A Place That Has Been Loved

Like the house where I live, the former Sorrel Farm, renamed Andalusia Farm, feels loved. In the early twentieth century, Andalusia Farm was loved by the uncles whose generosity and caring made late summer pony rides possible for Mary Flannery and her Boston cousins. Years later, love coincided with refuge as mother and daughter undertook to live together as adults under the cloud of a disease they already understood. Today, love remains visible in the window treatments that Regina Cline O’Connor crafted. Home sewers immediately recognize the difficulty of handling the heavy fabric, matching the pattern of peacock feathers or plaid, making the lining work, and pleating the tops of the draperies in the front room. The kitchen fridge and Cousin Katie Semmes’ book cases would have been her daughter’s evidence of love. To love a place one has not chosen seems to me a mark of character, resilience, and faith.

To make that place a sight of hospitality and conversation—as well as work and worship—requires additional commitment, a commitment that remains evident on each of my visits and resonates in The Habit of Being. I am grateful that friends, family, and publisher stepped forward in love fifty years ago to begin the process that makes a significant collection of Flannery O’Connor’s letters widely available today.

It is to the letters from mid-September that I now turn. This time in 1953, O’Connor was sending a blouse to Sally Fitzgerald as a house gift. Our author is anchored at Andalusia as she hears from friends traveling in Ireland and France and contemplates the Fitzgerald’s sojourn in Italy (Habit 62-63). In 1954, she was negotiating a target date for her first collection of short stories (72). In September 1955, her crutches are new (104). Around this time in 1956, she is commiserating with a pen pal who has lupus and chuckling about the fridge bought from the sale of rights to adapt “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (174-75). The ellipses in this letter most likely signal a passage not in the public but rather in the private sphere. For me, they announce that I do not necessarily have the right to know everything, and I concur.

September 1957 finds Flannery O’Connor writing some of her closest connections in ways that might seem to be trivial. Yet, under the apparently superficial are references to her beloved uncle—I believe Uncle Louis—moving home (240) and to the difficulty and pain of writing (242). September 1958 is similar in that things apparently innocuous lead to serious references to Nazis and race relations, as well as the craft of fiction (294-96). The middle of September 1959 finds O’Connor telling John Hawkes how much she would like to send him a prepublication copy of The Violent Bear It Away (349). A year later, our author and Maryat Lee are teasingly using the novel’s names as monikers (406).  A year after that, she mentions Shot’s inactivity (449), yet she keeps her own spirits up in the face of adversity. In mid-September of ’62, she is waiting for Dr. Helen Green to visit, reminding me of the close relationships she maintained with her former professors who were my esteemed predecessors here. Graduates of Georgia State College for Women during these years tell wonderful stories of their own visits to Andalusia Farm as students, usually in the Literary Guild. Mid-September of 1963 is heavy, as O’Connor reads Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and seems immersed in thoughts concerning race. This Flannery O’Connor  is the one whose writing Alice Walker came to respect. And then, before September returns, the years at Andalusia Farm have ended. What I think I do know is that much love and much courage were displayed there by a mother and daughter from a very strong family of women.

-- Elaine E. Whitaker, chair of the Department of English and Rhetoric at Georgia College, rents one of the historic properties in downtown Milledgeville, so following Dr. Bob’s references to another of these properties, the Thirteen Columns, seemed appropriate to her. Whitaker has admired and been inspired by O’Connor’s tenacity in her vocation as a writer and is grateful to all who keep O’Connor’s legacy to us alive.

An Uncanny Sort of Place

Over the past twenty-seven years of my residence in Milledgeville, the ante-bellum capital of Georgia,  I have found myself immersed (if not mired) in the history of this place.  Officially I am the University historian of Georgia College, and unofficially have become a local historian.  In the latter role I have visited sites both celebrated and obscure in Milledgeville/Baldwin County, but few have the unsettling effect that the Cline/O’Connor  estate  called  Andalusia  always  has on me.

