by Brad Gooch
Yet Lowell was quite intuitive in his introductions, helping Flannery make contacts crucial for her life and career. He brought her to meet Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, living with their two young children in a small, two-room apartment on York Avenue. A poet (A Wreath of the Sea), critic, and translator of Euripides and Sophocles, Robert Fitzgerald, nearly forty, had been brought up Irish Catholic in Springfield, Illinois, left the Church — O’Connor liked to say, “to become an intellectual” — and then returned to the fold, resulting in an annulled first marriage. Sally, thirty-two, the daughter of a Texas judge, was an aspiring painter who studied at the Art Students League in New York, served as an officer in naval intelligence during the war, and had become an intense convert to Catholicism, briefly considering entering a convent before her marriage.
Responding to their doorbell on the gray, wintry afternoon, the Fitzgeralds discovered, standing in the hallway, their disheveled poet friend, “shooting sparks in every direction,” accompanied by Flannery, slender, sandy-haired, with a straightforward blue-eyed gaze and shy half smile, dressed in corduroy slacks and a navy pea jacket. She bore out Lowell’s account of Yaddo as she sat facing the windows reflecting light off the East River. “She did this with some difficulty, frowning and struggling softly in her drawl to put whatever it was exactly the way it was,” remembered Robert Fitzgerald. “We saw a shy Georgia girl, her face heart-shaped and pale and glum, with fine eyes that could stop frowning and open brilliantly upon everything. We had not then read her first stories, but we knew that Mr. Ransom had said of them that they were written.”
She made a strong impression on Sally, too, who grew curious to discover “how this affable, smiling girl from Georgia who didn’t have much to say, wrote, how she went about it.” Finding a copy of “The Train,” she quickly became riveted by its intense tale of Hazel Wickers, “shapes black-spinning past him,” hurtling toward Taulkinham: “I was unprepared for it, for the force, the sheer power of the writing. When I finished the story my hair was standing on end.” By the time Flannery left that afternoon, a sort of familial triangle was already forming, with Robert as the paterfamilias, a font of literary knowledge, and Sally, an older-sister figure. “Mrs. Fitzgerald is 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighs at most 92 pounds except when she is pregnant which is most of the time,” Flannery nailed her in one of her caricatures. “Her face is extremely angular; in fact, horse-like, though attractive, and she does have the pulled-back hair and the bun.”
Equally profound was Lowell’s next introduction, Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace. Still a junior editor, with an alert, open face, Giroux had already published the early novels of Jean Stafford; the poetry of Lowell and T. S. Eliot; Hannah Arendt’s first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. When Lowell brought Flannery by the firm’s modern offices, at Madison Avenue and 46th Street, Giroux was instantly convinced of his “unusual” visitor’s literary future. “She was very quiet,” said Giroux. “She was very chary of words. Lowell of course was vocal and full of interesting phrases, a great talker. But she had electric eyes, very penetrating. She could see right through you, so to speak. I was a young publisher, interested in acquiring writers. I thought, ‘This woman is so committed, as a writer, she’ll do whatever she’s made up her mind to do.’” But he knew that she was signed to Rinehart and felt sure she would not go back on an agreement.
“At first, her speech was difficult to understand because she had a deep Georgia accent,” remembered Giroux. “I had to concentrate. I was amazed when Paul Engle told me he couldn’t understand a word she said. I could hear the words. It was the rhythm and accent that required attention. It occurs to me that Robert Lowell had a Southern accent, too. He was born in Boston. But he went to Kenyon, and Ransom had a definite, very nice, genteel Southern accent, and he sort of picked up on that.” Flannery’s only request was for a copy of Giroux’s surprise bestseller that season, The Seven Storey Mountain, a memoir, by his Columbia classmate Thomas Merton, of abandoning the literary life of Manhattan to become a Trappist monk in Kentucky. When she left his office that day, book in hand, she felt the same sympathetic tug of interest in the young editor, educated in a Jesuit high school, whom she would later call “my good editor,” that he felt for her.
