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[clapper clacking]
[ducks quacking]
[cows mooing]
[soft music]
[crutches on floor]
[clothes hangers moving]
[zipper]
[paper rustling]
[door shutting]
[car starting]
- This program is an attempt to bring forward
the most exciting new books we know of.
Such a book is a collection of short stories,
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find."
One critic called her perhaps the most naturally gifted
of the youngest generation of American novelists.
Here she is, Flannery O'Connor.
[upbeat music]
- [Flannery] The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida.
She wanted to visit some of her connections
in East Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance...
- To change Bailey's mind.
Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy.
- [Flannery] "Now look here, Bailey," she said,
"see here, read this.
Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit
is a-loose from the federal pen and headed toward Florida."
- I love Southern writing.
I particularly loved Flannery O'Connor.
You think it's this bitter old alcoholic
who's writing these really funny dark stories,
and then you find out she's a woman
and that she's devoutly religious.
- "I hope you don't think,"
he said in a lofty indignant tone,
"that I believe in that crap."
[typewriter keys clicking]
- She was able to go straight to the craziness
without always trying to make the craziness black
or the craziness white.
She just saw the mystery of the craziness.
- Flannery O'Connor's life in some ways
could have come out of a Flannery O'Connor story.
It was the illness I think that made her
the writer that she is.
[soft music]
- Flannery O'Connor is one of the maybe
five or six writers in the history of the world
who is least afraid to look at the darkness.
- You have a wolf dressed up as a grandma.
Something's going to happen.
[soft music]
[rooster crowing]
[typewriter keys clicking]
- [Narrator] "Whenever I'm asked
why southern writers particularly have a penchant
for writing about freaks, I say it is because
we are still able to recognize one."
[upbeat music]
- [Barker] All right, ladies and gentlemen, step right up.
[speaking drowned out by crowd noise]
- In a small town, you can lie, you can steal,
you can commit adultery, you can even murder somebody,
but you can't not go to church. [laughs]
[church bell ringing]
[people chatting]
[upbeat music]
[dog barking]
[marching band music]
- Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia,
into an Irish Catholic immigrant community
and she was in a largely Protestant town,
but a very cosmopolitan town.
[upbeat music]
- She's far more American than she is Irish
and she's far more southern than she is American.
- She was shy.
I mean she was not timid, and she was considered
a little uppity by the nuns in the parochial school
she attended in Savannah.
She had a rather fortunate childhood,
a very fortunate childhood.
Her father adored her, and so did her mother of course.
But they saw her in quite different ways
and she was able to see herself in different ways.
- [Narrator] "When I was five
I had an experience that marked me for life.
Pathe News sent a photographer from New York
to Savannah to take a picture of a chicken of mine."
- [Newsreader] Here's Mary O'Connor of Savannah, Georgia
holding the only chicken in the world
that actually walks backwards.
When she advances, she retreats.
To go forward, she goes back,
and when she arrives, she's really leaving.
- You'd see her at age five calm and in charge.
I mean, there's something about her
that's bewitching at that age.
She came back to this incident often.
She began to raise these special birds.
[birds honking]
She would joke about how she would then begin to raise
one eyed chickens to try to lure the film company
to come back to town, but they never did.
[geese honking]
[typewriter keys clicking]
[upbeat music]
- I would say her signature story
is "A Temple of the Holy Ghost,"
because it envisions this young girl
who is clearly a version of Flannery O'Connor.
- The story is very provocative
in exactly the way that O'Connor's stories usually are.
For one thing, she incorporates what she calls a freak.
A person who is not like everybody else,
a person who is radically non-conformist.
[girls singing in Latin]
Two visiting cousins go to see at the fair,
this intersex person.
- The two girls are singing in Latin.
They're Catholic girls, they go to Catholic school.
The boys in the town, they call it juicing.
[girls singing in Latin]
- The child in the story is too young to go,
so she doesn't actually get to see the person,
but she is fascinated by this idea
of someone who can be both male and female
and yet neither male nor female.
This child's faith life is in some ways
a version of Flannery's own faith life
in which she has doubts.
- [Narrator] "He could strike you this way,
but he has not, amen."
- She decides "I could never be a saint,"
but she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.
And then she thinks about the ways
in which she would be willing to die.
Boiled in oil, maybe, attacked by animals,
probably being torn apart by animals.
[lion growling]
- if you went to mass, you heard those prayers
over and over again.
You were encouraged to pray silently,
even oddly to contemplate at a very young age.
- [Narrator] "Her mind began to get quiet and then empty.
But when the priest raised the monstrance
with the host shining ivory colored in the center of it,
she was thinking of the tent at the fair
that had the freak in it.
You are God's imp, don't you know."
- What's happening here is something so remarkable
that the profane meets with the sacred
and it's within that comic meeting that the stories operate.
This is the way Flannery O'Connor works.
You either get it or you don't,
and if you don't, then don't go to the carnival.
- [Narrator] "God's spirit has a dwelling in you,
don't you know.
Amen."
♪ Oh you go to your church
♪ And I'll go to mine
♪ But let's walk along together ♪
♪ Our Heavenly Father is the same ♪
♪ So let's walk along together
- What does a writer try to do in a short story?
Or what does a writer try to do in a novel?
What is the secret of writing?
- Well, I think that a serious fiction writer
describes an action only in order to reveal a mystery
because he may be revealing the mystery to himself,
at the same time that he's revealing it to everyone else
and he may not even succeed in revealing it to himself,
but I think he must sense its presence.
- Her father, he was a man like many people
I know of that generation.
He simply couldn't make it.
The old economies in the south had just collapsed.
Since she was in Faulkner's generation.
The cities were where things were happening.
- They moved from Savannah to Atlanta
because that's where he could get work.
Flannery did not like it there, nor did her mother.
Regina, her mother and Flannery relocated
to Milledgeville to the Cline family mansion.
Edward would come home and visit them on weekends,
but they were used to living without him
for five days a week.
- Regina had grown up in rather genteel
circumstances in Milledgeville.
Her family, the Cline family where a very prominent
family in the town, much respected by other people there.
One of the very few Roman Catholic families.
The little church there may have been
largely paid for by one of her ancestors.
[muffled choir singing]
[priest speaking softly]
- Her mother had 15 brothers and sisters,
and a number of them still lived in the house.
Miss Mary still lived there.
Mr. Hugh, Miss Kate who Flannery called the Duchess.
Some great aunts.
So she was used to people getting sick, dying, strokes.
She always had a strong sense of mortality.
[upbeat music]
- The O'Connors had no money.
The money came from Aunt Mary who had had inherited money
and had land and these were not integrationists,
I can tell you.
The Jews of Charleston married the Jews of Savannah.
So the Catholics married the Catholics of Milledgeville
married the Catholics of Savannah, Augusta, so forth.
The time that Flannery lived,
the three Ks were always Koons, kikes and Catholics.
That is African-Americans, Jews and Catholics.
- Catholics were very suspect.
So there was a kind of siege mentality by Catholics.
But this was good for Flannery because it meant
that she didn't take for granted widespread approval.
She ignored the disapproval of her religion.
She ignored the disapproval of her fiction.
