Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  Flannery certainly felt this stirring, lying ravaged in an Atlanta hospital bed, her hair having fallen out during high fevers, her face bloated and “moon-like” from the cortisone. As she later described the mental over-stimulation to Betty Hester, “I was five years writing that book and up to the last I was sure it was a failure and didn’t work. When it was almost finished I came down with my energy-depriving ailment and began to take cortesone in large doses and cortesone makes you think night and day until I suppose the mind dies of exhaustion if you are not rescued.”

  She imagined a connection between the disease and the novel that she had worked on so strenuously. By a sort of magical thinking, propelled by the treatment — “the large doses of ACTH send you off in a rocket and are scarcely less disagreeable than the disease” — she wondered if she had perhaps predicted, even shaped, this illness through her writing: “during this time I was more or less living my life and H. Mote’s too and as my disease affected the joints, I conceived the notion that I would eventually become paralized and was going blind and that in the book I had spelled out my own course, or that in the illness I had spelled out the book.”

  Though her imaginings may have been delirious, she did hit on a critical truth. For while she “never had a moment’s thought over Enoch . . . everything Enoch said and did was as plain as my hand,” Haze did not truly cohere as a character until the stretch of time between her two hospital visits. In sickness and near death, the author bonded with her “morbid” character. Only in the last few months, and last dozen pages, had Haze moved beyond his snarling sermons atop his “high rat-colored” Essex for the Church Without Christ — preaching that would strike a Newsweek reviewer as “a subtle parody of Communist soapboxing” — to a glimmer of humility and self-awareness. As she would tell one interested reader, “I just unfortunately have Haze’s vision and Enoch’s disposition.”

  Following a month’s stay, Flannery emerged from Emory, and the harrowing debut of her illness, with a novel that finally felt balanced, after she continued to make changes in the hospital. Recuperating in Milledgeville, she was put by Dr. Merrill on a strict salt-free, milk-free diet, and she learned to give herself four daily shots of ACTH. But, mostly, she focused on preparing for submission the pages that had been typed for her in Atlanta. With Rinehart officially declining to publish the novel, she was now free to mail her manuscript to Robert Giroux, which she did on March 10. Having long ago discarded “The Great Spotted Bird,” and whittled down “Wise Blood and Simple,” the author, who had just been through four months of blood tests and blood transfusions, was set on a title, as well. “I have finished my opus nauseous and expect it to be out one of these days,” she wrote Betty Boyd Love, on April 24. “The name will be Wise Blood.”

  IN THE SPRING of 1951, shortly after her twenty-sixth birthday, Flannery and her mother moved to Andalusia, a practical change motivated by her difficulty navigating all the steps at the Cline Mansion, and allowing more privacy for recovery and writing. Regina O’Connor had already been spending more time at the dairy farm, as she became that most daunting of figures in a small Southern town, a tough businesswoman. After a summer marked by several returns to the Atlanta hospital, Flannery filled in the Fitzgeralds on her situation: “Me & maw are still at the farm and are like to be, I perceive, through the winter. She is nuts about it out here, surrounded by the lowing herd and other details, and considers it beneficial to my health. The same has improved.”

  The austere farmhouse where Regina and Flannery took up residence, expecting to stay through the summer, was the two-story, white-frame Plantation Plain–style house, with a steeply pitched red metal roof, built in the 1850s, where the writer had spent so many summer days and evenings with her cousins as a child. From any of the rockers always set in a row on its columned, screened front porch, mother and daughter could look out over a sloping front lawn, full of oak trees, and onto a 550-acre estate of rolling hills, ponds, pastureland, and pine forests, with Tobler Creek, a spring-fed waterway, meandering through hayfields and wetlands at the rear of the property. Sunsets, as O’Connor often paints them in her stories, might be a “purple streak,” or “flame-colored,” or “like a red clay road.” “Does it every evening,” the mother, Lucynell Crater, reminds shiftless Tom T. Shiftlet as he admires one in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

  When they arrived that spring, the property was at its most inviting. The four-mile ride northwest from town on the main paved road toward Eatonton cut through dense woods. Just before Andalusia was a half-mile stretch of fields filled with kudzu vines, and the fragrant purple buds and flowers of tree-climbing wisteria. “You could, literally, with your windows down in the car, smell it coming,” remembers the O’Connor scholar Robert Strozier of passing the spot in the early fifties. Regina, driving her black Chevrolet, would turn left off the public road onto a driveway that cut through a red clay bank and curved gently uphill for a quarter mile, until she swerved around the back of the house to an open carport, paved with flagstones. Rarely using the half-dozen, wide, brick front steps, mother and daughter generally entered by way of the low-ceilinged rear kitchen porch, Regina often fussing with packages, and Flannery moving along more slowly behind.

  Due to her convalescence, they chose to set up quarters on the main floor, leaving for guests two upstairs bedrooms, reached by a steep, railed, central staircase, its landing brightly lit by a long window. Flannery claimed, as her bedroom-study, the front corner room on the west side of the south-facing house. She soon had in place a narrow bed with a high Victorian headboard pushed against one tall front window; a few steps away she positioned a writing desk smack onto the back of an armoire, turned away from two corner windows, her attention focused inward rather than on any pastoral views. Her mother’s bedroom was directly behind hers, connected by a doorway. Across the entrance hall was a plain, high-ceilinged, gray-walled combination parlor and dining room; to the rear, the kitchen, where they met for morning coffee — always efficiently prepared by Regina the night before and poured into a thermos — and listened to news on the radio.

