Snapshots of Carver and O’Connor, Pre-Mortem :: Photographs Photos Carver OConnor Essays

Snapshots of Carver and O’Connor, Pre-Mortem Raymond Carver is glaring from the other side of the table, one beefy arm dangling on a chair, the other planted firmly in front of him. His eyes are white, ethereally white, and his hair is a salt and pepper gray. He looks like someone who buys rounds of drinks for everyone at a bar downtown, or, as one critic noted, maybe he’s your son’s little league coach. He is tough but jowly, going slightly soft, like a man who had a hair-trigger temper once but has worked all these years to overcome it. Flannery O’Connor, on the other hand, is a Sunday school teacher: bookish, awkward in a necklace, looking much older than 39. She is smiling crookedly, furtively, smiling away from us. At church socials, she would be a fixture, a great conversationalist, or possibly the woman that holds everything together, flitting from table to table, cooing in a gentle Georgia lilt. You might see Carver at the hardware store, or O’Connor picking through the stacks at the library. You might spy Carver raking his lawn on Sundays; O’Connor would be trying to settle a group of eight-year olds in a church basement with colorful stories of Noah and Moses. They seem like people I know, people I have seen around town, people I wave to on Sunday mornings. Yet for all their vigor, for all their presence, their days are numbered. I know that these are snapshots of people who are going to die. In a few years, their vivacity will be undercut by mortality, their photographic presence instead marked with the great void of absence. The later pictures show a Carver who is puffy, bald, with jowls dropping to the floor, paying for all those nights at the bar and all those cigarettes, a victim of intensive radiation treatment. O’Connor deteriorated in the opposite direction, not bloating but shrinking: the sinews in her neck jut out like those of a strange, scraggly bird, her soulful eyes bulge, and her body is rigid with lupus. In the final days, she had her God and her peacock farm in backwoods Appalachia. He had his friends, his writer’s reputation, his temporal achievements. Their intensive creative lives visible across their faces in the early photographs have been replaced by tranquility, the comforting promise of death, and a final absolution.