Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  Animals turned out to be fitting company that summer, as her own imaginary companion was Enoch Emery, the zoo guard who winds up near her novel’s end donning an ape suit. While many of the characters she was inventing were fated for the cutting-room floor, or spun off into other stories, “grinning” Enoch, in his “yellowish white” suit, “pinkish white” shirt, and “greenpeaish” tie, somehow stuck. First noticed by Haze, in a seventy-five-hundred-word draft, marked “Yaddo,” looking “like a friendly hound dog with light mange,” he became his faithful, if abused, sidekick. “In my whole time of writing the only parts that have come easy for me were Enoch Emery and Hulga,” O’Connor later admitted. During her Yaddo summer, she was sending out, getting back, and rewriting the two stories that brought Enoch to life, “The Peeler” and “The Heart of the Park.”

  The downside of Yaddo for Flannery was its artiness, or the “arty” pose she felt that many of her fellow guests adopted. “At the breakfast table they talked about seconol and barbiturates and now maybe it’s marujana,” she warned Dawkins. “You survive in this atmosphere by minding your own business and by having plenty of your own business to mind, and by not being afraid to be different from the rest of them.” The summer was marked by many of the legendary Yaddo parties, of which O’Connor claimed, “I went to one or two of these but always left before they began to break things.” The more extreme action usually took place on weekends at Jimmy’s Bar, on Congress Street, in the black section of town. But at one official Yaddo event, a woman writer, ginned up, felt inspired to perform a combination cancan and cooch dance.

  “Miss Highsmith and Mr. Wright had a taxi driver follow them around from bar to bar and then didn’t have any money to pay him so were taken to jail in a highly uncooperative mood, but managed to talk themselves out before morning,” Clifford Wright recorded of his high jinks with Highsmith, who characterized herself, at Yaddo, as falling “between those two stools” of writing and partying. All of the alcohol consumption — “in any collection of so-called artists you will find a good percentage alcoholic in one degree or another,” sniped O’Connor — combined with late hours, led, of course, to sexual escapades. “In such a place you have to expect them all to sleep around”; she went on, observing satirically, “This is not sin but Experience, and if you do not sleep with the opposite sex, it is assumed that you sleep with your own.”

  Having defensively decided that “the help was morally superior to the guests,” Flannery’s initial response was to shrink back from the others, and to make friends, instead, with Jim and Nellie Shannon, the Irish caretaker and head cook, who lived with their three kids in East House, one of three smaller buildings on the property. “Dad had been a ragpicker on the docks until he got in a brawl and someone put a bale hook in his skull, so he moved upstate,” says his son Jim. Although Flannery couldn’t reproduce her daily Iowa City ritual, each Sunday morning she drove with the Shannons in their 1930s Ford station wagon to mass at St. Clement’s Church on Lake Avenue in Saratoga Springs. She kept a close watch, too, on the staff of mostly Irish maids, a type she was familiar with — “all well over forty, large grim and granit-jawed or shriveled and shrunk.”

  Flannery did, soon enough, form a close friendship with one other woman writer, Elizabeth Fenwick. A Texas-born author of both thrillers and lyric novels, Fenwick was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, working for a Columbia professor. “I remember she was a kind of sexy creature, very attractive physically,” says Frederick Morton. The coincidence that brought Flannery together with the easygoing “Miss Fenwick,” as she liked to call the more facile writer, was that they were both working on novels for John Selby at Rinehart. As O’Connor later told Betty Hester of Elizabeth Fenwick Way, who remained a lifelong friend: “She lives by a kind of rhythm, has nothing to say but is full of lovely feelings, giggles, is a big soft blond girl and real nice to be around except that she bats her eyelashes. . . . She is a kind of complement to me, and we get on famously.”

  As in Iowa City, she took up as well with a few protective men who helped her along. One was Paul Moor, who wrote about music, described by Mrs. Ames in her notes as “an accomplished pianist and a socially graceful person.” Moor had an unfortunate summer: he collapsed from heat exhaustion on a visit to Manhattan and had to be flown back to Yaddo; at the end of July, his studio accidentally burned to the ground. Yet he made a most important difference in O’Connor’s professional life by recommending her to Elizabeth McKee, his literary agent. “Elizabeth McKee was a wonderful woman,” recalled Robert Giroux, who eventually became O’Connor’s publisher. “For New York, she was really genteel and didn’t act like most literary agents I knew. She was very loyal to Flannery, was a damn good agent for her, and really helped her.”

