by Brad Gooch
Flannery received from the lost, often amoral characters of this living Catholic novelist the same thrilling permission she received theologically from the Thomist definition of art, in Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, as a “habit of the practical intellect,” rather than a speculative or moral activity — the territory of theologians and saints. As Maritain concluded, “The pure artist considered in the abstract as such, is something completely unmoral.” The job of the Christian writer, understood in this “thirteenth century” way, was pure devotion to craft, to telling strong stories, even if they involved atheists, hoodlums, or prostitutes — the same craft lifted up by O’Connor’s New Critic teachers. As she would later spell out this enabling notion in folksier language to Betty Hester, “you don’t have to be good to write well. Much to be thankful for.”
As being at Yaddo and having a Guggenheim fellowship (of about twenty-five hundred dollars) were nearly synonymous in the late 1940s, Flannery decided that fall to apply. Clifford Wright, himself applying, described Lowell, when he arrived, as “Guggenheiming it.” Hardwick, likewise “enGuggenheimed,” had received hers in June. Flannery did find herself in the fortunate spot, shared by Lowell but few others, of having crossed a Mason-Dixon Line of literary politics — published by the Sewanee and Kenyon Reviews, associated with conservative, even reactionary Southern writers, as well as by Partisan Review, the provenance of left-leaning, often Jewish, New York intellectuals. Her own recommenders were George Davis; Philip Rahv; Paul Engle; Robert Penn Warren; Theodore Amussen, a Rinehart editor, who had moved to Harcourt Brace; and Robert Lowell, providing the inside information that she wrote “sentence by sentence, at snail’s pace.”
In December, pleading economic worries, Flannery made the bold decision to spend Christmas away from home. Instead, she hunkered down with the two remaining Yaddo guests, Lowell and Wright. By then, their social rhythm was comfortable. After Thanksgiving, Ezra Pound’s son, Omar Shakespeare Pound, visited, and Lowell reported, in a letter to T. S. Eliot, “I introduced him to our Yaddo child, Miss Flannery O’Connor. Weird scenes of Omar trying to help her into her muskrat coat — a new experience for both.” When Lowell recalled her tripping up stairs with a bottle of gin, she corrected him: “It was not gin but rum (unopened) and the steps were slick.” Wright appreciated Flannery’s “high moral tone,” and found “ingeniously funny and ominous” the zoo chapter from her novel, which she told him was titled The Great Spotted Bird. He found the title “perfect,” summing up the “grotesque” book as “short . . . the main character is a boy.”
The Christmas holidays were a bit milder than Lowell might have liked. “My suggestion that we have bottled egg-nog for Christmas breakfast fell rather flat,” he complained of his housemates, who were “not celebrating types.” But he consoled himself on Christmas Eve by reading Pride and Prejudice “aloud to the two Yaddonians,” and listening to the “Gloria” from three masses — Bach’s B Minor, a Palestrina, and a Gregorian. Remembering her last holiday on the train from Iowa City with Jean Williams, Flannery wrote her friend:
It would be nice to meet you again this year on the train. However, I am glad I won’t be fooling around with any trains this Christmas. I am not budging from this place. The Yuletide Poorhouse fare is very decent. The cook will be off and we three will be sent to the New Worden Hotel for dinner. We have a Christmas tree but will not hang up any stockings. We three are myself, Robert Lowell, and a stray painter.
Indeed the next day, after a week of light snowfall, the three were driven into town for a holiday dinner at the only year-round hotel, courtesy of the Yaddo Corporation.
Soon after the New Year, Flannery mailed her agent a freshly typed manuscript of the first nine chapters of her novel, adding up to 108 pages, with a note: “please show John Selby and let us be on with financial thoughts.” But her steady misgivings came true when the editor in chief responded with his impression that the work needed revision, allowing that its author was “a pretty straight shooter.” McKee forwarded Selby’s letter, which Flannery promptly showed to Lowell. She eventually passed on the poet’s comments to Paul Engle, now caught in the middle: “He too thought that the faults Rinehart mentioned were not the faults of the novel (some of which he had previously pointed out to me).” Engle pleaded, “Send me, please, like a good girl (and whether that designation fits or not) some sense of what the rest of the novel will be about.”
