Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (122 page)

She was brought up under the protective wing of her redoubtable mother, the aptly named Regina. Her father, the royally henpecked Ed O’Connor, was a failed businessman, brought low by the Depression and chronic illness. Even so the family survived the awful decade of the 1930s more comfortably than some. ‘There is,’ Flannery’s biographer records, ‘no evidence that O’Connor’s childhood was troubled’. In 1938, when she was twelve, the family moved to the family dairy farm, Andalusia, at Milledgeville, which Regina ran efficiently and profitably: there was still money in staples like milk and beef but not – with the boll weevil raging through the fields – cotton.

Incorrigibly self-deprecating, O’Connor records herself as having been ‘a pidgeon-toed, only-child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’. She attended convent school and recalled resolving ‘to stay aged twelve for life’. She divulged virtually nothing of her adult inner life to posterity. She may have been sexually nervous, inclined to chastity on religious grounds, or bisexual (although she is recorded as thinking lesbianism ‘unclean’). A college acquaintance observed that ‘O’Connor never seemed interested in the opposite sex’, or her own. Her biographer suggests that ‘O’Connor expressed her inner life through her birds.’ She was fascinated by the magnificent fan displays of the peacock and liked being pictured posed alongside her prize specimens.

She entered the Georgia State College for Women in 1942, aged seventeen. A high-performing student in the classroom, she wrote and drew cartoons for the college newspaper, graduated in 1945 and – considering a career in journalism
– went on to postgraduate study at Iowa. Momentously, she became involved in that university’s creative writing programme – at the time the best in the country, under the charismatic Paul Engle. He encouraged her to write and her early exercises in short fiction were passed around by discriminating judges able to help her on her way. Embarking on a writing career, she adopted the androgynous pen name ‘Flannery’. Of the alternative, ‘Mary O’Connor’, she inquired quizzically: ‘Who’s going to buy the stories of an Irish washerwoman?’ Her narratives all revolve around male characters, and inevitably ‘Flannery O’Connor’ (like Harper Lee) was routinely mistaken for a man.

While at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, O’Connor was already immersing herself in religious commentary: Aquinas, Simone Weil, Teilhard de Chardin were of particular interest to her. ‘I read a lot of theology,’ she said, ‘because it makes my writing bolder.’ She read it typically at night, before going to bed. The next formative step in her career was a fellowship at the Yaddo writers’ colony in New York State in 1948. She was there at the same time as Patricia Highsmith, currently working on her first novel,
Strangers on a Train
. O’Connor was meanwhile working on the short story, ‘The Train’, which would form the first chapter of her first novel,
Wise Blood
. She did not, like Highsmith, join in the high jinks and ‘always left before they started to break things’, but it was at Yaddo that she met Robert Lowell. A fellow Catholic, Lowell talked her work up (which was welcome) and went so far as to claim that personally she was a saint – a compliment which O’Connor found extremely distasteful. Acquaintances thought ‘she fell’ for Lowell. His wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, described O’Connor spitefully as ‘plain’ and ‘whiney’ – which adds to the suspicion that something may have been in the air.

In 1951, aged twenty-six, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus erythematosus, the same disease – for which there was no cure – that had killed her father in 1941. It meant a life of progressive invalidism at Andalusia, in the care (devoted but over-bearing) of her mother. After seven years perfecting her ‘opus nauseous’, O’Connor published
Wise Blood
in 1952. In a later preface (1962), she asserted it was ‘a comic novel about a Christian
malgré lui
’ – an interpretation which most readers may find a bit of a stretch. As the novel opens, it is 1947. Hazel Motes (the biblical allusion to eyes is meaningful) has come back from the war but we know nothing of his four years’ service for his country other than that the army ‘sent him half way round the world and forgot him’. He was wounded, and the shrapnel still in his body is poisoning him. Motes is first encountered on the train back to Taulkinham, Tennessee, wearing a suit of glaring blue, with the price tag attached ($11.98), and a ‘fierce black hat’. He is resolved to be a preacher. Religion is buzzing around in his head ‘like a wasp’. The problem is, he ‘doesn’t believe in anything’.

