Flannery O ‘Connor, the book by Romana Petri on the writer

TO Mary Flannery O’Connor interested the chickens. There in Savannah, Georgia, where she was born in 1925 (four years before Martin Luther King) in the courtyard of the house there were many chickens, ducks and courtyard animals, as he tells us Romana Petri in her beautiful book Savannah’s girl (Mondadori).

So much At five Mary taught a brownish hen to walk backwards. The news had such a relief in the lazy rural province that an operator came from New York to resume chicken prodigy. Too bad that in front of the unknown unknown the disoriented feathered refused to perform. But the O’Connor gentlemen swore they had seen him go backwards several times with their eyes and the reporter wanted to believe it, So much to shoot a film mounted on the contrary in which the hen miraculously kicked backwards.

Mary’s father, Edward, real estate agent, adored that only daughter, but in 1937 he was diagnosed with lupus systemic erythematosus that would bring him to the death in 1941, when Mary was 16 years old And the family had recently moved to Milledgeville. So Mary found herself alone with her mother Regina who wanted her so much but struggled a lot to really understand that strange girl Which was fine in school, wrote very special stories and had an original relationship to say the least with God.

Mary, who soon freed himself from that name that made her seem “an Irish lavender” to become only Flannery O’Connor for everyone (also excellent for not making the genre understand), it was a strange type: more comfortable with chickens than with human beings, he had however deeply caught its essence.

A fervent Catholic

She was a southern girlof that America to Away with the wind (set not by chance in Georgia). The Negroes (with the “G”, certainly, as in the 1939 film) did not attend them much, but He understood the minorities well: he was a fervent Catholic of Irish origins in the middle of the so -called Bible Belt, The Protestant South where the Ku Klux Klan. His mother understood that that reserved daughter had the gift of writing, but had not understood what writing.

Flan (no longer Mary) described terrible realities and horrors in his stories such as to leave dismayed His in love readers of hypocritical respectability. It would become one of the most illustrious exponents of the United States South Gothicwith disturbing pages, seasoned by a formidable sense of humor. Nothing consoling, open to hope, which would seem strange in a person of great faith, a faith that becomes aware of the fact that living is horrible and only grace can save you.

A voice outside the chorus, in the rural and racist south

In 1951, at 26, they diagnosed her with the same disease that her father died And they give her five years of life: fifteen will survive. With the hangers to be able to walk, he will write the story The cripples will enter first. It will commentel ironic in a letter to a friend: “Perhaps because they will be able to make a way to great crutch shots”.

In his short life Flan writes two novels and 32 stories, All immersed in the rural rural rural and racist that she knows well. They are stories of people who lead any existence until something unexpected and terrible happens, which forces each of the protagonists to reveal the true itself.

Romana Petri writes: “Every now and then Flan thought she had fallen in love three times in her life and had always been rejected.” She liked to repeat with that bitter unmistakable humor that (also in the professional field) As a hobby she collected letters of refusal.

The loves of Flannery O’Connor

The first falling in love had been with John Sullivana Catholic sergeant. He read what little she wrote and talked about it together. Then John is transferred, the letters thin out and in the last he writes that he will go to the seminary. It will remain little, however, he will get married and disappear from his life.

The second is Robert Lowell, a poet who at thirty has already won cleanzer, He divorced and converted to Catholicism, but then lost faith. He tells Flan he found her thanks to her, but then in their life the pretty Elizabeth Hardwich and Flan enters their lives finds herself to attend the falling in love between Robert and Elizabeth who decide to get married the following year.

The third is the Danish philosopher Eric Langkjaer. He kisses her three times in the car and this bodes it. But then it starts again for Denmark. They write, she letters and he letters. In the last he communicates them briefly that he is about to marry. “I am aware that, in my condition, there will never be another Eric in my life” recognizes Flan, objective as always. Point and that’s it.

From the infantile passion for chickens, to which he even cooked on the clothes as they were dolls, he moves on to that for majestic peacocksa symbol of immortality, just as care for his illness become more invasive. He comes to possess about forty.

The posthumous discovery of Flannery’s diary O’Connor

When he died, at 39 years old, on August 2, 1964, much of her still doesn’t know. Epistolary, correspondence, diaries will gradually be made known in more recent times, wise in 1969, letters in 1979, until the publication in 2013 of A Prayer Journal, the diary that she started writing at the University of Iowa, discovered by a friend. Each discovery added brushstrokes to the artist’s portrait and increased his fame.

FLAN in the States is now curricular as far as Faulkner, there are no theses on her. In addition to a great writer, she is a cultural icon: a woman with the elusive chin and the straw hat that takes care of her peacocks, moving hard on crutches. His farm is open to public visits, his face is on a stamp.

Obviously, Flan was a woman of her time and more recently the controversy on her alleged racism have turned on. There is a letter that she wrote to a friendly friendly rights activist just before dying, reported in an article by Paul Elie on the New Yorker issue of June 15, 2020: «Speaking of the Negroes, those I don’t like are the genre that philosopher, prophesies and pontifical, in James Baldwin style. Very ignorant but that is never silent. Baldwin can tell us what is felt to be a negro in Harlem, the problem is that he tries to tell us his own even on everything else. I don’t think ML King is the great saint of this era, but if nothing else is doing what he can and has to do. (…) The question I ask myself is usually: would this person be bearable if he were white? If Baldwin was white, nobody would endure him a minute ».

Direct, honest, ironic and, today we would say, politically incorrect. Savannah’s girl, as Romana Petri defines her in her book where she tells us in all her strength and contradictions, has become truly immortal. It is in the paradise of the great authors, cited, discussed, studied, taken as a model in the writing schools. Someone up there listened to his prayer: “Please help me, dear God, to be a good writer”

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