Nonfiction review: Flannery

NONFICTION

It can be hard to square the stories with the life.

Flannery O'Connor wrote 31 tales and two novels that find the bizarre in everyday life. She was a sheltered Southern woman, confined to her mother's house by the autoimmune disease lupus, a debilitating affliction that would eventually kill as it had her father when she was a child.

Brad Gooch, the author of "Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor," dispels the image of the writer as a secluded, silent Emily Dickinson by introducing us to a woman filled with humor and insight, a woman who maintained significant friendships with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Walker Percy and James Dickey among other literary stars. In a relatively short time she became a giant of 20th-century American literature.

Gooch has done his research. A biographer of the poet Frank O'Hara, he takes us through her childhood in Savannah, Atlanta and finally her mother's farm in Milledgeville, Ga. She attended Georgia State College for Women there and came under the guidance of teachers who recognized her writing talent even if they didn't fully comprehend the violent and satirical stories she turned in.

After she graduated, she moved on to the University of Iowa to study journalism. But she soon switched to fiction and her career blossomed.

"We would invite her to our house because we had little gatherings and ask her to read," recalled the writer John Gruen, who knew O'Connor in Iowa. "She would sit quietly at first until she was asked to read. . . . She took on all the characters. She would read in this kind of very heavy singsong but not really singing. It was a performance. It became totally hypnotic. So that all of us sitting there, young people in their teens and twenties, were totally struck."

At 25 she captured the interest of Robert Giroux, her eventual editor and book publisher, and her career was launched.

But in 1950, after noticing heaviness in her "typing arms," she was diagnosed with lupus and returned to Georgia for what she hoped would be a short recuperation. Instead, she would live on the family farm for her remaining 15 years, until her death at the age of 39.

She never knew how long she would live and had doubts about her doctors.

"There's one of these doctors in Atlanta that's taken a knife and cut the human heart," says a character in the short story "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," " . . . and studied it like it was a day-old chicken, and lady . . . he don't know more about it than you or me."

With the help of her often overbearing yet supportive mother, O'Connor refashioned her life. She made a new home for herself on the family farm and found inspiration for her stories in the men and women who worked there.

How these gothic stories filled with grotesque and morally flawed characters came from a writer cut off from the rest of the world except through letters, Gooch doesn't reveal. What he does divulge is a disciplined woman, who upon recognizing that her time was short, used that time to her advantage, writing inspired stories that would not only survive her but that revealed a universe we all inhabit.