- If you look at her in that direction,
you don't get this kind of romantic artist.
You get someone who's writing out of a specific time,
a specific code and a specific set of manners.
And the interesting thing is what she found
in all those manners was mystery.
[soft music]
- Flannery's father was the one
who encouraged her literary ambitions.
Her mother was interested in improving her.
Corrective shoes, braces, everything.
The father on the other hand, liked her as she was.
- Ed O'Connor is a sensitive charismatic man
who really went for her work and her cartoons
and her writing and her creativity.
Her father would carry around with him every day
these little drawings and things that she made
and show them to people.
He was very proud of them.
- Her drawings are marvelous.
These sharp faces.
Flannery would write to her father,
little letters in the house,
and they'd be under the napkins at breakfast.
And then he would write her little letters back.
- He had wanted to write himself,
as she noted in one of her letters.
She was 12 when he fell ill, 15 when she lost him.
And he died from lupus.
They had no treatment for lupus.
[soft music]
- The death of Edward O'Connor, no doubt,
was a major turning point in her life.
Up until that time, she had had
a reasonably happy childhood.
She was much loved. She was an only child.
She had the full attention of both of her parents,
and the loss of that suddenly was a huge void for her.
- "I suppose what I mean about my father
is that he would've written well if he could have.
Needing people badly and not getting them
may turn you in a creative direction.
He needed the people, I guess and got them
or rather wanted them and got them.
I wanted them and didn't."
[soft music]
[birds chirping]
[typewriter keys clicking]
- [Narrator] "Anybody who survived his childhood
has enough information about life
to last him the rest of his days."
[typewriter keys clicking]
♪ Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition ♪
♪ And we'll all stay free
[upbeat jazzy music]
[speaking drowned out by music]
- Flannery O'Connor started doing her writing
during World War II when she was a student
in Milledgeville at the Georgia State College for Women.
There was actually an interesting important moment.
She was in a women's college.
Most of the men were away fighting the war.
- The women professors here were encouraging
the female students to think about the various things
that they could do with their lives,
and Flannery picked up on, it's about
how the world was changing.
[upbeat music]
- [Sally Fitzgerald] She was very gifted as a caricaturists
and you could see that from the work.
[person whistles]
- [Brad Gooch] She does cartoons which were then published
in the student newspaper and in the yearbook
about life on campus, but they're not
happy prom sorority visions of life on campus
- [Narrator] "Oh, don't worry about
not getting on the Dean's list.
It's no fun going to the picture show at night anyway."
- [Brad Gooch] When the Waves are on campus,
who were navy women, she makes fun of them
as if they're an occupying force taking over the campus.
This early sensibility is both sarcastic,
empathetic, and funny and weird all at once.
[bowstring twanging]
- [Sally Fitzgerald] She thought she wanted to be
a serious writer who would support herself by cartoons.
- [Brad Gooch] She actually has
great ambitions for her cartoons.
She would send them to the New Yorker
when James Thurber was the great New Yorker cartoonist.
[upbeat music]
- She kept an orderly journal,
which she called higher mathematics.
What she did was very interesting because we learned
so much about her, how she felt about her shyness.
She said "sometimes I think I would give it all up,
for just a little social ease."
- [Narrator] "One new quarter of college begun.
I achieved enough success in English 360
by making a rather humorous remark
and then not laughing at it while the others did.
This is the sort of me I strive to build up.
The cool, sophisticated, clever wit.
The inarticulate confused blunderer overwhelms
the CSCW most of the time."
[upbeat music]
- She would never call herself a feminist,
but she saw what her classmates were doing.
She could leave mother, she could become
a political cartoonist and have a career.
- [Narrator] "Today, I envision myself
as a cartoonist block printer of national repute.
I'll make $400,000 before graduating from college
and with it in tow, prepare for the leisurely life
of a lethargic scholar and traveler."
- [Marshall Bruce] She knew that was going outside
the usual prescribed roles for a woman.
- [Brad Gooch] In these early cartoons,
you can almost see, weirdly, O'Connor's aesthetic intact.
- [Narrator] "Today I'm devoted to realism.
I will become a realist.
I will take note of the things around me accurately.
I wonder if some of these mental, emotional, social things
that are happening to me and the people have around me
could crystallize into a novel.
I must write a novel."
[upbeat music]
[typewriter keys clicking]
- The writing program there was very high powered,
I suppose it was the most famous in the country
and Flannery found herself in a literary hotbed.
- There is no Flannery O'Connor without leaving Georgia.
She's around people who get her maybe for the first time.
She gets exposed to literature, I think in a way
that she never had been before.
I think maybe at Iowa is the first time she didn't
feel like the absolutely smartest person in the room.
- Paul Engle had just started a very important
writers program, attracting all these soldiers
coming back from World War II who wanted
to write the great American novel.
Southern fiction was the hot fiction
and William Faulkner was the great modernist writer.
- She said to herself, she'd never read Faulkner,
never read Kafka and never read
any of the southern writers.
These were all new to her.
- The men in the class were making fun of her
for her writing and also for her southern accent.
Whenever I spoke to someone about O'Connor who
had been at Iowa Writer's Workshop,
they always mentioned this accent as something
so completely foreign and incomprehensible
as if she were speaking Mandarin.
- Workshops can be pretty brutal. [laughs]
- She was very shy.
People who were there, thought maybe
she wouldn't be much of a writer,
but the professors at the workshop
instantly knew that she was talented.
- They would tend to pick Flannery's work
out of the pile of student work and sort of recognize
this tone and this idiom in which she was writing,
to the annoyance of some of her fellow male students
who didn't understand why she was getting attention.
- Paul Engle recognized her talent at once
and immediately began to make a reading list for her.
And she'd drank it in.
She read Henry James.
She read the Russians. Dostoevsky.
She read everything at that point.
Then she knew what she wanted to do.
- One of the things O'Connor is trying to figure out
while she's here at Iowa is not only how to be
a good writer, but how to be a faithful Catholic writer.
What does it mean to put these two seemingly disparate
parts of her life and her personality together?
[soft music]
- If you take a look at the prayer journal,
her transcribed prayers that she was even copying out
while she was in graduate school, she was spending
a surprising amount of time talking to God
about the subconscious and the unconscious
- [Brad Gooch] Instead of going to the tavern every night
with the students, she went every morning to church.
And she worried over and even asked the priest
about dealing with race in her work, writing about
these characters, prostitutes and things like that.
She was trying to work out, almost sweetly
and innocently, her Catholicism.
- [Narrator] "Oh dear God,
I want to write a novel, a good novel.
I want to do this for a good feeling and for a bad one.
The bad one is uppermost, the psychologists say
it is a natural one."
- She's completely humble in her enterprise.
You see it in her prayer journal.
She's not trying to put herself forward as the storyteller,
as the wise woman, as the clever girl.
"I must write down that I am to be an artist,
not in the sense of aesthetic frippery,
but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship.
Otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually,
like this today.
I do not want to be lonely all my life,
but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God."
It's unbelievable.
- How is she going to find the stories
that she knows she needs to tell
and how is she going to tell them?
