WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.379 All right, I want you to picture something. The 00:00:02.379 --> 00:00:06.040 year is 1932. We're in Savannah, Georgia. It's 00:00:06.040 --> 00:00:08.279 hot, I'm sure. The depression is really starting 00:00:08.279 --> 00:00:12.400 to bite down. But in one specific backyard, something, 00:00:12.679 --> 00:00:15.599 well, something truly odd is happening. Yeah, 00:00:15.660 --> 00:00:17.539 something you wouldn't expect. There's this six 00:00:17.539 --> 00:00:21.600 -year -old girl, and she is laser -focused on 00:00:21.600 --> 00:00:23.920 training a chicken. And just to be clear, we're 00:00:23.920 --> 00:00:26.500 not talking about teaching it to, you know... 00:00:26.809 --> 00:00:29.050 tech on command or something normal like that 00:00:29.050 --> 00:00:31.230 no not at all she is teaching this chicken how 00:00:31.230 --> 00:00:33.490 to walk backward it's such a bizarre incredible 00:00:33.490 --> 00:00:35.789 image and the thing is this wasn't just some 00:00:35.789 --> 00:00:38.250 private childhood quirk and actually got noticed 00:00:38.250 --> 00:00:41.149 who did path i news the old newsreel company 00:00:41.149 --> 00:00:44.570 they actually sent a film crew to her house they 00:00:44.570 --> 00:00:46.630 filmed a little segment called little mary o 00:00:46.630 --> 00:00:49.369 'connor with her and this bantam chicken literally 00:00:49.369 --> 00:00:52.049 walking in reverse across the yard. It's just 00:00:52.049 --> 00:00:54.630 amazing. And decades later, when this little 00:00:54.630 --> 00:00:56.750 girl was a full -grown woman and one of the most 00:00:56.750 --> 00:00:59.049 important and challenging American writers of 00:00:59.049 --> 00:01:01.549 her century, she looked back at that moment. 00:01:01.729 --> 00:01:04.670 With that classic wit of hers. Exactly. She said, 00:01:04.750 --> 00:01:07.469 I was just there to assist the chicken, but it 00:01:07.469 --> 00:01:09.870 was the high point in my life. Everything since 00:01:09.870 --> 00:01:13.269 has been an anticlimax. And that quote, I mean, 00:01:13.269 --> 00:01:16.159 that's it. That's the perfect key to unlock everything 00:01:16.159 --> 00:01:18.239 we're going to get into today in this deep dive 00:01:18.239 --> 00:01:21.400 on Mary Flannery O 'Connor. It says so much. 00:01:21.480 --> 00:01:23.739 It really does. You get her humor, which was 00:01:23.739 --> 00:01:27.060 always incredibly dry and dark. But you also 00:01:27.060 --> 00:01:29.439 get her fascination with the strange, the thing 00:01:29.439 --> 00:01:32.200 that goes against the grain. That backward walking 00:01:32.200 --> 00:01:34.700 chicken is the perfect metaphor for her entire 00:01:34.700 --> 00:01:37.180 career. She was someone who looked at the world, 00:01:37.280 --> 00:01:40.189 well... In reverse. She came at reality from 00:01:40.189 --> 00:01:42.209 a completely different angle. A completely different 00:01:42.209 --> 00:01:45.150 angle. And she found the surreal, the grotesque 00:01:45.150 --> 00:01:47.930 right smack in the middle of everyday life. So 00:01:47.930 --> 00:01:49.629 that's what today is all about. We're going to 00:01:49.629 --> 00:01:52.069 try and understand that angle. We're unpacking 00:01:52.069 --> 00:01:55.349 the life, the mind, the work of Flannery O 'Connor. 00:01:55.680 --> 00:01:59.299 born in 1925 and she died tragically in 1964 00:01:59.299 --> 00:02:02.780 and our mission really is to figure out how a 00:02:02.780 --> 00:02:05.859 devoutly catholic woman living a pretty quiet 00:02:05.859 --> 00:02:08.639 secluded life on a farm with her mother in the 00:02:08.639 --> 00:02:12.900 very protestant rural south how did she become 00:02:12.900 --> 00:02:16.500 the creator of some of the most savage violent 00:02:16.500 --> 00:02:19.840 and frankly hilarious fiction of the 20th century 00:02:20.159 --> 00:02:22.020 It's a huge paradox, right? That's what keeps 00:02:22.020 --> 00:02:24.740 people coming back to her, I think, even 60 years 00:02:24.740 --> 00:02:27.419 after her death. She's constantly writing about 00:02:27.419 --> 00:02:30.319 things like morality and divine grace, but her 00:02:30.319 --> 00:02:32.759 stories are just full of serial killers, con 00:02:32.759 --> 00:02:35.680 men, you know, philosophical nihilists, and what 00:02:35.680 --> 00:02:38.139 she famously called grotesque characters. And 00:02:38.139 --> 00:02:40.319 then there's the personal paradox. She lived 00:02:40.319 --> 00:02:42.479 in physical seclusion because of this awful illness, 00:02:42.620 --> 00:02:45.379 but her voice on the page is so world -weary, 00:02:45.379 --> 00:02:48.360 so tough, so sardonic. It really is. And we've 00:02:48.360 --> 00:02:50.199 got a lot of great sources to help us dig into 00:02:50.199 --> 00:02:51.900 this. We're looking at her biography, of course, 00:02:51.979 --> 00:02:54.080 but also her private letters. That collection, 00:02:54.219 --> 00:02:56.340 The Habit of Being, is incredible. We'll also 00:02:56.340 --> 00:02:58.240 get into some very recent discoveries, which 00:02:58.240 --> 00:03:00.419 I find fascinating, about her visual art. And 00:03:00.419 --> 00:03:02.539 even the fact that her unfinished novel was just 00:03:02.539 --> 00:03:05.419 published in 2024. Yeah. And we should be clear, 00:03:05.500 --> 00:03:07.900 this isn't just going to be a book report. We're 00:03:07.900 --> 00:03:10.159 not just listing titles. We really want to get 00:03:10.159 --> 00:03:13.120 into the weeds. We need to unpack what she meant 00:03:13.120 --> 00:03:16.159 by a term like Christian realism, which is a 00:03:16.159 --> 00:03:18.659 phrase that I think can really confuse a modern 00:03:18.659 --> 00:03:21.219 reader. Absolutely. We're going to have to look, 00:03:21.259 --> 00:03:23.500 you know, head on at the controversy around her 00:03:23.500 --> 00:03:26.340 private letters about race, which is complicated. 00:03:26.460 --> 00:03:29.280 And frankly, it's uncomfortable. And we want 00:03:29.280 --> 00:03:31.580 to explore why she believes so strongly that 00:03:31.580 --> 00:03:34.930 grace can change us. But in her words. The change 00:03:34.930 --> 00:03:37.990 is painful. The change is painful. That's a line 00:03:37.990 --> 00:03:40.490 that really sticks with you. So let's start at 00:03:40.490 --> 00:03:42.110 the beginning. See where that worldview came 00:03:42.110 --> 00:03:44.469 from. We met her as a six -year -old with a chicken 00:03:44.469 --> 00:03:46.490 in Savannah. Let's flesh that out a bit. She 00:03:46.490 --> 00:03:49.629 was born Mary Flannery O 'Connor in 1925, an 00:03:49.629 --> 00:03:52.530 only child. Right. Her parents were Edward and 00:03:52.530 --> 00:03:55.650 Regina. Yeah. And they were of Irish Catholic 00:03:55.650 --> 00:03:58.409 descent, which is important. In the South at 00:03:58.409 --> 00:04:00.930 that time, being Catholic automatically made 00:04:00.930 --> 00:04:03.229 you a bit of an outsider in the largely Protestant 00:04:03.229 --> 00:04:05.620 culture. Bit of a displaced person from the start. 