by Brad Gooch
When Fitzgerald returned from teaching, and the children were tucked into bed, the three adults re-created some of the mood of Yaddo by mixing a pitcher of martinis, sharing a meal, gossiping — Mary McCarthy and Randall Jarrell taught at Sarah Lawrence, and were vital sources — and discussing books. The Fitzgeralds outdid even Flannery in the piety of their lengthy Benedictine grace, recited in Latin, as she ruefully recalled, “while the dinner got cold.” They circulated among themselves volumes by Catholic writers — Lord Acton, John Henry Newman, a history of the Reformation by Father Philip Hughes. Flannery recommended Nathanael West’s defiantly original novel Miss Lonelyhearts, as well as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, its central image of a mother’s coffin a fixation in the novel she was writing. “They were our movies, our concerts, and our theatre,” wrote Robert Fitzgerald of these talks that often went on until midnight.
Yet not all of the conversation was so high-minded. Flannery learned that she could always get a rise by telling droll tales of Georgia and her family. Daily letters from her mother, who also mailed hand-sewn baby clothes, fruitcakes, and arcane recipes, provided a rich inventory. Flannery told, too, of affable Uncle Louis, who sent “gewgaws” from the King Hardware Company in Atlanta, where he was now working as a salesman. Because of the prevailing familial tone — O’Connor dubbed the Fitzgeralds “my adopted kin” — Robert was one of the only people she ever spoke with about her father’s death; his father, too, had died when he was fifteen, and the loss had been equally devastating. “Perhaps this ménage a trois plus provided her with an easier and freer family life,” Sally Fitzgerald surmised. Dinners wound up at the kitchen sink as Sally and Flannery chatted while sudsing and drying, and the “master of the house” busied himself elsewhere.
Meanwhile, upstairs, the pile of yellow second sheets on which Flannery was composing her novel was mounting. She was making progress, thinning out and pacing the opening. “Well I can’t sustain that,” she told Sally when her friend praised “The Train.” “I have to tone it down.” Haze Motes, in his “glaring blue” suit and “hat that an elderly country preacher would wear,” was coming into focus as a slightly demented saint in the making, a shift in direction that Sally thought perhaps “due to criticism by Lowell.” Yet Flannery proudly wrote Elizabeth McKee, “The novel is going well, almost fast.” The biggest problem remained Rinehart. In October 1949, Giroux sent a provisional Harcourt contract. But Selby was refusing to let her off so easily, accusing her of being “unethical,” the worst word he could have chosen. To right the “malicious statement,” Flannery agreed to show Rinehart more pages, in March, she hoped for the last time.
Flannery was moving closer to achieving her goal of being “a writer on my own,” residing, like so many young American authors at the time, in New York City, or one of the many small towns within a hundred-mile radius. If she was unaware of the solitude of her chosen path, news that fall of the wedding plans of two girlfriends reminded her. From each event, she kept a stiff distance. When Mary Virginia Harrison invited her to be a bridesmaid at her wedding, she invoked canon law forbidding Catholics to participate in “outside” religious services, even though the reception was being held at Andalusia. She sent Betty Boyd a congratulatory note on her engagement to James Love, with a tiny line drawing of three disheveled violets, and the telling admission, “Marriages are always a shock to me.” According to Sally Fitzgerald, “She did husband her energies. She knew she had much work to do. And she knew that she had to do it alone.”
In December, Flannery returned to Milledgeville for what was expected to be a routine holiday visit. Lowell and Hardwick kept her company as she awaited her train in New York City. “We spent an hour and a half in the station with Flannery,” Lowell informed Robert Fitzgerald, “more or less on tip-toe because her train was ‘reported’ an hour late, which meant it might leave any minute.” Yet, once in Milledgeville, she fell seriously ill, and was told that she would need to be hospitalized for an operation for a floating kidney — upsetting news that she relayed lightly to friends. “I won’t see you again,” she wrote Lowell, of a planned rendezvous, “as I have to go to the hospital Friday and have a kidney hung on a rib.” In early January, she was admitted, for a month, to the Baldwin Memorial Hospital — a two-story redbrick building on Greene Street, formerly the Richard Binion Clinic, consisting of four doctors’ offices on the first floor and a small patient facility on the second — just a few blocks east of the Cline Mansion.