And that's really the question that she's asking God,
which is to say herself.
[soft music]
- It's a tremendous and astonishing in some way,
unmovable faith that I don't think
contemporary writers of any kind could sustain.
- [Hilton Als] I think Flannery O'Connor's travels,
I think they're vital.
You don't know what home is until you leave it.
- [Narrator] "Dear God, I cannot
love thee the way I want to.
You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see
and myself is the earth's shadow that keeps me
from seeing all the moon."
[upbeat music]
- After being at the Writers Workshop for three years,
she was admitted to Yaddo, a program in Saratoga Springs
where writers famously went and were able
to devote themselves to their writing.
There was a kind of southern renaissance.
Truman Capote had been there, Carson McCullers.
She changes from Mary Flannery to Flannery O'Connor
in this period, partly to escape the Southern double name
and also because as a writer in that period,
being a woman writer was already difficult.
When she sent out some of her first stories to magazines,
she got at least one rejection letter back
addressed to Mr. Flannery O'Connor.
Yaddo was very connected with a kind of bohemianism
and most of the tales of Yaddo are tales
of Carson McCullers being drunk
and everyone being drunk apparently.
- [Narrator] "This is not sin but experience
and if you do not sleep with the opposite sex
than it is assumed you sleep with your own."
- Her time at Yaddo was intense and complicated.
Lowell is there. Elizabeth Hardwick's there.
And she has a big crush on Lowell
in a way that's heartbreaking.
He was very sexy, very good looking,
but he was with Elizabeth Hardwick who was
kind of a glamor girl, also a southern girl.
- It might have been heady times for her
to be a companion protege of someone like Robert Lowell.
- [Narrator] "You ask about Cal Lowell.
I feel almost too much about him to be able
to get to the heart of it.
He is a kind of grief to me."
- [Brad Gooch] In his late twenties,
he'd already won a Pulitzer Prize.
Lowell was haunted by Christianity.
He was almost projecting onto O'Connor
a kind of Catholic sainthood.
- [Narrator] "I watched him that winter
come back into the church.
I had nothing to do with it,
but of course it was a great joy to me."
- [Brad Gooch] At the same time that she was writing
"Wise Blood," about a Christ-haunted character
who's also falling apart all the time.
- [Mary Gordon] He's crazy. He's bipolar.
He got her involved in this anticommunist witch hunt.
- [Brad Gooch] Lowell decided that the director
of the program had been harboring a communist
named Agnes Smedley and then he accused her of this.
He had O'Connor testifying against her,
which caused the whole place to kind of
blow apart for awhile.
- The communist party is the minority,
but a dangerous minority.
I believe that the entire nation
should be alerted to its menace today.
- [Brad Gooch] Flannery was walking through this
kind of political minefield that was going on
in America at the time.
- I hate communism.
No concern whatever for the individual person.
- It came down to that communism was atheistic
and was against her religion.
- Not the most admirable moment of her life,
but I think she would have done anything he asked her to do.
- [Brad Gooch] The upshot was that they all had to leave.
Sort of fine for Elizabeth Hardwick who had
an apartment in New York and fine for Robert Lowell,
but for Flannery O'Connor, she now had no place to go.
- [Narrator] "We have been very upset at Yaddo lately
and all the guests are leaving in a group Tuesday.
The revolution.
I'll probably have to be in New York a month or so
and I'll be looking for a place to stay.
Oh, this has been very disruptive to the book
and it's changed my plans entirely as I definitely
won't be coming back to Yaddo."
[soft music]
[pen scratching]
[cars and llama honking]
- [Brad Gooch] O'Connor was living in Manhattan.
She made two trips up to the Cloisters.
There was an affinity between her work
and the medieval aesthetic, and especially
the mixing of the spiritual with the ribald
and the humorous and the comic and the grotesque.
- [Flannery] There were reasons that intensified
the grotesque quality of some writing in these terms.
I feel that the grotesque quality of my own work
is intensified by the fact that I'm
both a southern and a Catholic writer.
[upbeat music]
- [Brad Gooch] Lowell helpfully, maybe guiltily
takes her to meet Robert Fitzgerald, translator and poet
and Sally Fitzgerald, who then become
O'Connor's really closest friends
and kind of a second family for her.
- One afternoon the doorbell rang,
and Cal was standing there with a shy young woman
in corduroy slacks and navy peacoat.
Flannery had been living in a furnished room
in someone's apartment up on the Upper West Side.
And she was pretty miserable.
So we said, "Well, why don't you come and live with us,
and be our boarder?"
[typewriter keys clicking]
- And I think becomes a kind of daughter of the house.
I don't think she ever yearned to be a wife or a mother.
I think her female identity was most importantly daughter.
- Underlying all that was the process
of writing "Wise Blood."
The struggle and the rewriting and the rewriting.
As young as she was, she was still
in her early twenties, I guess.
Here's a big revelation.
I think we all write somewhere in our notebooks,
"Oh, this is no good," you know?
I think you can see in her letters about working
on "Wise Blood," and the process that she went through,
her first publisher who didn't get it.
- Flannery said that the editor at Holt
treats me like a dim-witted campfire girl.
- He called her prematurely arrogant.
- [Brad Gooch] And O'Connor, very young, I mean,
completely stands up for herself and the possibility
that this book will never be published and just says
that I'm not writing this kind of novel.
- [Sally Fitzgerald] Publishers never intimidated her.
- [Narrator] "I am not writing a conventional novel,
and I think that the quality of the novel I write
will derive precisely from the peculiarity or the aloneness,
if you will, of the experience I write from."
- She was very clear-eyed.
You know, there are people you take one look at,
and you know, that's a bum, or that's a liar.
With her, it was, that's an honest person.
I published every book she wrote.
- One day she said, "You know, I think I'd
better see a doctor, because I can't
raise my arms to the typewriter."
I made the appointment with the doctor.
He said, "I suggest that when you go back to Milledgeville,
you check into the hospital and have
a complete physical examination."
- When she left New York on the train,
she wasn't feeling well.
When Uncle Louis met her at the station in Atlanta,
he said that she looked like she was a thousand years old.
She was so sick.
- Even when she knew that she was sick,
she thought she had arthritis.
She kept expecting to come back.
Doctor Arthur Merrill in Atlanta recognized it.
It sounds like lupus. Bring her in here today.
And when he saw her, he realized
that it was lupus, and it was advanced.
He told her mother, but her mother,
knowing that the father had died of the same disease,
thought that the shock would be too great for Flannery
and decided not to tell her.
Mrs. O'Connor told us of this decision.
Of course, we honored it.
She lost her hair.
She was rather disfigured by the medicine.
It could be combated, although not cured, by cortisone.
This is the way she was able to live as long as she did.
Flannery continued to talk about her arthritis
and the fact that she was looking forward
to getting back to Connecticut.
Never did send for her books, never sent for her clothes.
- She never stopped writing.
She was a good stonemason, good artisan,
so that way in everything.
Virgil wrote a line a day.
Flaubert wrote a paragraph a day, but they were craftsmen.
They weren't trying to save the world.
- [Narrator] "In a sense, sickness is a place
more instructive than a long trip to Europe.