00:04:05.780 --> 00:04:08.159 In a way, yeah. Her father was a real estate 00:04:08.159 --> 00:04:10.240 agent. But if you read her own descriptions of 00:04:10.240 --> 00:04:12.740 herself as a child, you don't get the sense of 00:04:12.740 --> 00:04:15.580 a, you know, a typical Southern belle in the 00:04:15.580 --> 00:04:18.680 making. She later called herself a pigeon -toed 00:04:18.680 --> 00:04:21.439 child with a receding chin and a you -leave -me 00:04:21.439 --> 00:04:24.120 -alone -or -I'll -bite -you complex. I love that, 00:04:24.139 --> 00:04:26.759 the I'll -bite -you complex. It feels like that 00:04:26.759 --> 00:04:28.920 never really left her. It just became more... 00:04:29.230 --> 00:04:32.430 It absolutely evolved into her literary voice. 00:04:32.569 --> 00:04:34.269 She just wasn't interested in pleasing people 00:04:34.269 --> 00:04:36.930 ever. But there's a really dark shadow over that 00:04:36.930 --> 00:04:40.310 childhood that we just can't skip past. In 1937, 00:04:40.470 --> 00:04:43.370 her father was diagnosed with systemic lupus 00:04:43.370 --> 00:04:46.410 erythematosus. Lupus? Yeah, it's a brutal autoimmune 00:04:46.410 --> 00:04:48.670 disease. Your body's own immune system basically 00:04:48.670 --> 00:04:51.569 starts attacking its own tissues. And back then, 00:04:51.589 --> 00:04:54.750 in the late 30s, the treatments were, well, they 00:04:54.750 --> 00:04:57.269 were almost non -existent. He died in 1941. And 00:04:57.269 --> 00:04:59.879 Flannery was only 15. Just 15. It's a foundational 00:04:59.879 --> 00:05:02.800 trauma. And as we're going to see, that specific 00:05:02.800 --> 00:05:05.939 disease, lupus, it wasn't just a tragedy that 00:05:05.939 --> 00:05:08.019 happened to her father. It was a kind of genetic 00:05:08.019 --> 00:05:10.560 ghost that was going to come back and completely 00:05:10.560 --> 00:05:13.939 define her own life. So after he died, she and 00:05:13.939 --> 00:05:16.579 her mother, Regina, they stayed in Milledgeville, 00:05:16.600 --> 00:05:18.970 Georgia. That's right. They lived in her mother's 00:05:18.970 --> 00:05:20.949 family home in town, which was known as the Klein 00:05:20.949 --> 00:05:24.930 Mansion. And then a bit later in 1951, they moved 00:05:24.930 --> 00:05:27.750 out to the country to a farm called Andalusia. 00:05:27.810 --> 00:05:29.870 And Andalusia is the place most people picture 00:05:29.870 --> 00:05:32.600 when they think of her. It is. But before we 00:05:32.600 --> 00:05:35.040 get to the farm life and the peacocks and all 00:05:35.040 --> 00:05:37.459 of that, we have to look at how she formed herself 00:05:37.459 --> 00:05:40.120 as an artist. And this is where things get really 00:05:40.120 --> 00:05:42.420 interesting because she didn't just start out 00:05:42.420 --> 00:05:44.839 as a writer. She was a visual thinker, first 00:05:44.839 --> 00:05:47.259 and foremost. This is one of those details that 00:05:47.259 --> 00:05:49.800 kind of gets glossed over in this standard high 00:05:49.800 --> 00:05:52.800 school English class version of her life. We 00:05:52.800 --> 00:05:55.060 think of writers as people who just live in words, 00:05:55.259 --> 00:05:58.339 but she was a cartoonist, a really prolific one. 00:05:58.579 --> 00:06:00.779 She was. When she was in college at the Georgia 00:06:00.779 --> 00:06:02.899 State College for Women, she was the art editor 00:06:02.899 --> 00:06:05.199 for the student newspaper, and she made all these 00:06:05.199 --> 00:06:08.680 fantastic linoleum block cartoons. Lino cuts. 00:06:09.120 --> 00:06:11.519 For anyone who's done that, you know it's a subtractive 00:06:11.519 --> 00:06:13.220 medium. You have to carve the image out of the 00:06:13.220 --> 00:06:15.420 block. It really forces a certain kind of style. 00:06:15.660 --> 00:06:18.180 It absolutely does. You can't really do subtle 00:06:18.180 --> 00:06:22.009 shading or soft edges. It demands strong... bold, 00:06:22.009 --> 00:06:25.329 high contrast lines, big blocks of black and 00:06:25.329 --> 00:06:28.529 white. And many critics point to this, to this 00:06:28.529 --> 00:06:32.430 idiosyncratic style of her cartoons and say it 00:06:32.430 --> 00:06:35.529 directly shaped her fiction. Oh, so? She saw 00:06:35.529 --> 00:06:38.209 the world as a caricature in a way. She would 00:06:38.209 --> 00:06:41.470 find the most distinctive, the most grotesque 00:06:41.470 --> 00:06:44.029 feature of a person and exaggerate it to reveal 00:06:44.029 --> 00:06:46.389 a deeper truth about them. She even said once, 00:06:46.490 --> 00:06:49.629 I don't know how to write, but I can draw. So 00:06:49.629 --> 00:06:51.930 when you read her descriptions in her stories, 00:06:52.069 --> 00:06:54.850 and she describes a character with a face like 00:06:54.850 --> 00:06:57.329 a cabbage or a Bible fieldsman with hollow leg. 00:06:57.529 --> 00:06:59.430 That's the cartoonist. Sketching with words. 00:06:59.629 --> 00:07:02.230 Exactly. It's the art of using exaggeration not 00:07:02.230 --> 00:07:04.889 to lie, but to get at a truth that's maybe hidden 00:07:04.889 --> 00:07:07.529 under the surface. If you draw a politician with 00:07:07.529 --> 00:07:09.569 a gigantic smiling mouth, you're saying something 00:07:09.569 --> 00:07:12.209 true about them. She did the same thing, but 00:07:12.209 --> 00:07:15.050 with a person's moral flaws. She'd amplify their 00:07:15.050 --> 00:07:17.329 pride or their hypocrisy to make it visible to 00:07:17.329 --> 00:07:20.350 the reader. So she graduates in 1945 and she 00:07:20.350 --> 00:07:22.310 heads north. She does. She gets into the Iowa 00:07:22.310 --> 00:07:24.689 Writers Workshop. Which even then was becoming 00:07:24.689 --> 00:07:27.089 a legendary place. Oh, yeah. It was the center 00:07:27.089 --> 00:07:29.389 of the literary universe in post -war America. 00:07:30.170 --> 00:07:32.329 She actually enrolled to study journalism at 00:07:32.329 --> 00:07:34.910 first, but she switched to fiction very quickly. 00:07:35.769 --> 00:07:37.509 And the people she's interacting with there, 00:07:37.589 --> 00:07:39.870 I mean, it's a who's who. Robert Penn Warren. 00:07:40.639 --> 00:07:43.420 John Crow Ransom, Paul Engle. And Paul Engle, 00:07:43.420 --> 00:07:45.759 he read her early stuff. He was the first person 00:07:45.759 --> 00:07:48.639 to read the drafts of what would eventually become 00:07:48.639 --> 00:07:51.379 her first novel, Wise Blood. Yeah. He saw her 00:07:51.379 --> 00:07:53.220 talent right away, even though her style was 00:07:53.220 --> 00:07:55.819 so different, so, so strange compared to the 00:07:55.819 --> 00:07:58.360 polished realism that was popular then. And Iowa 00:07:58.360 --> 00:08:00.519 is also where she makes a really key decision 00:08:00.519 --> 00:08:03.240 about her identity. She rebrands herself. She 00:08:03.240 --> 00:08:06.100 does. She drops her first name, Mary. She apparently 00:08:06.100 --> 00:08:08.540 thought Mary O 'Connor sounded too common. Her 00:08:08.540 --> 00:08:10.300 exact words were that it sounded like an Irish 00:08:10.300 --> 00:08:13.000 wash woman. Whoa. Yeah. She wanted something 00:08:13.000 --> 00:08:14.699 that would stand out on the cover of a book, 00:08:14.839 --> 00:08:18.819 something memorable. So she becomes simply Flannery 00:08:18.819 --> 00:08:22.019 O 'Connor. It's a great name. It's strong. It's 00:08:22.019 --> 00:08:24.540 a little ambiguous. It sounds serious. It worked. 