Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  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 skin rash turned out to be the first, visible symptom of an autoimmune disorder that causes the body to produce antibodies that attack its own healthy tissues. Initially thought to be rheumatoid arthritis, the disease was eventually diagnosed as lupus erythematosus, or “red wolf,” after a facial rash associated with it. As an adult suffering from the same disease, following the development of diagnostic blood tests in the 1940s and new treatments, Flannery O’Connor tersely assessed her father’s earlier treatment: “at that time there was nothing for it but the undertaker.” Asked about the disease, Regina O’Connor once surmised, “Oh, I don’t know. He may have had it when we got married.”

  The flaring of this mysterious disease, with no known cause, ten times more likely to occur in women than men, combined with a downward business spiral to create a life crisis. Due to declining health, Edward O’Connor resigned midterm from his position as state commander. Traits that had been thought of as laziness — such as coming home to take afternoon naps — were now understood as symptoms of the illness. Toward the end of a difficult year, O’Connor began a letter-writing campaign to lobby for a job in President Roosevelt’s newly created Federal Housing Administration. On December 23, 1937, he wrote to Erwin Sibley, a well-connected attorney friend of the Cline family, “Tried to get in touch with you while in Milledgeville the other day, but was unable to catch you. Wanted to ask a favor of you.” He hoped Sibley would plead his case with the two Georgia senators and with Congressman Carl Vinson, representative from the Sixth District of Georgia and chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee.

  “WHEN I WAS twelve I made up my mind absolutely that I would not get any older,” O’Connor wrote in 1956 to her friend Betty Hester, who had pointed out a childlike quality in her. “I don’t remember how I meant to stop it. There was something about ‘teen’ attached to anything that was repulsive to me. I certainly didn’t approve of what I saw of people that age. I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve, or anyway, less burdened. The weight of centuries lies on children, I’m sure of it.”

  Some of that burden, “the weight of centuries,” was her father’s illness, and the forces set in motion by his troubles amounted to the abrupt end of her childhood. In the spring of 1937, she was still the little girl who arrived at school in “the electric,” and was taken occasionally by Mrs. Semmes for swimming lessons in the pool of the De Soto, Savannah’s fanciest hotel. During the summer, she wore a yellow-and-white-striped seersucker sundress with shoulder straps tied together in a simple bow, hand-sewn by her mother. She donned, as well, the unlikely green serge dress and jacket uniform of the Girl Scouts; disliking troop hikes, she rarely attended meetings, even though they were held just across Lafayette Square in the carriage house of the pink Italianate villa where Juliette Gordon Low founded the national organization as the Girl Guides in 1912.

  Between the lines of this life as usual, though, the watchful girl with keen eavesdropping abilities would have sensed something amiss, as news of her father’s sickness remained hushed and secret. “She never knew her father had lupus,” said her childhood friend Newell Turner Parr. “She never had any idea. In those days, they didn’t tell children those things. You might be told Grandmother’s deaf or Mrs. So and So can’t see very well, be nice to her, don’t knock her down, but diseases and death and things like that, children weren’t told.” In her early, autobiographical story about Mary Flemming, the father is likewise only half seen, imminent, as the mother, slicing tomatoes at the sink, orders “MF,” as she calls her, to the bathroom to wash her hands after “fooling with those chickens” in the backyard: “‘Your father will be here any minute,’ her mother said, ‘and the table won’t be set. Hold your stomach in.’”

  During her twelfth year she began a journal that amounted to a collection of random rants. Venting injustices, her funny, outraged voice sounds off in its pages, which she bound together, writing a warning hex on the front: “I know some folks that don’t mind their own bisnis.” She complained that her teacher corrected her spelling, but Mary Flannery thought that skill was unimportant. She likewise brushed off the usefulness of most mathematics, such as geometry, which used letters instead of numbers, as well as multiplication tables, and even having to learn to add and subtract. She railed against her dance classes, and mandatory cleaning of her room, which she preferred to keep filled with all of her own “litter.” She confides of her mother, “R. said I was clumsie.”