It's a place where there's no company,
where nobody can follow."
[typewriter keys clicking]
[upbeat banjo music]
- I'm a preacher.
- What church?
- Church of Truth Without Christ.
- Protestant? Or is it something foreign?
- Oh, no, ma'am, it's Protestant.
- People did not really understand "Wise Blood"
when it first came out.
They all mistook her first book
as being the work of a nihilist.
- There ain't but one thing that I want you to understand,
and that's that I don't believe in anything.
- Nothing at all?
- Nothing.
- [Angela O'Donnell] Primarily because Hazel Motes
is one of O'Connor's characters who is running away from God
but is hounded by God.
- Some preacher's left his mark on you.
- [Angela O'Donnell] Always doing
the most outrageous things.
Going to a whorehouse,
preaching the church of Christ without Christ.
- The church without Christ don't have a Jesus.
- [Angela O'Donnell] Murdering people in the street.
And yet, every time he turns around,
there's that ragged figure that's following him,
that's following him.
- Why don't we go someplace and have us some fun?
- He can't estrange God, and there's no way
you could ever entirely estrange yourself from God.
So O'Connor understands this. This is her theology.
- There's no peace for the redeemed.
If they was three crosses there, and Jesus Christ hung-
- When I went to do her first novel as a film,
I in a very calculated way, I chose a director
who was an atheist.
Because I did not want some soppy religious thing,
and she would have hated it.
- When John Huston decided to make a movie of it
many, many years later, I wondered,
how is he going to do it?
- Where you come from is gone.
Where you thought you were going to, weren't never there.
- [Michael Fitzgerald] But when she wrote the novel
in my parents' house, my father was at the time translating
the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, which she had never read.
[indistinct speaking]
She was so shocked by the Oedipus Rex
that she reworked the entire novel to accommodate
Hazel Motes' blinding himself, as Oedipus does.
- There is where the razor's edge of "Wise Blood"
and Flannery O'Connor really are.
- [Woman] Mr. Motes, what's that wire around you for?
- How can a person really be a saint?
What kind of a saint would that person be, she wondered?
- Now I remember on the last day, John,
his hands over my shoulders leaned in and said,
"Ben, I think I've been had."
By the end, he realized, I've told another story
than the one I thought I was telling.
I've told Flannery O'Connor's story.
- Huston kind of looks down, and he looks up at everybody
and looks around, and he says, "Jesus wins."
[people talking over each other]
♪ I would sleep on a bed of nails ♪
♪ Til my back was torn and bleeding ♪
♪ In the deep darkness of hell
♪ The Damascus of my meeting
♪ I wanna get right with God
♪ Yes, you know you got to get right with God ♪
- [Sally Fitzgerald] It was admired.
It was very much admired, because its power was undeniable.
But critics didn't understand it.
- [Robert Giroux] I'll tell you that
the publishing point of view was, this book is a flop.
It got bad reviews.
I was shocked at the stupidity of these reviews,
the lack of perception or even the lack
of having an open mind about it.
- [Narrator] "Reviewing time was terrible.
Nearly gave me apoplexy.
The one in the Atlanta Journal
was so stupid, it was painful.
It was written, I understand,
by the lady who writes about gardening.
They shouldn't have taken her away from the petunias."
- At the autograph party in Milledgeville,
all the ladies came, and they were all excited
about this new author in town.
They all walked away with her book, "Wise Blood,"
all autographed and everything.
And I think she was just kind of chuckling to herself
as she saw them all leave the room, thinking,
oh, wait till they find out.
Or wait till they really see what it's all about.
[soft music]
- Bernard Cline, brother of Regina, put together
three tracts of land which became Andalusia Farm.
In 1951 when Flannery became so ill,
it was possible for them to move out here.
Regina continued to run it as a dairy farm.
They both could live on the ground floor
and not have to climb stairs to the second floor.
- [Brad Gooch] She was confined on this farm,
and she really found her material
around her in that setting.
- [Sally Fitzgerald] She realized that she didn't have to
sit in New York and lose her ear for southern speech,
that she had it everywhere.
The farm women, the farm people.
Everything was grist for her mill.
- I think maybe the reason she appeals to so many musicians
is because she's one of those writers who is best heard.
- [Narrator] "Everything is getting terrible.
I remember the day you could go off
and leave your screen door unlatched.
Not no more."
- One day, Flannery and I
had driven over to Milledgeville to do errands.
She said something again about her arthritis.
I said, "Flannery, you don't have arthritis.
You have lupus."
Her hand was shaking. My knee was shaking on the clutch.
We drove back up and down the road, and a few minutes,
she said, "Well, that's not good news.
But I can't thank you enough for telling me.
I thought I had lupus. And I thought I was going crazy.
And I'd a lot rather be sick than crazy."
- The disease that had eaten her up and had,
it was a great moment in which the hope and everything
she had, suddenly, the hope of her writing and everything,
suddenly hit her, that she just may never
get to do what she wanted to do.
- [Sally Fitzgerald] This was devastating knowledge.
She expected to live three years,
which is what her father had lived
after his disease was diagnosed.
- Going to Iowa, going to that early success,
living with the Fitzgeralds, going to Yaddo,
being part of that whole little literary scene.
And then being really dragged out of it
by the physical constraints of her lupus.
- After she got sick and had to go home,
she was a prisoner of her body.
I think she loved writing so much
because it freed her from the corporeal.
- I think that it's inevitable that her dark view
of the body and not nature, but the bodily world
as being only a source of dark things,
has to be connected to her lupus.
The deformed body, the broken body, the afflicted body
is very much a theme that recurs in her work.
- In some ways, I think we can say now,
thank God for her suffering, because it allowed her
to produce the work that she produced.
- To know yourself is to know your region
and yet it's also to know the world.
And in a sense, or paradoxically,
it's also to be an exile from that world.
♪ Lord, a good man is hard to find ♪
♪ You always get another kind
♪ Just when you think that he's your pal ♪
♪ You look and find him foolin' round ♪
♪ Some other gal
[typewriter keys clicking]
- [Sally Fitzgerald] The first real story
that was unquestionably carrying the power
that she would later show.
- "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" changed her reputation.
- She got her back up, earning her own voice
and not caving to lupus at that time in her life
when she then had no choice but to
be there for her work constantly.
- Unlike what happened with "Wise Blood,"
which was incomprehension, they had to go through
several printings, she comes to New York,
is interviewed on television, a kind of new popular medium,
and has these great, glowing reviews in the New York Times,
and this really establishes her then
as an important American writer, and especially
a writer of her signature genre, the short story.
[typewriter keys clicking]
- They're on their way to Florida for vacation.
And the grandmother is sitting in the backseat
with her two grandchildren.
"'Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground,'
John Wesley said. 'And Georgia is a lousy state, too.'"
- [Narrator] "Outside of Toomsboro,
she woke up and recalled an old plantation
that she had visited in this neighborhood once
when she was a young lady.
' Oh, look at the cute little pickaninny,' she said,
and pointed to a Negro child
standing in the door of a shack.
'Wouldn't that make a picture, now?' She asked."