00:08:24.639 --> 00:08:27.279 It sounds almost severe, which fixed her perfectly. 00:08:27.660 --> 00:08:30.459 So she gets her MFA. She spent some time at Yaddo, 00:08:30.639 --> 00:08:32.740 the artist's colony up in New York. And then 00:08:32.740 --> 00:08:35.460 she ends up living with Robert and Sally Fitzgerald 00:08:35.460 --> 00:08:37.639 in Connecticut. And the Fitzgeralds are hugely 00:08:37.639 --> 00:08:40.480 important to her story. They are crucial. Robert 00:08:40.480 --> 00:08:43.519 Fitzgerald was this brilliant poet and translator 00:08:43.519 --> 00:08:46.320 of the Greek classics. If you've ever read The 00:08:46.320 --> 00:08:49.259 Odyssey or The Iliad in English, chances are 00:08:49.259 --> 00:08:51.840 it was his translation. They became her closest 00:08:51.840 --> 00:08:54.440 friends, her editors, and her intellectual sparring 00:08:54.440 --> 00:08:57.179 partners. They really understood the deep Catholic 00:08:57.179 --> 00:09:00.799 theology that was fielded. But even while she's 00:09:00.799 --> 00:09:03.639 up north, surrounded by these East Coast intellectuals, 00:09:03.639 --> 00:09:06.220 the style she's developing is just so deeply, 00:09:06.340 --> 00:09:08.960 unmistakably Southern. Oh, completely. Which 00:09:08.960 --> 00:09:10.799 brings us to that label that always gets attached 00:09:10.799 --> 00:09:13.519 to her. Southern Gothic. Right. And people throw 00:09:13.519 --> 00:09:15.360 that term around a lot. It can mean anything 00:09:15.360 --> 00:09:18.460 from, you know, spooky stories with Spanish moss 00:09:18.460 --> 00:09:21.340 to just anything weird that happens south of 00:09:21.340 --> 00:09:23.860 the Mason -Dixon line. What did it mean for O 00:09:23.860 --> 00:09:26.320 'Connor? Well, she had a really specific, almost 00:09:26.320 --> 00:09:29.279 combative relationship with that term. She knew 00:09:29.279 --> 00:09:32.039 exactly how people outside the South, especially 00:09:32.039 --> 00:09:34.860 in the North, saw her and her work. She had this 00:09:34.860 --> 00:09:37.820 fantastic quote about what she called the Northern 00:09:37.820 --> 00:09:39.500 reader. I have it right here. It's brilliant. 00:09:40.039 --> 00:09:42.580 She said, anything that comes out of the South 00:09:42.580 --> 00:09:44.659 is going to be called grotesque by the Northern 00:09:44.659 --> 00:09:47.860 reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case 00:09:47.860 --> 00:09:50.419 it is going to be called realistic. It's just 00:09:50.419 --> 00:09:53.429 such a perfect. cutting observation on regional 00:09:53.429 --> 00:09:56.490 bias she's basically saying you guys up north 00:09:56.490 --> 00:09:58.330 already think we're a bunch of freaks so when 00:09:58.330 --> 00:10:00.110 i write about the freaks you think i'm just reporting 00:10:00.110 --> 00:10:02.820 the news But she did embrace that label, the 00:10:02.820 --> 00:10:05.259 grotesque. She took it and she ran with it, but 00:10:05.259 --> 00:10:07.759 for a very specific purpose. Her characters are, 00:10:07.799 --> 00:10:10.179 I mean, they're morally flawed in the extreme. 00:10:10.220 --> 00:10:12.639 They're often physically disabled or disfigured, 00:10:12.659 --> 00:10:15.600 which reflects her own later experience. They're 00:10:15.600 --> 00:10:18.539 often these wild -eyed fundamentalist Protestants. 00:10:18.740 --> 00:10:21.379 And the one thing that unites almost all of them 00:10:21.379 --> 00:10:24.679 is a complete and total lack of sentimentality. 00:10:25.070 --> 00:10:27.289 That word sentimentality, it feels like it was 00:10:27.289 --> 00:10:29.649 her ultimate enemy. She seemed to have an almost 00:10:29.649 --> 00:10:32.090 physical revulsion to it. She despised it. She 00:10:32.090 --> 00:10:34.690 actually once compared sentimentality to pornography. 00:10:35.230 --> 00:10:37.909 That's a pretty strong comparison. How do you 00:10:37.909 --> 00:10:41.559 get from, say, A schmaltzy movie to pornography. 00:10:41.899 --> 00:10:44.419 For her, the logic was that both of them demand 00:10:44.419 --> 00:10:47.399 an immediate emotional payoff without any of 00:10:47.399 --> 00:10:49.200 the hard work or the reality that's required 00:10:49.200 --> 00:10:52.639 to earn it. Sentimentality wants that warm, fuzzy 00:10:52.639 --> 00:10:55.679 feeling of connection or grace, but it skips 00:10:55.679 --> 00:10:57.539 over all the suffering and messiness of real 00:10:57.539 --> 00:10:59.980 life. And pornography. Pornography wants the 00:10:59.980 --> 00:11:02.919 feeling of sexual release, but it skips the messiness 00:11:02.919 --> 00:11:06.740 and commitment of actual intimacy. For her, both 00:11:06.740 --> 00:11:09.500 were cheap. Both were lies. They were shortcuts 00:11:09.500 --> 00:11:12.340 that avoided the difficult, grotesque truth of 00:11:12.340 --> 00:11:14.399 the human condition. So when the first reviewers 00:11:14.399 --> 00:11:16.860 of her work called it brutal or sarcastic or 00:11:16.860 --> 00:11:19.519 horror, they were just, they were missing the 00:11:19.519 --> 00:11:22.059 point entirely. From her perspective, yes. They 00:11:22.059 --> 00:11:24.080 were missing the theology behind it. She always 00:11:24.080 --> 00:11:26.019 defended her work by calling it Christian realism. 00:11:26.139 --> 00:11:27.700 And I know that sounds like a contradiction in 00:11:27.700 --> 00:11:30.700 terms to a lot of people today. Right. When you 00:11:30.700 --> 00:11:33.019 hear Christian fiction now, you tend to think 00:11:33.019 --> 00:11:36.730 of something very safe, very clean. You know, 00:11:36.769 --> 00:11:39.649 a wholesome romance where everyone finds faith 00:11:39.649 --> 00:11:41.789 and lives happily ever after. And that is the 00:11:41.789 --> 00:11:44.429 exact opposite of what she was doing. She was 00:11:44.429 --> 00:11:47.389 fighting against that safe, clean version of 00:11:47.389 --> 00:11:49.769 faith. She believed a writer's meaning had to 00:11:49.769 --> 00:11:52.629 be embedded in the story, in the action, not 00:11:52.629 --> 00:11:55.129 spelled out like a sermon. She saw the world 00:11:55.129 --> 00:11:57.909 as fallen. She saw human beings as deeply, deeply 00:11:57.909 --> 00:12:01.740 flawed. And she believed that grace. God's grace 00:12:01.740 --> 00:12:04.899 was not some warm blanket. It was a disruption. 