Two looks at Flannery O'Connor's life and work

Flannery O'Connor, the mystic of Milledgeville, Georgia, has been tending her flocks of peacocks elsewhere since 1964, when she died of lupus. Her fictions -- novels and stories that have inspired a generation of gothic tales and Southern mythologies -- remain uniquely her own, although she herself saw nothing special in her rural life. "Lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy," she said of herself.

Her brief life and unassuming character make O'Connor a subject of continuing fascination for many readers, an interest reminiscent of that in Harper Lee, another icon of Southern literature, who continues to live quietly in her home town of Monroeville, Alabama.

O'Connor's life and work features in two new books: Ann Napolitano's A Good Hard Look (Penguin Books. 2011) is a fictional recreation of O'Connor's final years in Milledgeville. Fantagraphics Books is publishing a first collection of O'Connor's youthful cartoons she drew for her high school and college publications in the early 1940s.

Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons is the first compilation of her graphic work in pen-and-ink and linoleum cuts. Before her writing career the young student aspired to be a cartoonist, and she developed a visually bold and eye-catching style. The results are witty and acid comments on campus life and American culture that show O'Connor developing her own acerbic point-of-view.

'Do you have any books the faculty doesn't particularly recommend?'

She was aware early that her opinions might be too strong for some: for an audience resistant to your views, O’Connor once wrote, “draw large and startling figures” -- a comment that can just as easily apply to her characters in her novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away.

She herself disliked it when reviewers called her fiction mean or cynical, though her stories often involved transformations through events that are painful and violent. "When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror," she commented after the publication of her collection A Good Man is Hard to Find in 1955. Her fractious, deceptively simple characters come to change by their own beliefs, a hallmark of the author's strong feelings towards her own Catholic faith; her stories are allegories about man's divinity, not lessons about about church doctrine.

Ann Napolitano's A Good Hard Look places the author in the center of a story populated with a cast of characters that struggle with their own very human problems, from uncertain marriages to the meddlings of the neighborhood busybody. Unlike O'Connor's outsized and almost freakish misfits, the Milledgeville folks make do with what they've got: mainly, themselves and the rituals of life in a small Georgia town.

O'Connor has her own doubts and insecurities and family issues: the presence of her hard-headed mother Regina gives the author a sense of balance as her health worsens and she begins to wonder if it was a terrible mistake “centering her life on a string of words typed on a page.”

Ann Napolitano

Escape from her own fate becomes a theme in the book. Finding a soul-mate in Melvin, who is teaching her to drive, O'Connor thinks of “flashing down the road with a man sitting next to her, that she was someone else, living a normal, contented life.” The choices of a normal life are in marked contrast to O'Connor's fictional creations -- the "large and startling figures" that she featured in her cartoons and that came to life in her stories.

The author was 39 when she died. Napolitano resists the temptation to make O'Connor's life and early death into one of the writer's own fictions -- the folks in Milledgeville are neighbors, after all, not gothic figures. A Good Hard Look is a fan's story and a good, inventive tale, one that O'Connor herself might take prickly pride in reading.

Three poems by Tomasz Jastrun from "On the Crossroads Of Asia and Europe"

"Afghanistan"

On the soldiers' shoulders

Ride the white doves of peace

With their eyes poked out

As long as the Afghan people

Are in need of help

The soldiers will remain

And remain and remain

We cry out

Butterflies and crickets in bondage

But who will understand

The language of butterflies and crickets

Those breathing freedom

Have a different set of problems

A shorter memory

They slip off to sleep untroubled

One day to wake up

In Afghanistan

"Scrap"

After us will be neither scrap metal

Nor a laugh

From beginning to end

We have had no illusions

All our uprisings

Lie packed in the foyer

Along with a toothbrush

And towel

When someone knocks on the door

The echo

Pounds through the empty years

But there is no call to action

No convoy to Siberia

Only the upstairs neighbor whose sink

Once again has overflowed

He comes wringing his hands to warn us

"Last Supper"

Thirteen of us still not released

A full table

Though missing

Are Christ and Judas

Victims of a cruel death

And we the living

Are joined together

To share our lost cause

The hand

With the rusted nail

These poems by Tomasz Jastrun appear in his prose and poetry collection On the Crossroads of Asia and Europe and are translated by David Bourne, published by Salmon Run Press, 2010. They appear at Artful Dodge, Bourne's online journal of writing in translation. Jastrun, born in Warsaw in 1950, was a member of Solidarity and his novels and essays have been published since 1978. He has written that The biggest psychological problem people have is giving and taking affection. On the Crossroads of Asia and Europe originally appeared, in Polish, in 1982.