  In her introductory letter to McKee, on June 19, Flannery apologized for writing to her “in my vague and slack season,” and warned, “I am a very slow worker. . . . I have never had an agent so I have no idea what your disposition might be toward my type of writer.” Evidently charmed by the candor and self-deprecation, McKee responded within a few days: “Your work sounds very interesting. . . . Please don’t let it worry you that you are not a prolific writer.” As they began to discuss the details of the contract for her novel with Rinehart, Flannery, who reported that she was working on the twelfth chapter, further defined her “type of writer” as decidedly not formulaic: “I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.”

  McKee showed commitment to her new writer by asking George Davis, a fiction editor at Mademoiselle, for a chance, as her agent, to look over the galleys of “The Turkey,” set to be published as “The Capture” in the magazine’s November issue.

  The gentleman most taken with the taciturn young lady from the South was Edward Maisel, a musicologist, author, and Harvard graduate in his early thirties, who had published a successful biography of the American composer Charles T. Griffes five years earlier. A confidant of Mrs. Ames, he lived with an overflow of guests out at North Farm, on the far side of Union Avenue, where he could sing at the top of his lungs while writing. He was fond of picking up Flannery after working hours to take long strolls in the woods, and he even led her on a boating expedition on a nearby lake. The two occasionally walked into downtown Saratoga Springs, where he introduced her to some of the townspeople he found amusing. She obviously responded, as she later wrote: “after a few weeks at Yaddo, you long to talk to an insurance salesman, dog-catcher, bricklayer — anybody who isn’t talking about Form or sleeping pills.”

  Maisel was caricatured by Robert Lowell, in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, as “a real Yaddo ringer who knows everything and everybody — is in on everybody — and is sort of a pain.” He was fond of telling guests’ fortunes with a deck of tarot cards. Yet his very nature as a learned and amusing busybody stood Flannery in good stead when he took it upon himself to become her advocate. As silence was the rule at Yaddo, much communication took place by note passing; Mrs. Ames’s favorite medium was a blue slip on which she often warned guests of infractions. In one typed missive, Maisel diplomatically urged her to notice Flannery’s distinction: “By the way have you got to know Flannery O’Connor at all? Probably not, because she’s so very silent and withdrawn, and needs bringing out; but I have been on several evening walks with her, and find her immensely serious, with a sharp sense of humor; a very devout Catholic (thirteenth century, she describes herself). I think you would enjoy her, Elizabeth.”

  Flannery’s describing herself as “thirteenth century” on their walks shows the weightiness of some of these crepuscular conversations; she wasn’t much for small talk. The phrase was also a passkey to her more private thoughts. “She was completely intellectual, and cerebral,” assured Giroux. “She was a thinker. And in those days encountering a philosophical woman thinker was rarer.” The most “thirteenth-century” book s
he was reading, and avidly underlining, at the time was Art and Scholasticism, by Jacques Maritain, a French Thomist, who was teaching at Princeton and helping to make the thought of Thomas Aquinas relevant in forties America. Its eighth chapter, “Christian Art,” was a thunderclap to O’Connor; she drew line markings next to the passage “Do not make the absurd attempt to sever in yourself the artist and the Christian.”

  Maisel’s crusade worked, and on July 26, a mere three days before Flannery’s departure, Mrs. Ames sent a note inviting her to return: “Then you may count on staying, definitely, to the end of the year: and I shall do my best for you to remain well after that date.” In a note of thanks, Flannery claimed, “I have worked with much peace here.” Her invitation was a coup, treated as a loud secret, in keeping with the intrigue around most of Ames’s decisions. “Dear Flannery is leaving tomorrow, but is coming back in September to stay all winter (this is a secret from the rest of the guests),” Clifford Wright confided in his diary. Soon after her return to Milledgeville, Flannery wrote “Dear Elizabeth,” that “were it not for my mother, I could easily resolve not to see Georgia again.” Her news of an open-ended stay at the artists’ colony, though, was greeted with far less enthusiasm by Regina, irritated that her daughter would give up a practical Iowa teaching fellowship.

