Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  “I used to date Flannery and I remember sitting with her long hours on the porch swing of her boardinghouse . . . discussing a number of deep matters or reading the new chapters of Wise Blood, which she was writing at the time,” Macauley later recounted. “As for the deep matters, I remember that Flanders Dunbar had become intellectually fashionable that year and we’d both read her, and so we spent a lot of time discussing psychosomatic medicine.” The Dunbar book was Mind and Body, its author also a medievalist with an interest in Dante, a favorite of the two new friends. Macauley also occasionally escorted Flannery, with Workshop instructor Paul Griffith and his girlfriend, to Sunday lunch in Amana, the historic German Pietist community, twenty miles from Iowa City: “We ate in a big barnlike dining hall with everybody at long tables. Flannery liked that.”

  During the fall, Macauley introduced Flannery to his friends Walter Sullivan, a Workshop writer from Tennessee, and his wife, Jane. “Robie took care of Flannery . . . he had a gift of making her relax,” Sullivan has observed of their easygoing relationship. When Macauley first brought her by a small party at their home, promising, “There’s a little Georgia girl here you’ve got to meet,” she found an audience highly receptive to spun tales of her childhood, especially her centerpiece story of the Pathe News arriving to film her backward-walking chicken. “Flannery would get strung out and start telling stories about the South,” said Jane Sullivan of her many visits. “Funny stories, and it was hysterical, but this required a small group for conversation; it wasn’t party stuff.”

  Regarding his friendship with Flannery, Macauley used the term “date” a couple of times with interviewers. Yet whatever dating occurred was of the lightest sort. As he explained when pressed, “Flannery and I had no ‘romantic’ relationship. I was engaged to Anne Draper (who was in New York) and Flannery was well aware of it. . . . We did spend a lot of time talking and reading manuscripts.” Her bond with the tall, soft-spoken intellectual, not a “party man,” was more as a “soul mate.” Like the soldier John Sullivan, he was a good-looking, somewhat unavailable, slightly older guy who protected and encouraged her. And she brought a similar excitement to their friendship. Once Jean Williams saw Flannery on her way to the library to check out Gogol’s Dead Souls, which Macauley told her was a must-read for every writer. “So I reckon I better do it,” Flannery said.

  The first week in October a dorm mate of Macauley’s from Kenyon, Robert Lowell, arrived to give a poetry reading in the Old Capitol and to critique Workshop poems. A Boston-born disciple of the Fugitives, Lowell had camped out during the summer of 1937 in the backyard of Allen Tate and his wife, Caroline Gordon, in Tennessee, to learn at the feet of the Vanderbilt masters; he then broke with family tradition by leaving Harvard to study, like Macauley, as one of “Ransom’s boys,” at Kenyon. Later describing Iowa City as “tame and friendly,” the thirty-year-old poet, in 1947, was treated as a wild celebrity. Chain-smoking, curly-haired, and unruly, he cut a poetic figure. “He was so sensitive, he trembled as he read to us,” recalls James B. Hall. Flannery was quite impressed by Lowell, at the reading and at a dinner, where he held forth one night during his four-day visit.

  A visitor altogether different from Robert Lowell arrived later in the month for a weekend stay — Mary Virginia Harrison, her attractive “best friend” from high school. Mary Virginia stayed at a hotel, and one night the girlfriends shared a double bed at Mrs. Guzeman’s. Flannery had written that she could meet her train at any hour, as her own life was “simple, austere.” As for clothing, she advised, “The well dressed Iowa Citian is usually seen in a sweat shirt, trousers or skirt (as the sex may dictate), heavy coat and limp cigaret.” A Jessie classmate they both knew was Faye Hancock, married to the Workshop writer Hank Messick, and living in Victory Park, a student trailer park for veterans. Messick later recalled that on her visits Flannery preferred bottled Blue Ridge spring-water. “When it was gone,” he wrote, “she returned to mixed drinks, claiming a lot of Scotch was necessary to make the water drinkable.”