Hardly resistant to rewriting — indeed Selby wondered about “some aspects of the book that have been obscured by your habit of rewriting over and over again” — Flannery was more annoyed by his tone. She asked McKee, “Please tell me what is under this Sears Roebuck Straight Shooter approach,” and she resented the jauntiness of a reply “addressed to a slightly dim-witted Camp-fire Girl.” Emboldened by having Lowell on her side, she wrote back to Selby of her choice to take the high road of art, responding to his sense of a limiting “kind of aloneness in the book, as if you were writing out of the small world of your own experience”: “I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.” Because Selby was disturbed by what he termed “the hardening of the arteries of her cooperative sense . . . most unbecoming to a writer so young,” a decision was made that she come down from Yaddo for a late-February meeting, to clear the air, or part ways.
In the meantime, Yaddo was going through one of its seasonal reshufflings, the deck held entirely in the hands of Mrs. Ames, who informed Flannery that she was free to stay until the end of March, and perhaps beyond — as long as she swept the hallway carpet, each Sunday. Added to the mix, in January, were James Ross, brother-in-law of the Southern novelist Peter Taylor; Edward Maisel, redux; and Alfred Kazin, staying with Mrs. Ames at Pine Garde, her English Tudor cottage on the grounds. Kazin’s first impression was that Flannery “seemed to be attending Robert Lowell with rapture.” But he quickly became more interested in her writing, as he read pages from her novel, tipping off Giroux at Harcourt Brace, for whom he was working as a scout. “No fiction writer after the war seemed to me so deep, so severely perfect as Flannery,” wrote Kazin. “She would be our classic: I had known that from the day I discovered her stories.”
The arriving guest having the most catalytic social effect was “dimpled agreeable” Elizabeth Hardwick, returning on January 5, as she excited Lowell’s already teeming passions. If their quickly escalating romance bothered Flannery, she did not let on. Indeed for the young lady who wished to remain on the prepubescent side of twelve, and with Lowell who saw her as “our Yaddo child,” the development may have been tolerable, even comfortable. “Lizzie Hardwick and Cal Lowell have become about as close as two people can get,” Wright reported. “I have not infra-red photo phlashes to prove it. Flannery is playing it cool.” As Kazin, who engaged in heated nightly political debates with Lowell, crankily recalled, “Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick were a brilliant couple, but Lowell was just a little too dazzling at the moment.”
Hardwick, too, tended to view Flannery as even younger than her twenty-three years, about seven years younger than she and Lowell: “Most of all she was like some quiet, puritanical convent girl from the harsh provinces of Canada.” Remembered Hardwick, “She was a plain sort of young, unmarried girl, a little bit sickly. And she had a very small-town Southern accent . . . whiney. She whined. She was amusing. She was so gifted, immensely gifted. But the first thing I saw of hers after we met her at Yaddo, I’m sort of ashamed to admit, maybe I saw pages of Wise Blood, and I thought, ‘What on earth is this?’ It was just so plain, so reduced, after reading really startling things like Ulysses. Of course now I think it’s wonderful, I later did. But at first it didn’t hit me. . . . I think she and Cal were quite friendly. He was very interested in her.”
By early February, political controversies overtook aesthetic distinctions, or became intensely enfolded in them. Engagé Marxists of t
he thirties, many of whom found a home at Yaddo, had mostly, by 1949, evolved into non-Stalinist leftists, disillusioned by the Trotsky trials and the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 — just as Partisan Review outgrew its original thirties stance as official magazine of the Communist-dominated John Reed Club. Yet more conservative Southern Agrarians, and modernists such as Eliot and Lowell — with sympathies for religion, and a visceral response to Communist atheism — still distrusted these reformed “fellow travelers.” Such complex partisan issues were being played out in a nation just a year away from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s speech denouncing Communist infiltration in the State Department and already engaged in “red-baiting,” and a Cold War with the Soviet Union.