On the face of it,  Andalusia  is  simply  another survival of a local plantation—those reminders of the horrors of slavery and the wealth generated by the cotton boom.  The farm is part of an antebellum plantation owned by a merchant and cotton grower named Joseph Stovall.  Stovall’s townhouse still survives in downtown Milledgeville, a magnificent structure known as the “Thirteen Columns.”  His plantation, three miles north of the capital, was comprised of 1,700 acres worked by at least 39 slaves.  It ran along Tobler’s Creek, one of three Tobler’s Creeks in Georgia, the name variously attributed to an early German-Swiss family in the colony and also to a Creek Indian named Tobler.  The plantation was little different than other local farms with names such as Westover, Little Creek, and  Brookline.  After Stovall’s death in 1848, the estate was acquired by Nathan Hawkins who worked it with 100 slaves.  Many of these people were sold on the auction block located hard by the Presbyterian Church in town.

I can easily imagine in the 1850s riding out in a cart, bumping along the old Sheffield Ferry Road to visit the Hawkins farm.  He had just built a modest two-story frame house that would be occupied one hundred years later by Regina Cline O’Connor and her daughter Flannery.  Other names associated with the old Stovall/Hawkins plantation, as it was broken up into smaller sections over the years, included Col. Thomas Johnson and the locally prominent McCraw family.  The current part of the farm was acquired by Mary Flannery O’Connor’s maternal uncle, Bernard Cline in 1931.

I have visited so many of these old plantation sites over the years, some barely visible, others such as Westover that still have many of their outbuildings and landscaping largely intact.  But Andalusia is different; unsettling in ways that are sometimes benign and other times not.  Over time I have read most of O’Connor’s works and the strong sense of place that permeates them surely casts a spell.  But even when I first visited the property, having read little of O’Connor, walking along the pond, out by the barns, stable, tenant house, milk house, and of course the main house, there was a quiet sense of something transcendent that sometimes stopped me cold.  I love Andalusia, but I still often get the shivers when I visit.

Stovall-Conn-Gardner House, "13 Columns" - Milledgeville, GA

Robert J. Wilson III, Ph.D. has taught early American history at Georgia College since 1987.  Ph.D., University of Massachusetts (Amherst),  B.A. and M.A. from the University of Hawaii. He refers to himself as a Yankee, and hails from Niles, Ohio.

Fences and Walls

It must have been so very lonely.

Flannery O’Connor’s kind of art, the conjuring of words and characters out of the void, required solitude. Aloneness.

America’s greatest female writer spent great unforgiving lengths of time at a desk in a room in an old country house she called Andalusia Farm near Milledgeville, Georgia. Her kind of art required that she fence herself off from the world – at least this world – and to work apart from collaborators or distractions. Perhaps, like many writers, she even craved isolation from noise. (Surely more than once the madwoman cries of peacocks around her farm house interrupted the labored creation of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or Wise Blood.)

If art puts up fences, illness builds hard stone walls. What shock of loneliness did Flannery O’Connor feel when a doctor looked in her remarkable eyes and pronounced the dreaded word: lupus? She had already seen her father waste away to that cruel autoimmune disease, his body betraying itself, attacking itself, finally killing itself. Her diagnosis exiled her to a stony cell of specialness, of sickness, as unlucky as a poor prisoner meted out a death sentence from some all-powerful, invisible judge. Flannery O’Connor didn’t face solitary confinement, but she knew confinement … and she knew its loneliness.

This summer, I read at Andalusia from my novel, Pickett’s Charge, one member of a two-person traveling event named Misfits, Mission and Mercy in Southern Fiction. I appeared with Kaye Park Hinckley (A Hunger in the Heart, Tuscany Press 2013; Birds of a Feather, Wiseblood Books 2014). Hinckley is a fine writer in the O’Connor style – Catholic, born and raised in a deeply southern place (Dothan, Alabama, my own home town), a storyteller with a moral compass in every sentence.

We read in Flannery O’Connor’s house. It felt somehow like the writer still lived there, that she simply had ghosted out for a walk into the dewy yard while 25 strangers came and went through her rooms, read from a lectern in her kitchen, gawked at the gewgaws in the parlor, peeked at this and that. I certainly did my share of sight-seeing – for many years, I daydreamed of visiting Andalusia, making this pilgrimage to literary Lourdes.