  For her third holiday trip home to Milledgeville that December, Flannery was accompanied as far as La Salle Street Station in Chicago by Jean Williams. The train ride in high-backed swivel chairs in the parlor car was their longest time spent together. Flannery convinced the porter it would be “right nice” if he would “allow” her friend into the first-class section, too. She was putting the final touches that month on “The Train,” which would be published in April in the Sewanee Review, the prestigious quarterly from Tennessee’s University of the South, edited by both Lytle and Tate. “They know exactly what they’re doing all the time,” she said, eyeing the porter. “No dilly-dallying atall.” She then took out a snapshot of the Cline Mansion from her purse to show. “Flannery was glad to be going home that Christmas,” wrote Jean Williams Wylder. “She looked very pretty, more like a college girl . . . almost tall in a blue plaid suit and tan polo jacket.”

  When they both returned to Iowa City, Jean accompanied Flannery on a walk that doubled as a fact-finding mission. At work on a chapter about Haze’s lone friend, Enoch Emery, at City Forest Park Zoo, Flannery suggested they visit the local City Park Zoo, a half-mile walk along the Iowa River. Here she got her inspiration for Enoch’s fixation on a cage of “two black bears . . . sitting and facing each other like two matrons having tea,” which she worked into her story “The Heart of the Park.” According to her friend, on this bleak Sunday afternoon in February, a “completely absorbed and interested” Flannery stared at “the two sad and mangy bears, the raccoons, and the special foreign chickens they had.” O’Connor later remembered “two indifferent bears . . . and a sign over them that said: ‘These lions donated by the Iowa City Elks Club.’”

  If her “barbarous Georgia accent,” as she joked of it, had been a liability two years earlier, during the spring of 1948 readings by Flannery were much sought after. One circle where she felt comfortable sharing her work gathered on Sunday evenings at Austin Warren’s elegant home. The in-group included Robie Macauley; Andrew Lytle; Warren Miller, reading from a Kafkaesque novel in progress; and Clyde McLeod, one of only three women in the Workshop that year, who sang a ballad with a “Hootie, Hootie” refrain. “Flannery’s novel is sure going to be very beautiful,” Paul Griffith reported in mid-February to Engle, still on leave; “her chapter at AW’s was polished and colored to perfection.” Hansford Martin, an instructor in the Workshop, annoyed by her endless revisions, complained to Engle that “Flannery, in spite of all that Paul and I say, is still rewriting her first chapter.”

  Another such informal Midwestern salon took place in the rented rooms of the writer John Gruen and the painter Jane Wilson, then both MFA students at Iowa. “We would invite her to our house because we had little gatherings, and ask her to read,” says Gruen. “She would sit quietly at first until she was asked to read. ‘Okay, Flannery, did you bring your story?’ ‘Yeeees.’ ‘Are you going to read it?’ ‘Yeeees.’ I believe that she read the first chapters of her novel in an accent that was even fiercer than the way she regularly spoke. She took on all the characters. She would read in this kind of very heavy singsong but not really singing. It was a performance. It became totally hypnotic. So that all of us sitting there, young people in their teens and twenties, were totally struck.”

  In early drafts of her novel, Hazel had a sister, Ruby Hill, a “modern” type who lives in a boardinghouse and, upon discovering she is pregnant, wishes to have an abortion. The bit Jane Wilson recalls Flannery reading was a version of this subplot, later spun off by the “demon rewriter,” as Robie Macauley dubbed his friend, into “Woman on the Stairs,” published the next summer in Tomorrow, a small literary magazine, and eventually revised and published as “A Stroke of Good Fortune.” “She read the story in this rhythm of a woman climbing a stair,” remembers Wilson. “It was so persuasive. It was a monologue of silly miseries and dismay. ‘Oh this waistband is so uncomfortable on me. Oh, God!’ Then in the end when she gets to the to
p of the stairs her worst fears have burst through. It’s not weight gain. She’s pregnant. . . . The writing was scary. But she emanated warmth while she was reading it . . . affection, in a way.”

  Over the course of the spring, Flannery was given guidance in planning her future. As Norma Hodges suggests, “She had this air of dependence about her, as if she needed someone to take care of her.” Engle arranged a teaching fellowship for the following year. Griffith suggested applying for a summer residency at the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. He then helped her gather a strong list of recommendations. Austin Warren endorsed her as “a personally shy but kind and charming young Southern writer.” Andrew Lytle wrote that she had “as much promise as anyone I have seen of her generation.” Engle praised her as “one of the best young writers in the country.” Her application was successful, and Hansford Martin reported to Engle in April, “Flannery seems happiest of all, blossoming like a rose, packing for Yaddo.”

