Flannery O'Connor and Robert Giroux
Flannery O'Connor is considered one of America's greatest fiction writers. The immensely talented Robert Giroux, editor-in-chief of Harcourt, Brace & Com...
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University of Notre Dame
Right from the beginning, the literary relationship and personal friendship of O’Connor and Giroux took on a character of its own and thereafter never remained static; it changed in subtle and unpredictable ways as their lives intersected at various times in configurations that could never have been predicted, particularly due to Giroux’s decision to leave Harcourt, Brace and to O’Connor’s debilitating illness, caused by disseminated lupus erythematosus, a chronic inflammatory disease, as well as the exhaustion resulting from typing and retyping her fiction and essays. In late June 1960, when O’Connor felt great stress on a number of fronts, she wanted to make sure that none of this affected in the least her relationship with Giroux: “I don’t know how the rumor could have originated that I am dissatisfied with my publisher,” she wrote to Elizabeth McKee, “because it certainly isn’t true….If Giroux has got the notion I am dissatisfied, please tell him there is nothing to it.” (For citations and material taken from O’Connor’s published letters not found in the endnotes, I have relied on letters in two books: The Habit of Being and O’Connor’s Collected Works. It should be noted that some of the letters in this latter volume were not published in The Habit of Being. For those who wish to consult the larger context of these published letters, I indicated the recipient and the date or time period of each letter, since I did not want to burden the reader with an enormous amount of bibliographical citations.) Toward the end of her life, as she became more and more incapacitated, Giroux’s 1961 laconic and positive reply to her request to have a book published by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy about the short life of Mary Ann Long, who suffered from a large cancerous tumor on her face in addition to having had one eye removed, showed the tremendous confidence he had in O’Connor’s judgment: “I read the story, with a few misgivings which somehow are not important.” Neither Carver nor Lindley, I believe, would have risked accepting this book about a girl who died so tragically, but Giroux, calling on years of experience with a vast array of authors, a good number of whom were Catholic and had written books not unlike what O’Connor was proposing, appreciated and valued the literary and theological significance of each work she submitted to him for publication. O’Connor, who wrote the introduction to the book, was overjoyed by Giroux’s response and in February 1961 she considered getting this book published a “genuine miracle”—not a phrase she would use offhandedly. In a more unguarded moment, O’Connor wrote of this book: “It’s very badly written but should be published and Giroux had the good sense to see it.” Only years of respect and trust could have brought such an author and such an editor together in mutual accord. It should be mentioned, too, that after O’Connor’s own death, her mother served as the executrix of the Estate of Mary Flannery O’Connor and Robert Fitzgerald acted as O’Connor’s literary executor, and, after Fitzgerald’s death in January 1985, Giroux served for a while in this capacity.

The lives of O’Connor and Giroux cannot be set out synoptically in clear, parallel fashion, precisely because their age differences; family backgrounds; educations; personal and professional interests, travels; friendships; obligations, and differing longevity do not allow facile coordination. Yet the gaps in time and place—those generational spaces that separated these two individuals—become highly relevant and add a specific tone and texture to their particular relationship, opening up possible connections that might not always have verifiable certitude, but go from the sense of the possible, to that of the probable, to that which approximates the real. While facts can ground biographical perspectives, they sometimes fail to capture the imagination that demands interpretive interspaces. It is possible in hindsight to make certain connections that most likely were intuited but rarely articulated by either O’Connor or Giroux, but which nevertheless permitted these two individuals to form a bond that withstood unforeseen setbacks and changes. Giroux, for example, did not know the complete story behind the Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Contest until after O’Connor’s death; only then could he fill in the pieces and reconfigure in his mind what O’Connor was going through when they first met.

When friends of Gertrude Stein first saw the portrait of her done in 1906 by Picasso, for which Stein had at least eighty sittings, they turned to the famous artist and said, not liking Stein’s heavy-lidded, mask-like face, “Gertrude doesn't look anything like that.” To which he coyly replied, “Oh, but she will.” In like manner, when O’Connor preferred that her self-portrait painted in 1953 be used for the cover of her first collection of stories, she wrote to Giroux in January 1955 that it would “do justice to the subject for some time to come.” Curiously when she painted it, after suffering from a particularly acute siege of lupus, she did not look either at herself in the mirror or at the pheasant cock, since she knew what both looked like. Thus the power of portrait artists (and writers of critical books and essays that contain biographical information, as well as writers of biographies) to create long-lasting personal images that are distinctive and, if successful, compelling.