As Lyman Fulton was in training as a physician, she went beyond her usual vague, comic report that she was “having a kidney tacked up” when telling him of her situation. “She wrote to me about having had a so-called Dietl’s crisis,” said Fulton. “This is a condition, often very painful, in which a kidney slips out of place so as to cause a kinking and obstruction of the ureter. Surgery is often necessary. I wrote expressing my condolences.” When he learned later of her lupus, he understandably wondered if “the Dietl’s crisis, if that’s what it really was, may actually have been the opening salvo in her battle with that cruel disease.” Spending the month of February recuperating at the Cline Mansion, Flannery indicated the serious toll of the “radical cure” on her energies only to her agent: “I’m anxious to be on with the book but don’t have any strength yet.”
When she did finally return to Connecticut, near the end of March, the seasons were already turning, as Robert Fitzgerald has poetically recalled: “We worked on at our jobs through thaws and buds, through the May flies, and into summer, when we could take our evening ease in deckchairs on the grass.” In May, the Fitzgeralds’ newly born third child, Maria Juliana, was ready for baptism, and Flannery held her as godmother, standing with her fellow godparent Robert Giroux. “I noted what good spirits Flannery was in,” said Giroux, “as we gravely performed our roles as godparents, renouncing the devil and all his works and pomps.” For Flannery, as for the Fitzgeralds, the sacrament confirmed not only Maria’s, but Flannery’s, place among them. “She was now one of the family,” Robert Fitzgerald wrote, “and no doubt the coolest and funniest one.”
The warmer months in Redding were highly productive for the novelist. During the spring, she invented central episodes involving the radio preacher Hoover Shoates, a shyster’s name much celebrated by the Fitzgeralds. In the summer, when she reached an impasse with the character of Haze, she found a startling solution by reading the copy Robert Fitzgerald had inscribed for her of his translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Meditating on Oedipus blinding himself in recognition of his sins, she dared to have Haze sear his own pecan-colored eyes with quicklime. Having closely read, as well, over the past year, three women saints — Catherine of Siena, Catherine of Genoa, and Teresa of Avila — she added some dark, medieval touches, including Haze lining his shoes with broken glass and wearing a shirt of barbed wire. Now reflecting physical pain, and compunction, her novel was growing doubly deep, and far more ambitious.
She humorously complained to the Fitzgeralds, in December, of heaviness in her “typing arms.” She had retyped her entire novel to set up Haze’s self-blinding, and blamed the ache on her labors, because she could no longer raise her arms to the typewriter. Flannery insisted, in later years, that hers had not been a particularly sickly childhood. “I am wondering where you got the idea that my childhood was full of ‘endless illnesses,’” she corrected Betty Hester. “Besides the usual measles, chickenpox and mumps, I was never sick.” Yet even before the Dietl’s crisis, she noticed problems while living at Yaddo, and in Manhattan, as she “ran from one end of it to the other looking for an honest doctor.” When the condition in her arms worsened, she began to fear having a contagious disease that the children might catch. So, at Flannery’s request, Sally drove her to Wilton for an appointment with Dr. Leonard Maidman, the Fitzgerald family physician.
Dr. Maidman offered a provisional diagnosis of the joint pains as rheumatoid arthritis; he said the symptoms checked out, but not perfectly. Since she was soon travel
ing to Milledgeville, he recommended a complete physical examination at her local hospital. “She had disguised her symptoms,” explained Sally Fitzgerald, “and had not told us how severe they were.” When Sally saw her off for the Christmas holidays, she noticed some stiffness in gait as Flannery walked away from her along the boarding platform. But otherwise she seemed fine, “smiling perhaps a little wanly but wearing her beret at a jaunty angle,” promising to be back in January. On the overnight train trip south, though, she became desperately ill, and by the time of her arrival, Uncle Louis, who had not seen her in nine months, said his niece resembled “a shriveled old woman.” The Fitzgeralds were in “a state of complete shock” when Mrs. O’Connor telephoned, a few nights later, to break the startling news that Flannery, at twenty-five, was dying of lupus.
