On Public Spaces

My new home faces a very public square. On one of the trust lots facing Lafayette Square sits The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, its twin spires two talisman guiding my return home when I venture out. The Andrew Low house faces from another trust lot, as does the Hamilton-Turner Inn at the opposite end.

On my first Saturday afternoon, as we returned from a walk city officials were busy unloading a truck full of folding chairs in preparation for a wedding on the public square. Later than evening, we shared a bottle of wine while sitting on one of the park benches under a moss draped live oak. Passersby stopped and spoke with us, sharing a joke or observation as they walked dogs or just strolled on a warm early summer evening. Although it was still fairly early after sundown, there were parties well underway in two houses also facing Lafayette square. I watched as three young women clad in attire appropriate for the season parked their (or more likely, their parents’) Mercedes SUV and scampered up steep steps to the parlor floor apartment.

Clearly, Savannahians live life in and within sight of the public square.

In Turkey this week Istanbulites have been doing the same in Taksim Square and Gezi Park, one of the last bits of green space in the great modern and Byzantine city of Istanbul. There have been piano concerts and tango competitions and tear gas attacks and water canon blasts and fireworks as the government of Turkey tries to push out a group of protestors who originally simply didn’t want the trees razed to build an Ottoman inspired shopping mall. Since that first group was tear-gassed and pummeled with high pressure water, the entire country has erupted into mass protests that go beyond the building of yet another mall by the mercantile Islamist governing majority. That public square is now a daily battleground between the forces of modernity and the Ottoman past. Just today, the Istanbul governnor called on mothers to pick up their sons and bring them home. They didn’t. Instead, a parade of middle-aged women showed up and arm in arm encircled the protestors, daring the police to gas and water blast them away.

For me, this is personal. My baby brother is one of the protestors, at the square by night and at work by day, pushing back against the slide into the past.

Public spaces are crucial to democracy’s survival. Eliminate the square and you eliminate visible opposition.

The Finding Flannery Project explained

Finding Flannery is an experiment in what Padgett Powell calls drafting in the mind of a genius. Let me be clear - I am no genius. Flannery O’Connor most certainly was. Nonetheless, I am compelled to answer the question Powell posits thus in his brilliant essay Breathing the Same Air as Genius in the May 2003 issue of The Oxford American. He asks:

If you could breath the same air over the same ground, could you draft in the mind of a genius?

Folly perhaps, but in the words of Savannah’s great songwriter, Johnny Mercer, Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear to Thread.

What books to bring?

OK - it’s down to packing. Books mainly. Even after culling the shelves of paperbacks and duplicates, there are still (perhaps literally) tons of books to sift through. It’s obvious that quite a few books will end up in storage for a while. And it’s equally obvious that while I own a Kindle, I don’t much use it. Given a choice between hardback, paperback or pixels, I chose hardback every time.

Obvious choices - anything by and about Flannery O’Connor. Anything by or about other Southern writers. Conrad Aiken’s poetry and short stories. Carson McCullers. Truman Capote. Harper Lee. Tennessee Williams. Maybe even John Grisham.

Other obvious choices - anything and everything about World War II - restricted to the European theater to get the book count down. Especially important are several books inherited from my Great Uncle Kris, including a first hand account by a Norwegian death camp survivor written just a few years after the end of the occupation. And a fascinating little book by Quisling published during the occupation and which bears a dirty boot print on the title page. (To be clear - that one was not part of my family library - but discovered on Ebay a few years ago.)

Anything and everything on Edvard Munch, who died during the last year of occupation and who refused to cooperate with the occupiers but whose corpse was given a grand Nazi funeral procession.

Less obvious choices - a collection of Faberge books and guides - because there’s a Quisling connection. By some accounts, Quisling owned an egg, perhaps purchased during a famine relief trip to Russia in the years before the war. When his widow died in 1984, it was listed in the auction notes for her estate though I haven’t yet been able to track its travels since then.

A read-off

It’s on. A James Baldwin - Flannery O’Connor read-off culminating in viewing Wise Blood and The Price of the Ticket via Netflix. And it looks like our first writerly visitor will be journalist and friend Adrienne Terrell Washington. We will debate race relations as viewed through the eyes of Baldwin and O'Connor and record the event. 

Writing in a writer's house

It’s official - beginning June 1, 2013, I will be living and (more importantly) writing in the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah. My husband and fellow writer and I have been wanting to relocate to Savannah for well over a decade now, but the right opportunity never quite came our way. First we tried to buy an old victorian, only to find that the seller didn't quite have title, having contracted to buy it out of a foreclosure that wasn't quite legitimate. That's right, we had a contract to buy a house from a guy who had a contract to buy the house from a bank that didn't have title. So I had packed up my library (no small feat) for no good reason. Ah, Savannah. 

Facebook to the rescue. About three weeks ago, I saw a notice from the Childhood Home that the garden apartment was available for the first time in ten years. I immediately made contact, shamelessly pitching ourselves as writers who would be perfect tenants. With the help of friends and neighbors willing to vouch for our bona fides, we nabbed the place. And I packed some of the books up again.

