A good Flannery O’Connor documentary is easy to find
The epitome of the Southern Gothic literary genre, Flannery O’Connor was born Mary Flannery O’Connor in 1925 in Savannah, Ga. She dropped the Mary because she thought Flannery O’Connor sounded better (she was right) and notably a lot less feminine.
Like many artists, O’Connor, who is the subject of the award-winning documentary “Flannery” from directors Mark Bosco, a Jesuit scholar, and filmmaker Elizabeth Coffman, was a misfit. She was a shy, “pigeon-toed kid” with a receding chin, and she was a Catholic in a land of bible-thumping Baptists. Her father was a real estate agent. As an adult, O’Connor would attend Mass every day. As a young student, she could draw and was the art editor of her high school newspaper, creating caricatures, which some might argue is what she did in her fiction.
The film begins with a sign reading “Calves for Sale,” reminding us that O’Connor lived on her family farm most of her life. But she also attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she met such literary luminaries as Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom and began work on what was to become her 1952 novel “Wise Blood.” In 1948, O’Connor continued to work on “Wise Blood” at Yaddo, the artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. She was preceded there by Carson McCullers and Truman Capote. For six months in 1949, she even lived in — gasp — New York City.
We hear the sound of typing and a blues guitar playing. As an adult, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus. Drugs prescribed to combat it caused joint damage. Soon, she was on crutches.
Readers such as Hilton Als, a theater critic for The New Yorker magazine, actor Tommy Lee Jones and novelist Alice Walker (“The Color Purple”), whose family lived across the street in Milledgeville, Ga., from the O’Connor family farm, tell us of their passion for O’Connor’s work. The film, which is often spellbinding and is the perfect companion to current release “Shirley,” uses never-before-seen archival footage, interviews with O’Connor’s cousins, two biographers and others, newly discovered personal letters and lines from O’Connor’s own work lyrically narrated by Mary Steenburgen.
“Flannery” pays close to attention to the issue of race in O’Connor’s work (yes, she uses the N-word in it), including her sensational 1953 collection of stories “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and in the South in general and recalls the time O’Connor refused to meet with James Baldwin in Georgia. But “Flannery” soft-pedals the racist words and attitudes in some of O’Connor’s personal correspondence described and quoted in a June 15, 2020, article in, yep, The New Yorker titled “How Racist was Flannery O’Connor?” The short answer to the article’s title is: pretty racist.
O’Connor kept a journal in which she addressed letters to God. She painted a framed self-portrait of herself with one her farm’s many peacocks. She wrote about the South in the distinct and specific Southern vernacular of such masters as William Faulkner. She mixed the sacred and the profane and discerned the demons and angels in ordinary people, which is what gives her art its fairy tale-like quality and dark music. O’Connor was the oracle of what she called “the Christ-haunted South,” and her stories, which are rooted in her time and place, have become mysteriously universal in the manner of great art. “Flannery” sheds a light on why.
(“Flannery” contains literary depictions of anger and violence.)