As the first week in March, and Lent, progressed, so did Lowell’s religious fervor, and Flannery’s special role in his vivid imaginings. His was to be a poet’s conversion more dramatic than even Merton’s. On March 4, he phoned Robert Fitzgerald to inform him that on Ash Wednesday, March 2, his thirty-second birthday, he had “received the shock of the eternal word.” He went on, “Today is the day of Flannery O’Connor, whose patron saint is St. Therese of Lisieux.” At Lowell’s direction, Fitzgerald got out a pad and pencil and took notes, writing, “He filled his bathtub with cold water and went in first on his hands and knees, then arching on his back, and prayed thus to Therese of Lisieux in gasps. . . . He went to the Guild Bookshop to get Flannery a book on St. Therese of Lisieux but instead before he knew it bought a book on a Canadian girl who was many times stigmatized.” Lowell then left town on a weeklong meditative retreat for absolution and counsel at his own chosen Trappist monastery in Rhode Island.
Word of these visions, and of Lowell’s insistence on canonizing Flannery, began to circulate at Manhattan cocktail parties. When Betty Hester heard such tales, independently, during the sixties, and asked her friend about them, she obviously hit a tender topic. “Let me right now correct, stash & obliterate this revolting story about Lowell introducing me as a saint,” O’Connor fired back, about the part played by her and Robert Fitzgerald. “At the time it was happening, poor Cal was about three steps from the asylum. He had the delusion that he had been called on some kind of mission of purification and he was canonizing everybody that had anything do with his situation then. I was very close to him and so was Robert. I was too inexperienced to know he was mad, I just thought that was the way poets acted. Even Robert didn’t know it, or at least didn’t know how near collapse he was. In a couple of weeks he was safely locked up.”
When Lowell returned to New York on March 16, he appeared much calmer, as he awaited the Yaddo board meeting scheduled for March 26, following the inconclusive Garage meeting a month earlier. During that week, he and Hardwick brought Flannery along to dinner at the midtown apartment of the novelist Mary McCarthy and her husband, Bowden Broadwater. In O’Connor’s words, McCarthy, a lapsed Catholic, prominent in the Paris Review circle, was “a Big Intellectual.” Arriving at the apartment at eight, the group engaged in fast-moving dinner conversation, with Flannery never adding a word — it was “like having a dog present,” Flannery said, “who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.” At a defining moment toward one o’clock in the morning, she did finally speak. As O’Connor told the story, “Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, he being the ‘most potable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’” Of what became a well-known response, Hardwick, McCarthy’s close friend, said defensively, “It did become famous, in Flannery’s favor, so to speak. But I don’t consider it a proper answer. . . . Considering how intelligent she was, she was more pious than any other Catholic I’ve ever known.”
Flannery was not present for the denouement of Lowell’s mise-en-scène, his temporary downfall. For to his great disillusionment, a counterpetition in support of Mrs. Ames was signed by fifty-one writers, including Kazin, Porter, McCullers, Delmore Schwartz, and Cheever, accusing him of “a frame of mind that represents a grave danger both to civil liberties and to the freedom necessary for the arts.” At their March 26 meeting, the Yaddo board dismissed Lowell’s charges. Stung by the rebuke, and following an appearance at a Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he introduced himself as “a poe
t and a Roman Catholic,” Lowell flew off to Chicago to visit Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon. There his behavior grew extreme enough for him to finally be hospitalized at Baldpate, in Massachusetts. Of what he felt was their enabling of Lowell’s delusions, Tate chidingly wrote to Hardwick, “But you are a woman and Miss O’Connor is a woman, and neither of you had the experience or knowledge to evaluate the situation in public terms.”
A few days before the Yaddo board meeting, Flannery was already on the train home, where she celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday and stayed through Easter. When Giroux had handed her a copy of The Seven Storey Mountain, he did so for her “to take with her to her mother’s house in Milledgeville.” She read there of the importance to Merton of Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism in reconciling his identities as novelist and contemplative, and of a religious conversion played out in apartments and Catholic sanctuaries in Manhattan. In Georgia, arguments were stacked against her living in Manhattan. Mrs. O’Connor worried about her daughter alone in the most notorious of northern cities. Money was tight; as Flannery wrote Paul Engle, “I didn’t get any Guggenheim.” Yet her Yaddo friend Elizabeth Fenwick had helped her secure a rented room in the uptown apartment of an acquaintance, and Flannery had every intention of returning.