Hazel solves the problem by establishing the ‘Church of Truth without Jesus Christ Crucified’. He preaches his Christless Christianity from the hood of his beat-up car, ‘a rat-colored machine’.

He recruits two disciples: one is an idiot boy, Enoch Emery, who has ‘wise blood’ but an unwise head. A guard at the local zoo, Enoch is obliged (to promote a King-Kong style movie) to make himself even more ridiculous in a gorilla suit. As an act of devotion, he steals a holy relic for Hazel from the city museum – an Egyptian mummy (‘a dead part-nigger shriveled up dwarf’ is te recipient’s blunt description). Hazel’s other disciple is a pubescent, underage nymphomaniac, Sabbath Lily Hawks, who affords him cheaper relief than the local whorehouse (a setting which, as unkind male critics pointed out, did not show O’Connor at her most knowledgeable). In the climax of the story, Hazel blinds himself with quick lime, mortifies his body with barbed wire, and puts sharp stones in his shoes. Why? he is asked. ‘To pay’ is his reply. He finally dies of starvation in a ditch.

O’Connor called
Wise Blood
‘autobiographical’. It’s a difficult comment to make sense of, but easier than the instruction mentioned earlier that the work should be read as comedy. The novel was published in 1952 to largely perplexed reviews (‘Southern Gothic’ was not yet an established genre) and a surge of scandalised protest in Milledgeville, where bookstores sold it in brown paper bags. A disapproving Regina stopped reading at page 9. The American publishers who, like other novelists, had great faith in O’Connor, sent a proof copy to Evelyn Waugh in the hope that, as a Catholic, he would recognise its genius. He replied, frigidly: ‘If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.’ T. S. Eliot (Anglo-Catholic, and a Southerner by birth) was also shown the text, with a view to Faber publishing it, and returned it with the observation ‘my nerves are just not strong enough’.

O’Connor had some unsatisfactory close relationships with men, one of whom reported that kissing her was like kissing a skeleton. She had a long, intimate correspondence with Betty Hester, who was alcoholic, lesbian and chronically suicidal. Hester went so far as to say she loved O’Connor but the relationship never went beyond the intimacy of letters. By 1954 O’Connor needed a cane to walk with and by the end of the decade crutches. A novel took her seven years of grinding work – but at least it could be said that this was three times the pace of her fellow Southern novelist, Katherine Anne Porter, who took twenty-four years over
Ship of Fools.
Short stories took O’Connor less time and she turned out a couple of volumes’ worth from the mid-1940s on, with smart titles such as: ‘You Can’t Be Any Poorer than Dead’, ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’, ‘The Artificial Nigger’ and, her most famous work in this area, ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’. By the time of her second,
and last, novel in 1960, O’Connor was, with Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Porter, a dominant Southern fiction voice: the leader of a school where women, unusually, shared the lead.

Increasingly incapacitated, O’Connor was looked after by her mother and taken on a trip to Lourdes in 1958. It was her sole trip outside the US. Wry as ever, she commented that much as she loved the Catholic religion she was not sure that she was prepared ‘to take a bath for it’. She declined to be dunked, but was profoundly moved by the experience, and by Rome. She was profoundly unmoved by the civil rights movement (‘this race business’) which was tearing the South apart in the early 1960s.

Her second novel,
The Violent Bear It Away
, was published in 1960. Like
Wise Blood
, it chronicles the ‘hard facts of service for the Lord’. The narrative is more complex (she had been – tentatively – studying Faulkner). Death, redemption, temptation and salvation are again the themes. The novel opens:

Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.

‘Tarwater’, readers of
Great Expectations
will recall, has overtones of ‘snake oil’ – false salvation of the body. The novel, one notes, is dedicated to the novelist’s dead father whose inheritance – lupus – is killing her. Psychobiographers have had a fine time with Flannery O’Connor. Tarwater, it emerges, was kidnapped as a child (he does not know his age) by his uncle who believed he would grow up to have a mission. After a fraught passage with the devil, and an ugly rape, Francis’s eyes are ‘burned clean’. He hears the command of God to go out into the world and ‘GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY’. Which he does.