During the fall, Lowell’s foil for dinnertime political rows had been Charles Wagner, who was writing a “pious” history of Harvard. “I wouldn’t give the life of one American soldier he betrayed for Pound’s,” Wagner snarled one evening. To which Lowell shot back, “But no one lost his life because of Pound.” Wagner’s adversarial role was taken up by Kazin, who complained in his memoir New York Jew: “It was a gloomy time for me; listening to Lowell at his most blissfully high orating against Communist influences at Yaddo and boasting of the veneration in which he was held by those illiberal great men Ezra Pound and George Santayana, made me feel worse.” Wright reported Lowell’s intent to turn Yaddo by the next summer into a haven for “the agrarian–little magazine entente.” Pleading writer’s block, and marital problems, Kazin fled back to Manhattan.
The spark finally set to all this Yaddo tinder was a front-page story in the New York Times on February 11, 1949: “Tokyo War Secrets Stolen by Soviet Spy Ring in 1941.” Including an accusation by General Douglas MacArthur, the article reported evidence from the army that Agnes Smedley had run a Soviet spy ring out of Shanghai. A friend of Mrs. Ames, with the special dispensation of being a Yaddo guest from 1943 until March 1948, Smedley was in the midst of writing a biography of Marshal Zhu De, founder of the Chinese Red Army. “She idolized Mao Tse-tung,” remembers Jim Shannon. “She walked around the place like a man, like a soldier marching through the paddy fields.” Eight days later, the army disowned its report. Opposite a February 20 notice of Smedley thanking the army for clearing her name ran the announcement: “Pound, In Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Treason Cell.”
Yet by the date of the retraction, paranoia had been heightened by the appearance, on February 14, of two FBI agents, questioning Hardwick and Maisel about Communist sympathies at Yaddo, tipped off by Mrs. Ames’s secretary. The first casualty of this “Red Scare” was Clifford Wright — sent packing as Mrs. Ames had the “fantastic idea” that he was the FBI informant. At Saturday dinner, with Flannery and Elizabeth Hardwick, Mrs. Ames defended Smedley as “an old-fashioned Jeffersonian Democrat.” Lowell, incensed by Ames’s control of guests’ stays and by the liberal left in general, pushed for a meeting with the board of directors to demand her ouster. Shortly before the meeting, James Ross took off. “I had refused to join with the other guests in bringing charges against you,” he wrote Ames, “and had expressed my opinions rather violently one night at dinner.”
A bizarre inquisition, orchestrated by Lowell, and attended by eight of the directors of Yaddo, as well as the four remaining guests, took place in the Garage on Saturday morning, February 26. “I shall compare the institution to a body and the present director to a diseased organ,” Lowell began, with an extended simile, “chronically poisoning the whole system.” Hardwick spoke of a summer party where “Molotov cocktails” were served, and jokes made, “Is it too pink for you?” In an Et tu, Brute? moment, Mrs. Ames confronted her accusers: “They frequently came to my house for music or cocktails, a harmonious life, with now and then little affectionate notes . . . then all of this changed with the morning of Tuesday.” The director Everett Stonequist, a Skidmore sociologist, mused aloud that the FBI investigation released “some of the excitement, hysteria, perhaps, which seems to be part of the post-war period in American history.”
Its least likely participant was Flannery O’Connor, ever silent, and keeping a canny distance. Yet the combination of Lowell’s mesmerizing personality, some annoyance with Mrs. Ames’s autocratic style, and a simple view of Communism as evil, all led her to take part. Her cross-examination by Lowell was the least expansive of the testimonies, just a single page of a sixty-page transcript. Describing her relations with Mrs. Ames over the summer as “very pleasant. I saw little of her,” she said matters had devolved to being “precariously cordial”: “I felt more like Mrs. Ames’ personal guest than a guest of the Corporation.” To Lowell’s leading question, “Has Mrs. Ames said anything contrary to her official position?” she replied sharply, “Mrs. Ames said that Agnes Smedley had been living in fear for a long time . . . that seemed different to me. It did not seem to fit in with an impression of her as an old-fashioned Jeffersonian democrat.”