Part Two
Chapter Six
The Life You Save
Her pivotal train ride from New York City back to Georgia, at Christmastime 1950, was a strong enough plot point in O’Connor’s life to show up nearly intact in her fiction. She once insisted that “any story I reveal myself in completely will be a bad story.” Yet when she wrote “The Enduring Chill,” seven years after the event, her depiction of a homecoming was barely camouflaged. The playwright Asbury Fox, returning, ill, from New York City, is a young man, but he is also twenty-five, and the detail of putting three thicknesses of the New York Times between his blankets to stay warm in his apartment, during winter, reminded Robert Fitzgerald of conditions in Connecticut: “I know for a fact that she had to stuff newspaper in the window cracks; we did, too.”
Although Asbury’s train, in the fictional rendering, is met by his widowed mother, the shock described is familiar from the recounting by Uncle Louis of Flannery’s disembarking. As soon as Mrs. Fox catches a first glimpse of her son, bracing himself behind the conductor, with a bloodshot left eye, “puffy and pale,” she gasps: “The smile vanished so suddenly, the shocked look that replaced it was so complete, that he realized for the first time that he must look as ill as he was.” Through the medium of this snotty young artist, O’Connor allows a glimpse of some of her own fears while experiencing her reversal of fortune: “The train glided silently away behind him, leaving a view of the twin blocks of dilapidated stores. He gazed after the aluminum speck disappearing into the woods. It seemed to him that his last connection with a larger world were disappearing forever.” The difference is that Asbury’s dread disease turns out to be undulant fever, heightened by self-dramatizing and hypochondria. Flannery would be a longer time coming to understand the true nature of her illness and its more serious significance.
“Borne home on a stretcher, all out helpless,” as she put it, she was immediately admitted to Baldwin Memorial Hospital, where she had spent the previous yuletide season. This Christmas she found the place “full of old rain crows & tree frogs only — & accident victims — & me.” On December 23, she informed Betty Boyd Love, “I am languishing on my bed of semi affliction, this time with AWRTHRITUS or, to give it all it has, the acute rheumatoid arthritis, what leaves you always willing to sit down, lie down, lie flatter, etc. . . . I will be in Milledgeville Ga. a birdsanctuary for a few months, waiting to see how much of an invalid I am going to get to be . . . but I don’t believe in time no more so its all one to me.”
Lying in her “horsepital” bed, she thought back on Dunbar’s Mind and Body, which had so fascinated her in Iowa City. “These days you caint even have you a good psychosomatic ailment,” she wrote Betty. And she read T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, earning her a reputation among the nurses as a “mystery fan.”
Not unlike bald, round-faced Dr. Block, a stethoscope hung about his neck, in “The Enduring Chill” — so “irresistible to children” that “they vomited and went into fevers to have a visit from him” — Flannery’s attending physician, Dr. Charles Fulghum, was a beloved general practitioner in Milledgeville. “He was a little fella, sort of makes me think of Old Doc on Gunsmoke,” says town resident Margaret Uhler. “He was delightful and everybody loved him.” He was an internist, when, according to his partner Dr. Zeb Burrell, “Internal medicine was the Cadillac of specialties, not in income but intellect. Internists were thought of as the diagnosticians of the time. Physicals consisted of an hour-long conversation with the patient, followed by an hour-long checkup.” Dr. Fulghum had for many years been one of the Cline family’s regular doctors, and had served as a pallbearer at the funerals of both Flannery’s father and her aunt Gertie.