- The grandmother, who in a sense
is the central character in the story,
her vanity which literally causes the catastrophe.
- [Narrator] "'It's not much farther,' the grandmother said.
And just as she said it, a horrible thought came to her.
The thought was so embarrassing that she turned
red in the face, and her eyes dilated
and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the car.
The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top
she had over the basket under it, rose with a snarl
and Pitty Sing the cat sprang onto Bailey's shoulder.
[car crashing]
'We've had an accident,' the children screamed
in frenzy of delight.
'But nobody's killed,' June Star said with disappointment.
The horrible thought she had had before the accident
was that the house she had remembered so vividly
was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.
In a few minutes they saw a car some distance away
on top of a hill, coming slowly as if the occupants
were watching them.
The grandmother stood up and waved both arms dramatically
to attract their attention."
- Because she had seen newspaper accounts
of the Misfit and most of the other figures.
- [Narrator] "'You're The Misfit,' she said.
'I recognized you at once.'
'Yes'm,' the man said, smiling slightly,
as if he were pleased in spite of himself to be known.
'But it would have been better for all of you, lady,
if you hadn'ta recognized me.'"
- And he's going to shoot her.
But she said, "I know you're not common and ordinary.
I know you're a good man."
- [Narrator] "There was a piercing scream from the woods,
followed closely by a pistol report.
'Lady,' The Misfit said, looking far beyond her
into the woods, 'there never was a body
that gives the undertaker a tip.
Jesus was the only one that ever raised the dead,'
the Misfit continued, 'and he shouldn't have done it.
He thrown everything off balance.
If he did what he said, then it's nothing for you to do
but throw away everything and follow him, and if he didn't,
then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes
you got left the best way you can, by killing somebody
or burning down his house, or doing
some other meanness to him.
No pleasure but meanness,' he said."
- He's shot everybody else,
and he's about to shoot the grandmother.
And for the first time in her life, she gets it.
- [Narrator] "'Why, you're one of my babies.
You're one of my own children.'
She reached out and touched him on the shoulder.
Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him
and shot her three times through the chest."
[gun firing]
- And she dies quite happily.
Flannery, of course, insisted
that this is a story about grace.
A woman's sudden realization of her kinship with a criminal.
- The moment of violence is not
where we recoil from each other,
but when we are connected to each other.
- "'Take her off and throw her where you'd thrown
the others,' he said, picking up the cat
that was rubbing itself against his leg."
[cat meows]
- [Narrator] "'She was a talker, wasn't she?'
Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with the yodel."
- "She would have been a good woman if it had been
someone there to shoot her every minute of her life,"
and well, most of us would be.
[soft music]
[birds calling]
- [Host] I understand you're living on a farm.
- Yes, I only live on one though. I don't see much of it.
I'm a writer, and I farm from the rocking chair.
[soft music]
- [Brad Gooch] Because she was ill and she was on crutches,
everything had to be precise.
There was only so much energy that could be given.
- I knew Flannery for quite a while when she was ill,
and she was on crutches.
And I never heard her complain.
She was very adept at getting around on them.
I never saw her wince in pain.
She just was, as far as I could see, always in a good humor.
- [Narrator] "I'm making out fine,
in spite of any conflicting stories.
I have enough energy to write with,
and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow,
I can with one eye squinting take it all as a blessing."
- Flannery and Regina went to mass every morning,
usually at seven o'clock which was the only mass there was.
You know, the Catholics were very few in number.
- Flannery worked every morning,
from I guess she started around nine.
But you couldn't go there before 11:30.
- While I was staying at Andalusia,
the farm in Georgia, where Flannery
lived with her mother and needed her mother.
Her mother, you know, took care of her.
I of course learned a great deal about peacocks,
because there were a certain 40 or 50 peacocks on the farm.
I had a camera, and I said,
whenever they saw my camera they'd start to pose.
They're real, they're movie stars, you know.
And she said, "I know they're stupid and all," she said,
"but they have a lot to be proud of."
- O'Connor is very difficult to predict
what her reactions are going to be.
She always had a kind of funny bone about popular culture.
- Her aunt finally said, "Oh, well, you know,
you're on television, you know, you're important."
- [Brad Gooch] She gets a TV late.
She's on TV before she actually owns one,
so when her work is adapted for TV,
she just focuses on, well, I bought my mother
a new refrigerator with the royalties.
- [Narrator] "I have just learned via one of those
gossip columns that the story I sold for a TV play
is going to be put on in the spring,
and that a tap dancer by the name of Gene Kelly
is going to make is television debut in it.
The punishment always fits the crime."
- Neither Flannery nor Regina ever expected
to have to live together as adult women.
Such a complicated relationship.
- She was considered an eccentric,
and yet, she was Miss Regina's daughter
and her manners were perfect, and they couldn't
quite reconcile these two figures.
- Mrs. O'Connor said to me, "Mister Giroux, can you,
why can't you get Flannery to write about nice people?"
And I started to laugh, then I looked at Flannery,
absolutely poker faced.
So I didn't laugh.
Her mother really was disappointed
that her daughter was not a southern belle.
Instead, she was a writer.
- She had to, you know, face Regina at the dinner table,
who was still waiting for her to come out
with "Gone With the Wind Two."
- From what I understand, she couldn't stand
that movie when she was 14.
- Her mother was such a classic,
closed-mind southerner of that era.
I feel, though, that Flannery had a great subject there.
And that she did a lot of examination
of that particular personality.
[typewriter keys clicking]
- For years, I've been fooling the sorry people.
Sorry people, poor white trash and niggers.
They drain me dry.
- I first discovered Flannery O'Connor's work
after I saw the television adaptation
of "The Displaced Person."
- [Brad Gooch] "The Displaced Person" is about
an immigrant family from Poland,
postwar refugees, who move into the south.
- Who are they, now?
- They come from over the water.
Only one of them seems like can speak English.
They're what is called displaced persons.
- Regina never dreamed that she
was a character in all of the stories.
The stupid woman was herself.
- Slowly but surely, the father figure
for this refugee family starts to
kind of take over the farm.
- Screw?
- The violence in the stories
was something that was always clear to me
as a symbolic act leading to transformations.
[engine rumbles]
- Even though she is recognizable in Mrs. McIntyre,
Regina was not contained in those characters.
[people crying] [priest speaking Latin]
- You want some kind of clear resolution
of all these different conflicts, and she denies it to us.
- [Narrator] "I'm always irritated by people who imply
that writing fiction is an escape from reality.
It is a plunge into reality,
and it's very shocking to the system."
- But she's funny.
She's really funny, and she's often funny
in a very dire way.
The laughter is the laughter of the skull
of the memento mori on your desk.
[knives thudding]
- I didn't realize that Flannery O'Connor
lived across the way from us for many, many years.
It was one of our brothers who took milk
from her place to the creamery in town.
When we drove into Milledgeville, the cows that we saw
on the hillside going into town would have been
the cows of the O'Connors.
- [William Sessions] Milledgeville had a enclosed society.
It's a remarkable town.
It really was a culture in itself,
and they lived in terms of that.
- Of course in '52 there was the same racism
that had always been there.
- [William Sessions] They lived in terms of
the institutions that were there.