Many writers come selfishly to Andalusia, secretly hoping to pull a sword from the stone of genius, to inhale some of O’Connor’s leftover talent from the air of the place. When invited by Elizabeth Wylie, the executive director of Andalusia Farm, Kaye and I seized the opportunity to see where greatness lived, where genius worked.

It felt so very lonely.

Ms. O’Connor’s bedroom, isolation itself, looks the same as when the writer suffered there – from her art and from her illness. The mattress on the conspicuous bed seems to hold a small hollowed-out shape. A metal crutch, the kind my own poor Aunt Rose Nell used back in Alabama for 50 years after polio crippled her, leans against a desk. Light pours through windows; the room feels holy, somehow like a church.

She wrote in that room. Alone. The day of the reading, I thought of Flannery O’Connor seated for hours (for eternity now) at the wooden desk in her bedroom, leaving behind her own kind of Bible for those of us who write.

Destiny … or God … or the devil … or whatever we understand (or misunderstand) fate to be, set Flannery O’Connor apart from the world. Life placed fences and walls around her. How could this writer not have thought from time to time, despite her famously deep faith, that the gods played cruel tricks, fatal ones, on the innocent and undeserving? Why else would a child be made to watch a father slowly fade away to an incurable disease? And why else would that child be stricken with the same terrible illness?

God may work in mysterious ways. Those can seem ungodly. 

To comprehend these mysteries, I believe Flannery O’Connor willed herself to become Fate herself, or God, or the devil, or whatever we understand a seeking writer to be. On the lonely edge of this life, she created her own universe, filled it with light, sea, plants, animals, then people. On the seventh day … and many other days as she grew sicker and sicker in the course of her shortened life … she rested on her little bed at Andalusia.

The universe she goddessed into existence out of the void, out of the face of the deep, feels a lot like ours. Mean things happen to good people. Good things happen to mean ones. Crazy hilarity comes howling out of terrible cruelty. (“She would've been a good woman … if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”)

The only order of Flannery O’Connor’s cosmos, the only sense any of it makes, comes from something that can’t be found in any room, behind any wall or fence. It can only be found inside, in the loneliest place of all. 

Grace.

Flannery O’Connor found it… and somehow deeply believed in it… in a wooden house near Milledgeville. 

Charles McNair is the author of Pickett’s Charge (Livingston Press, 2013) and Land O’ Goshen (St. Martin’s Press, 1994). A native of Alabama, he lives in Atlanta and writes for a living. He asks readers and writers who appreciate Flannery O’Connor to contribute to an endowment drive to preserve Andalusia Farm. (www.andalusiafarm.org)

 

I Would Like to Know Who This Is Who Understands My Stories

Excerpt from a short story, “I Would Like to Know Who This Is Who Understands My Stories,” previously presented at the Georgia College Flannery O’Connor Conference “Startling Figures” in 2011. 

Hester Journal: September 27, 1955

Third letter and counting. I keep thinking of how she said she would like to know who this is who understands her stories—Finding myself deeply gratified that even in this mess of modernity smart women can sometimes find one another and survive the recognition.

Now says that if she were to “live long enough and develop as an artist to the proper extent [she] would like to write a comic novel about a woman.” What is more comic, she says, and terrible than “the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth?” Well that reference was not so thinly veiled. I imagine, of course, that it is a heap easier to find the comic in it when you are on the other side of the teeth-grinding. Steeped in her own faith, her certainty about the great and terrible structure of it all, she’s like an old tree that bends in the wind but accepts without question the shape of the sky under which it rises or falls. And then has a good laugh about it. She sees me, on the other hand, as a great example of the religious consciousness without a religion. I do regard the heavens, but they move by the mighty jet stream. If God lives at all it is in the indifferent global wind. That is as close as I can get. Anything else feels like shading your eyes in the face of what’s horrible and real, and I learned early that I am not one to look away.

All this, and yet—I can’t deny that the hope of faith remains within me. And now it even comes to me disguised in envelopes from Milledgeville—home, fittingly enough, of our most famous insane asylum.