  She was happy enough even to overcome her reluctance to read aloud in the Workshop. In the class run that spring by Lytle, Flannery had rarely spoken up. Once, when her mentor asked her to comment on a student’s story, she paused a beat, then in a deadpan voice, she replied laconically, “I’d say the description of that crocodile in there was real good.” For her memorable late-April performance, she chose to read the vignette of the woman on the stairs, which she introduced as the second chapter of her novel. Her “flat, nasal drawl” reminded the Workshop writer Gene Brzenk of the comic screen actress Zasu Pitts, known for her switchboard-operator voice. “She never looked up,” he recalled, “and acknowledged her audience only when the laughter drowned out her voice. When she finished reading, we all applauded and the meeting broke up in high good humor.”

  At the close of the afternoon, Flannery quickly disappeared through the door to return to her room, while the other students regrouped for beers at the Brown Derby, a hangout on Dubuque Street. But Jean Williams turned to Clyde McLeod, unsatisfied. “For once there was not going to be any critical dissecting,” Jean Williams Wylder has written. “That we had said nothing about Flannery’s story was a tribute to her genius. But, the other girl writer and I wanted there to be something more — some more tangible token of our admiration. We went around Iowa City on that late spring afternoon, walking into people’s yards as if they were public domain, to gather arms full of flowering branches — taking only the most beautiful — and we carried them up to Flannery.”

  Chapter Five

  Up North

  Arriving on the first of June for her stay at Yaddo, located on the outskirts of Saratoga Springs, near the Adirondack region of upstate New York, Flannery found herself among a crush of summer invitees on overlapping two-week to two-month residencies. Many had taken the morning train from New York City, reaching the local station at around four in the afternoon. Courtesy Cab Company then offered a special fifty-cent rate for the short ride past ornate hotels, once catering to visitors “taking the waters” in the nineteenth-century spa town; a string of Edwardian and Victorian mansions on Union Avenue; and the Saratoga Race Course for thoroughbreds, with its low fences and practice tracks, bordering the estate of Jock Hay Whitney as well as the grounds of the artists’ colony.

  “It did not take Georgia for me to appreciate Yaddo,” Flannery joked that summer of the four-hundred-acre estate, arrived at by passing between stone pillars and driving down a long, curving road lined by tall evergreens and occasional ponds. Better preparation for appreciating the rarefied style of Yaddo might have been her early favorite, Edgar Allan Poe, rumored to have written “The Raven” on a lower lake during a visit to the property in the 1840s. For looming on a piney mountain ridge, surrounded by dark woods, formal rose gardens, fountains, and rockeries, was a fifty-five-room, turreted, late-Victorian, stone mansion, as Gothic as anything Poe imagined. Built by the stockbroker Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina, in 1893, along with sixteen outlying buildings, the puzzling name of the estate was first lisped by one of their four children to rhyme with “shadow.”

  By the time Flannery arrived in the summer of 1948, Yaddo had been open for creative business since 1926, bequeathed by Katrina Trask, who outlived her husband and all her children, as a center for “creating, creating, creating.” Earning his keep as a summer assistant during the early thirties, the novelist John Cheever later credibly claimed, for the acreage, “more distinguished activity in the arts than any other piece of ground in the English-speaking community, or perhaps in the entire world.” Guests walking across the sloped lawn in just its first two decades included the poets Louise Bogan, Langston Hughes, and Delmore Schwartz; the critics Philip Rahv and Lionel Trilling; the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Sidney Hook; the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson; the novelists Paul Bowles, James T. Farrell, and Jean Stafford; and the composers Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland, who wrote his “Piano Variations” in the Stone Tower on Lake Spencer.

