Posts Tagged ‘Elizabeth Coffman’

Among the highlights during my brief Chicago visit last week was the first-ever full screening for a general audience of Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The film, directed by Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco, includes never-before-seen archival footage and photographs. Mary Steenburgen narrates, with interviews from Alice Walker, Tobias Wolff, Tommy Lee Jones, Mary Karr, Alice McDermott, Conan O’Brien, Mary Gordon, and people from O’Connor’s life. (The film includes “motion graphics,” rather than “dramatic reenactments,” in keeping with the requirements of the O’Connor Trust.)

“Most literary biopics and most documentaries about writers fail in my opinion because they tend to exclude or at least minimize the writing when of course the writing itself is the key element that defines why we care about the writer,” said film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, in remarks before the screening. He was critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 to 2008, and author of a number of books on films. “There’s an analogous problem for me in most films that feature jazz, where it’s felt that audiences are too restless to sit still for uninterrupted writing.”

Then he cited Wendy Lesser, writing in Bookforum: “Flannery O’Connor is like Mark Twain, but with a harder edge. Both the pathos and the ludicrousness of the life she perceives and creates are always present to her, and which one will win out depends on how wrathful she feels her God to be at any given time.”

“Ignorance is by no means her only target. Knowingness, of a highly educated and smug sort, also comes under fire, especially in the later stories that are more visibly self-mocking.”

But the final word in his remarks was from O’Connor herself, in her preface to Wise Blood: “Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.”

George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo, called it “a beautiful and important film about one of our great American artists.” The screening at Loyola’s Damen Cinema was part of the “Catholic Imagination” conference, launched by Dana Gioia in 2015.

Flannery O’Connor with Robie Macauley and Arthur Koestler in Iowa, 1947. (Photo: Cmacauley/Creative Commons)

Image, a journal headed by the estimable Gregory Wolfe, has a scoop in its fall issue: the never-before-published college journal kept by writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). According to Mark Bosco: “Four years ago my colleague Elizabeth Coffman and I embarked on a feature-length documentary about O’Connor’s life and work, and so we found ourselves at Emory University, where O’Connor’s archive had recently found a home. We already had over thirty hours of recorded interviews … It was time to see – and to touch – the physical objects of her life and photograph them for use in our documentary. We found in a box a Sterling notebook, standard issue for students in those days, inscribed ‘Higher Mathematics I.’ On perusing it we discovered an earlier attempt at a journal when O’Connor was just eighteen years old and already at Georgia State College for Women. She wrote her first dated entry during her Christmas Break, on December 29, 1943, and her last is marked February 6, 1944 – in all, a mere thirty pages. Reading it, you see O’Connor trying out the journal form as a way to examine her thoughts.”

It’s not online, so here is a short excerpt from “Higher Mathematics: An Introduction.” (And you can get a copy of the issue here.)

From the January 19, 1944 page in the journal:

I begin to wonder – what next? I have always wondered, but this wondering is different. This wondering sees me on the threshold of something or near it. I realize for the first time that all these knots must be untied – all this tangle unstrung – and me got out of the middle of it.”

I don’t like to write about things that make me lonesome. Yet they are so big – to me now. I hate to think of saying “goodbye” – the actual mechanics of the thing grieve me more than the loss. The way the rest will do – what they may say. If I should begin to feel sorry for myself – however erroneously – I could easily move myself to a liquid-eyed condition, and that would be disastrous. I have such an affection for myself. It is second only to the one I have for Regina [her mother]. No one else approaches it. I realize that joyfully just now. If I loved anyone as much or more than myself and he were to leave, I would be too unhappy to want myself to advance; as it is, I look forward to many profitable hours. I have so much to do that it scares me.

She was already beginning to experience the symptoms of lupus, which she mistook for arthritis. She was diagnosed with the disease, which had killed her father, in 1952, and lived for another dozen years – five more than expected. She died at 39.