Southern Discomfort

Over at Book Forum , Wendy Lesser has written a fascinating review of Brad Gooch’s new biography Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor :

Gooch clearly loves O’Connor, but they are just as clearly a bad match (as are so many of the pairings—religious, marital, filial, random—in O’Connor’s stories). She is demonically witty. He reports everything with a straight face. She wrote by scraping her fictions down to a bare minimum, cutting out all the connective tissue, clearing away all the furniture that usually surrounds literary characters. He never met a fact or a detail he didn’t like, and he’s included them all. We get a whole paragraph describing the baby carriage O’Connor was wheeled around in as an infant, as well as the entirely predictable Latin words spoken by the Catholic priest at her baptism . . . .

What Poe had, and what O’Connor either inherited or, more likely, invented, was the courage to confront the horrifying without flinching. In Poe, this seems unallied to any belief system: Cruelty alone (his characters’ cruelty toward one another, his toward them) prevails, and madness is the ordinary state. O’Connor has taken on these extreme conditions, but she does so with the word of God ringing in the background. It is never a word we can take at face value; often it comes to us from the mouths of corrupt preachers, congenital morons, cruel parents, hate-wielding provincials, and madmen of all stripes and colors. But it keeps sounding nonetheless and refuses to be ignored.