'Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor' by Brad Gooch

Author of a biography of the poet Frank O'Hara, Brad Gooch is a sympathetic critic of both O'Connor's life and writings: the life sadly concluding with her death from disseminated lupus at age 39; the writings consisting of two novels and a few dozen brilliant short stories. A collection of her sparkling letters would appear posthumously.

On the basis of this relatively slim output, O'Connor has had her fiction and other prose published in the Library of America; she has also (Gooch informs us) become an academic industry of extraordinary proportions -- as of last year, 195 doctoral dissertations and 70 book-length studies. One can imagine what the inventively sharp-tongued woman would have said about such a phenomenon.

Perhaps the most original contribution Gooch makes to our understanding of O'Connor is his thorough filling-in of her early life in Savannah and in Milledgeville, Ga. Her father, Edward O'Connor, died of lupus when his daughter was 15; her mother, Regina, was a forceful, determined and conventional woman. She also had a number of aunts and uncles.

Flannery -- she would drop her first name, Mary, when she became a writer, asking, "Who was likely to buy the stories of an Irish washerwoman?" -- graduated from the Georgia State College for Women, then won a scholarship to the University of Iowa's graduate school of journalism.

After a semester, she transferred to the Iowa Writers' Workshop under the direction of Paul Engle, a creative writing program at the university that would become the most prestigious in America. O'Connor earned a master of fine arts degree there and would be the first famously successful writer to emerge from such workshop instruction.

In her years at Iowa, then in New York City and at Yaddo, the writers retreat in Saratoga, she became close friends with a number of literary talents, many of them, like herself, serious Roman Catholics. Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, and Robert Lowell were notable among them.

But O'Connor's likely intention to remain in the North as she worked on her first novel, "Wise Blood," and matured in her art of short fiction, received a crushing blow when, at age 25, she was diagnosed with lupus and went home to Georgia to live with her mother at Andalusia, a dairy farm near Milledgeville. Except for forays out to deliver lectures and give readings, she remained there, surrounded by her beloved peacocks and practicing her trade of writing with steady devotion for a few hours each morning.

One after another, her violent, lethally humorous stories appeared in "little magazines" like the Kenyon and Sewanee reviews. Her neighbors were shocked by such stories as "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," "Good Country People" and the one that would title her first book, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

One of those neighbors, quoted by Gooch, allowed that "I don't know where Mary Flannery met those people she wrote about, but it was certainly not in my house." Regina O'Connor, puzzled and somewhat dismayed at her daughter's strange occupation, once asked about her second novel, "The Violent Bear It Away," "Does it have symbolisms in it? I know when I was coming along they didn't have symbolisms."

Regina and other Milledgeville women provided the impetus for the self-righteous, "decent" ladies in the stories who usually meet their comeuppance, often in the form of religious revelation. Gooch usefully describes the genesis of individual stories and the presence in them, transformed, of people O'Connor knew, such as Erik Lankjear, a close friend whom she "dated" (he once kissed her goodbye) and whom she turned into the sinister trickster Manley Pointer in "Good Country People" who seduces the heroine, then steals her wooden leg.

Gooch is a good literary critic but never quite faces up to what, for this reader, is the most fascinating aspect of O'Connor's art. Time and again her stories conclude in disturbing, often violent ways. O'Connor wants to attach religious meaning to these endings, either in the story itself or in later comments and letters about it.

For example, in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the grandmother, a chattering woman full of platitudes and received wisdom, is murdered along with her son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren by an escaped convict known as "The Misfit." As a Catholic writer, O'Connor saw the event as an instance of grace descending through the grandmother and touching The Misfit. Yet after he kills her, The Misfit opines, "She would of been a good woman ... if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

Whether the wild, idiomatic extravagance of this can be translated into theological language such as O'Connor proposes is a question readers should consider, here and in other stories by this absolutely original talent. Brad Gooch's biography will help bring that talent into clearer sight.

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William H. Pritchard teaches English at Amherst College. His collection of essays, "On Poets and Poetry," is forthcoming.