My dear thesis advisor, Margaret Myers, once said she would deface my grave if I didn’t finish my novel. Really, she said that. (Margaret - such a Savannah act that would be.) So here’s the plan. Under the watchful eye of Flannery, I will finish the novel I began at JHU. I will re-read her works, her letters, her lectures and comment on them on this blog. Think of it as Julie and Julia meet Southern Gothic. 

Wish me luck. Keep in touch. And if you're down this way, look me up. I'll be easy to find.

Why Flannery?

I have a dear friend who, shall we say, does not share my enthusiasm for all things Flannery. I thought of her when I recently came across a letter between O’Connor and playwright Maryat Lee.

The 1959 letter touches on everything from race relations to cocktail parties, Flannery O’Connor uses friend Brainard Cheney as a foil to explain her view of race relations in the South and in the Northeast - particularly urbane and sophisticated New York City. Mr. Cheney, she says, is trying to write a novel “set in interracial circles in New York,” but after two weeks in Gotham has been “unable to meet one Negro” socially. Cheney, she explains, would probably like to meet James Baldwin.

O’Connor apparently had been asked to see James Baldwin in Georgia but declined to do so because it would cause the “greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion.” She added that she had read one of his stories and “it was a good one.”

She ends the letter by suggesting that if Cheney wants to try again, “I’ll get him to call you and maybe you could scout up a few,” though she thinks he will instead rely on his imagination.

I don’t know whether Cheney ever met Baldwin or which story of Baldwin’s O’Connor read and found to be “a good one.” It could not have been “Going to Meet the Man,” which was not written until after O’Connor died. Nor did Cheney’s imagination allow him to finish that Northeast interracial novel - all his published works are set in the rural South.

So Adrienne, if you are reading this, I’d like to suggest that, in the parlance of our times, “it’s complicated.” Or not. So let’s talk soon - at Flannery’s.

Finding Flannery’s T

I have come to Lafayette Square to see what Flannery saw.

Others may seek out Andalusia, but it is Flannery’s childhood home that draws me. It is here, at 207 E. Charleton Street, that she spent the most important years of her life, from her birth in 1925 to 1938, when she and her family moved to Milledgeville. So it must be from her experiences here that she concluded “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his life.” Children, she told a friend, have nothing to do but observe the world around them and then later transfer those observations into their writing.

I and my two walking companions approach the house slowly, crossing Lafayette Square from the North, passing the Catholic church where Flannery was baptized and worshipped and the Catholic elementary school where Irish nuns taught her to read and write. It is a three story tabby stucco house with a steep stairway to the parlor level and the obligatory historical marker in front.

I know the house is closed for renovation, but that does not deter me. I climb the stairs, hoping to at least peak inside through the stained glass pane in the door. The door swings open. A young workman with missing front teeth greets me. He is wearing dusty jeans and a baseball cap and a great big smile, apparently not the least bit embarrassed at his dental impairment.

“Y’all want to look around?”

Do I ever.

He steps out of the way and we follow him. He apologizes for the “mess” and explains that the renovations are just beginning. Here, in the parlor, he shows how the historic preservationists have begun pealing back the paint and wallpaper, trying to get back to the wall covering as it existed in the late ’20s and the ‘30s. He explains that they are trying to put the building back exactly as it would have been when Flannery lived here, evoking her name as if he personally knows her.

Up the stairs we go, to the main bedroom floor and to the back bedroom that was Flannery’s. He points out her cradle, and some peacock feathers and the view from the window down to the garden level backyard below.  He becomes animated as he explains that this was where she trained the chicken to walk backwards and I love the way he assumes we know the story.

Our impromptu tour done, he escorts us back out.

“Now, don’t be strangers, “he says. “Come back when I’m done.”

My companions drift off down Charleton to look for a lunch place and I tell them to get a table and order for me. I’m not quite ready to leave and plant myself on the top step and look out over Lafayette Square. Big, broad live oaks shade the square, Spanish moss dripping from the branches, the sunlight that makes it through the dense canopy casts golden shadows across the grass. Squirrels frolic. Cicadas buzz. The humid air reeks of magnolia blossoms and decaying leaves. An elderly man sleeps on a bench, adding his snore to the cacophony. A woman in a bright flowered sleeveless dress walks a little white dog. Two teenagers in matching white oxford shirts and plaid skirts toting back packs chatter as they cross the square.

So this is Flannery’s T.

Until this moment I have doubted my right to recount the occupation. It had seemed too audacious. After all, I left Oslo at age nine. Yet here, on this porch, on this square and in this church and at the school just around the corner Flannery learned all she needed to know to understand humanity. Perhaps it is not so audacious after all to think that the hours I spent resting on my grandmother’s lap in a cabin in the Oslo woods listening to the adults describe the defining years of their generation are enough to tell their Truth.