The Action of Grace

"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."
Flannery O’Connor

One of my favorite factoids about Flannery O’Connor is that she liked to raise domestic birds. Me, I prefer my fowl viewed through binoculars at difficult-to-identify distances with a tattered Peterson Field Guide. I like to stroll along through a damp wood, listen to happy, whistled melodies, and have no idea which variety of bird is making that sound.  Why anyone would want to keep parrots in cages or raise guinea hens out back is beyond my comprehension. I’d rather have a snake in a terrarium than a squawking, crapping, stinking, molting bird. Still, I just love it that Flannery loved them.

When she was a little girl in Savannah, Flannery taught her pet bantam chicken to walk backward. It was recorded by a Yankee cameraman, appearing on newsreels across America in 1932. I learned about the trick back in April, while visiting Flannery’s childhood home. There, in that narrow little unimpressive house, with its view of St. John the Baptist Cathedral through distorted glass, Mary Flannery decided, at age 6, that she was ready to be an adult. She started calling her parents by their first names and quit going to Sunday school, instead attending Mass with the grownups. When the nuns at St. Vincent’s Grammar School tried to punish her, Mary Flannery informed them that the church would not dictate how the O’Connor family chose to worship. That was one of the first fights the tenacious young author would win against conformity.

In the last couple of days, I’ve learned that the quality of my memory of (and the value I place on) an author’s landmark depends largely on the docent. The odd character who gave us the tour in Savannah back in April (who himself lives in Flannery O’Connor’s attic, writing his own as yet unpublished novels in the mornings, only available to give tours in the afternoons) was the best, most intelligent, literate, passionate, and knowledgeable of the docents I’ve met on the Southern Literary Trail. He is the reason, I’m certain, I’ve retained what little I know about O’Connor in the dark recesses of my muddled ability to recall.  

When we visited Andalusia on Thursday, the 544-acre farm where Flannery O’Connor lived her last 14 years and wrote most of the work that she published, the best thing that happened was having my Savannah memories stirred. I didn’t learn anything new. I liked seeing her bedroom, how her desk was set up, the crutches leaning against the bookshelf to remind visitors of the painful lupus which ultimately claimed her at the young age of 39. The peahens in the aviary are not descendants of her birds, but I pulled up short in front of the strutting, colorful cock, who yanked me right down memory lane.

Not only did a bird take me back to Savannah two months ago, but back to San Francisco State, circa 1986. I was then a 20-year-old creative writing major who didn’t know much about anything, and sure didn’t know how to write.  When my writing teacher had us read a short story called “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” I got my first taste of Flannery O’Connor. Based on that one riveting story (which, yes, I thought of as “hard, hopeless and brutal” but – whoa!  It smacked me upside my head and said “Forget everything you know about conventional femininity and the South, Girlie!”),  I marched right down to City Lights Bookstore and bought The Complete Stories. I never, in 25 years paused to wonder why the cover picture was a graceful peacock.

As Paul and I drive along, stopping to visit historic landmarks of authors we have loved, I wonder… why? What exactly is it that makes me want to visit people’s houses, look at their gardens and their beds, their dishes and their empty bourbon bottles?

I know at least part of it is that I want some kind of connection – still, at my age – or maybe it’s especially at my age. My writing is no more like Flannery O’Connor’s than it was 25 years ago, but I do consider her an influence. I tend to think that I, too, strive to create characters upon whom grace is visited (in spite of themselves). 

But that's where I get a little bit tangled - what exactly is grace? I'm sure not talking about the dictionary definition of "the state of being protected or sanctified by the favor of God." When I think of grace, I'm talking about goodwill; I'm talking about "a disposition to be generous or helpful." I want that to also be what Flannery's talking about, her being a good nonconformist and all. Never mind that the docent at Andalusia reminded me she attended mass with her mother almost every single day of her life. Her grace and my grace might not be synonymous.

A casual chat with Paul brings a touch of clarity. (Yet another of the reasons why I love this man - we talk about books and authors as casually as folks talk about the weather, and in a relaxed conversation, I wind up learning something.) I read him the quote and he nods enthusiastically, says, "O'Connor is very much about grace. She's a traditional Roman Catholic Southern Christian woman whose goal for her characters is salvation, redemption, grace. But the paths that they take are shocking, surprising, tortuous... and not at all traditional. She wants to take her characters right to the point where they have a chance to be saved, but she stops before they have a chance to cross the threshold to salvation." He says something else, something wise and wonderful about maybe it's not even the characters so much as it's her readers that that are poised on that threshold ... but as we're drinking wine in our hotel room on the Mississippi River now, I'm losing my ability to focus on these lofty considerations at all. 

To sum up - or at least, stop the rambling - I still haven't figured out why I'm visiting these houses, what they mean to me, what I'm looking for. I feel like a little girl wading in shallow water, tentatively dipping a toe in, not quite ready to dive into the deep. But I'm longing for it. I'm gazing at it. Maybe one of these days - maybe soon - I'll figure some stuff out, swim out to where I can't touch.

Meanwhile, I'm still wading in the shallows, and trivial though it felt, I did stop at the aviary at Andalusia long enough to aim my camera at that big blue peacock. I smiled at it, glad it didn’t want to get any closer to me than I to it. I zoomed in with the lens, paused for a moment, and then snapped its picture.