During her month down South, she continued to bristle from the Yaddo incident. Even Lowell would later joke of the time they “blew our lids there” and “tried to blow the roof off.” Her upset at the time, though, was nearly as charged as his. Her GSCW history professor Helen Greene remembers Flannery agitatedly stopping by her office in Parks Hall during this spring visit, asking reproachfully, “Why didn’t you teach me about Communism?”: “I told her that her major in social studies had included a great deal on the subject and that she had probably made an A on it, or surely a B+. She was really shocked to find that many of those gifted fellows appointed to do creative work at Yaddo were unwilling or unable to believe in God. Their main reason, perhaps, was the appeal of Communism — whatever it meant to them. She had no patience with such attitudes.”
In a letter to Betty Boyd that summer, Flannery was every bit as shrill, and apocalyptic, in her damning of Communism, as Lowell, the Catholic Church, or even Billy Graham, who preached, in a career-making, eight-week mission in Los Angeles in 1949, “On one side we see communism . . . against God, against Christ, against the Bible.”
She vehemently reported on the Yaddo incident to her college friend, “Our action gained a good deal of publicity — not through us — and we have been assailed as people who want to destroy civil liberties etc etc. . . . As to the devil, I not only believe he is but believe he has a family . . . Yaddo has confirmed this in me.”
When she did return to Manhattan, Flannery survived a muggy summer, marked by heat waves “much worse than Georgia.” She lived for four months in a furnished room on the twelfth floor of the Manchester, a pre–World War I brick apartment building, at 255 West 108th Street and Broadway, in Morningside Heights, a neighborhood teeming with Columbia students, Jewish families, and Puerto Rican immigrants. Replicating her Iowa City routine, she began each morning by walking around the block to pray at the white marble Church of the Ascension, a mostly Irish parish, near Amsterdam Avenue. “I liked riding the subways and busses and all,” she reminisced, “and there was a church on 107th and I got to Mass every day and was very much alone and liked it.” She told Betty Boyd, “All the women over sixty-five in New York are wearing sun back dresses.”
But she spent most of her time in her room, writing; any progress achieved by training her attention on what she called, near the end of Wise Blood, “the pin point of light but so far away that she could not hold it steady in her mind.” Claiming that her own knowledge of the complicated layout of the city was limited to “uptown” and “downtown,” she later admitted to a friend, “I didn’t see much of the city when I stayed in New York. . . . I didn’t go to a single play or even to the Frick Museum. I went to the natural history museum but didn’t do anything the least cultural. The public library was much too much for me. I did well to get out and get a meal or two a day. I finally ended up eating at the Columbia University student cafeteria. I looked enough like a student to get by with it, and it was one of the few places I suspected the food of being clean.”
A rare visitor to her small, comfortably arranged apartment was Lyman Fulton, a Tennessee native, who had begun a residency at New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center on July 1. A friend of Mary Virginia Harrison, Fulton visited three or four times in the company of Flannery’s first cousin Louise Florencourt, and he found her “not overly talkative. I decided she was reclusive, probably a bookworm. . . . I had the impression she spent most of her time at the apartment.” A running joke between them was the meal she served her guests of “goat’s milk cheese and faucet water.” The longest conversation between the two Southerners concerned Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, published with much controversy the year before. Added into the scandal, still being discussed at Yaddo, was Capote’s summer affair with Newton Arvin. “I do remember that she had a definitely negative opinion of Truman Capote,” said Fulton.
Her greatest consolation, outside the featureless room where she wrote, was two trips to the medieval collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Cloisters, the assemblage of monastic chapter house and chapels, imported from France and Spain, and reconstructed stone by stone just a decade before, on a dramatic crest overlooking the Hudson River, at Fort Tryon Park. The Cloisters was a must-see destination for postwar visitors, its energetic curator, James J. Rorimer, excelling at public relations. Shortly after, as Flannery returned from Georgia, the New York Times ran a double-column photograph of a thirteenth-century sculpture of the Virgin from a choir screen of the Cathedral of Strasbourg as “An Easter Attraction at the Cloisters”; in a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece, James Rorimer, “a pipe smoker, in the best detective and curatorial tradition,” escorted a reporter through the popular Nine Heroes Tapestries exhibition.