00:12:05.080 --> 00:12:06.580 It was a disruption. It was a terror. It was 00:12:06.580 --> 00:12:08.799 a violent force that knocks you off your feet. 00:12:08.919 --> 00:12:11.460 Which brings us back to that quote, grace changes 00:12:11.460 --> 00:12:14.240 us and the change is painful. Precisely. That's 00:12:14.240 --> 00:12:16.899 the engine of all her stories. Violence in an 00:12:16.899 --> 00:12:19.240 O 'Connor story is almost never gratuitous. It's 00:12:19.240 --> 00:12:22.120 a tool of grace. It's often the only thing powerful 00:12:22.120 --> 00:12:24.279 enough to wake a character up from what she called 00:12:24.279 --> 00:12:26.980 their moral blindness. These are characters who 00:12:26.980 --> 00:12:29.500 are just so stuck. So stuck in their own pride, 00:12:29.679 --> 00:12:31.559 their own little social hierarchies, their own 00:12:31.559 --> 00:12:34.240 intellectual arrogance, that they need a profound 00:12:34.240 --> 00:12:37.820 shock to the system. They need a car crash or 00:12:37.820 --> 00:12:40.440 to be attacked by a bull or to meet a murderer 00:12:40.440 --> 00:12:42.860 on a dirt road. Something to shatter the ego. 00:12:43.039 --> 00:12:45.580 Exactly. Something to shatter that hard shell 00:12:45.580 --> 00:12:48.580 of self -satisfaction so they can finally see 00:12:48.580 --> 00:12:51.759 reality, see themselves for the first time. So 00:12:51.759 --> 00:12:54.279 let's take her most famous story. A good man 00:12:54.279 --> 00:12:56.580 is hard to find. Yeah. You have the grandmother, 00:12:56.740 --> 00:13:00.120 who is just this wonderfully annoying, manipulative, 00:13:00.159 --> 00:13:02.679 self -righteous character. Oh, she's a masterpiece 00:13:02.679 --> 00:13:04.740 of annoying characters. And she and her family 00:13:04.740 --> 00:13:07.720 run into this escaped convict, the misfit. That 00:13:07.720 --> 00:13:10.299 final scene, that moment of pure terror for her. 00:13:10.960 --> 00:13:13.019 In O 'Connor's world, that's actually her moment 00:13:13.019 --> 00:13:16.139 of salvation. 100%. The misfit is literally holding 00:13:16.139 --> 00:13:18.200 a gun on her. Her whole world has collapsed. 00:13:18.340 --> 00:13:20.200 All her little social pretensions are useless. 00:13:20.700 --> 00:13:23.139 And in that last second, all the nonsense burns 00:13:23.139 --> 00:13:25.340 away. She looks at this killer and she has a 00:13:25.340 --> 00:13:27.899 moment of genuine human connection. She reaches 00:13:27.899 --> 00:13:30.259 out to him and says, why you're one of my babies? 00:13:30.320 --> 00:13:32.200 You're one of my own children. It's an incredible 00:13:32.200 --> 00:13:35.139 moment of empathy. It's a moment of grace. She 00:13:35.139 --> 00:13:37.620 sees him not as a monster, but as another broken 00:13:37.620 --> 00:13:40.419 human being just like her. And then he shoots 00:13:40.419 --> 00:13:42.779 her three times in the chest. It's so brutal. 00:13:43.379 --> 00:13:45.779 And the misfits line afterwards is just chilling. 00:13:46.879 --> 00:13:49.240 She would have been a good woman, he says, if 00:13:49.240 --> 00:13:50.940 it had been somebody there to shoot her every 00:13:50.940 --> 00:13:53.240 minute of her life. It is brutal. But O 'Connor 00:13:53.240 --> 00:13:55.679 would say that it's far better to die in a single 00:13:55.679 --> 00:13:58.740 moment of truth than to live 100 years in a comfortable 00:13:58.740 --> 00:14:02.309 lie. The violence served its purpose. It shocked 00:14:02.309 --> 00:14:04.429 her into grace. And this all connects to this 00:14:04.429 --> 00:14:07.549 very famous story about her own faith, the one 00:14:07.549 --> 00:14:09.750 people call the Eucharist incident. Right, the 00:14:09.750 --> 00:14:12.169 literary dinner party story. It's a classic. 00:14:12.370 --> 00:14:14.429 She was at a dinner party in New York with a 00:14:14.429 --> 00:14:16.450 group of intellectuals, including the writer 00:14:16.450 --> 00:14:19.149 Mary McCarthy. And Mary McCarthy was a very prominent, 00:14:19.230 --> 00:14:21.929 very secular intellectual, a lapsed Catholic. 00:14:22.639 --> 00:14:25.360 Exactly. And somehow the conversation turns to 00:14:25.360 --> 00:14:27.480 the Eucharist, the Catholic sacrament, where 00:14:27.480 --> 00:14:29.820 the bread and wine are believed to literally 00:14:29.820 --> 00:14:33.759 become the body and blood of Christ. And McCarthy, 00:14:34.080 --> 00:14:36.980 trying to be sort of diplomatic and polite, says 00:14:36.980 --> 00:14:39.259 that she thinks of the Eucharist as a symbol 00:14:39.259 --> 00:14:41.580 and a pretty good one at that. And Flannery, 00:14:41.659 --> 00:14:43.360 who had probably been sitting there quietly the 00:14:43.360 --> 00:14:45.299 whole time. She just lowers the boom. She leans 00:14:45.299 --> 00:14:48.700 forward and says flatly, well, if it's a symbol. 00:14:49.120 --> 00:14:51.240 To hell with it. If this is symbol, to hell with 00:14:51.240 --> 00:14:53.840 it. That one line just explains her entire body 00:14:53.840 --> 00:14:56.259 of work. For O 'Connor, things weren't symbols. 00:14:56.600 --> 00:14:59.519 They were. The spiritual wasn't an abstraction 00:14:59.519 --> 00:15:02.100 floating above the real world. It was embedded 00:15:02.100 --> 00:15:05.100 in the real world. The world was, in her words, 00:15:05.259 --> 00:15:08.399 charged with God. If the Eucharist is just a 00:15:08.399 --> 00:15:10.840 symbol, it's powerless. If her stories are just 00:15:10.840 --> 00:15:12.559 metaphors for something else, they're powerless. 00:15:12.820 --> 00:15:14.779 She wanted the blood and the dirt and the grace 00:15:14.779 --> 00:15:17.419 to be real physical things. She had no time for 00:15:17.419 --> 00:15:20.940 abstractions. That intensity is just blazing 00:15:20.940 --> 00:15:23.220 through her work. I mean, her output wasn't huge, 00:15:23.360 --> 00:15:25.940 but it was so dense. She wrote two novels, Wise 00:15:25.940 --> 00:15:28.799 Blood in 1952, and then The Violent Buried Away 00:15:28.799 --> 00:15:31.059 in 1960, and then the short story collections. 00:15:31.179 --> 00:15:33.340 Right. A Good Man is Hard to Find was published 00:15:33.340 --> 00:15:37.039 in 1955, and Everything That Rises Must Converge 00:15:37.039 --> 00:15:40.600 came out just after she died in 1965. Later, 00:15:40.659 --> 00:15:42.759 they were all collected into the complete stories. 