{"id":2377,"date":"2008-03-25T11:54:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-25T11:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/happy-birthday-dear-flannery.html"},"modified":"2008-03-25T11:54:00","modified_gmt":"2008-03-25T11:54:00","slug":"happy-birthday-dear-flannery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/happy-birthday-dear-flannery.html","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday, dear Flannery"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most influential and enduring Catholic writers in America remains Flannery O’Connor. Today is her birthday. And, over at Busted Halo<\/a>, a writer has taken a pilgrimage to her fabled Georgia homestead Andalusia: <\/p>\n

<\/a> You\u2019ll find her along the fence line of Memory Hill Cemetery, to the left. The grave sits in a family plot. There are Treanors and Clines\u2014relations of her mother\u2019s\u2014and then, finally at the edge, O\u2019Connors. A low, flat, plain marble gravestone, next to two just like it belonging to her parents. The etching, too, is plain: a cross, trimmed with \u201cIHS,\u201d and beneath it her full Christian name, Mary Flannery O\u2019Connor, the day she died (August 3, 1964), and the day, only 39 years earlier, when she was born: March 25, 1925.<\/p>\n

It was tempting, when I was a pilgrim in Flannery O\u2019Connor’s hometown, to think of what might have been for her. And it is tempting now, on her birthday. Lupus, the same disease that claimed her father, hobbled her then took her life long before she had tested the limits of her genius. Today, she would have been 83\u2014six years younger than Doris Lessing, who won this year\u2019s Nobel Prize and is still writing.<\/p>\n

But what O\u2019Connor left behind remains vibrantly alive. Two gawky, if brilliant, novels, and two collections of nearly immaculate short stories that dig into the deepest spiritual truths. A posthumous collection of essays, Mystery and Manners, that remains required reading for any aspiring, or established, Catholic writer. And an anthology of her correspondences, The Habit of Being, which is hilarious and humane, and one of the most entertaining documentations of Southern life in twentieth-century American literature.<\/p>\n

Milledgeville, Georgia is a town of about 16,000, two hours southeast of Atlanta. It\u2019s where O\u2019Connor lived, mastered her craft, died and is buried. The town remains a Flannery kind of place, slightly grotesque in that rural Georgia way that courses through her works (and that was shed long ago by larger cities like Atlanta and Augusta, where I live). Oddities abound, of a peculiarly Southern hue\u2014tiny churches poke through the woods on the edges of town, and advertisements line the roads for psychics and an exterminator business called Bug House.<\/p>\n

Up Columbia Road a few miles from the cemetery is the library of Georgia College and State University. Flannery went to school here, when it was still called Georgia State College for Women. A party was thrown for her in this library upon the 1950 publication of Wise Blood, her first novel. Today it holds many of her original manuscripts under lock and key, available only to scholars who give at least a week\u2019s notice. On public display, they keep a few of her most important possessions: a grand typewriter (kept under glass) where she wrote and re-wrote; her baptismal gown; books she owned by Faulkner and works of Christian apologetics.<\/p>\n

The walls in the exhibition room are lined with her citations, mostly Literary Achievement Awards from the Georgia Writers\u2019 Association. One from 1960 praises her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, for its portrayal of \u201cChrist and the sacraments, including\u2026the bread and wine of Communion\u201d\u2014an innocuously Protestant statement that must have drawn one of her typically wry pronouncements. This, after all, was a woman fiercely devoted to the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist. \u201cIf it\u2019s a symbol,\u201d she once quipped, \u201cI say to hell with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Further north, Columbia Road becomes U.S. 441 and the strip malls fan out on both sides of the highway. On the left side up a hill is Andalusia, Flannery\u2019s home, which sits back along an unpaved road away from the ugly commotion. Pulling up the driveway, it\u2019s easy to imagine the amusement O\u2019Connor would have felt today, knowing she lived across the street from an America\u2019s Best Value Inn, and next door to a Wal-Mart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You’ll want to read the rest<\/a>, and see what else the author discovered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most influential and enduring Catholic writers in America remains Flannery O’Connor. Today is her birthday. And, over at Busted Halo, a writer has taken a pilgrimage to her fabled Georgia homestead Andalusia: You\u2019ll find her along the fence line of Memory Hill Cemetery, to the left. The grave sits in a family…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":365,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-and-that"],"yoast_head":"\nHappy Birthday, dear Flannery - The Deacon's Bench<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/happy-birthday-dear-flannery.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Happy Birthday, dear Flannery - The Deacon's Bench\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"One of the most influential and enduring Catholic writers in America remains Flannery O’Connor. 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