- When you said you were from Milledgeville,
everyone would laugh and say,
"Oh, you're one of those crazy," you know,
it was sort of like Milledgeville was synonymous
with the state hospital.
- Gothic.
Grotesque.
This small world.
A world that was circumscribed within a farmhouse.
A farm, the surrounding countryside.
So much could happen in that world.
- [Host] Do you have a fixed pattern of work?
- Yes, I work every morning.
- [Host] And you don't miss a day?
- No. Not even Sunday.
- Intense.
I remember that Tomas Mann once said that he hated writing,
that it was a trap that he had fallen into.
Do you feel that at all?
- Well, I think you hate it and you love it, too.
Something that, when you can't do anything else,
you have to do that.
- The ear for Flannery O'Connor is everything.
Not the eye. The ear.
- She liked capturing the actual speech
of all these people around her.
The actual speech of many southern whites at that time
was racist, and she would record it.
- We have a good set of niggers here.
And they don't want to be disturbed.
I have one that I just love.
She nursed my children for about six years.
Of course, there are some getting some ideas,
and that's all right.
That's progress.
- Part of my worry as a reader is that she's too good,
by which I mean that her mimicry
of the voices around her is too acute.
In that accuracy, she doomed herself,
because a lot of these stories are judged
by modern readers as unacceptable.
- I don't associate with niggers, but on the other hand
I don't associate with common white trash
or Jews or Catholics, if I can help it.
- She's a brilliant reporter about the ways
in which the social order was changing.
Over and over again in her stories, she was showing
the disruption of the fantasy of whiteness.
The fantasy of power.
- I think Flannery was writing for people
who have been racist for a long time,
and they know there's something wrong with that.
- [Hilton Als] I don't think Flannery was racist
so much as she has a knee jerk reaction to race
in the way that she had a knee-jerk reaction to her mother.
- I expect that before long, there won't be
no more niggers on the place, and I'll tell you what,
I'd rather have niggers than them Poles.
- [Sally Fitzgerald] "Artificial Nigger" was a reference
to a little hitching post.
They were ornaments.
She heard the expression from a local country man,
and she knew at once that she must use it somewhere.
[typewriter keys clicking]
- [Narrator] "The Artificial Nigger" tells the story
of the elderly Mister Head who brings
his young grandson Nelson to Atlanta
to see negros for the first time.
[train whistle blows]
"'That was a Nigger,' Mister Head said and sat back.
Nelson jumped up on the seat and stood looking backward
to the end of the car, but the negro had gone.
'I'd have thought you'd know a nigger,
since you've seen so many when you was
in the city on your first visit.'
'That's his first nigger,' he said
to the man across the aisle.
The boy slid down into the seat. 'You said they were black.
You never said they were tan.
How do you expect me to know anything
when you don't tell me right?'"
- Suddenly the boy is wondering,
what language have you been using?
You know, because negro or black
doesn't describe what this is.
- You take those white racist characters,
one of whom is learning to be a racist
in the course of the story.
You take them to Atlanta, and they encounter
scene after scene after scene after scene after scene,
where they have to be learning that
their racism has hurt them.
- [Brad Gooch] She insisted on having this title,
so there's a way in which she was true to what
she was actually observing and hearing around her.
And she could put on blinders about
what the repercussions might be.
- [Flannery] Well, but the title was so dominant.
- [Man] It's hard to live up to it.
- [Flannery] I didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings.
I stood out for my title.
- She's been banned, 'cause the N-word came out.
And that's true in certain universities
that her text won't be read because
the N-word is used or something else.
And this seems to me unfortunate,
It's like Huckleberry Finn.
- I think "The Artificial Nigger" is an amazing story
in terms of behavior and the ways in which
this sort of almost Pilgrim's Progress through Atlanta
and through difference, transforms these people.
- Well I think there Flannery's telling the truth
that recovering from white racism takes a long time.
♪ On a hill far away
♪ Stood an old rugged cross
♪ The emblem of suffrin' and shame ♪
[geese honking]
- [Richard Rodriguez] Around 1954 she met Eric Langkjaer-
- Who had grown up in Denmark,
decided to come to this country.
He was very much interested in religious matters,
but he was far from being a Catholic.
- I was working for Harcourt Brace
as a college textbook salesman.
And I had the whole of the south,
east of the Mississippi as my territory.
- [Sally Fitzgerald] And one of his stops along the way
was Georgia College in Milledgeville.
And when he was there, on his first visit,
he went out to meet Flannery.
They became fast friends.
- [Richard Rodriguez] Eric Langkjaer,
tall, very learned and interesting young man,
develops this fascination from his side with O'Connor.
She was very isolated.
This chance to have these kinds of conversations
with a handsome young man were very important to her.
- He liked her very much and they had clearly
a kind of affinity and he perceived that her life
was very limited and so he would take her out for rides.
- [Richard Rodriguez] This relationship
has a romantic aspect to it.
One of the women who worked on the farm
said to someone else who worked there,
"That's her boyfriend. They're going out on a date."
- I had to completely rearrange my itinerary
so as to be able to end up in Milledgeville
as often as possible on weekends.
And I would say that Regina absolutely did not
discourage this sort of thing.
- [Richard Rodriguez] On his last time
before he's going off to Europe for the summer,
they go for a ride in his car.
- I may not have been in love, but I was
very much aware that she was a woman.
So I felt that I'd like to kiss her, which I did.
I was not by any means a Don Juan, but in my late twenties,
I had of course kissed other girls.
And there had been this firm response
which was totally lacking in Flannery.
I had a feeling of kissing a skeleton
and it reminded me of her being gravely ill.
- [Mary Gordon] He loved her, he revered her
particularly as a writer, but he was very freaked out.
He then left the country, went back to Denmark.
- Then ensued a number of letters from Flannery,
about 13, which are very revealing.
- [Narrator] "Dear, dear Eric,
you're wonderful and wildly original.
Did I tell you I call my baby pea chicken
Brother in public and Eric in private?"
- In the course of time, he wrote announcing his engagement.
Flannery felt this disappointment very deeply.
Her mother had never mentioned Eric Langkjaer to me.
We were old friends and I was able to push her a little bit
and I said, "But did she suffer, Regina?
Did she suffer over this?"
And she looked down and against
her customary reserve, she was able to say,
"Yes she did. It was terrible."
- [Richard Rodriguez] She has a terrible emotional
personal reaction, but also a literary reaction
which is in four days, which is almost record time
for O'Connor, who was known as the demon rewriter,
she writes "Good Country People," a story that in some way
metaphorically is about this relationship.
- [Mary Gordon] "Good Country People" is this story
of an unhappy woman with a wooden leg
from a hunting accident.
Her given name was Joy, but she changed it to Hulga,
just to spite her mother.
One day, a traveling Bible salesman comes to her door.
- Eric's lists from Harcourt Brace, he called the Bible.
- Reading it, I realized right away
that here I was in some sort of disguise.
- [Richard Rodriguez] In the hayloft on the farm
that's exactly a replica of Andalusia, the O'Connor's farm,
she has this kind of flirtation with the Bible salesmen.