00:15:43.080 --> 00:15:45.500 And that collection won the National Book Award 00:15:45.500 --> 00:15:49.279 in 1972, posthumously. And not only did it win, 00:15:49.399 --> 00:15:52.740 but in a 2009 poll of writers and critics, it 00:15:52.740 --> 00:15:55.600 was voted the best book ever to have won the 00:15:55.600 --> 00:15:57.580 award. Think about that. That's putting her ahead 00:15:57.580 --> 00:16:00.960 of Faulkner, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow. It shows 00:16:00.960 --> 00:16:02.860 you the lasting power of those stories. They 00:16:02.860 --> 00:16:04.679 don't feel dated. They don't because they're 00:16:04.679 --> 00:16:07.850 about things that don't date. human pride, mortality, 00:16:08.230 --> 00:16:10.649 the capacity for both cruelty and grace. And 00:16:10.649 --> 00:16:12.450 when you really look at the themes, you see she 00:16:12.450 --> 00:16:14.409 wasn't just writing about strange people in the 00:16:14.409 --> 00:16:16.870 backwoods. She was tackling the biggest social 00:16:16.870 --> 00:16:19.470 issues of her day. Take a story like The Displaced 00:16:19.470 --> 00:16:21.809 Person. That's really about the Holocaust and 00:16:21.809 --> 00:16:24.210 the refugee crisis after World War II. It is. 00:16:24.230 --> 00:16:26.909 It's about a Polish refugee, a survivor of the 00:16:26.909 --> 00:16:29.610 camps who comes to work on a southern farm. And 00:16:29.610 --> 00:16:32.250 the story is a brilliant dissection of how the 00:16:32.250 --> 00:16:34.970 locals, the farmhands and the owner react to 00:16:34.970 --> 00:16:37.490 him. They can't comprehend the scale of the evil 00:16:37.490 --> 00:16:39.350 he's experienced. They're too wrapped up in their 00:16:39.350 --> 00:16:42.210 own petty bigotries and social hierarchies to 00:16:42.210 --> 00:16:45.409 see the monumental human tragedy standing right 00:16:45.409 --> 00:16:47.509 in front of them. And this story, like the title 00:16:47.509 --> 00:16:49.590 story from her second collection, Everything 00:16:49.590 --> 00:16:52.529 That Rises Must Converge. Yeah. That is directly 00:16:52.529 --> 00:16:55.429 about. out racial integration in the South. Directly. 00:16:55.450 --> 00:16:57.889 It's this devastating portrait of a generational 00:16:57.889 --> 00:17:00.610 conflict. You have an older woman, the mother, 00:17:00.769 --> 00:17:03.570 who is just completely stuck in the racist mindset 00:17:03.570 --> 00:17:05.869 of the old South. And you have her son, Julian, 00:17:06.089 --> 00:17:08.289 who sees himself as this enlightened, progressive 00:17:08.289 --> 00:17:10.670 liberal. But O 'Connor doesn't let him off the 00:17:10.670 --> 00:17:13.190 hook. Not at all. In fact, she portrays Julian 00:17:13.190 --> 00:17:15.390 as being just as flawed as his mother, if not 00:17:15.390 --> 00:17:17.990 more so, because his progressivism is all about 00:17:17.990 --> 00:17:19.970 his own ego. It's intellectual and abstract. 00:17:20.109 --> 00:17:22.809 He wants to teach his mother a lesson. but there's 00:17:22.809 --> 00:17:25.670 no love or compassion in it. He's using his supposed 00:17:25.670 --> 00:17:28.450 enlightenment as a weapon against her. That seems 00:17:28.450 --> 00:17:31.369 to be a recurring target for her. The well -meaning 00:17:31.369 --> 00:17:33.230 liberal who thinks they have all the answers. 00:17:33.369 --> 00:17:37.150 Oh, she loved to skewer that character. The sociologist, 00:17:37.289 --> 00:17:39.769 the do -gooder, the intellectual who comes down 00:17:39.769 --> 00:17:42.630 to the rural South with a theory about how to 00:17:42.630 --> 00:17:46.089 fix people. In her stories, they fail again and 00:17:46.089 --> 00:17:48.650 again because they're operating on what she saw 00:17:48.650 --> 00:17:52.569 as a sentimental illusion. The idea that human 00:17:52.569 --> 00:17:54.789 beings are basically good and just need to be 00:17:54.789 --> 00:17:57.289 educated. Whereas O 'Connor's starting point 00:17:57.289 --> 00:17:59.250 was very different. Her starting point was the 00:17:59.250 --> 00:18:01.849 doctrine of original sin. She believed people 00:18:01.849 --> 00:18:04.150 are fundamentally broken and in desperate need 00:18:04.150 --> 00:18:06.710 of salvation, not just education. And you can't 00:18:06.710 --> 00:18:08.509 have a conversation about her work without talking 00:18:08.509 --> 00:18:10.829 about her own body because her physical reality 00:18:10.829 --> 00:18:13.970 took a dramatic turn in 1952. Right when her 00:18:13.970 --> 00:18:16.009 career was taking off. Exactly. She was only 00:18:16.009 --> 00:18:18.269 27. She'd just published Wise Blood. She was 00:18:18.269 --> 00:18:20.349 getting noticed. And then she was diagnosed with 00:18:20.349 --> 00:18:23.210 disseminated lupus erythematosus, the very same 00:18:23.210 --> 00:18:26.009 disease that had killed her father. And in 1952, 00:18:26.069 --> 00:18:28.190 that diagnosis was basically a death sentence. 00:18:28.640 --> 00:18:31.380 It was. The doctors told her she had maybe five 00:18:31.380 --> 00:18:34.480 years to live. She ended up surviving for 12, 00:18:34.759 --> 00:18:37.640 which was a miracle in itself, but it meant her 00:18:37.640 --> 00:18:40.559 life of independence was over. She had to move 00:18:40.559 --> 00:18:43.339 back home, a forced return to her mother's farm, 00:18:43.480 --> 00:18:46.319 Andalusia. That had to be incredibly difficult. 00:18:46.539 --> 00:18:48.500 You know, she tasted that freedom in Iowa and 00:18:48.500 --> 00:18:50.200 New York. She was corresponding with the literary 00:18:50.200 --> 00:18:52.500 elite. And suddenly she's back in her childhood 00:18:52.500 --> 00:18:55.359 home, completely dependent on her mother for 00:18:55.359 --> 00:18:57.980 her daily care. It was a massive, massive constraint. 00:18:58.680 --> 00:19:01.240 But in a way that is so typical of her, she turned 00:19:01.240 --> 00:19:04.039 that prison into her workspace. She established 00:19:04.039 --> 00:19:06.440 this incredibly rigid routine. She'd go to mass 00:19:06.440 --> 00:19:08.480 in the morning. Then she would write for three 00:19:08.480 --> 00:19:11.420 hours, nine to noon, every single day, no exceptions. 00:19:11.740 --> 00:19:13.960 And then she'd spend the entire afternoon and 00:19:13.960 --> 00:19:16.400 evening just recuperating, reading, and dealing 00:19:16.400 --> 00:19:18.480 with her illness. And the treatment for lupus 00:19:18.480 --> 00:19:21.710 back then was brutal in itself. It was. The main 00:19:21.710 --> 00:19:24.470 treatment was cortisone, these early high dose 00:19:24.470 --> 00:19:27.549 steroids. And the side effects were just awful. 00:19:27.789 --> 00:19:29.950 They caused her face to swell up, which is why 00:19:29.950 --> 00:19:32.029 she looks so different in later photographs. 00:19:32.289 --> 00:19:35.069 Her hair thinned and worst of all, they weakened 00:19:35.069 --> 00:19:38.430 her bones. Her hip bones eventually just disintegrated 00:19:38.430 --> 00:19:40.390 and she spent the last decade of her life on 00:19:40.390 --> 00:19:42.829 crutches. So she was living with constant pain. 00:19:43.160 --> 00:19:45.700 constant pain and yet look at what she produced 00:19:45.700 --> 00:19:48.200 in that state she wrote the bulk of her work 00:19:48.200 --> 00:19:50.779 over two dozen short stories and her second novel 00:19:50.779 --> 00:19:54.099 while on these debilitating drugs it completely 00:19:54.099 --> 00:19:56.319 changes how you read her descriptions of the 00:19:56.319 --> 00:19:58.720 human body in her stories when she writes about 00:19:58.720 --> 00:20:01.819 bodies that are failing or grotesque or that 00:20:01.819 --> 00:20:03.740 don't do what the mind wants them to do she's 00:20:03.740 --> 00:20:05.460 not just making it up she's writing from direct 00:20:05.460 --> 00:20:08.920 personal experience when your own body is literally 00:20:08.920 --> 00:20:11.680 attacking itself the idea of the grotesque isn't 00:20:11.680 --> 00:20:14.769 some abstract literary device. It's your morning 00:20:14.769 --> 00:20:17.769 reality. And somehow, in the middle of all this 00:20:17.769 --> 00:20:19.710 pain and all this writing, there were the birds. 