  Like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Yaddo had recently been hosting a Southern renaissance. Katherine Anne Porter shared a chicken dinner with her fellow guest Eudora Welty — and had the dubious pleasure of finding Carson McCullers stretched across her doorway in the main mansion, professing undying love, as she simply stepped over her admirer on the way to dinner. Porter was so taken with the place that she soon bought South Hill Farm nearby. During the summer of 1946, Truman Capote was ensconced in Katrina Trask’s uppermost Tower Room, with its ornate Gothic tracery windows, writing his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Following Capote’s suggestion to apply for a Yaddo fellowship, the Texas-born Patricia Highsmith had arrived in mid-May, coinciding with O’Connor’s stay for six weeks, to work on her own first novel, Strangers on a Train.

  Flannery was put up for her two-month summer residency on an upper floor of the mansion, along with most of the other twenty-three guests, including two composers, six painters, and fifteen writers. The coveted, rose-motif Tower Room that season went to Clifford Wright, an exuberant young Scandinavian American painter from Seattle, by way of Mott Street in lower Manhattan, who became friendly with her, noting in his June diary entry cataloging the arriving guests: “. . . and Flannery O’Connor who is a youngster working on her first novel.” Highsmith pegged her as “very quiet, stayed alone . . . while others of us were shockingly gregarious and unwriterlike.” A decade later, O’Connor was still passing along her favorable first impressions of Yaddo to Cecil Dawkins: “I really think you ought to look into the Yaddo business. The food is very good. The quarters are elegant. The servants are very nice. The scenery is magnificent.”

  In a polished atmosphere of grandeur past, not unlike the Cline Mansion, though more ostentatious, Flannery descended the red-carpeted staircase each evening for dinner. With the other guests, she lingered in the Great Hall, an eccentric repository of Persian carpets, pink velvet sofas, a Tiffany chandelier and glass mosaic of a phoenix rising above the fireplace, oversized oil portraits of the Trasks, and a pair of painted sleighs, gifts of Queen Marie of the Netherlands. At six thirty, a silver bell rang and everyone passed across oiled hardwood floors and through velvet drapes, to be seated around a carved Tudor table with high-backed, dark oak chairs, the Trasks’ silverware glinting from sideboards. The dress code was jacket-and-tie for men and evening wear for women.

  Presiding at the head of the table was Elizabeth Ames, the director of Yaddo since its first season, when she was appointed by Mrs. Trask’s second husband, George Peabody. A widowed schoolteacher from Minnesota, Mrs. Ames affected an imperious, affable air. “She is like a well-meaning early Hanoverian king — but she’s a liberal and doesn’t approve of kings,” commented Robert Lowell, a guest during the summer of 1947. She was also half-deaf, and recycled stories. The novelist Frederick Morton, in residence with O’Connor, recalls someone telling a story that summer about the Hollywood actor Monty Woolley. Mrs. Ames caught his name, and retold exactly the same gossip. “There was the same laughter, mostly staged,” says Morton.
“Everybody was very scared of her, because she had a decisive voice in who would be invited.”

  Equal parts Mother Superior and monarch, Mrs. Ames ran Yaddo with many of the strict rules of a convent, except for chastity — though spouses were discouraged from visiting. This regimen was made to order for Flannery, who suddenly found herself in a world where at least some others, like her, worked “ALL the time.” Following breakfast, the guests were handed a black tin workman’s lunchbox and thermos, and sent off to their studios. Those favored by the kitchen staff sometimes found an extra raw carrot. “I would have been happier writing in my room,” O’Connor said, “but they seem to think it proper you go to a studio.” A great silence, straight out of the Rule of St. Benedict, was imposed from nine until four in the afternoon, with no visiting or talking among guests allowed, and invitees were restricted to the hours of four to ten at night.

  Flannery made her way each morning down a dirt road, through the pinewood, most likely to Hillside Studio, built in 1927 as a piggery but never used for that purpose. Instead its hearth and chimney, constructed for smoking hams and curing sides of bacon for Yaddo meals, qualified the outdoor wooden studio as one of the more desirable, along with Meadow Studio to its east, with views all the way across the Hudson Valley to the Green Mountains of Vermont. O’Connor remembered her cottage for June and July simply as “a long single room with a fireplace and chaise longue and a couple of tables and straight chairs.” When not writing, she took “nice walks . . . around the lakes and back towards the race tracks.” Her constant companions were a “studio squirrel,” as well as some “chipmonks and a large important-looking woodchuck.”