Flannery O'Connor
Some of you writers may be interested in Brad Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor. I saw this in the Economist. Writers these days often do research before writing, and many feel that they can’t write without research. Ms. O’Connor had the opposite philosophy:
One of the strengths of Brad Gooch’s biography is its elegant pooh-poohing of her claim that “experience is the greatest deterrent to fiction” and that “any story in which I reveal myself in completely will be a bad story.”
Ms. O’Connor, according to the article, lived what she preached. She only left the United States once, and most of her time was sepnet on her mother’s dairy farm in Georgia. She preferred animals to humans. There was only one man known to have kissed her, and he said, “I had the feeling of kissing a skeleton and in that sense it was a shocking experience.”
Check it out.
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I agree with everything you said. About #1…I think...
When Flannery O’Connor went to Iowa to try and get into the writing school, the director couldn’t even understand what she was saying. She had to write it down because her accent was so unfamiliar and thick.
I can’t imagine she’d be a good kisser. If her own life experience was one of imagination, I wonder why it always centered on loss and failure.
Wow. I guess she really was a writer.
In this post, I was originally going to say that activists and writers are not always the same people, and I was going to state my belief that activism requires experience while writing only sometimes requires experience. I’ve met “writers” (I put it in parantheses because I have no idea how well they write) who are completely useless when it comes to dealing with people, and I was going to say that activists and maybe writer-activists are at a disadvantage without experience.
However, the article mentions “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” which I thought was incredibly feminist and ahead of its time, especially as it was published in 1955. So out with my theories, I guess…
Oops…scratch that. I was thinking of another story… Maybe my theories are correct…
“A Good Man is Hard To Find” is one of my favorite stories with a gothic ending. It doesn’t get much better than the Misfit killing the grandmother. I love how he says, “she would’ve been a good woman if there was someone there to kill her every day of her life.” I feel that way about a lot of people.
Flannery O’Connor has always fascinated me. The fact that she may have kissed only one man and he happens to be a complete cad (I mean, maybe HE was one of those sloppy overeager kissers and didn’t do much for her) adds to the fascination.
Sometimes I think experience ruins the imagination – by presupposing how things should be instead of how things COULD be.
So the story I was thinking of was “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell, which was very feminist. Who knows how I could’ve gotten those two confused? I read “The Best American Short Stories of the Century,” and I think “Greenleaf” by O’Connor and “Jury” by Glaspell were close together.
Man, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a dark story. Wow. Good quote, and very true of a lot of people.
Flannery O’Connor reminds me a bit of Patricia Highsmith. Highsmith was a very dark writer. She was probably a bit more engaged with the rest of the world, although she too was rather private.