The Violent Bear It Away
, such being the fate of second novels, was less well received than its predecessor. But at the time of her death, O’Connor was becoming regarded as one of the very great American writers. The doomed John Kennedy Toole, author of the unpublishable
Confederacy of Dunces
, made a pilgrimage to Milledgeville just before connecting some garden hosepipe to the exhaust of his car and gassing himself outside Biloxi in Mississippi on 26 March 1969. He was just thirty-one years old, eight years younger than O’Connor at the time of her death.

Depression is a wimp of a word for a howling tempest in the brain.

William Styron was born in the literary decade defined as Gertrude Stein’s ‘lost generation’. ‘
They
weren’t lost. What they were doing was losing
us
,’ complains one of his characters. He hit his stride in the early 1950s as the ‘Southern Novel’, the literary school of which he was the last ornament (along with Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty), was decaying, replaced by the smarter New York Jewish school (Roth, Malamud, Mailer). The ‘Kingdom of the Jews,’ he calls it, ironically, in the opening paragraph of
Sophie’s Choice
. Jewish intellectuals and artists are typically alien elements in Styron’s fiction.

It was Styron’s fate in life always to arrive just after the great historical event. He was swept up in the patriotism of the Second World War and signed up as soon as he was age-eligible, but just on the brink of being shipped out they dropped the bomb. As a reservist officer recalled for Korea in 1951, he was invalided out with eye trouble – again on the eve of being posted into battle. But there was always money in Styron’s life to cushion such frustrations. He was born into money, married more of it, and with two mid-career No.1 bestsellers, his situation was, as Victorians would have said, ‘warm’. He could travel first class and choose where he lived – which was expensive places on the Eastern seaboard. Most significantly, he could take his time over his novels. He published only four major works in a sixty-year career. A forty-year ‘abusive’ drinking career was an added impediment – but money helped there as well.

William Clark Styron II was born in Newport News, Virginia. He offers a description in the opening pages of his debut novel,
Lie Down in Darkness
(1951), redolent with swamp smells, shoreline flotsam and the sprawling debris of a decaying Southern seaport which he left, but which never left him. Typically, the viewpoint is that of an arriving train, with the coffin of a returned suicide in its baggage car. Styron’s grandfather had fought for the Confederates. It is him, one guesses, that Styron quotes in the person of the patriarchal Loftis, in his first novel: ‘we stand at the back door of glory … we are the driblet turds of angels’. The Styrons were a family historically engaged in coastal trade and (a mere sixty years earlier) plantations and slaves. His father, also William, with whom he had a difficult relationship, was a marine engineer working in the docks of ‘Tidewater’ – as Styron called the James River estuary. William’s mother died lingeringly of cancer when he was fourteen. It was, he later recalled, traumatic.

His father remarried promptly and the Styron home was thereafter inhospitable
for William Jr. After an undistinguished school career, where football mattered more to him than books, Styron ended up at Duke University. His undergraduate course was interrupted by his Marine service. After graduating, unbloodied, from Duke after the war, he gravitated – by literary magnetism – to New York, a city that was in creative ferment. Styron had, as he put it, ‘the literary syrup inside him but it would not pour’. Like Saul Bellow’s hero, he ‘dangled’ in a lodging house in Brooklyn. He had a day-job at the publisher McGraw-Hill. He wanted to be William Faulkner; they wanted someone to Roto-root through the slush pile. He walked out to become a full-time writer.

A former girlfriend’s suicide was the ‘germ’ of his first novel
Lie Down in Darkness
, which he struggled with for three years. It is 1946 in the novel as it opens. Milton Loftis – well born, rich and cultivated – is terminally alcoholic, chronically adulterous and spiritually exhausted. His daughter Peyton, having fled the South to marry a Jewish artist in New York, has committed suicide. Her remains are returning ‘home’ to Tidewater, to lie down in final darkness. Milton’s subsequent decline is accelerated by the pain of his incestuous lust for Peyton – the principal cause of his daughter’s self-destruction (the novel veers very close to Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury
, in this plot strand).