  Still, Flannery pushed ahead, writing Paul Engle a postcard suggesting he transfer her grant to Clyde McLeod, while including an inside joke about Haze’s casketlike upper berth in “The Train”: “I sleep in my coffin beginning every evening at 7:30.” The biggest excitement on her visit home was an August 12 rally of 350 Klan members on the steps of the Milledgeville Court House, which she reported, dryly, to Ames: “It’s too hot to burn a fiery cross, so they bring a portable one made with red electric light bulbs.” Likewise regaling Clifford Wright with tales of visiting her “ancient wealthy” cousin Katie, who told her to mind her manners more, she confided her tactic of not telling tales of Yaddo for fear of upsetting her relatives, who “think the height of Bohemianism is wearing slacks out of the house.”

  When Flannery returned to Yaddo on the early afternoon of September 16, she joined a reduced group of fifteen guests. Among them, until the end of the month, was Elizabeth Hardwick, a Kentucky-born Partisan Review writer in her early thirties, already a lively presence on the literary scene in Manhattan. “She was a brilliant creature, a wonderful conversationalist, who fainted once that summer on the tennis court,” says Morton. When Mrs. Ames invited Hardwick back for January, she signed her note, with unusual warmth, “My love to you.” Staying until mid-October was Malcolm Cowley, assistant editor of the New Republic from 1929 until 1944 and one of the Yaddo board members who approved O’Connor’s application, with the comment “She seems to have talent.” (The only naysayer on the board, the Smith College professor Newton Arvin, found her submitted stories “hard to like . . . unrelieved, gray, uncolored.”)

  As the main mansion was shut for the winter months, Flannery was put up, for “the small season,” in a modest bedroom, and separate work studio, on the first floor of West House, where Mrs. Trask had spent her final years, until her death in 1922. A miniature version of the mansion, with an attached stone tower, the whimsical wooden farmhouse had its own Victorian parlor with chandeliers, marble mantelpiece, shelves lined with cracked library sets, and a grand piano. Flannery loved the quieter mood, as fall transformed Yaddo into what the critic Alfred Kazin, author of the highly successful On Native Grounds and among a half-dozen visitors that winter, called “a thorny mysterious return to another century on the rim of the Adirondacks, a mixture of primeval woods and the genteel tradition.” O’Connor assured Cecil Daw-kins, “It is beautiful in the fall and winter, and most of the creepy characters take off at the end of summer.”

  Flannery felt herself on deadline at West House to finish a draft of her novel, to send to John Selby at Rinehart in hopes of an advance to cover a year of rewriting. Yet she was already bracing herself — and Elizabeth McKee — for rejection: “I cannot really believe they will want the finished thing.” Laid out on the table before her were chapters in varying states of completion: the opener, “The Train”; a third chapter, “The Peeler,” where Haze (now Motes) meets Enoch, as well as the fake blind man who begins to tap his way through her novel like the truly blind prophet Tiresias of The Waste Land; “Woman on the Stairs,” then chapter four; and “The Heart of the Park,” chapter nine. Though unsure about Selby, she was encouraged to learn that Philip Rahv, editor of Partisan Review, had decided to publish “The Heart of the Park” in the February issue.

  Into Flannery’s seclusion and her pile of plans, six days after her own arrival, walked Robert Lowell, assigned a West House bedroom and studio for the fall and winter, too. Crackling with the sudden literary fame that she had seen him manifesting in Iowa City, Lowell had a knack for stirring up controversy. He arrived fresh from the post of poetry consultant to the Library of Congress — and from a fight, eventually successful, with supporting votes from Eliot, Auden, and Tate, to award Ezra Pound the 1948 Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos. Protests had come from leftist poets over Pound’s wartime radio broadcasts for Mussolini. Indeed, one of Lowell’s first letters from Yaddo was to Pound, under sanatorium arrest for treason at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, informing him that “Yaddo is a sort of St. Elizabeths without bars — regular hours, communal meals, grounds, big old buildings etc.”

  Except for Elizabeth Hardwick, whom he found charming and convinced to return in midwinter, Lowell could be sharp about the skeleton crew remaining. Clifford Wright was “pleasant,” but with “a rather withering old-maidish torpor.” The English professor J. Saunders Redding and the painter Charles Sebree were pegged as “an introverted and extroverted colored man,” the painter James Harrison as “a boy of 23 who experiments with dope.” He judged Malcolm Cowley likeable but boring. For his part, Cowley was stressed by the endless table talk about politics, both literary and national. Off-season dinners took place on the second floor of the Garage, and the charged topic, in the fall of 1948, was the Progressive Party candidacy of Henry Wallace for president, described by one guest as “the friend of Moscow.” Asked whom he was voting for, Cowley, a radical Marxist during the thirties, cautiously replied, “There’s not one of them I want to see elected.” Then “Someone gave a nervous laugh,” he recalled, “and conversation resumed.”

