did just that.
While president of her house this past year, I’ve often asked myself: What would Flannery say/do? Because how else to fulfill our mission and honor her legacy? And so I began board meetings by reading a passage from one of her letters from The Habit of Being.
While holed up at home, I recently read all the letters from the last eight months of her life.
She was in and out of the hospital, with a “torn up” stomach, repeated kidney infections and transfusions, eyes “swollen shut.” She hobbled around on crutches.
But in characteristic Flannery fashion she remained as she always had, frank, matter-of-fact, forward-thinking — rescheduling what she had to cancel, steadfast, and wisecracking. Maudlin? In denial? Nope. Her response to an English teacher who wrote with literary questions: “I think you folks sometimes strain the soup too thin.” She wrote “like mad” when she could. And when she could only endure one hour a day? “[M]y, my do I like my one hour. I et it up like it was filet mignon.”
My favorite quote is probably this one: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
Here in Savannah we celebrate Flannery’s birthday with an annual parade in the square adjacent to her home. This March the parade moved inside. Next year, I hope we’ll be back outside with the usual chicken poop bingo and gorilla. Tourism pays most of the bills, but you can still support our charitable foundation until we reopen.
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To buy the paperback of “Wise Blood” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.
To buy the paperback of “The Violent Bear It Away” from Amazon, click here.
For the Kindle edition, click here.
To buy “Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works: Wise Blood /A Good Man Is Hard to Find /The Violent Bear It Away /Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters” from Amazon, click here.
To buy the paperback of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” from Amazon, click here.
To buy the paperback of “Everything That Rises Must Converge” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.
To buy the paperback of “A Prayer Journal” from Amazon, click here.
For the Kindle edition, click here.
To rent the stream of the movie of “Wise Blood,” click here.