Though I do not fear proselytizing from her. Her spiritual influence on me is at once more subtle and more insidious. I worry instead that in the course of winning my heart as a friend she will convince my brain of the virtue of faith. She must suspect by now that this is where I live. 

Hester Journal: June 25, 1956 

Andalusia visit complete. Whole time I was there could barely sit. The drive down was fine, but once I arrived and saw the first sharp little peacock head jutting around the yard, its startling tail blazing and bumping behind, then saw the first glint of sunlight off her glasses as she stood crooked on the front porch, and then the same light off her teeth smiling at me. A nervous energy pulsed through me all day. Something she radiated that reached out and affected me, leaving this unrelenting ripple on water inside. Something that told me she is one of our very best, and that that this new friendship, struck a year ago this summer, will continue to reverberate through me and will not leave me unchanged. So the whole time there my nerves jangled a little and my teeth rattled a little and I had a hard time staying in one spot for too long, let alone sitting down to eat like a normal human being. She, of course, was perfectly calm and composed. I could see that she was quite happy to have me, she and Regina both.

The both of us spinster co-habitants of widows, nonetheless hard to believe that we are near the same age—she seems older, somehow, and yet younger too. Some combination of a perpetual 12-year-old about to make a terrible remark and an 80 year old sitting with the ever-shocking knowledge that life must end for all of us, but quick. Gives the impression that nothing whatsoever can be worked out on the surface of things. Like she bears the weight of more wisdom than she ought to have, but retains a perfectly easy capacity for happiness. The peacocks please her no end. At one point, watching her face soften as they ate the feed she scattered for my benefit, I couldn’t help but feel gratitude for the New Yorker writer who said her stories were full of groundless cruelty and depraved half-wits. Bless his idiotic heart for starting this friendship. And now, one year later, I am inching closer to the Christ-centered world like a nearly good woman fearing that someone may arrive to shoot me every minute of my life.

She did seem fragile though. Why was she standing so crooked on the porch, and making her way so crooked down the stairs, when her writing is ramrod straight, even the letters. Why is she here in Georgia and not out, up and out, in the northeast where all the real writers are? Everyone knows that Mississippi keeping Faulkner must be thanks to some Mrs. Faulkner who will tolerate his foolishness and edit his garbled drafts on the condition that she get to remain in Oxford. Besides, Faulkner needs the South more than Flannery does, despite what she thinks. All she seems to need is the Trinity, a few likable people, and an unending supply of regular, profoundly unlikeable, people—and that particular constellation can be rendered just about anywhere. I want her here, but I also can’t help but wonder what might happen should she get out of the “region” and into the “world.” She would of course say that there is no difference between the two.

In sum, post-Andalusia: she is everything I expected. And she is more. And she is perhaps a little less. But mostly she is more. And she is certainly among our best, our very very best.

TO: Betty Hester

FROM: Flannery O'Connor
28 June 1956

[Y]ou don't look anything like I expected you to as I always take people at their word and I was prepared for white hair, horn-rimmed spectacles, nose of eagle and shape of ginger-beer bottle. Seek the truth and pursue it: you ain't even passably ugly. […]

You are wrong that it was long ago I gave up thinking anything could be worked out on the surface. I have found it out, like everybody else, the hard way and only in the last years as a result of I think two things, sickness and success. One of them alone wouldn't have done it for me but the combination was guaranteed. I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.

Flannery 

Hester Journal: June 30, 1956 

Letter arrived today from F. Says next time I visit I must eat, if for no other reason than to "attain reality" for Regina. And that I gave the impression of being "poised for flight.” That if she had turned her back, I might have been gone. She’s certainly wrong about that, but the “lark with a jet engine” feels true enough. She also says that sickness is a place, one where there's no company, where nobody can follow. I think that must also be true of grief.

-- Rachel Watson has a PhD in English from the University of Chicago. She has published criticism on Harper Lee, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and William Faulkner, and her fiction has appeared in the Sonora Review and in a collection edited by Paul Auster, I Thought My Father Was God

Our guest blogger was among 24 scholars attending "Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor" a Summer Institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and held at Georgia College in July 2014. For more information about the institute, please visit http://www.gcsu.edu/nehoconnor/index.htm