Thursday, August 23, 2007

Flannery O’Connor: A Life, by Jean Cash

Jean Cash's biography Flannery O'Connor: A Life is a disappointing hagiographic litany of facts and quotations. Cash does not know how to edit and consolidate information. Every fact and every statement she got from interviewees seem to appear in the book, even when they are redundant and repetitious. Thus we learn a great deal about O'Connor's love of chickens and other birds, her iconoclastic ways as a child, her unsociability. Cash includes contrasting opinions and accounts of O'Connor alongside one another without attempting to sort them out or resolve the conflict.

Cash goes to some pains to show that Flannery O'Connor was not a lesbian, that she was (or was not—there is some vacillation) a racist (Cash concludes that O'Connor has progressive racial views for a person living in Milledgeville in the 1950s and 60s, but she kept most of those views to herself to avoid offending the people she lived with). Cash believes O'Connor loved to goad some of her more liberal friends by pretending to be more racist that she really was. Cash argues that O'Connor was a brilliant intellectual in the hinterlands of middle Georgia, crippled by disease and place and circumstance.

The book is useful for the basic outline it provides of O'Connor's life. It is also useful for the many quotations from O'Connor's essays and letters it provides—drawing these together in one place it effectively builds the case for her intellect. They do allow us to develop a sense of a person and writer. But most of this work we have to carry out on our own—Cash the biographer doesn't carry it out for us.

The book is a disappointment for its failure to connect O'Connor's life with the fiction she created. We hear a lot about where O'Connor was when she was working on Wise Blood, and we hear a little about her writing of the stories that found their way into A Good Man is Hard to Find, her first story collection. There are some efforts to connect events and people in O'Connor's life—especially her mother Regina—with events and characters in the fiction, but sometimes Cash doesn't go far enough with these connections, and sometimes she goes too far. In general, she seems to regard the fiction as incidental to her claim that O'Connor was a great genius and intellect

This is an account of a writer's life. It is not a literary biography. It doesn't describe and explain the writer. It merely tells what she was doing on a particular day in a particular year. We don't learn much about how she wrote, why she wrote, what she was thinking as she conceived of a particular character or a particular plot. Maybe there isn't enough documentary evidence to provide such information. But some discussion of the novels and the short fiction would have provided the literary context that would make clear why this woman merits a biography. We receive discussions of what people thought of O'Connor when they met her at a particular meeting or reading. Chapters are devoted to O'Connor's book reviews in The Georgia Bulletin, a Catholic newspaper, and to readings and to friends, but no chapters discuss her writing of Wise Blood or the short stories or The Violent Bear it Away. No chapters offer analyses of these works.

The book is poorly written, with prose you would find in a small-town newspaper. There is too much repetition. This overly short biography or a woman whose complicated life was itself too short is too long and prosaic. It raises more questions than it answers. It portrays O'Connor and her work pretty much as O'Connor would have wanted, not from the imaginative, objective, analytical standpoint that a genuine biography should take, not from a standpoint that would expand and deepen the way we regard this writer. O'Connor deserves better.

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