Brad Gooch

I remember reading WISE BLOOD and some of O'Connor's stories when I was in grad school, back in 1969-70. I can't remember if I knew then that O'Connor had only died about five years earlier. What I do remember is how taken I was with her odd characters in that "grotesque" southern literature she became so famous for. Brad Gooch's biography, FLANNERY, answered a lot of questions about O'Connor's short, mostly cloistered sort of life. There is so much information here, about her early show more schooling in Savannah, her family's devout Catholicism, her college days in Georgia and Iowa, her fascination with birds (chickens, pheasants, and especially peacocks). I mean, geeze, there's a LOT of stuff in here, most of which I found pretty damn interesting.

The thing is, O'Connor only wrote a couple of books. And there's a collection of about thirty stories she wrote over her short career, before she died of complications from lupus at the age of 39 in 1964. Apart from her grad school days in Iowa and a short stay in NYC, O'Connor spent most of her life on the family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, living with her mother. There are indications here that she may have been 'gay,' but Gooch never asserts this straight out, since it can't be proven. But her relationships with men always seemed chaste and/or problematic in some way; and there were a couple of close friendships with women (Betty Hester and Maryat Lee) that remained 'unrequited,' probably because of O'Connor's very strong sense of 'sin' - from her very Catholic upbringing. She was also a student of theology and divinity, which showed up so darkly in her quirky stories.

What I perhaps enjoyed most of all in Gooch's narrative were all the literary 'connections' in O'Connor's life, with the mentions of such luminary lights as: Elizabeth Hardwick, Caroline Gordon, Alfred Kazin, Robert Lowell, Robie Macauley (who later became the fiction editor for Playboy), Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, James Dickey (and his son, Christopher), Pete Dexter and many others. Because traveling was distasteful and often physically problematic for O'Connor, many of these folks admired her work enough to come to her.

So, given that most of O'Connor's life was spent in rural Georgia, how in the hell did Gooch manage to make this book so interesting? Well he relied heavily on O'Connor's voluminous correspondence and personal papers, and he used these sources very well. He must have, because I was fascinated by this bio of the somewhat reclusive O'Connor. I need to get hold of her Collected Stories to reacquaint myself first hand with her work. If you are a devotee of Flannery O'Connor, then this book is a must-read. Highly recommended. show less

In the midst of re-reading _The Habit of Being _ (a collection of Flannery O'Connor's correspondence) and her stories & occasional writings, I happened on this recent biography at a bargain price. I was interested in filling in some of the gaps in the writer's life, and this bio was an opportunity to do that.

The chief strength of this biography is the way the author shows how Flannery O'Connor seized on details of her (relatively circumscribed) life and (chiefly literary) acquaintance for show more the genesis of many of her stories. The potential danger of this, which Gooch largely (although sometimes just barely) sidesteps, is that it may give the impression that O'Connor's fiction was largely a way to externalize and improve on the events and preoccupations of her personal life. Anyone who is already familiar with her stories will probably not be too disturbed by this treatment, but I think some readers of the biography who are not yet well-acquainted with O'Connor's fiction may have their reception of the stories, when they do eventually read them, tainted by the notion that the stories are all in some way "autobiographical." Caveat lector.

I suppose Gooch chose this way of recounting O'Connor's life, in part at least, because otherwise the biography would be a fairly bare tale (Flannery herself famously opined that no one would ever write the story of her life because it was so uneventful). By showing how personal details are reflected in her stories, the biographer manages to show that Flannery's imagination was so fertile that any small detail of her daily life could light a creative spark that she would fan into a blaze of glorious story-telling. Indeed, the account of her early years, for which Gooch depended on snippets of memories from people who knew her only slightly or from a distance, is the weakest part of the book, and the least sympathetic to the subject.

I would say that the weakness of the book, which will trouble many O'Connor devotees, is the fact that, while he clearly admires O'Connor as a writer, the biographer does not seem very sympathetic toward, or understanding of, the fundamental moral and theological wellsprings of her life and work. Since Flannery O'Connor repeatedly insisted that such was the absolute source of her creativity and the unswerving orientation of her life, it seems to me a significant weakness in a biography that the biographer has such a tenuous grasp on what really animated the life he is writing.

In the final analysis, I find this biography of Flannery O'Connor interesting, useful, but fundamentally flawed. I'm sorry that Sally Fitzgerald never finished her own biography of her friend's life, which would probably have given a much more sympathetic and understanding view, and which Brad Gooch mentions in his Acknowledgments as something that Fitzgerald worked on for many years but never completed. Nonetheless, I'm glad to have read Gooch's treatment of O'Connor's life, as it did what I had hoped, filling in the gaps left by _The Habit of Being_ and fleshing out some of the real-life characters who meant so much to her. show less

In his new memoir Smash Cut, novelist (Scary Kisses) and biographer (City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara) Brad Gooch recounts his experiences in New York City during the turbulent ’70s and ’80s. With his relationship with filmmaker Howard Brookner as the focus, Gooch covers a dizzying array of events and a constellation of notable characters in retelling his life with Brookner, from their first date in 1978 to Howard’s death at age 34 in 1989. Interspersed with photos, show more drawings and other documents, the memoir uses the titular “smash cut” film device of “splicing one image or event up against another totally unrelated image or event” to tell its story. At times, Gooch hesitates, puts off telling a detail or a story, most often about some sexual or drug-related transgression, as exploring the “wild side” in the ‘70s and ‘80s meant trips to the infamous Mineshaft bar, speed, cocaine and heroin as well as clubbing at the Paradise Garage and visiting with Chelsea Hotel neighbor Virgil Thompson. Gooch gets over these hesitations and presses on, telling almost all. Oddly, however, what’s often missing in Smash Cut is not detail, for there is a good deal of that, but the difficult to put ones finger on ‘flavor’ of the times. What did it feel like to be in these places, live at these times? However, if, as Tolstoy famously wrote “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Brad Gooch has given us a fine example of what a happy gay couple holding onto each other through tumultuous and finally tragic times looks like.
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/05/03/smash-cut-a-memoir-of-howard-art-the... show less

Not knowing anything about Flannery O'Connor's life but having read some of her stories, I expected her to have a dark and twisted childhood; I'm happy to be wrong.

Gooch uses mountains of letters and interviews to get into O'Connor's short life from her birth and death in Georgia and all the other places in between. His approach is very "here are the facts--do with them as you will," and I liked how he didn't try to interpret the meaning behind her works as there seem to be enough other show more tomes that do that.

I now want to read the O'Connor novels I've missed and reread her stories and also delve into her prose and all the letters she wrote. Flannery O'Connor's story doesn't just end with this biography--it keeps on, and I think Gooch did an excellent job of telling it all while making the reader thirst for more. show less