00:20:19.930 --> 00:20:21.609 We started with the backward walking chicken, 00:20:21.670 --> 00:20:24.410 but at Andalusia, her obsession with birds just 00:20:24.410 --> 00:20:27.890 exploded. It became her trademark. She started 00:20:27.890 --> 00:20:31.619 raising peafowl. peacocks and peahens. At one 00:20:31.619 --> 00:20:33.559 point she had around a hundred of them roaming 00:20:33.559 --> 00:20:35.799 the farm. A hundred peacocks? I can't even imagine 00:20:35.799 --> 00:20:37.980 the noise. They are not quiet birds. They have 00:20:37.980 --> 00:20:40.299 the scream that famously sounds like a woman 00:20:40.299 --> 00:20:43.180 being murdered, but she loved them. And she had 00:20:43.180 --> 00:20:46.660 other birds too. Ducks, geese, even ostriches 00:20:46.660 --> 00:20:50.220 and emus for a time. But the peacocks were special. 00:20:50.480 --> 00:20:52.180 She wrote a whole essay about them, The King 00:20:52.180 --> 00:20:55.720 of the Birds. She did. And for her, the peacock 00:20:55.720 --> 00:20:57.960 was this perfect living symbol of what she was 00:20:57.960 --> 00:20:59.900 trying to write about. It represented divine 00:20:59.900 --> 00:21:02.299 beauty and mystery. It makes sense when you think 00:21:02.299 --> 00:21:04.440 about it. I mean, a peacock is kind of a clumsy, 00:21:04.640 --> 00:21:07.500 awkward -looking bird with those weird feet and 00:21:07.500 --> 00:21:10.160 that scrawny neck. It's a bit grotesque. All 00:21:10.160 --> 00:21:12.140 right, until it opens its tail. And then it's 00:21:12.140 --> 00:21:15.559 just this overwhelming, unbelievable, iridescent 00:21:15.559 --> 00:21:18.970 explosion of beauty. Exactly. It's grace made 00:21:18.970 --> 00:21:21.410 visible. It's beautiful, but it's also strange. 00:21:21.990 --> 00:21:24.869 And she loved the eyes on the feathers. She connected 00:21:24.869 --> 00:21:26.950 them to the all -seeing eyes of the church. It 00:21:26.950 --> 00:21:29.690 was a constant living reminder of her core themes. 00:21:29.930 --> 00:21:31.990 And it wasn't a lead -in -life hobby either. 00:21:32.190 --> 00:21:34.309 There's that great anecdote from her high school 00:21:34.309 --> 00:21:37.289 years. Oh, the duck. It's fantastic. Before the 00:21:37.289 --> 00:21:39.710 peacocks, when she was a teenager, she had a 00:21:39.710 --> 00:21:43.369 pet duck. And she sewed a complete... outfit 00:21:43.369 --> 00:21:46.569 for it like a little jacket a full outfit underwear 00:21:46.569 --> 00:21:49.509 and clothes she sewed a whole wardrobe for this 00:21:49.509 --> 00:21:51.730 duck and then took it to school to model it for 00:21:51.730 --> 00:21:53.910 her home economics class that's just wonderful 00:21:53.910 --> 00:21:57.029 it shows that even then She had this instinct 00:21:57.029 --> 00:22:00.509 for the surreal, for performance. It does. And 00:22:00.509 --> 00:22:02.789 it's a good reminder that she wasn't just this 00:22:02.789 --> 00:22:05.109 grim, suffering saint. She had this playful, 00:22:05.269 --> 00:22:08.390 strange sense of humor. But we absolutely should 00:22:08.390 --> 00:22:10.769 not mistake her physical isolation on the farm 00:22:10.769 --> 00:22:12.970 for intellectual isolation. No, she was anything 00:22:12.970 --> 00:22:14.930 but a hermit in that sense. She was a voracious 00:22:14.930 --> 00:22:17.789 reader. And she was a professional critic. She 00:22:17.789 --> 00:22:20.289 wrote over 100 book reviews for various Catholic 00:22:20.289 --> 00:22:23.329 newspapers and diocesan bulletins. And she wasn't 00:22:23.329 --> 00:22:26.519 reviewing, you know, light inspiration. No way. 00:22:26.660 --> 00:22:30.059 She was reviewing serious... difficult theologians 00:22:30.059 --> 00:22:32.980 and philosophers, people like Simone Weil, Romano 00:22:32.980 --> 00:22:35.740 Gardini, the Christian existentialist Gabriel 00:22:35.740 --> 00:22:39.599 Marcel. She was deeply, deeply engaged with the 00:22:39.599 --> 00:22:42.279 most complex theological and philosophical currents 00:22:42.279 --> 00:22:44.240 of her time. And she didn't just stay on the 00:22:44.240 --> 00:22:46.839 farm. Not at all. Despite being on crutches, 00:22:47.039 --> 00:22:49.660 despite her frail health, she traveled all over 00:22:49.660 --> 00:22:52.019 the country to give lectures. She made over 60 00:22:52.019 --> 00:22:54.539 public appearances at colleges and writing conferences. 00:22:54.900 --> 00:22:57.440 She was determined to be a part of the literary 00:22:57.440 --> 00:22:59.819 conversation. Which brings us to a part of the 00:22:59.819 --> 00:23:01.799 conversation about her that is much more difficult. 00:23:02.180 --> 00:23:04.099 It's something we have to talk about if we're 00:23:04.099 --> 00:23:06.460 going to be honest about her legacy. We have 00:23:06.460 --> 00:23:09.079 to talk about the Mrs. Turpin letters and the 00:23:09.079 --> 00:23:11.859 controversy over her views on race. Yeah, this 00:23:11.859 --> 00:23:14.519 is it's a critical part of understanding O 'Connor 00:23:14.519 --> 00:23:16.740 in the 21st century. For a long time, the public 00:23:16.740 --> 00:23:19.519 image of her was that for a white woman in Georgia 00:23:19.519 --> 00:23:22.500 in the 1950s and 60s, she was relatively progressive. 00:23:22.960 --> 00:23:25.880 Right. The record shows she voted for John F. 00:23:25.920 --> 00:23:29.170 Kennedy in 1960. She privately expressed support 00:23:29.170 --> 00:23:31.410 for Martin Luther King Jr. and the goals of the 00:23:31.410 --> 00:23:33.450 civil rights movement. And her stories, as we've 00:23:33.450 --> 00:23:36.710 said, often brutally satirize racists. But then, 00:23:36.750 --> 00:23:39.650 then you read her private letters. And a very... 00:23:39.819 --> 00:23:43.000 different and much more troubling picture emerges. 00:23:43.240 --> 00:23:46.079 A much more complicated one. Yes. She had this 00:23:46.079 --> 00:23:48.740 long correspondence with the playwright Mariette 00:23:48.740 --> 00:23:51.400 Lee. And in those letters, O 'Connor sometimes 00:23:51.400 --> 00:23:54.359 adopted the persona of Mrs. Turpin, a character 00:23:54.359 --> 00:23:57.039 from her story revelation who is this incredibly 00:23:57.039 --> 00:24:00.680 prejudiced, self -satisfied, judgmental woman. 00:24:00.859 --> 00:24:03.539 And the things she wrote as Mrs. Turpin, or just 00:24:03.539 --> 00:24:06.000 as herself, they can be really jarring to read 00:24:06.000 --> 00:24:08.579 today. They can. There's one quote in particular 00:24:08.579 --> 00:24:10.960 that is... cited all the time. She wrote to Marriott 00:24:10.960 --> 00:24:13.819 Lee, you know, I'm an integrationist by principle 00:24:13.819 --> 00:24:16.799 and a segregationist by taste. I don't like Negroes. 