He gets her to unscrew her wooden leg,
and then makes off with it.
- "'Give me my leg,' she screamed and tried to lunge for it,
but he pushed her down easily.
'What's the matter with you all of the sudden,' he asked,
frowning as he screwed the top on the flask
and put it quickly back inside the Bible.
'You just awhile ago said you didn't believe in nothing.
I thought you was some girl.'
'Give me my leg,' she screeched.
He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him
sweep the cards and the blue box into the Bible
and throw the Bible into the valise.
And then the toast colored hat disappeared down the hole
and the girl was left sitting on the straw
in the dusty sunlight.
When she turned her churning face toward the opening,
she saw his blue figure struggling successfully
over the green speckled lake."
you know, as Dostoevsky said,
"Without God, everything is permitted."
- [Narrator] "Dear Eric, I'm highly taken with the thought
of you seeing yourself as the Bible salesman.
Dear boy, remove this delusion from your head at once.
Never let it be said that I don't make the most
of experience and information, no matter how meager."
♪ Well just because you think you're so pretty ♪
♪ Just because you think you're so hot ♪
♪ Just because you think you got something ♪
♪ That nobody else has got
♪ So you make me spend all my money ♪
♪ You laugh and call me Old Santa Claus ♪
♪ But I'm telling you
♪ Honey, I'm through with you
♪ Honey, 'cause, just because
[pen scratching]
- I for myself think that although Ms. O'Connor
can be called a Southern writer,
I agree that she's not a Southern writer,
just as Faulkner isn't, and that they are,
for want of a better term, universal writers.
They're writing about all mankind
and about relationships and the mystery of relationships.
And I'm relieved that you write as simply as you do.
- So after the disruption of a relationship with Eric
and also then the publication of
"A Good Man is Hard to Find," she develops
different sorts of relationships.
That kind of friendship with Maryat Lee,
bisexual sister of the President of
the Georgia State College for Women comes to see her.
And Maryat Lee is living in Greenwich Village
and the unlikely eccentric looking woman
in the middle of Georgia, walking around in boots
and a cape and things like that.
But again, the two hit it off.
- Maryat and I came out once and Flannery was painting.
And I think she was working on this piece.
- She shows first of all her tremendous generosity
as a friend and her gameful spirit, you know,
especially with Maryat Lee, just hilarious spirit.
- Maryat's very being kind of buttressed Flannery's,
okay, there's another one out there.
- She could scowl as effectively as anybody I've ever known.
One of the few signs of Flannery's lupus
was the fact that after the midday meal,
you could see her tiring.
The cortisone derivative that she took,
which saved her life, had softened the bones
and also had put her on crutches
and this had altered her appearance.
But she was wonderfully animated
when she was interested in what she was saying,
when a good question was asked
and she could answer with zest.
- [Narrator] "If the fact that I'm a celebrity
makes you feel silly, what dear girl
do you think it makes me feel?
It's a comic distinction shared with Roy Rogers' horse
and Miss Watermelon of 1955."
- Betty Hester appeared at a point in Flannery's life
where she had just had a bit of disappointment
and realized that she was going to be alone
for the rest of her life, that her life
was going to be writing.
And she needed conversation.
And suddenly she received a letter
from a complete stranger in Atlanta
who seemed to realize that these stories,
as she put it, are about God.
And Flannery said, "Who is this who understands my story?"
- [Narrator] "I'm very pleased to have your letter.
Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find
someone who recognizes my work for what I try
to make it than it is for you to find
a God-conscious writer near at hand.
The distance is 87 miles, but I feel
the spiritual distance is much shorter."
- There began a conversation
that lasted for years, by letter.
They wrote every two weeks,
Betty Hester was a clerk in a credit office.
- Betty was lesbian and had actually
suffered horribly far that, I mean she was in the Air Force
and she was kicked out and had to go back to 1950 South
where it was hard for a woman, period, to get a job.
And if your service records said something,
you may as well go back to the penitentiary.
She lived in fear from that time on,
she had no relationships with anybody.
She lived with her aunt.
- She had a dingy little job and her whole life was reading
and the letters that she elicited from Flannery are
among the real treasures to be found in Flannery's letters.
- [Narrator] "I found myself in a world
where everybody has his compartment,
puts you in yours, shuts the door, and departs.
My audience are the people who think God is dead.
At least these are the people
I am conscious of writing for."
- Then Betty Hester, she writes a letter
of almost confession to Flannery O'Connor
about the lesbian activity that had caused her
to be discharged from the military.
When you're reading this exchange of letters between them,
I was on the edge of my seat because you're wondering
where O'Connor is going to go with this.
I mean she could go almost either way.
- [Narrator] "Betty, I can't write you fast enough
and tell you that it doesn't make the slightest
bit of difference in my opinion of you,
which is the same as it was, and that is based
solidly on complete respect.
You've done me nothing but good.
But the fact is above and beyond this
that I have a spiritual relationship to you.
What is necessary for you to know
is my very real love and admiration for you.
Yours, Flannery."
- Flannery's letters were her closest relationships
with other human beings and they were very important to her
and she worked really hard to be the kind of friend
that an individual needed for her to be.
Those letters, those are her real love relationships.
- A book of letters could reveal a person
in a way that biography doesn't.
- "The Habit of Being" opened that door
so that people understood that this woman
had a religious point of view, that she saw life
as the action of God's grace and that without
understanding that, it's impossible to know
what she was doing and what those stories really mean.
- That's the whole point of her writing, I think,
the Catholic thinking, to not be so doctrinaire
that she revealed it to be obvious
to feeling and thinking people.
♪ Wildcat Willie, lookin' mighty pale ♪
♪ Was standin' by the Sheriff's side ♪
♪ And when that Sheriff said
♪ I'm sendin' you to jail
♪ Wildcat raised his head and cried ♪
♪ Oh give me land, lots of land ♪
♪ Under starry skies above
♪ Don't fence me in
♪ Let me ride through the wide open ♪
♪ Country that I love
♪ Don't fence me in
♪ Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze ♪
♪ And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees ♪
♪ Send me off forever but I ask you please ♪
♪ Don't fence me in
- Why do you have to fight for your civil rights?
If you're fighting for your civil rights,
that means you're not a citizen.
- There was a famous incident that's been cited a good deal
when Flannery was invited by Maryat Lee
to meet James Baldwin, she offered to arrange a meeting
when Baldwin was traveling through Georgia.
And Flannery declined this meeting.
Although she was careful to say that she would be
delighted to meet James Baldwin anywhere else,
but she would not meet him in Milledgeville.
- [Narrator] "In New York, it would be nice to meet him.
Here, it would not.
I observe the traditions of the society I feed on.
Might as well expect a mule to fly
as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia."
- She didn't want to be a spokesman for the South.
She was an artist.
She could only talk about the South
if she was one of its citizens.
If they met in Georgia, it would be a civil rights cause
and she would not be able to live in that town unobserved.
And that was the whole point of writing for her
was to be almost a reporter.
- [William Sessions] Flannery was crippled,
Flannery was sick.
She couldn't say, "I'm out of here, I'm out."
"Where are you going Flannery?
