For the Love of Flannery
by Ana Braga-Henebry in Family on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 6:00 AM
Ironically, it was my husband who gave me the first Flannery O’Connor book. The Habit of Being
My love for Flannery O’Connor has been fruitful and inspiring. And now it is my husband who is visiting Flannery’s home, church, and grave in Milledgeville, Georgia, on a side trip during a scientific conference.
Does it bother me? Funny, but it does not. In my vocation of mother-at-home, I’ve long been used to it. I can only explain this sacramentally: used now for over twenty years of parental life together, the interchangeability of physical place has certainly become commonplace for us. So often it is either one of us who attends a piano or ballet recital, drives a child to an allergist, picks up a college kid from the airport, or in this case, visits Flannery O’Connor’s world in the Deep South.
Truly, if my husband is there, I feel as if I were there. Insert instant photos from his Blackberry and comments sent to me during his visit and we can even enjoy the experience in the same time-window.
But our shared experience goes further. My husband would not be at Flannery’s home at all if it weren’t for my love for her—a love he caught, like as in a contagious disease, from me. At St. John’s College, where he first encountered the profoundly Catholic and yet mesmerizing author, he says they all missed the point by hundreds of miles during the subsequent discussions.
I first heard of Flanney O’Connor in graduate school at a secular state university, where an excellent professor declared she was the best American writer of all time. I wonder if my husband could predict, when he gave me a copy of The Habit of Being, her collected letters, that it would turn into a lifelong love affair. I have since savored each paragraph of every O’Connor short story several times, and entered her paradoxical novels determined to conquer. I have collected every Catholic literary analysis of her fiction and some have been extremely pleasurable to read, side by side with the stories.
But most of all I have admired and loved the person I met in The Habit of Being, a person of extraordinary gift for words and with qualities that resound like the best a person can be this side of Paradise. Now, if every talented writer would have their heart fixed on heaven, or in the Cross ...
This sharing of literature is a common occurrence in our marriage: I would not have loved Waugh’s fiction if it weren’t for my husband, and I certainly could not have understood the humor in McCall Smith’s Portuguese Irregular Verbs
Thus marriage happens: husband and wife visiting places for the other, representing the other’s presence, and growing intellectually together.
To go back to my initial and understated point: my husband and I take our love for literature seriously and this we do, in part, because we take parenthood seriously. Loving our kids does not mean we cease to have adult interests. Library books are constantly cluttering our living room and old books too, always pulled from an obscure corner of our multiple bookshelves by my husband’s accurate hand. We are intelligent adults and the kids need to see us enjoying and discussing literary works beyond Margaret Wise Brown or Tolkien, as good as these may be.
If we expect our children to be cultured, well-read, and appreciative of what is excellent, we must set the example.
So sometimes the kitchen dishes are neglected and a room left messy, but Chopin Études will be playing loudly and beautifully from the stereo (or being practiced piecemeal on the piano), or poems might be read aloud to kids still in pajamas.
On one of her trips years ago, my mother brought home a little plaque that said: “My home is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy”. She posted it by her sewing center and lived by it. It almost seems nowadays that it is easier to find either extreme than this prudent compromise.
I like to think that Catholic families may exemplify my mother’s little plaque, one she did embody fully. In the happy company of her children and grandchildren, Mother would clearly show where her heart was by enjoying sitting and visiting. She would read poetry, lecture on etymology at the drop of a hat, recite Latin sayings, or tell a fascinating story of a great historical character. Quotidian chores fell to their rightful secondary plane.
Chores would get done eventually—they always do. I am truly thankful that my mother’s embracing of an intellectual life is my model, rather than an immaculate house.
— Ana Braga-Henebry has a Masters Degree in Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. She has written myriad articles for Catholic homeschool periodicals, has been writing book reviews for over ten years, and blogs from the family acreage in South Dakota.
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