American Masters (1985–…): Season 35, Episode 6 - Flannery - full transcript

- 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.

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.

"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."



- 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.

- 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.

"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."

All right, ladies
and gentlemen, step right up.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

"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."

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.

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.

- 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.

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.

- 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.

"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.

- 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.

"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.

"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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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."

"Anybody who
survived his childhood

has enough
information about life

to last him the
rest of his days."

♪ Praise the Lord and
pass the ammunition ♪

♪ Praise the Lord and
pass the ammunition ♪

♪ And we'll all stay free

- Flannery O'Connor
started doing her writing

during World War Il
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.

She was
very gifted as a caricaturists

and you could see
that from the work.

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

"Oh, don't worry about

not getting on the Dean's list.

It's no fun going to the
picture show at night anyway."

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.

She thought she wanted to be

a serious writer who would
support herself by cartoons.

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.

- 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."

"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."

- 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.

"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."

She knew that was going outside

the usual prescribed
roles for a woman.

In these early cartoons,

you can almost see, weirdly,
O'Connor's aesthetic intact.

"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."

- 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 Il 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.

- 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?

- 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

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.

"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.

- It's a tremendous and
astonishing in some way,

unmovable faith
that I don't think

contemporary writers of
any kind could sustain.

I think
Flannery O'Connor's travels,

I think they're vital.

You don't know what home
is until you leave it.

"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."

- 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.

"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 protégé of
someone like Robert Lowell.

"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."

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.

"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."

At the same
time that she was writing

"Wise Blood," about a
Christ-haunted character

who's also falling
apart all the time.

He's
crazy. He's bipolar.

He got her involved in this
anticommunist witch hunt.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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?"

- 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.

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.

Publishers
never intimidated her.

"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.

"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."

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

♪ 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 ♪

It was admired.

It was very much
admired, because its
power was undeniable.

But critics didn't
understand it.

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.

"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.

- 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.

She was confined on this farm,

and she really
found her material

around her in that setting.

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.

"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.

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

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.

- 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.'"

"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.

"'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.

'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.

"'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."

"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.

"'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."

- 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."

"'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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

"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.

- 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."

"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.

- Even though she is
recognizable in Mrs. Mclntyre,

Regina was not contained
in those characters.

- You want some kind
of clear resolution

of all these different
conflicts, and she
denies it to us.

"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.

- 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.

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.

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.

Do you have a
fixed pattern of work?

- Yes, I work every morning.

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.

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.

"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.

"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.

"'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.

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.

Well but
the title was so dominant.

It's hard to live up to it.

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 ♪

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

"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.

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."

"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

- 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.

"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?"

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

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.

"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."

For these meetings,

she wrote these
wonderful little essays

that appear in
"Mystery and Manners."

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.

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.

"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.

- 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.

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.

"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.

- There is this
wonderful short story

about these people in a waiting
room of a doctor's office.

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.

"'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.

"'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.

"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."

- She always worked.

As long as she was able
to work, she worked.

Even in the hospital
she was making notes

or observations, certainly.

- "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.

- We found a calendar
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.

I think 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!'"

♪ 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 ♪