00:24:16.799 --> 00:24:18.299 They all give me a pain. And the more of them 00:24:18.299 --> 00:24:20.680 I see, the less and less I like them, particularly 00:24:20.680 --> 00:24:23.920 the new kind. Integrationist by principle and 00:24:23.920 --> 00:24:28.460 a segregationist by taste. That phrase just captures 00:24:28.460 --> 00:24:30.880 such a deep, uncomfortable conflict. It's like 00:24:30.880 --> 00:24:32.940 she's admitting that her intellect, her moral 00:24:32.940 --> 00:24:35.900 compass, knows that integration is right. But 00:24:35.900 --> 00:24:37.880 her gut reaction, her cultural conditioning, 00:24:38.000 --> 00:24:40.539 is pulling her in the opposite racist direction. 00:24:41.099 --> 00:24:43.000 Exactly. And she doesn't try to pretty it up. 00:24:43.039 --> 00:24:45.720 She just states it with that same blunt, unsparing 00:24:45.720 --> 00:24:48.660 honesty she applies to everything else. And it 00:24:48.660 --> 00:24:50.980 creates this massive paradox for us as readers. 00:24:51.859 --> 00:24:54.859 Her biographer, Brad Gooch, he points out that 00:24:54.859 --> 00:24:56.940 in other letters, she's fiercely defending a 00:24:56.940 --> 00:24:59.019 black friend she made back in Iowa to her own 00:24:59.019 --> 00:25:01.319 mother, who was more traditionally racist. So 00:25:01.319 --> 00:25:03.279 in one context, she's defending a cross -racial 00:25:03.279 --> 00:25:05.359 friendship. And in another, she's writing these 00:25:05.359 --> 00:25:08.480 frankly ugly racist comments. Which is why Gooch 00:25:08.480 --> 00:25:10.359 says, you know, it's complicated. I don't think 00:25:10.359 --> 00:25:13.259 that we can box her in. She resists easy categorization. 00:25:13.579 --> 00:25:16.299 But that complexity has had real world consequences. 00:25:16.819 --> 00:25:19.680 In 2020, Loyola University in Maryland made the 00:25:19.680 --> 00:25:21.519 decision to rename a resident. residence hall 00:25:21.519 --> 00:25:24.039 that had been named for her. They cited the racism 00:25:24.039 --> 00:25:26.359 present in some of her work and specifically 00:25:26.359 --> 00:25:29.119 these private letters. It forces us into that 00:25:29.119 --> 00:25:31.299 really difficult debate about separating the 00:25:31.299 --> 00:25:33.640 art from the artist, especially when the artist's 00:25:33.640 --> 00:25:36.480 work is so focused on dissecting the very moral 00:25:36.480 --> 00:25:39.980 flaws like racism that she herself seems to have 00:25:39.980 --> 00:25:42.319 privately held. I mean, everything that rises 00:25:42.319 --> 00:25:44.980 must converge is one of the most brilliant critiques 00:25:44.980 --> 00:25:47.400 of white liberal condescension and old Southern 00:25:47.400 --> 00:25:50.039 racism. ever written and yet the person who wrote 00:25:50.039 --> 00:25:52.740 it held some of those same views it's a tension 00:25:52.740 --> 00:25:55.460 that just doesn't resolve we want our artistic 00:25:55.460 --> 00:25:58.380 heroes to be morally pure and flannery o 'connor 00:25:58.380 --> 00:26:01.160 just wasn't she was as flawed and contradictory 00:26:01.160 --> 00:26:03.759 as one of her own characters and so much what 00:26:03.759 --> 00:26:06.200 we know about her inner life comes from those 00:26:06.200 --> 00:26:08.829 letters The main collection, The Habit of Being, 00:26:08.990 --> 00:26:12.029 edited by Sally Fitzgerald, is considered a literary 00:26:12.029 --> 00:26:14.589 work in its own right. Oh, absolutely. Some people 00:26:14.589 --> 00:26:16.450 argue her letters are her greatest work. She 00:26:16.450 --> 00:26:18.789 corresponded with major poets like Robert Lowell 00:26:18.789 --> 00:26:21.269 and Elizabeth Bishop. But for years, one of her 00:26:21.269 --> 00:26:23.309 most important correspondence was a complete 00:26:23.309 --> 00:26:25.849 mystery. In the book, she's just referred to 00:26:25.849 --> 00:26:28.970 as A. Yeah, it sounds so mysterious. It was for 00:26:28.970 --> 00:26:31.569 a long time. It turned out A was a woman named 00:26:31.569 --> 00:26:34.470 Betty Hester, a file clerk from Atlanta. She 00:26:34.470 --> 00:26:37.009 just wrote O 'Connor a fan letter one day, a 00:26:37.009 --> 00:26:39.930 very intelligent one, and it sparked this incredibly 00:26:39.930 --> 00:26:43.130 deep, years -long correspondence about faith, 00:26:43.230 --> 00:26:46.430 literature, despair, everything. And her identity 00:26:46.430 --> 00:26:49.640 was kept secret. At her own request. Betty Hester 00:26:49.640 --> 00:26:51.859 gave the letters to Sally Fitzgerald for the 00:26:51.859 --> 00:26:53.859 book on the condition that she remain anonymous. 00:26:54.519 --> 00:26:57.259 Her identity was only finally revealed after 00:26:57.259 --> 00:27:00.140 her death when the full unsealed collection was 00:27:00.140 --> 00:27:03.799 opened at Emmer University in 2007. It just goes 00:27:03.799 --> 00:27:05.960 to show how O 'Connor could forge these profound 00:27:05.960 --> 00:27:08.319 intellectual and spiritual connections through 00:27:08.319 --> 00:27:10.900 writing because her physical world was so small. 00:27:11.119 --> 00:27:13.180 Her letters were her lifeline. They were. And 00:27:13.180 --> 00:27:15.000 what's amazing is that we're still discovering 00:27:15.000 --> 00:27:17.660 things about her. Here we are in the 2020s and 00:27:17.660 --> 00:27:19.690 new material. is still surfacing. Let's talk 00:27:19.690 --> 00:27:22.369 about some of that recent stuff. In 2024, a new 00:27:22.369 --> 00:27:25.170 O 'Connor book was published, Why Do the Heathen 00:27:25.170 --> 00:27:27.509 Rage? Which is just incredible to think about. 00:27:27.589 --> 00:27:29.769 This was her unfinished third novel, the book 00:27:29.769 --> 00:27:32.910 she was working on when she died. A scholar named 00:27:32.910 --> 00:27:35.589 Jessica Hooten Wilson took the fragments, the 00:27:35.589 --> 00:27:38.650 drafts, the notes, and assembled them into a 00:27:38.650 --> 00:27:41.430 coherent volume. So it gives us a glimpse of 00:27:41.430 --> 00:27:43.789 where she was headed creatively. It does. It 00:27:43.789 --> 00:27:46.549 draws on characters and themes from stories like 00:27:46.549 --> 00:27:49.789 the enduring chill and why do the heathen rage. 00:27:50.069 --> 00:27:52.029 It seems like she might have been trying to move 00:27:52.029 --> 00:27:53.930 in a slightly different direction, maybe away 00:27:53.930 --> 00:27:56.230 from the pure grotesque and towards something 00:27:56.230 --> 00:27:58.750 else. But we'll never really know for sure. And 00:27:58.750 --> 00:28:00.930 then there's the art. We talked about her college 00:28:00.930 --> 00:28:04.430 cartoons, but in 2023, there was a major discovery 00:28:04.430 --> 00:28:06.609 in the attic of her childhood home in Savannah. 