Dr. Fulghum initially concurred with Dr. Maidman’s diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, treating his patient with cortisone, a hormone produced by the adrenal gland, with powerful anti-inflammatory properties. As Flannery informed her agent, “Am in the hospital, taking Cortisone, a new drug for that, & am improving.” While correct about the recent discovery of the treatment — earning a 1950 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, for Drs. Kendall, Hench, and Reichstein — her expected improvement turned out to be wishful. The cortisone kept her alive, but her alarming fevers continued rising. Given the crisis, Dr. Fulghum contacted Dr. Arthur J. Merrill, an internist and Georgia’s first kidney specialist, at Emory University in Atlanta. Over the telephone, Dr. Merrill suggested a likely diagnosis of disseminated lupus erythematosus. He also spoke quite honestly and directly with Mrs. O’Connor about her daughter’s chances.
In February, on the recommendation of Dr. Merrill, Flannery was transferred to Emory University Hospital. Located on the main campus, in the residential Druid Hills neighborhood of Atlanta, the Italianate-style hospital, built in 1922 as Wesley Memorial, was a 320-bed facility, treating more than 11,500 patients a year. Under the care of the forty-two-year-old physician she came to refer to as “Scientist Merrill,” or, simply, “the Scientist,” she underwent a battery of tests. As she told Betty Boyd Love, “I stayed there a month, giving generous samples of my blood to this, that and the other technician, all hours of the day and night.” The LE cell test — the first lupus test, developed in 1948 — confirmed Dr. Merrill’s diagnosis. Yet her mother, fearing the shock of her discovering that she had the same disease that killed her father, chose to conceal the news. “She was already weak and it would have been too awful,” concurred Sally Fitzgerald.
A disorder in which the immune system forms antibodies that attack its own connective tissue, causing chronic inflammation and often affecting multiple organs, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), with no certain viral or genetic trigger, remained nearly as elusive to her doctors as it had in her father’s day, due to a confusing array of possible symptoms. While syphilis, treatable with penicillin, had earned the title “the great imitator” in the nineteenth century, lupus, frequently misdiagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis on first examination, inherited this same distinction by the early fifties, because no two patients exhibited exactly the same symptoms. Like a more virulent undulant fever (“It’ll keep coming back,” Dr. Block warns in “The Enduring Chill”), the disease complicated matters by oscillating between “flares” and “remissions.” As Flannery later wrote to Robert Lowell, “It comes and goes, when it comes I retire and when it goes, I venture forth.”
Since the disease could compromise joints, blood vessels, lungs, kidneys, heart, or brain, its diagnosis involved identifying at least two to four items on a checklist of nearly a dozen symptoms, including rashes, high fevers, photosensitivity, oral ulcers, hema-tologic disorders, and arthritis. Suffering from a severe case, Flannery manifested a number of these markers during her great “flare” of 1951. Of the disease that often announced itself with a wolfish rash across the bridge of the nose, she reported, in 1957, to a friend, “I have not had the rash in several years.” And she wrote to Maryat Lee, “When I was nearly dead with lupus I had these sweats. They are a sign of serious chemical imbalance.” Indicating a low white blood cell count, she recalled, “In ’51 I had about 10 transfusions.” Most obvious, in her case, were the painful, inflamed joints of arthritis.
The lifesav
ing treatment Dr. Merrill prescribed was a high dosage of ACTH, or adrenocorticotropic hormone, derived from the pituitary glands of pigs. She would eventually sing the praises of this natural hormone, discovered by the same group of scientists who had developed cortisone for treatment: “I owe my existence and cheerful countenance to the pituitary glands of thousands of pigs butchered daily in Chicago Illinois at the Armour packing plant. If pigs wore garments I wouldn’t be worthy to kiss the hems of them.”
As a corticosteroid — one of the hormone groups generally produced by the outer part, or cortex, of the adrenal glands on top of the kidneys — ACTH stimulated the body’s secretion of cortisone. Yet all such new cortisone-related treatments, especially at high doses, had potent side effects. “I was an intern at Columbia Presbyterian Medical School, in the fifties, when cortisone came into widespread use in hospitals,” says the psychiatrist and O’Connor scholar Robert Coles. “One gets stirred by cortisone. I don’t want to turn this into a federal case, or an interpretation of her writing. But the drug that was saving her life was also, to some extent, stirring her body and mind.”