In her testimony on Ames’s arbitrary rule, Flannery told prosecuting Lowell, “I asked to stay through July, largely through economic pressure, which has not improved, but I am leaving next Tuesday.” The last four guests did hastily depart Yaddo within a day or two. Of the “little mix-up,” Hardwick claimed, “It wasn’t as much as it seems now. Flannery wasn’t so much in that.” All was forgiven enough for Elizabeth Ames to invite O’Connor to return, in 1958; she declined, writing back of her peacocks, “When I look at my birds I often think of Yaddo and how well a few of them would go with the place.” Yet at the time much was being made, and aftershocks followed the group to New York City, where a board meeting was scheduled the next month to decide the issue. Having been present at the feverish Garage meeting, Malcolm Cowley reported back to a friend: “The guests departed, vowing to blacken the name of Yaddo in all literary circles and call a mass meeting of protest. . . . I left too, feeling as if I had been at a meeting of the Russian Writers’ Union during a big purge. Elizabeth went to a nursing home. Her secretary resigned. Yaddo was left like a stricken battlefield.”
THE SELF-IMPOSED EXILE of the group from Yaddo threw Flannery into confusion, vexing for a young woman whose writing depended so much on cloistered regularity. “We have been very upset at Yaddo lately and all the guests are leaving in a group Tuesday — the revolution,” she reported to Elizabeth McKee on February 24. “All this is very disrupting to the book and has changed my plans entirely.” Arriving in Manhattan during a winter storm that covered everything in snow and ice, with gusting winds, she was nearly as disturbed as she had been during her abrupt girlhood removal to Atlanta. As Enoch cries to Haze, of Taulkinham, in “The Peeler,” published nine months later in Partisan Review, “There’s too many people on the street . . . all they want to do is knock you down. I ain’t never been to such a unfriendly place before.”
Flannery was oblivious to most of the changes that were making New York City the “first city” of the postwar world: its population, during the administration of Mayor William O’Dwyer, approaching the 1950 census figure of 7,891,957; construction beginning along the East River of the United Nations Secretariat, the world’s first glass-walled skyscraper; African American sharecroppers migrating from Southern cotton farms to Harlem; Puerto Ricans arriving on daily flights from San Juan. Yet she was painfully aware of the numbers on the streets, the crowds captured in the canonic images of the Life photographer Andreas Feininger, using a telephoto lens, to compress lunch-hour workers on Fifth Avenue into even more of a cliché of a “rat race” in a “skyscraper jungle.” As she told Betty Boyd of the anomie she was witnessing daily, “There is one advantage in it because although you see several people you wish you didn’t know, you see thousands you’re glad you don’t know.”
Her first stop was Elizabeth Hardwick’s apartment in Devonshire House, a 1920s building in the “Hispano-Mooresque” style at 28 East 10th Street, where she stayed briefly, while Lowell checked into the Hotel Earle, off Washington Square. Always retaining fond feelings for Hardwick, she later
wrote of the “very nice girl” to Betty Hester, “I think Elizabeth is a lot better writer than she gets credit for being. She is a long tall girl, one of eleven children, from Kentucky. . . . I used to go up to Elizabeth’s apartment to see her when I lived in New York and the elevator man always thought I was her sister. There was a slight resemblance.” Hardwick felt the mistake had to do with their accents, adding, “But mine was upper South, hers was very deep, small-town Southern.”
She moved next into a two-dollar-a-day room that smelled like “an unopened Bible,” in Tatum House, a “horrible” YWCA residence, at 138 East 38th Street, on Lexington Avenue. The building provided breakfast, and she took most of her other meals at a nearby “very good co-op cafeteria,” on 41st Street between Madison and Park: “The only place in New York that I could afford to eat downtown where I didn’t feel I was going home with pyoria.” She was hardly alone her first week in the city, though, as Lowell introduced her around. Including her in visits to friends, he rallied support for his Yaddo crusade, while announcing his “reconversion” to Catholicism, having attended mass, with Flannery, for the first time in over a year, before leaving Saratoga Springs. Both issues meshed in his psyche into an apocalyptic struggle of good versus evil.