Happy Birthday, Ms. O'Connor

Somewhere in a file down here in the basement, I have at least a half dozen old stories, some published, some not, that bear the unmistakeable influence of Flannery O'Connor, a woman who, more than anyone else, was, once upon a time, my role model. I think I came to know her best when I first started teaching in college--her bizarre ledger of freaks and misfits, her whacko humor, her Southern gothic sensibility. When I first had time to write, hers was the only path my heart knew toward writing stories.

What both impressed and challenged me was her uncanny ability to let her faith move mountains in the weird tales she told. "The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all," she once wrote. "I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development." The supernatural descends often brutally in O'Connor, most often with a vengeance. God is there. Be careful.

Born and reared a determined Roman Catholic, she sometimes appears, in her stories, as if she were some strange holy roller herself. Her characters, she most famously admitted, were Southern, and therefore "Christ-haunted"; but in a way, so was she. Her God was very real and identifiable, even if he appeared as a rogue bull or mad man. "You shall know the truth," she wrote once upon a time, "and the truth shall make you odd."

Flannery O'Connor's popularity crossed over the oldest boundaries of all--between nature and grace. When I had Ray Carver as a teacher in the summer of 1981, he assigned Mystery and Manners, her essays; that book was required reading, even though he never said a word about religion, and M and M is full the brim of her faith. Somehow, everyone--or nearly so--loved Flannery O'Connor, believers and non, and that's why, for several years, I tried to be her, tried to write like her, tried to pattern my stories after her.

Lord knows I could have had a worse heroes back then, even though I didn't stand a chance in the world of ever doing anything akin to what she did. She understood that. She had a very deterministic sense of particular calling--and she was right: "The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live," she once said. One has to find one's own voice--that step may be the first and foremost in the life of any writer.

Nonetheless, she was there at the very dawn of my own desire to write stories, an inspiration--and she still is: "Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not."

She died young, a victim of lupus. Like Dickinson, once she received her education--including a stint at Iowa in the early years of the program--she returned to her childhood home in Milledgeville, Georgia, rarely left, and finally died there, at just forty years old, having completed only a couple dozen short stories and two very strange novels.

"All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful," she once wrote and amply demonstrated through her odd, short lifetime as a writer.

Today she'd be 85 years old, had she lived. If I had the time to write fiction, I think I'd still try to write like she did, just not so much in her way. What she saw is what every Christian writer sees, or should: "The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location."

This morning's thanks is a belated happy birthday wish to someone who has played no minor role in my life. My guess is she's somewhere not far off, scribbling away.