00:28:06.910 --> 00:28:09.910 A treasure trove. They found two large barrels 00:28:09.910 --> 00:28:12.509 just filled with paintings she had done on wood 00:28:12.509 --> 00:28:14.130 tiles. And they had been hidden. They'd been 00:28:14.130 --> 00:28:16.650 hidden away for decades. The story is that the 00:28:16.650 --> 00:28:18.890 trustees of her estate were worried that if people 00:28:18.890 --> 00:28:21.269 knew she was also a painter, it might somehow 00:28:21.269 --> 00:28:24.190 distract from her legacy as a serious writer. 00:28:24.430 --> 00:28:27.039 That's a strange kind of logic. It is. But now 00:28:27.039 --> 00:28:28.819 they've been recovered and they're slated to 00:28:28.819 --> 00:28:32.519 be exhibited in 2025. It just adds another whole 00:28:32.519 --> 00:28:35.039 layer to her creativity. She was always making 00:28:35.039 --> 00:28:37.880 things, whether with words or with a paintbrush. 00:28:38.119 --> 00:28:40.140 And popular culture is still wrestling with her, 00:28:40.160 --> 00:28:43.039 too. There was the 2023 film Wildcat. Right. 00:28:43.240 --> 00:28:45.240 Directed by Ethan Hawke, starring his daughter 00:28:45.240 --> 00:28:48.380 Maya Hawke as Flannery. It focuses on her early 00:28:48.380 --> 00:28:50.740 years and her struggle to get Wise Blood published. 00:28:51.039 --> 00:28:52.440 But we should probably add a little academic 00:28:52.440 --> 00:28:54.920 disclaimer here. We should. A number of O 'Connor 00:28:54.920 --> 00:28:58.039 scholars have taken issue with the film's historical 00:28:58.039 --> 00:29:01.170 accuracy. One scholar, Bruce Gentry, went so 00:29:01.170 --> 00:29:04.509 far as to claim it contains 500 factual errors. 00:29:04.970 --> 00:29:08.990 500. So it's probably best to view it as a fictionalized, 00:29:09.009 --> 00:29:11.630 impressionistic take on her life, not a documentary. 00:29:12.289 --> 00:29:14.750 It's a movie. It needs a movie's narrative arc, 00:29:14.890 --> 00:29:17.049 which doesn't always line up with the messy reality 00:29:17.049 --> 00:29:19.529 of a person's life. That's good advice. So we 00:29:19.529 --> 00:29:21.069 have all these new discoveries, the art, the 00:29:21.069 --> 00:29:23.690 unfinished book, the film. But ultimately, her 00:29:23.690 --> 00:29:26.730 story ends where it began, in a way, with the 00:29:26.730 --> 00:29:28.960 disease that had shadowed her. since she was 00:29:28.960 --> 00:29:32.420 a teenager. It does. In the summer of 1964, she 00:29:32.420 --> 00:29:35.039 had to have surgery for a fibroid tumor. The 00:29:35.039 --> 00:29:37.480 stress of the surgery caused her lupus, which 00:29:37.480 --> 00:29:39.680 had been in a kind of remission, to flare up 00:29:39.680 --> 00:29:41.480 with a vengeance. And she knew what was happening. 00:29:41.559 --> 00:29:43.839 Oh, she knew. She wrote a letter to a friend, 00:29:43.920 --> 00:29:45.940 a nun named Sister Mariella Gable, and she used 00:29:45.940 --> 00:29:48.240 this absolutely chilling phrase. She said, The 00:29:48.240 --> 00:29:50.859 wolf, I'm afraid, is inside tearing up the place. 00:29:50.920 --> 00:29:53.759 The wolf is inside. And lupus, the word itself, 00:29:54.059 --> 00:29:56.799 is Latin for wolf. She knew exactly what she 00:29:56.799 --> 00:29:59.200 was writing. It was the end. She died on August 00:29:59.200 --> 00:30:02.859 3rd, 1964. She was only 39 years old. 39. It's 00:30:02.859 --> 00:30:05.480 just so young. But the body of work she left 00:30:05.480 --> 00:30:09.440 is so dense, so heavy. So as we wrap up this 00:30:09.440 --> 00:30:11.900 deep dive, let's try to synthesize it. What's 00:30:11.900 --> 00:30:35.070 the big takeaway from Flannery O 'Connor? And 00:30:35.070 --> 00:30:39.849 that, I think, is the so what. for us today why 00:30:39.849 --> 00:30:42.390 does she still matter so much we live in a world 00:30:42.390 --> 00:30:45.569 that is so incredibly curated our social media 00:30:45.569 --> 00:30:49.049 lives are all about presenting a filtered sentimental 00:30:50.059 --> 00:30:52.880 pretty version of reality. Exactly. And Flannery 00:30:52.880 --> 00:30:55.839 O 'Connor is the ultimate antidote to that. She 00:30:55.839 --> 00:30:58.539 offers what you might call an unsentimental acceptance 00:30:58.539 --> 00:31:02.079 of imperfection. She demands that you, the reader, 00:31:02.240 --> 00:31:04.539 look at the grotesque reality of things, your 00:31:04.539 --> 00:31:07.480 own flaws, your own mortality, your own capacity 00:31:07.480 --> 00:31:10.700 for ugliness, and find grace there in the mess, 00:31:10.779 --> 00:31:12.920 not in some cleaned up, filtered fantasy. It's 00:31:12.920 --> 00:31:14.640 a real corrective. It makes me think of that 00:31:14.640 --> 00:31:16.640 little controversy over the postage stamp. Oh, 00:31:16.680 --> 00:31:20.269 that is the perfect final example. In 2015, the 00:31:20.269 --> 00:31:22.289 U .S. Postal Service issued a stamp to honor 00:31:22.289 --> 00:31:24.650 her, and the portrait they used was nice. It 00:31:24.650 --> 00:31:26.609 was too nice. That's what the critics said. They 00:31:26.609 --> 00:31:28.490 argued it was a complete betrayal of who she 00:31:28.490 --> 00:31:30.549 was. It was the soft, focused portrait of her 00:31:30.549 --> 00:31:32.470 with some pretty decorative peacock feathers 00:31:32.470 --> 00:31:34.470 in the background that made her look pleasant, 00:31:34.529 --> 00:31:37.450 like a kindly, gentle librarian who likes birds. 00:31:37.710 --> 00:31:39.890 And pleasant is the last word anyone would use 00:31:39.890 --> 00:31:42.460 to describe Flannery O 'Connor or her work. Not 00:31:42.460 --> 00:31:45.059 even close. This was a woman who wore these sharp, 00:31:45.160 --> 00:31:48.880 aggressive cat -eye glasses, whose face was scarred 00:31:48.880 --> 00:31:51.980 and swollen from her medication. She wrote, in 00:31:51.980 --> 00:31:54.980 her own words, to shock a morally blind world. 00:31:55.420 --> 00:31:57.980 And by smoothing out her image on that stamp, 00:31:58.099 --> 00:32:01.079 by making her palatable and pretty, the USPS 00:32:01.079 --> 00:32:03.960 was doing exactly what she accused the northern 00:32:03.960 --> 00:32:06.000 reader of doing. They were trying to make the 00:32:06.000 --> 00:32:08.140 grotesque acceptable. Trying to make it comfortable. 00:32:08.180 --> 00:32:10.819 And her entire project was about making us uncomfortable 00:32:10.819 --> 00:32:13.519 for the good of us. of our own souls so the question 00:32:13.519 --> 00:32:15.740 she leaves us with is are we willing to look 00:32:15.740 --> 00:32:18.779 at the world and at ourselves as it actually 00:32:18.779 --> 00:32:21.839 is backward walking chickens violent grace and 00:32:21.839 --> 00:32:24.980 all or do we just want the soft focus postage 00:32:24.980 --> 00:32:26.839 stamp version it's a question I think she would 00:32:26.839 --> 00:32:28.920 be very pleased we're still asking well on that 00:32:28.920 --> 00:32:30.640 provocative thought I think that's where we'll 00:32:30.640 --> 00:32:33.019 end our deep dive for today thanks so much for 00:32:33.019 --> 00:32:33.839 listening thank you