An excerpt from "House of Stone," by Anthony Shadid

...In old Marjayoun, in what is now Lebanon, Isber Samara left a house that never demanded we stay or enter at all. It would simply be waiting, if shelter was necessary. Isber Samara left it for us, his family, to join us with the past, to sustain us, to be the setting for stories. After years of trying to piece together Isber's tale, I like to imagine his life in the place where the fields of the Houran stretched farther than even the dreamer he was — a rich man born of a poor boy's labors — could grasp.

In an old photo handed down, Isber Samara's heavy-seeming shoulders suggest the approach of the old man he would never become, but his expression retains a hint of mischief some might call youthful. More striking than handsome, his face is weathered from sun and wind, but his eyes are a remarkable Yemeni blue, rare among the Semitic browns of his landscape. Though the father of six, he seems beyond proper grooming. His hair, apparently reddish, is tousled; his mustache resembles an overgrown scattering of brush. Out to prove himself since he was a boy, Isber would one day come to believe that he had.

By the time the photo of Isber and his family was taken, he was forty or so, but I am drawn more to the Isber that he became — a father, no longer so ambitious, parted from his children, whom he sent off to America to save their lives. I wonder if he pictured them and their descendants — sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, on and on — moving through lives as unpredictable as his. Did he see us in years ahead, adrift, climbing the cracked steps and opening his doors?

At Isber's, the traveler is welcome, befitting the Bedouin tradition of hospitality that he inherited. The olive and plum trees stand waiting at this house of stone and tile, completed after World War I. The place remains in our old town where war has often stopped time and, like an image reflected in clear water, lingers as well in the minds of my family. We are a clan who never quite arrived home, a closely knit circle whose previous generations were displaced during the abandonment of our country decades ago. When we think of home, as origin and place, our thoughts turn to Isber's house.

Anthony Shadid

Built on a hill, the place speaks of things Levantine and of a way of life to which Isber Samara aspired. It recalls a lost era of openness, before the Ottoman Empire fell, when all sorts drifted through homelands shared by all. The residence stands in Hayy al-Serail, a neighborhood once as fine as any in the region, an enclave of limestone, pointed arches, and red tile roofs. The tiles here were imported from Marseilles and, in the 1800s, suggested international connections and cosmopolitan fashionableness. They were as emblematic of the style of the Levant as the tarbush hats worn by the Ottoman gentlemen who lived in the Hayy, where the silver was always polished and the coffee came often in the afternoon. Old patriarchs — ancient and dusty as the settees — wiped rheumy eyes with monogrammed handkerchiefs. Sons replaced fathers, carrying on treasured family names. Isber was not one so favored.

In a place and time not known for self-invention, Isber created Isber. His extended family, not noteworthy, consisted of "less than twenty houses." His furniture, though expensive and imported from Syria, was as recently acquired as his fortune, and his house stood out not just because of its newness. It was a place built with the labor of a rough-hewn merchant whose eye was distracted from accounts only by his wife, Bahija. It serves as a reminder of a period of rare cultivation and unimaginable tragedy; it announces what a well-intentioned but imperfect man can make of life. Isber's creation speaks of what he loved and what sustained him; it reminds us that everyday places say much, quietly. The double doors of the entrance are tall and wide for men like Isber, not types to be shut in. ...

From House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid. Shadid, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, died after an asthma attack in February caused by an allergy to the horses used by the smugglers who ferried him into Syria. (Photo by Terissa Schor at The Periscope Post.)