  Lowell’s favorite was Flannery, who treated him at dinner to the surefire story of her backward-walking chicken that had delighted their mutual friend Robie Macauley. Lowell found her “acute and silent,” and quickly became her champion, writing Caroline Gordon, who was teaching Creative Writing in the General Studies program at Columbia: “There’s a girl here named Flannery O’Connor, an admirer of yours, a Catholic and probably a good writer, who is looking for a teaching job. Is there anything at Columbia?” Gordon later told Sally Fitzgerald, of O’Connor’s feelings for her new, larger-than-life friend, “She fell for him; she admitted it to me.” Arriving back in January, Edward Maisel opined theatrically, “I lost her to Robert Lowell.” Whether or not her ardor was romantic remained a well-kept secret. Giroux surmised, “She wasn’t in love with him; she was impressed by him.” Yet she did write Betty Hester eight years later, “I feel almost too much about him to be able to get to the heart of it. . . . He is one of the people I love.”

  Lowell’s feelings for Flannery were not romantic, but they were full of excitement for her Roman Catholicism and her rare brand of Southern literary talent: “I think one of the best to be when she is a little older,” he promised the poet Elizabeth Bishop. “Very moral (in your sense) and witty.” Of strong-jawed New England Puritan stock, Lowell had converted to Catholicism during his marriage to his first wife, Jean Stafford, partly from reading Jacques Maritain; when he left the marriage, he left the Church. As O’Connor later put it, “I watched him that winter come back into the Church. I had nothing to do with it but of course it was a great joy to me.” Wri
ting by day of a “Christ-haunted” character, she confronted one at dinner each night. He, in turn, liked the glamour of canonizing a new saint. As late as 1953, Caroline Gordon wrote to friends, “Cal Lowell says she is a saint, but then he is given to extravagance.”

  Lowell was extremely tender, and full of elegy and exactitude, when he later wrote Elizabeth Bishop, on hearing of Flannery’s death. Their Yaddo autumn had been a sort of parenthesis in both their lives, as she worked on her novel, and he on his long narrative poem The Mills of the Kavanaughs:

  It seems such a short time ago that I met her at Yaddo, 23 or 24, always in a blue jean suit, working on the last chapters of Wise Blood, suffering from undiagnosed pains, a face formless at times, then, very strong and young and right. She had already really mastered and found her themes and style, knew she wouldn’t marry, would be Southern, shocking and disciplined. In a blunt, disdainful yet somehow very unpretentious and modest way, I think she knew how good she was.

  At the time, of course, his tone about her was far more gossipy, and bemused, as he shared news, usually with Robie Macauley, as if she were a little sister passed from the care of one brother to another: “She’s run through the local library, put out crumbs for birds, bought a sternostove — I think she’s planning a sort of half-hibernation to never leave a small dark cheerless room where she’ll subsist on vita-min B soup capsules, and Dr. E. Flanders Dunbars psycho-somatic summa. But we’ve learned her ping-pong.”

  The library Flannery read her way through was an ugly brick building at Skidmore, the small liberal arts college housed mostly in antiquated Edwardian and Victorian buildings in downtown Saratoga Springs. Especially absorbing to her was the dark fiction of the eminent French Catholic novelist François Mauriac, which addressed the irreconcilability of sexual passion with the world of pure spirit. Wright complained that he heard so much about Mauriac at dinner that he finally gave in and made a painting titled The Desert of Love, after Mauriac’s novel about the romantic triangle of a father, his son, and a fatally attractive woman. Of Mauriac’s books, at least fifteen of which she came to own, Flannery was especially drawn to the novel Destines, published in English under the title Lines of Life, about a middle-aged widow infatuated with a troubled, dissolute young man. As she later wrote of the novel, to Betty Hester, “I read it about ten years ago in the Skidmore College Library and remember nothing about it but the last sentence, which in that translation was: ‘And (she) was again one of those corpses floating down the stream of life.’”