Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia - O'Connor lives on in a personal doc, rumours of her 'cancellation' notwithstanding
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-minus
The documentary Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia profiles Flannery O’Connor, who died at 39 in 1964, and was a sort of sacred oddity of American literature. Her violent, funny and enigmatic stories about flawed human beings in the “Christ -haunted” South were written in a precise blend of vernacular and literary prose that is magnetic, weird and disturbing.
Illustration from Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find
If you’ve read her at all, you probably know that she lived most of her life in rural Georgia living with her mother, raising peacocks, and that her work was rooted in her suffering from the painful auto-immune disease lupus and in her hard-headed intellectual Catholic faith.
O’Connor has been resurrected in the news recently, 56 years after her death. In June, writer Paul Elie wrote a piece in The New Yorker entitled How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?, quoting her personal correspondence and establishing, without ambiguity, that she wrote racist things as late as 1964, the year of her death: (“You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. I don’t like negroes.”)
Following a student petition at Loyola College Maryland, O’Connor’s name was stripped from a women’s dormitory and replaced by that of the late civil rights activist and nun, Thea Bowman.
Throughout this month, there has been flurry of concerned online essays expressing outrage that O’Connor has been “cancelled.” (Several sources insisted that a common Twitter declaration was “Flannery O’Connor is dead to me.” In fact, I can’t find a single example, but if I did, I’d assume it was intended to be funny.)
Flannery O’Connor
In practice, apart from losing her name on a building at a college she never attended, O’Connor’s brand may be boosted by the controversy, and offers another chance to consider the differences between an artist and her art.
The New Yorker article also addresses the film, Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia, as part of the history of polishing O’Connor’s image. The film certainly does not ignore O’Connor’s attitudes and fictional treatment of race. It just doesn’t make it particularly central to her reputation.
Co-directed by Mark Bosco, a Jesuit priest who teaches a course on O’Connor at Georgetown, and Elizabeth Coffman, who teaches film at Loyola University Chicago, it’s part of the PBS American Masters series, with the typical line of talking heads, photographs and archival clips that seem more suitable to the classroom than the movie theatre.
Some of the interviews are irrelevant (Tommy Lee Jones, Conan O’Brien) and others more or less insightful. Those include writers such Alice Walker and New Yorker theatre critic, Hilton Als. There are also interviews with her biographer Brad Gooch.
Archival clips are mixed up with contemporary footage in a sometimes confusing way, though it’s satisfying to hear the unpretentious warmth of her longtime editor, Robert Giroux (who died in 2008). Then there’s the affectionate observations of O’Connor’s friend and one-time landlady, the magnificently patrician Sally Fitzgerald (who died in 2000) the editor of O’Connor’s posthumously published essays and letters.
It's amusing also to see Erik Langkjaer, a handsome Danish text book salesman who briefly dated O’Connor and became the model for one of her sardonic tales, Good Country People, about a Bible salesman who steals an obnoxious intellectual woman’s wooden leg.
O’Connor’s letters are read aloud by Mary Steenburgen, who gives O’Connor’s prose a helpful drawl. But there’s an awfully misguided idea of using animation to illustrate some of O’Connor’s stories (O’Connor aspired to be a cartoonist).
Other visual material includes brief clips from a couple of television adaptations and some segments from John Huston’s 1979 film, Wise Blood, weird and striking enough to make you want to see the film again.
The most lively footage here is from a 1955 television appearance, when O’Connor went to New York on a book tour, sitting stiffly in a chair while chain-smoking literary journalist Harvey Breit peppers her with questions. When Breit asks her about being a “regional writer” she goes deep quickly:
“I think that to overcome regionalism, you must have a great deal of self-knowledge. I think that to know yourself is to know your region, and that it’s also to know the world, and in a sense, paradoxically, it’s also to be an exile from that world.”
The power of the writer’s “voice” is not usually intended to be literal, though there was something in O’Connor’s deep Georgia rhythm, the unrehearsed expression of her thought process, that sent a shiver up my spine.
After the closing credits, I went to my bookshelf, sat down and re-read three of her stories.
Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia. Directed by Mark Bosco and Elizabeth Coffman. With Brad Gooch, Hilton Als, Alice Walker, Sally Fitzgerald, Robert Giroux, and others. Flannery is available through Hot Docs at Home.