Where are you going to get the money?"
They had no money.
I mean Flannery didn't make any money from her books.
That's why she went out on speaking tours.
- [Narrator] "Next week I go to Rosary College in Chicago
and then to Notre Dame.
Then I have to go to Emory and talk to
a Methodist Juden congregation on the South,
their choice of topic.
A little of this 'honored guest' business goes a long way,
but it sure does help my finances."
- [Sally Fitzgerald] For these meetings,
she wrote these wonderful little essays
that appear in "Mystery and Manners."
- [Flannery] There is something in us as storytellers
and as listeners to stories, that demands
a redemptive act, that demands that what falls
at least be offered the chance of restoration.
[protestors shouting]
- [Brad Gooch] When she came in to live in the South,
she felt that Northerners were trying to either
have some moral superiority in their positions on race
or were trying to impose changes.
So she had a position you couldn't easily characterize.
- [Narrator] "I am speculating that maybe,
by the time of your next visit, some of the local
backwoodsmen will be irritated enough by things in general
to stage a little cross burning on the mansion lawn.
Last time the Klan had a big gathering here,
they set up a portable fiery cross
in front of the courthouse.
That is to say they plugged it in.
It was lit from many red electric bulbs."
- Maryat Lee poked fun at Flannery's religion
and Flannery poked fun at Maryat's activism.
Flannery addressed her friend Maryat
as "Dear nigger-loving New York white woman."
It was the New York white woman that was the hidden insult,
but it has been held up as an example
of Flannery's errant racism.
- If you just see the Southern writers,
generally white Southern writers on the basis of
more or less their racism, which is there,
nobody should be locked into ideologies
that they were born into and that they often
were not even able to see.
So the writers get sold, they get sold down the river too.
[singing in foreign language]
- Flannery had been ill so long
and her prospects was so dim,
her cousin Katie wanted her to go to Lourdes.
As Flannery said, "it's her end all and be all
that I go to Lourdes."
And Regina wanted to go,
and Flannery very reluctantly agreed.
She said, "I don't want a miracle.
I've come to terms with my life.
I don't want a miracle.
I want to go right on doing what I'm doing."
But she didn't like to disappoint her cousin.
- [Newsreader] Without cessation,
throughout the day at Lourdes,
60,000 pilgrims attended or heard divine services.
Many will have been ill and beyond medical aid,
but hoping to show on their return
that their faith has made them whole.
- Of course, there were many people there,
sick, the lame, the halt and the blind were there
and everyone full of hope.
And it was very touching. It was very moving.
But Flannery was still very reluctant to take the bath.
She said, "I'm the kind of Catholic who could
die for her faith before she would take a bath for it."
- For a while, it looked as though something
had really happened 'cause about six months later,
Regina said to me in an aside, she said
the hip had begun to recalcify and so forth.
Of course it didn't last.
- [Narrator] "I have a large tumor and if they don't
make haste and get rid of it, they will
have to remove me and leave it."
- She had surgery the next day
and I had a note from her when she could write
saying that the surgery was a howling success.
The operation may have been a howling success,
but lupus came howling back.
- I was working with a dying writer, I knew it.
We were putting together her last book,
"Everything That Rises Must Converge."
She was in the hospital in Atlanta.
It was, in a way, it was in kind of a horror story
because she was so anxious to get the last story,
"Revelation," she wanted that to get in.
[typewriter keys clicking]
- There is this wonderful short story
about these people in a waiting room of a doctor's office.
[people coughing]
This young woman with this garish face who is angry at
the woman who was sitting across from her, Mrs. Turpin.
A black delivery man comes in.
- [Narrator] "'They oughtta send all them niggers
back to Africa,' the white trash woman said.
'That's where they come from in the first place.'
'Oh, I couldn't do without my good colored friends,'
the pleasant lady said.
'There's a heap of things worse than a nigger,'
Mrs. Turpin agreed.
'There's all kinds of them just like
there's all kinds of us.
It wouldn't be practical to send them all back to Africa.
They've got it too good here.'"
- Good satire always has a center. And she has a center.
It's a center so profound that she can see
everything is distorted and very funny.
- Flannery made Mary Grace this person
with a sense of rage that was building.
- [Narrator] "'Go back to hell where you came from,
you old warthog.'"
- "Revelation" was a bowing of Flannery to Maryat's concern
that she not address or reference issues of race.
Maryat went to Wellesley, Mary Grace went to Wellesley.
The last letter that Flannery wrote before she died
was to Maryat, which I think is a testament
to the kind of closeness they had.
- [Narrator] "Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself
at night naming the classes of people.
On the bottom of the heap were most colored people.
Not the kind she would have been if she'd been one,
but most of them.
Then next to them, not above, just away from,
were the white trash.
Then above them were the homeowners.
And above them, the home and landowners,
to which she and Claud belonged.
Usually by the time she'd fallen asleep,
all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around
in her head and she would dream they were all
crammed in together in a boxcar being ridden off
to be put in a gas oven."
[soft music]
- She always worked.
As long as she was able to work, she worked.
Even in the hospital she was making notes
or observations, certainly.
[pen scratching]
- "The sun was behind the wood, very red.
Looking over the paling of trees
like a farmer inspecting his own hogs.
'Why me?' She rumbled.
'It's no trash around here, black or white,
that I haven't given to and break my back to the bone
every day working, and do for the church.
Go on!' She yelled,
'Call me a hog, call me a warthog from hell.
Put that bottom rail on top.
There'll still be a top and bottom.'
A final surge of fury shook her and she roared,
'Who do you think you are?'"
It's so good.
[somber music]
- We found a calender in Regina's room,
and it was turned to August of '64.
And on the day Flannery died,
Regina had written "death came for Flannery."
- I'm really sorry she died at the age of 39.
Iúthink that both my parents thought
that she was with God, so it was okay.
- She looks at the darkness unflinchingly
and she approaches it with clarity and with precision.
And that I think is her greatness.
- I feel that that Flannery O'Connor's life
and Flannery O'Connor's work were all of a piece.
They were both returns of her gifts, her talents.
She considered her faith a gift.
She considered her talent a gift.
And she wanted to return them with gain.
And I think she did.
I think her life is almost as imposing as her work.
- She's one of the best writers of the 20th century.
I've read everything that she's written
- The life of Flannery O'Connor and what she had to offer
in terms of her relationship to the greater mysteries
of existence are going to be things that people
will tap into because they aren't going away.
- "At length, she got down and turned off the faucet
and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house.
In the woods around her, the invisible cricket choruses
had struck up, but what she heard were the voices
of the souls climbing upward into the starry field
and shouting, 'Hallelujah!'"
[soft harmonica music]
♪ I saw her standin' on her front lawn ♪
♪ Just-a twirlin' her baton
♪ Me and her went for a ride, sir ♪
♪ And ten innocent people died
♪ From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska ♪
♪ With a sawed off .410 on my lap ♪
♪ Through to the badlands of Wyoming ♪
♪ I killed everything in my path ♪
♪ I can't say that I'm sorry
♪ For the things that we done
♪ At least for a little while, sir ♪
♪ Me and her we had us some fun ♪