Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [18]
A likeable politician, Ed O’Connor was not simply a glad-hander. He was far more complicated, with an almost dreamy side that could sometimes be construed as diffidence, or lassitude. To Katherine Doyle Groves, who knew him when she was a little girl, he seemed “aloof” or “snooty,” a man with his head “sort of in the clouds” and his nose “a little elevated.” A longtime resident of Savannah reported an impression of him around town as “a dreamer.” O’Connor would later write to her friend Betty Hester, “I am never likely to romanticize him because I carry around most of his faults as well as his tastes.” Fitzgerald surmised that these unnamed “faults” included “sloth,” a vice Flannery O’Connor often claimed for herself, combined with the stubbornness her father showed in pursuing his Legion life against his wife’s wishes. “More likely, she was told this of him,” Sally Fitzgerald guessed, “or heard him being told it of himself, or overheard it implied in some conversation among adults that she was not meant to overhear.”
His touch of poetic inwardness, combined with the patriotism of a boy who grew up in Savannah as a uniformed junior hussar, contributed to his great strength as a Legion commander: speechifying. “He was quite an orator,” says Angela Ryan Dowling, a Sacred Heart classmate of his daughter. Her positive assessment was backed up by the Savannah Morning News, which regularly carried reports on the speeches he gave as he traveled around the state to preside at meetings and initiate new projects. “Head of Legion Talks to Rotary” was the headline of a half-column summary of O’Connor’s 1936 pre–Armistice Day talk at the Hotel De Soto in Savannah: “How veterans have picked up the ends of a normal life, disrupted by the World War, gone about constructive pursuits, and the service the American Legion has rendered in aiding the young men to re-orient themselves was brought out in an address yesterday by E. F. O’Connor, Jr.”
Reading through handwritten pages of some of these talks twenty years later, Flannery O’Connor felt reassured that writing constituted her most intimate bond with her “writer” father. On a visit to O’Connor’s family farm, Andalusia, during the summer of 1956, Betty Hester revealed that her own aunt and uncle were active in the American Legion, and had known Ed O’Connor personally. Hester said that her aunt had described him “in tones not usually applied to members of the Legion.” A few weeks later, O’Connor wrote back to her, “Last year I read over some of the speeches he made and I was touched to see a kind of patriotism that most people would just laugh at now, something childlike, that was a good deal too good and innocent for the Legion. But the Legion was the only thing provided by the country to absorb it.”
Still pondering in her heart the few words of praise from Hester’s aunt, she added two weeks later, really giving him credit for her vocation, “My father wanted to write but had not the time or money or training or any of the opportunities I have had. . . . Anyway, whatever I do in the way of writing makes me extra happy in the thought that it is a fulfillment of what he wanted to do himself.” In a monthlong series of exchanges — a rare expression of her tender feelings toward her father — she stressed his likeability: “I suppose what I mean about my father is that he would have written well if he could have. He wrote all the time, one thing or another, mostly speeches and local political stuff. Needing people badly and not getting them may turn you in a creative direction, provided you have the other requirements. He needed the people I guess and got them. Or rather wanted them and got them.”
At the height of his term as state commander and public speaker, in 1937, a whitish patch appeared on Edward O’Connor’s forehead. Seemingly innocuous, this