As if anybody in real life would ever be a fan of Flannery O'Connor. Or ever read a word of her stories, unless they were forced by some horrible literature professor.
I was forced to read two of her stories in college:
"A Good Man is Hard to Find": a family on vacation is murdered, one at a time. Including the children. Grandma is the last to go. Why would anyone willing read about something so horrible? Why would anyone write about it.
"Good Country People": a depressed philosophy major thinks that a traveling salesman is interested in her, but she's fat! No chance! He really just wants to steal her prosthetic leg.
A devout Catholic, she really hated intellectuals: all that book learning keeps you from the mystery of faith. She also hated atheism and religions other than Catholicism. She lived her life in Milledgeville, Georgia, never married, attended Mass daily, and died of lupus in 1964, at the age of 39.
Sounds like the life of most of her isolated, miserable characters.
Wait -- never married?
And she had a lesbian buddy!
We were not aware of the relationship until the day after Christmas1998, when 75-year old Betty Hester shot herself. Next to her bed was a copy of the Flannery O'Connor fan newsletter splattered with her blood.
Fan newsletter? It must have three subscribers.
They began a correspondence of hundreds of letters. Some were published in a collection of Flannery's works, but with a pseudonymn, as if revealing Betty's identity would be too personal. They are mostly about philosophy and religion: Flannery begs Betty to convert to Catholicism, the only true faith.
Betty agrees to convert, but there might be a problem: she's a lesbian. Flannery states that she "doesn't care in the slightest," nor will it make the slightest difference in her relationship to the Church. She only starts to get annoyed when Betty decides to leave the Church in 1961. The two continued to correspond, but more cooly, up until Flannery's death.
So, was Flannery a lesbian, too? Or did she not care because lesbians were only mildly salacious compared to the human monsters she was accustomed to writing about?
Her biographer insists that Flannery couldn't have been a lesbian because she dated a man, once, in the early 1950s. Proof positive!
Next Betty got a crush on Iris Murdoch, another philosophical Catholic writer whose biographer insists "couldn't have been a lesbian." But Flannery remained her first, and truest love.
You're probably wondering about the top photo.
Flannery's novel Wise Blood is about the preacher in the Church of Truth without Christ, which doesn't believe in God, heaven, hell, or sin, so you are free to do whatever damn thing you want. Enoch Emery, a teenage follower, leaves the church when he starts worshipping a new Jesus, actually the shrunken corpse of a South American Indian in a museum.
In the 1979 movie version, Enoch Emery was played by Dan Shor. Two years later, Dan starred in the horror movie Strange Behavior, which features a lengthy conversation buck nekkid, his bare butt displayed to a generation that had almost never seen male nudity on a screen.
I wish I had written this post on Dan Shor rather than Flannery O'Connor. Lesbian or hot, I hate her works with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns. I even hate the plot synopses of her works.
Milledgeville Ga. is home to Central State Hospital formerly known as Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum. When I was growing up the phrase "So and so went to, was sent to, ended up in, should be in Milledgeville" was frequently code for gay.
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