But Flannery’s favorite was not the striking statue of the Strasbourg Virgin, celebrated in the daily press. In the soft light of the Early Gothic Hall, illuminated by three thirteenth-century windows carved by stonecutters in Normandy, she was drawn instead to a smaller, four-foot-high statue of Virgin and Child, with both parties “laughing; not smiling, laughing.” She imagined that “the Child had a face very much like the face of a friend of mine, Robert Fitzgerald.” What chiefly pixilated her in the sculpture was its artistic sensibility. As she wrote to a friend, “Back then their religious sense was not cut off from their artistic sense.” Embodying a profound spirituality that could accommodate humor, even outright laughter — a recipe she was working toward in her own novel — the statue, which “wasn’t colored,” was living proof of Maritain’s writings on the breadth of expression possible in religious art.
Another entertainment that fascinated her, in August, was of a different sort altogether, satisfying her countervailing taste for the more ludicrous products of popular culture. She either saw or closely followed reports of the premiere of Mighty Joe Young, a film that opened to wide success at the Criterion Theatre in Times Square. Its publicity campaign of a man in an ape suit greeting customers in front of the theater made the August 8 edition of Newsweek, with a photograph of the ape-man dangling from a line stretched across Broadway. Flannery lifted features of its simian hero, and its publicity gimmick, for her novel; when Enoch, the embodiment of all things goofy, slips into a cinema to watch a film “about a baboon named Lonnie who rescued attractive children from a burning orphanage,” he was actually engrossed in the finale of Mighty Joe Young.
Lyman Fulton rightly enough concluded, “I don’t think New York City was Flannery’s cup of tea.” At her most excoriating, she complained to Betty Boyd of its thick “culture fog” and even its “fornication.” More immediately, she was bothered by its hay fever season, accompanied by a high pollen count that “comes in there August 15 and
don’t leave for three weeks.” So she quickly accepted an offer from the Fitzgeralds to move, as a “paying guest,” to a large country house they had bought, in July, in the woods of Connecticut. The plan had been put forth by Robert Lowell — now out of Baldpate and married to Elizabeth Hardwick, as of July 28. Anticipating more children, the Fitzgeralds were feeling constricted by New York apartment life; the agreement was that O’Connor would pay sixty-five dollars a month, and babysit one hour each afternoon.
“ME AND ENOCH are living in the woods in Connecticut with the Robert Fitzgeralds,” Flannery proudly reported her change of address to Robie Macauley. Her new rural retreat, “miles from anything you could name,” was actually a stone and timber house on a wooded hilltop in Redding, Connecticut, a two-hour drive from the city. Located on Seventy Acre Road — a dirt road at the time — and set back in a wilderness of laurel and second-growth oak, the rambling structure included an attached garage with an upstairs bedroom and bath. In this modest garret, with a gable roof and three casement windows overlooking a boulder-strewn field, Flannery set up her typewriter. To make the room more welcoming, the Fitzgeralds rolled a coat or two of paint on the beaverboard walls, and painted the Sears, Roebuck dresser a bright sky blue. When the nights turned frosty, their clever boarder pushed pins into the walls, to “hurt their feet,” she said of the field mice pattering between the timbering.
Each morning, Flannery and one of the Fitzgeralds drove to low mass at Sacred Heart Church, in Georgetown, four miles away, while the other parent stayed behind. Upon returning, Flannery boiled herself a breakfast egg and lingered at the kitchen table, with highchairs pushed up to it, until Robert left for his commute to Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester. Flannery then disappeared up the interior back stairs, to put in four hours of writing — “which I find is the maximum,” she wrote Betty Boyd. At noon, dressed in a sweater, blue jeans, and loafers, “looking slender and almost tall,” she reappeared with a daily letter to her mother, posted by walking a half mile to the mailbox at the bottom of the hill. At least one hour every afternoon was spent in her room babysitting for Ughetta, the eldest girl. As Sally Fitzgerald recalled her style of child-rearing, “Flannery would lie on the bed and watch the child as she would play around the room. I remember once she told me that she listened to her howling . . . and finally, when she paused for breath, Flannery said, ‘Your mom can’t hear you over here.’ The child waited, then walked over to the door and started howling out, which Flannery reported to us.”