  Reading books was as dear to the little girl as writing and binding them; her approach was just as personal. During the summer of 1937, she traveled with her mother to enroll in a Vacation Reading Club offered by the Carnegie Library of Atlanta, which awarded a certificate to any child reading and reporting on ten books over the summer. According to a library bulletin from the summer before, the most popular books with the twenty-four hundred children who completed the program were Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Little Men, and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. O’Connor agreed about Alcott, as she wrote on the flyleaf of her copy of Little Men, “First rate. Splendid.” Mother and daughter stayed with relatives in Atlanta, and spent time with family friend Helen Soul. Back in Savannah, with her inscribed Vacation Reading Certificate, O’Connor wrote a thank-you note to Soul for encouraging her to “read those books,” and ended with a strangely abrupt promise that “Regina says she’ll write you when she has time.”

  She kept up this habit of reading and “reporting” as sister activities, becoming her own book reviewer almost as soon as she was a reader. On the flyleaf of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she wrote, “Awful. I wouldn’t read this book”; on Shirley Watkins’s Georgina Finds Herself, one of a series of “Books for Girls”: “This is the worst book I ever read next to ‘Pinnochio.’” She held on to these opinions into her thirties, when she wrote to Betty Hester, “Peculiar but I never could stand Alice in Wonderland either. It was a terrifying book; so was Pinocchio. I was strictly a Peter Rabbit man myself.” A cousin once bought her a subscription to National Geographic because, whenever she visited her home, she headed straight to the latest issue of the shiny, colorful magazine of global exploration and science. Much of its appeal, O’Connor later admitted, “wasn’t a literary or even a geographical interest. It has a distinct unforgettable transcendent apotheotic (?) and very grave odor. Like no other mere magazine.”

  Nothing Mary Flannery was writing, or reading, directly addressed the “ancient” or “weighted” sense she remembered from that year. Yet later on she did evoke these feelings. In a fragment of another early story, an “MF”-style girl named Caulda mourns when her dog trots up carrying in his mouth her pet chicken, Sillow. She thinks of Sillow as her “brother” and fights with her mother to allow her to keep the dead chicken in her bed. Her mother, annoyed at the carcass that “was stiff already and he smelled some,” tries to scare her by telling her that the man in white she spotted walk
ing up the road is Death coming to get her. In an eerie passage, the frightened little girl confronts the fears raised by this shadow of death. “‘Will he cut my tongue?’” she asks. “‘That and more,’ her mother said. ‘That for yer lyin.’” Trapped in bed, Caulda feels as if she’s running: “She had the feeling like a stone was creeping all over her and she was facing a wall of it and another was behind her and one was pushing in on one side and he was coming up the other.”

  She may well have sensed the same convergence of threatening forces in her home life at the time. In January 1938, Ed O’Connor received positive news from Erwin Sibley of Congressman Vinson’s intention to help. He responded to Sibley, “Can’t tell you how much I appreciate your kindness.” But the good news was accompanied by a shake-up. By March, with the politicking completed, her father needed to move to Atlanta to take a position as senior zone real estate appraiser for the Federal Housing Administration, or FHA. As he went ahead to arrange a living situation for himself and his family, Mary Flannery was quickly removed from Sacred Heart School, and enrolled, for April and May, the last two months of her seventh grade, in the Peabody Elementary School in Milledgeville. This arrangement began an unsettled two-year period for mother and daughter of shuttling between Atlanta and the Cline familial home in Milledgeville.

