Flannery O'Connor: a Life.

By Jean W. Cash. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. Pp. xviii, 356. $30.00, ISBN 1-57233-192-5.)

Flannery O'Connor has been dead for almost forty years. Sally Fitzgerald, one of O'Connor's literary executors, spent most of this time amassing a mountain of material about O'Connor's life. At Fitzgerald's death in 2000, however, she left behind a vast three-thousand-page manuscript that may never be published. Jean W. Cash has now supplied us with perhaps the next best thing: a new biography that contains most of the relevant information about O'Connor's comings and goings.

Cash has labored prodigiously, interviewing nearly everyone who knew O'Connor while also tracking down many previously unpublished letters. Unfortunately, Cash fails to surmount her uninstructive emphasis on O'Connor's alleged "individualism" (p. xv). O'Connor was indeed the thorniest and least innocuous American writer of the twentieth century, but her primary commitments, to her writing and her Roman Catholicism, were far from "individualist." On the contrary, O'Connor remained gladly dependent on both her literary and religious communities. Moreover, these two radically communal worlds were deeply implicated in her life and work, as O'Connor's remarkable friendships--and her even more remarkable letters--magnificently attest.

While Cash fails to explore the complex webbed relation of O'Connor's primary communities, she gets O'Connor's sexuality exactly right, especially concerning her lesbian writer-friend Maryat Lee. O'Connor was neither a closeted lesbian nor a frustrated heterosexual, Cash shows, but a woman who, seeing that she would probably not live into old age, surrendered all hope for marriage and devoted herself entirely to her art. Rather than prompting a recoil into Catholicism, the illness that killed O'Connor at thirty-nine was its severest test.

Concerning the race question, alas, Cash is determined to sanitize O'Connor at all costs. Cash fails to discern that the writer's conscience was insufficiently stung by the evils that blacks suffered in the segregated South. Nor does she see that O'Connor sought to redeem her occasionally racist attitudes by setting forth her deepest racial convictions in such a story as "The Artificial Nigger." Neither do we gain any fresh understanding of O'Connor's deep but difficult relation with her domineering mother, Regina Cline O'Connor. We never learn, for example, why Flannery made herself the model for the unsavory intellectual sons and daughters who seethe with resentment against their spiritually obtuse mothers.

Cash does disclose, ever so helpfully, that O'Connor's mother-managed childhood turned her into a waspishly funny, almost misanthropic prodigy. But we are not shown how O'Connor largely overcame this native meanness of spirit through a lifelong cultivation of her ever-deepening Catholicism and through her ever-widening circle of abiding friendships. Cash gets matters exactly backward, for instance, when she says that O'Connor was able to "look ... critically at the restrictive dogmas of her faith" (p. xiv) and that she was drawn to atheists and non-Catholics in order to broaden her perspective. Far from having a comforting and assuring faith, O'Connor wrestled like Jacob with the wounding angel of the divine presence, even as she admired non-Christians who acknowledged the trauma of their own unbelief. What we still need, therefore, is a biography that will do for O'Connor what Jay Tolson did for Walker Percy in Pilgrim in the Ruins (New York, 1992)--that is, show how the writer's life and work profoundly cohered.

RALPH C. WOOD

Baylor University