A Few Thoughts… On a big word, Flannery O’Connor and Alexander the Great

By Sandy Compton
Reader Staff

In the July 3 edition of the Reader, I confessed to gathering odd words and the names of short-lived famous people from American Heritage Dictionary’s booster seat edition. For two-plus years, I’ve put them in a notebook for further research. I’m not done with the dictionary (two-thirds of the way through “P” at “pronate”), but research has begun. 

People of the Month are Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, who died at age 39 of lupus; and Alexander the Great, who died at age 32 in 323 B.C.E. of nobody is quite sure what. 

Mystery Word of the Month is: “antiferromagnetic,” an adjective meaning designating or exhibiting a form of magnetism characterized by an antiparallel alignment of adjacent electron spins in a crystal lattice. If you understand this, you may have a master’s degree in physics. It’s fun to say, but very hard to use in everyday conversation. 

Don’t even bother with “ferromagnetic.” It’s a shorter word with a longer definition that makes less sense. 

Historic explanations of Alexander’s death don’t quite make sense, either. In the 12 years between his 20th birthday and his death, he conquered much of his known world — from Egypt to the Himalayas. He planned and fought long campaigns and married wives and daughters of his conquered enemies, many of which he murdered — the enemies, not the wives. Then he died, which took 11 days, during which many of his soldiers filed past in tribute. There are many theories of the cause of deaths, some of which involve poisoning by one enemy or another (of which there were plenty), and some suggesting more mundane causes — typhoid fever, acute pancreatitis, West Nile virus, meningitis or Guillain-Barré syndrome. Plutarch notedthat whatever killed him, Alexander spent his last days in mute and increasing agony. 

Brave and brazen, he received many severe wounds in combat. He was also a heavy drinker, and spent a day and a night before onset of his final illness carousing with two friends — Nearchus, a naval commander; and Medius of Larissa, one of his senior officers. 

After Alexander’s death, his empire immediately began to disintegrate. There were even arguments about who would bury him, not to mention succeed him. Two years after he died — in 321 B.C.E. — his empire fell apart. It took 40 years of war to stabilize the Middle East again. 

Twenty-two-and-a-half centuries later, on March 25, 1923, Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Ga. It’s interesting, to me at least, that we share a birthday. She became much more famous than I — at least so far — as a renowned writer of “Southern gothic” novels and short stories. A compilation of her stories won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1972. However, in an ironic twist she might have scripted herself, she died eight years before of a disease to which she had a predisposition. Her father died of lupus in 1941, a few months before her 16th birthday. 

Diagnosed with lupus in 1952, she lived another 12 years — seven more than expected. In those dozen years, she published two novels and numerous short stories, and wrote scores of letters. It is thought that the lupus affected most of her writing, which is dark, with twisted, arcane plots and sometimes sordid endings. Complications are piled on her characters until they either break or die or both.

She was also a cartoonist, which she began when she was about 5 years old. While attending Georgia State College for Women, she contributed to the student newspaper. Many were black-and-white linoleum prints, and one seems to be a self-portrait. A woman with glasses sits alone on a chair facing the viewer as couples dance around her. The caption: “Oh, well, I can always be a Ph.D.”  

As a woman who grew up in the mid-20th century South, she was overtly racist, though somewhat conflicted about it. In one letter she wrote: “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste.” But in a letter to her mother, she also defended her friendship with a Black person she met in college. 

What have Flannery and Alexander have to do with each other? Not a lot, except that they lived large and died young. Flannery fought culture and lupus. Alexander fought the whole world.