  At first, her father kept alive the hope of returning to their pleasant town house in Savannah. In the 1939 Savannah City Directory he was listed as “on govt. service in Atlanta.” In 1940, his name was still listed at 207 East Charlton, but the notice changed to a more final “moved to Atlanta.” The family never did return, and Ed O’Connor never paid off his loan to Katie Semmes, who remained its owner. When Mrs. Semmes died in 1959, she left the property to Flannery O’Connor, who reported the news, simply, to the Fitzgeralds: “Cousin Katie left me the house in Savannah I was raised in.” As its new landlady, she rented out the premises, even though she once complained to a friend of two properties her mother owned, “My papa was a real-estate man and my mamma has two apartment houses and we have gone nuts with renters for years.”

  Flannery O’Connor rarely returned to Savannah. Her adult letters contain only a few references, when someone from there sends her mother an azalea, or mother and daughter give three-dollar donations to St. Mary’s Home for girls, or she expresses relief at being unable to accept an invitation to speak to a Savannah Catholic women’s group. Yet for the writer who claimed, “I think you probably collect most of your experience as a child — when you really had nothing else to do — and then transfer it to other situations when you write,” her time in Savannah registered as a strong afterimage in her work. Especially in the guise of the unnamed twelve-year-old girl in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” pacing back and forth in her upstairs bedroom “with her hands locked together behind her back and her head thrust forward and an expression fierce and dreamy both, on her face.”

  Chapter Two

  Milledgeville: “A Bird Sanctuary”

  In 1934, the city council of Milledgeville voted to designate the town a “Bird Sanctuary.” Writing up “the glad news” of the town’s nickname, the local historian and poet Nelle Womack Hines, in her Treasure Album of Milledgeville, gave credit to a “bird conscious” population, especially a circle of avid bird-watching professors at Georgia State College for Women. She whimsically recorded that, after the vote, “The rumor spread that several Robin Red Breasts were building nests in various parts of town — something almost unheard of.” To advertise the special event, the council and the local Audubon Society ordered road signs posted at all the main entrances to the city:

  MILLEDGEVILLE, GA.

  A BIRD SANCTUARY

  These sturdy metal signs mounted on poles captured the attention of Mary Flannery O’Connor, as she moved to Milledgeville to complete the final two months of seventh grade. A wry version of this fascination still shows up in her adult letters. She occasionally liked to put as her return address, “Milledgeville / A Bird Sanctuary.” When one of her stories, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” was televised in 1957, she reported to a former high school teacher, “It was well received here in the Bird Sanctuary and everybody thinks that I have now arrived.” Extending a backhanded invitation, in 1960, to her friend Maryat Lee, who was living in Manhattan, she asked, “Why don’t you take yourself a real vacation in that land of happy retreat, Milledgeville, a bird sanctuary?”

  For the thirteen-year-old O’Connor, her family’s spring 1938 move to Milledgeville, though sudden, was not a total disruption. Her parents had been spending time in Milledgeville ever since she was a baby. The visits were regularly covered on the Social and Society page of the Union-Recorder, the local newspaper. When she was just fifteen months old, the paper reported, “Mrs. E. F. O’Connor and little daughter, of Savannah, are visiting the Misses Cline.” In November 1937, four months before their move from Savannah, an item appeared: “Mr. and Mrs. Ed O’Connor and daughter, of Savannah, were the week-end guests of Misses Mary and Katie Cline.” The motor trips of Mrs. Katie Semmes were all documented, as were trips by the Cline aunts to Savannah.

  Milledgeville was Our Town done with a middle Georgia drawl. Described by one journalist as “a styling epicenter for the Deep South,” the sleepy community at the dead center of Georgia, with barely six thousand residents, blended provincial conservatism with much local color. “We have a girls’ college here,” O’Connor wrote, in the early fifties, “but the lacy atmosphere is fortunately destroyed by a reformatory, an insane asylum, and a military school.” Georgia State College for Women did provide the town’s grace notes — a steady supply of male and female professors. The reformatory was Georgia State Training School for Boys; the military school, Georgia Military College. Yet because of State Hospital, previously named Milledgeville Lunatic Asylum, the town was mostly synonymous, in Georgia slang, with “going crazy.” As one miffed character says to another in Clock Without Hands, by Carson McCullers, who grew up in Columbus, 130 miles away, “‘A thing like this makes me think you ought to be in Milledgeville.’”

