Flannery OConnors Manhattan Memorial

Credit Photograph by Mondadori Portfolio via Getty

This week, Flannery OConnor was inducted into the American Poets Corner at St. John the Divine, the only shrine to American literature in the country (or so a church representative told me). Upon entering the cathedral for the small induction ceremony, attendees were greeted by two gigantic, sparkling sculptures suspended from the ceilingthey are phoenixes, part of an installation by the Chinese artist Xu Bing, but at first glance you might mistake them for peacocks, like the ones that OConnor raised on her familys Georgia farm, Andalusia. Few of the previous Poets Corner inductees were as suited to the ecclesiastical setting as the deeply religious OConnor. (Last years inductee was John Berryman; before that were Katherine Anne Porter, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, and Tennessee Williams.) Those who spoke during the ceremony stood in front of a shining cross, towering choir stalls, and giant pillars illuminated with glowing yellow lights. A booming echo made them sound like somewhat unintelligible voices from beyond. The effect was fitting, evoking simultaneously OConnors keen sense of the ominous, the numinous, and the ironic.

The first speaker, a priest named George Piggford who wore black robes, gave an erudite talk about OConnors commitment to the sacrament of the Eucharist (she once wrote that it was the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable) and her debt to the Jesuit mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He discussed a passage that OConnor underlined in her copy of de Teilhards The Divine Milieu, which argues that the great sacramental operation does not cease with the transformation of bread into flesh and wine into blood during mass, but continues out through time and space to transform all earthly matter into divine substance. The cosmic Eucharist, Piggford called it. It pictures the worlds corrupt bulk as the starting point of a miracle that will result in a universe that is tangible but pure. (OConnors work is full of nothing if not corrupt bulk.) The Divine Milieu carries the dedication Sic deus dilexit mundum:For those who love the world. Its an ambiguous line. Is it pointing to reform for those who, against Biblical orders, love the things below more than the things above? Or is it offering validation of that love and a way that it might be turned into something holy?

The writer and poet Alfred Corn spoke about letters he exchanged with OConnor when he was in college. After seeing OConnor speak at Emory University, Corn wrote to her to ask about his struggles with unbelief, and she not only responded but carried on a correspondence with him. I dont know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief, she wrote to him. She told him to cultivate Christian skepticism. He was nineteen years old at the time; she was thirty-seven. She walked on crutches because of the lupus that had plagued her for almost half her lifeshe would die two years later, at the age of thirty-nine. The chronology of OConnors life in the Library of America edition of her collected works sometimes reads like a list of literary triumphs alternating with medical defeats: Completes story Everything That Rises Must Converge is closely followed by Proposes operation to insert steel hip joints, but Dr. Merrill forbids it. But Corn described her as a person who seemed not much interested in accidents that happen to the body without choice. She was interested, rather, in weighty moral questions, and not much concerned with anything outside the business of soul-making.

Marilyn Nelson, the cathedrals current poet in residence, began her remarks with a tribute to the strength of OConnors mother, Regina, who ran the farm at Andalusia and watched her only child endure the same painful disease that had killed her husband. She sustained Flannery through the difficult years and never lost her faith, Nelson said. The world owes her a debt of thanks. Flannery was close to Regina and dependent on her, but their relationship was complicated and vexed. In Brad Goochs 2010 biography of OConnor, he reports that Regina initially kept Flannerys lupus diagnosis from herFlannery found out she had the disease only after a friend let the secret slip. Dont ever tell Regina you told me, Flannery told the friend. Because if you do she will never tell you anything else. I might want to know something else sometime. Robley Wilson, the former editor of theNorth American Review,once described meeting Miss Regina, who came from an old Catholic family of some social standing, a few years after the OConnors death. On the visit, he and his wife sat one Sunday afternoon in her mansion (one of the few Milledgeville homes not destroyed by Sherman on his march to the sea), drinking sherry and nibbling dainty, thin mints; then joined her the next morning at Andalusia, where we met the famous peacocks and an old couple Regina referred to as my darkies. Many of OConnors most famous stories (A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Everything That Rises Must Converge, Good Country People) feature mothers who are intrusive, embarrassing, obliviously racist, and meet unfortunate ends. I wonder what Regina made of them.

Not that the mothers are exceptional. As Nelson pointed out, one of the most consistent features of OConnors fiction is the ugliness of her characters. Nelson quoted Alice Walkers observation, in an essay, that OConnor wrote about the South, and in particular Southern whites, with not a whiff of Magnolia. Black, white, male, and female, OConnors characters, Walker says, are miserable, ugly, narrow-minded, atheistic, and of intense racial smugness and arrogance, with not a graceful, pretty one anywhere who is not, at the same time, a joke. The characters and the world they inhabit are fundamentally twisted, unable to move in a straight line.

Dark is a word often used to describe OConnors fiction. But darkness can have many hues; in twentieth-century literature, it often means emptiness, the horror a nothingness that cant be filled. In OConnor, the looming darkness isnt a void that threatens to swallow you; its the shadow of a piano thats about to fall on your head. OConnors work is dense with corrupt matter in need of a chemical changethe horror isnt in whats missing but in whats there, the evil lying in the earth beneath your feet and in your own bones. Her characters are murdered, cruelly abandoned, or meet with freak accidents. One old woman is gored by a bull. OConnor painted finely textured portraits of the time and place she knew, but she was also writing about prehistoric forces and eternal destinies. In her prayers, which she recorded in adiary, she asks God for goodness and help with her writing she put it in terms of a cosmic realignment: You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earths shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon.

Marilyn Nelson told me that inducting OConnor this year was a fairly easy consensus decision. More contentious was the selection of the quotation for her plaque. The challenge was to tread a line between what Nelson called OConnors grand pronouncements and what Alfred Corn called her southern cracker-barrel humor. The quote they settled on is from a 1953 letter that OConnor wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, to whom she became close after meeting them at Yaddo. Describing her fathers contracting of Lupus, she writes, there was nothing for it but the undertaker. Her own disease could be controlled somewhat with medication, but its clear she must have frequently been in pain. She has enough energy to write, though, she says, and then she sums up her tussle with her body in the line thats now on her upper-Manhattan memorial: I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.

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Flannery OConnors Manhattan Memorial