Admiration grew for his contradictory subject

Amy Driscoll

Nov. 8, 2009 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- If most biographers start out in love with their subjects and end up hating them, Brad Gooch did things backward as he researched his highly regarded biography of southern writer Flannery O'Connor.

The tart-tongued, contrary, wickedly funny O'Connor, who died in 1964 at 39, fascinated Gooch almost two decades earlier. But his interest had been intellectual, an arms-length admiration of the unnerving intensity of her stories and knife-sharp wit.

Later, when he delved deeply into O'Connor's life for Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown, $30), he began to see beyond the eccentric to the brave woman underneath. Through letters and writings he found a person as harsh on herself as she was on others, a passionate Catholic who had no room for pity or fear as she faced a life increasingly curtailed by lupus, the disease that would kill her.

"I didn't agree with all her religious and political views. I felt more formal and a little uncomfortable at the beginning," Gooch says from his home in New York. "But by the end -- seeing the way she met her death and the degree that was displayed in her writing -- it became very moving to me, and I came to admire that beyond what I had expected."

Originally Gooch was attracted to O'Connor's letters as a medieval-studies graduate student in the late '70s. He was so impressed by a book of her letters -- she called herself "13th century" -- that he wrote to an O'Connor friend in hopes of securing access to unpublished letters from the author.

STOPPED COLD

But his self-professed "bright idea" to write the biography was stopped cold by Sally Fitzgerald, a longtime O'Connor friend, who bluntly told him to forget it.

"If there was a biography to be written, she would write it," Gooch recalled her responding. "Though she did offer to let me be her assistant if she ever needed one."

Rebuffed, he went on to write a biography of poet Frank O'Hara and only then returned his attention to O'Connor. His timing was good. Fitzgerald had died without writing the book, some previously unpublished letters were now available and more of O'Connor's friends -- many in their 80s, so Gooch "could hear the clock ticking" -- were willing to talk about the enigmatic author who wrote about the grotesque but lived much of her adult life on the family farm in Milledgeville, Ga., where she collected exotic birds.

Interviewing those who remembered her from Milledgeville, Gooch found protectiveness but also puzzlement. Why would he be interested in writing a biography of Mary Flannery O'Connor, someone they viewed as well known but essentially local?

"In Georgia, there's an idea that no one would even get Flannery outside of Georgia. . . . It's just surprising to them that she's global and that someone was interested who wasn't from the South."

O'Connor's legendary contrariness made the research an exercise in twists and turns for Gooch. He was never sure where she would come down on an issue. Though she spent most of her life in the South, she was a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lived at Yaddo, the artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in 1948-49. She also lived briefly in New York City.

"She was always crossing these two wires that didn't usually cross. So in her work, the humor crossed with the violence so that you're laughing, even though people are getting killed," Gooch says. "In a certain way, she was ever a contradiction. She had a profound faith, a very deep person that way, but she was so funny and so smart."

And though she wrote black characters into her stories, voted for Kennedy and remained good friends with at least one extremely liberal woman, O'Connor also apparently collected racial jokes.

So when Gooch was reading some newly released O'Connor letters that included the revelation that one of her friends was gay, Gooch found himself unsure how she would react.

NO BIG DEAL

"I was reading those letters, and I'm turning papers wondering, 'What is she going to say about this?' And she reacts with this nonchalance. And I thought, 'Ah yes, she was at Yaddo, at Iowa, this is nothing to her.' "

Did he end up liking her?

"Like? Hmmm. Deep admiration," Gooch says. "Great respect. Love, perhaps. Like? I don't know about that. I think it would be difficult to sit on the front porch with Flannery O'Connor. . . . She was forever giving people enough rope to hang themselves. I'm sure I'd be hanging."

Brad Gooch appears at 11 a.m. Nov. 15 in Batten Community Room.

Newstex ID: KRTB-0123-39531365