  Though hardly as cosmopolitan as Savannah, this fourth capital of Georgia from 1803 until 1868 was built on a similar geometric plan. As Nelle Womack Hines pointed out in her Treasure Album, the capital city, named for Governor John Milledge, “probably has the distinction of being one of two cities thus molded into shape for such a purpose, the other being our National Capital, Washington, D.C.” The original plan reserved four large squares for a capitol, governor’s mansion, penitentiary, and cemetery, with nineteen wide streets intersecting at right angles. Dubbed “a town of columns,” Milledgeville became identified with a “Milledgeville Federal” style of architecture, marked by colossal porticoes, cantilevered balconies, pediments adorned with sunbursts, and fanlit doorways. When O’Connor’s professor friend Ted Spivey visited, he found this early style “idealistic,” as opposed to the town’s midcentury Greek Revival mansions, recalling “the fanaticism of cotton barons defending slavery and states’ rights.”

  Peabody Elementary, where Mary Flannery completed seventh grade, was an all-white school, mostly attended by girls. White boys typically went to Georgia Military College, fittingly located in the Gothic Revival Old State House of the Confederacy, with pointed arch windows and gray battlements, the scene of the Secession Convention of 1861. (“If war comes I’ll drink every drop of blood that’s shed,” Robert Toombs promised in one of the convention’s rallying speeches.) The Milledgeville City Cemetery, where Mary Flannery’s Cline and Treanor relatives were buried, was divided, with graves for whites on higher ground, and those for blacks, including slave plots, on the southern edge running steeply down to Fishing Creek. The Cline family had a decent legacy with the blacks in town, though. When Mayor Peter Cline, Jr., died, in 1916, the pastor of the Colored Presbyterian Church wrote a tribute, praising the mayor’s advocating “in public the rights of our race.”

  The Ward-Beall-Cline Mansion at 311 West Greene Street, where mother and d
aughter moved that spring, while Ed O’Connor visited on weekends, was one of about forty remaining antebellum homes. A traditional Federal clapboard house, with four white, fluted, Ionic columns — built by General John B. Gordon in 1820 and used briefly as the Governor’s Mansion in 1838 and 1839 — the Cline Mansion developed into a showpiece with the slow accretion of architectural details: a pitched Victorian red metal roof, a wraparound front porch, a widow’s walk, a lace-brick wall, built by slaves, and an antique lamppost, imported from Savannah. Each spring, as the azaleas, dogwoods, and redbuds bloomed along the town’s elm-lined streets, the Cline Mansion ranked as an attraction for garden club tours and, beginning in the spring of 1939, the annual State Garden Club “pilgrimage of old homes.” O’Connor watched, as a young girl, while her neighbors “trouped through in respectful solemnity.” She signed the guest book with her own name and the names of all of her chickens and listed their joint address as “Hungry.”

  The impresario of the Cline Mansion was Aunt Mary Cline, her mother’s oldest sister, then in her midfifties. A tall, thin woman, her salt-and-pepper hair tied back, with an elegant, patrician air and regal posture, “Sister,” as O’Connor called her, was the family’s ersatz matriarch. O’Connor’s college friend Betty Boyd assumed the nickname was a private joke on Aunt Mary’s appearance: “an austere nun . . . always in white.” Yet Regina O’Connor corrected this impression in a note she penned in the top margin of a memoir Boyd showed her years later: “Sister was the first girl to arrive in the family after five boys and everybody in the family called her Sister.” Indeed Mary Cline was the only girl in Peter Cline’s first family of seven children. When her father died, as had the two Mrs. Clines, she declined Katie Semmes’s invitation to move to Savannah; she chose instead to take on the responsibility of matron for home and family.