Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Wolfe shared one unlikely bond: public reaction to their first novel. In Wolfe’s case, many people in his hometown of Asheville, N.C., were incensed by the thinly disguised portrayals of themselves in “Look Homeward, Angel” in 1929.
With O’Connor, it was the release of “Wise Blood” in 1952 in her hometown of Savannah, Ga., that shocked her family and prompted her cousin Kate Semmes–who had sent local clergymen copies of the book before opening it–to write an apology to those same clergy after she read the novel.
How did a cloistered young Southern girl ever come to write about grotesque, emotionally stunted, often violent characters?
Mary Flannery O’Connor was an unusually focused young woman, biographer Jean W. Cash tells us in “Flannery O’Connor: A Life” (University of Tennessee Press, 392 pages, $29.95). Protected in her upbringing by her family and faith in the Catholic church, she determined to live the literary life, persevering despite the crippling disease lupus that eventually killed her at the age of 38 in 1964.
Only two other books were published during her lifetime, a short-story collection, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” in 1955 and a second novel, “The Violent Bear It Away,” in 1960. Her collected works recently were published in the Library of America series, critical studies of her work appear regularly, and now with Cash’s volume, we have the first full-length biography.
Catholicism was the dominant force in O’Connor’s life. She “held an absolute religious faith that prompted her vocation as a writer,” Cash writes. “As she often asserted, her major impetus for writing was to undercut the secularity of her era, to guide the unbelieving toward belief; in addition, she was totally dedicated to the rules of Roman Catholicism.”
Disease was another critical element in O’Connor’s life. Stricken with lupus in 1951 before her first book appeared, she coped courageously to live a fairly active life over the next 13 years. She would never leave her home in Milledgeville, Ga.
Cash offers copious details about O’Connor’s life in these pages. But her blandly written, occasionally encyclopedic biography wants for some analysis of what it all means and does little to give O’Connor three dimensions.
What is “Wise Blood” really about? How do those marvelous stories connect to the themes of her faith? What is the use of the grotesque in her fiction? Cash apparently assumes most readers of her book already will know the answers. Many of them, I suspect, will find the absence of such explanations a serious flaw in this earnest but less-than-satisfying biography.