  Not having lived at home since college, Flannery now found herself faced with coping, as an adult, with her mother, in close quarters. Regina was both a godsend and a challenge for the daughter she persisted in calling “Mary Flannery.” Having matured from a comely Southern belle into a feisty, formidable widow, with a straight back, sharp nose, small chin, and enormous blue eyes, she countered Flannery’s near silence with endless garrulousness, and a zest for moneymaking. As overseer of the farm, she was a natural. According to one friend, “Regina was very petite, in charge. She was a very capable manager.” She was also an ideal nurse and caretaker, but, at times, as trying a companion for Flannery as she had been for Edward. “With me, Flannery tended to be a bit joking and sarcastic about her mother,” remembered Robie Macauley. “But the idea that Regina was a tyrant — though a beloved one — also came through.”

  While their former plantation house on a rise of land was the main attraction of the twenty-one-acre central farm complex, its working plant had grown more productive since Uncle Bernard willed the operation to Louis and Regina. Outbuildings now included a low horse barn; a vast, two-story cow barn with hayloft; brick milk-processing shed; well house; pump house; and a white wooden water tower on tall spindly legs. The tenants’ house was an early-nineteenth-century, two-story plantation cottage, with an open porch, just two hundred feet from the main house. Three other workers’ shacks were located in low-lying fields farther out on the property. By the time the Union-Recorder ran a feature on Andalusia, in 1958, the dairy farm boasted eighty-five Holstein, Guernsey, and Jersey cows, grazing on fescue grass and crimson and white clover, and supplying milk to the Putnam County Cooperative: “the cows are fat and sleek and giving plenty of milk.”

  As Regina busied herself with driving about the property in her stick-shift automobile, inspecting fencing, or planning a livestock pond at the bottom of the hill, h
er daughter stayed in her room, shades drawn, having reinstated an inviolable regimen of writing for several hours in the morning. Yet during her first season at Andalusia, most of this writing consisted of rewriting. Although she felt that her novel was essentially finished, the publication process was full of starts and stops, beginning with a long silent spell that made the first-time author nervous. In April, she tugged at her agent: “Would you check on my manuscript at Harcourt, Brace? . . . I am anxious to get it off my mind.” She was not aware that Robert Giroux had run into some blank, uncertain reactions from the editorial board and sales department. “I thought, Wow, this is really taking a chance, but it’s the right chance to take,” said Giroux. “It was all against the grain.”

  In June, word finally came of the acceptance of Wise Blood, and Flannery was “mighty pleased.” Following the good news, Giroux sent a list of suggested additions and corrections. She had also mailed the manuscript to the Fitzgeralds, her steady correspondents throughout her convalescence. With her permission, Robert Fitzgerald passed the manuscript on to Caroline Gordon. Like her husband, Allen Tate — just asked by the Fitzgeralds to stand as godfather for their fourth child, Michael — Caroline Gordon was a recent convert in search of a Catholic literary “renascence.” In Wise Blood, and in the manuscript of another first novel, The Charterhouse, sent to her almost simultaneously by Walker Percy from Louisiana, though never finally published, she saw some of her wish realized. As she reported the coincidence to Brainard Cheney, a friend in Nashville: “It is no accident, I’m sure, that in the last two months the two best first novels I’ve ever read have been by Catholic writers. The other novel is by Flannery O’Connor. Harcourt, Brace say it is the most shocking book they have ever read but have finally agreed to publish it.” And to Fitzgerald, she wrote back excitedly, “This girl is a real novelist. She is already a rare phenomenon: a Catholic novelist with a real dramatic sense, one who relies more on her technique than her piety.”

  True to character, Gordon did find herself “wanting to make a few suggestions” on improving two “muffed” scenes, and was “presumptuous” enough to send them along. Yet for countless young writers, as Gordon knew, her opinion was most welcome; the literary pedigree of this fifty-five-year-old Kentucky-born author of a half-dozen Southern novels and of such classic stories as “The Captive” and “Old Red” was impeccable. As she liked to point out, she had been Ford Madox Ford’s secretary in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, and he had once been Henry James’s secretary; Lowell thought of her as “almost my mother.” Her fiction workshops at Columbia, where she had taught since 1946, were coveted. One of her students recalls, “She presented herself in class as a correct Southern lady, wearing a frilly dress, polished black shoes, and a hat. But she told fascinating tales of friendships with Hemingway, in Paris, and Hart Crane, and was incredibly generous with her time, and her pages of typed comments.”

  Flannery was quite grateful for the “touch here and touch there,” indicated by Gordon, whose criticism obviously struck her as more apt than Selby’s earlier “vague” comments that she suspected were designed to “train it into a conventional novel.” She made her corrections, in ink, while “a lady around here types the first part of it.” But rereading the revised draft in mid-September felt to the novice author like “spending the day eating a horse blanket.” So she asked “Mrs. Tate” if she would mind taking yet another look. Emboldened by the request, Gordon typed back a staccato, nine-page, single-spaced list of suggested edits. Jammed into these tight lines was a crash course in the basics of her fictional creed: Henry James advising a “stout stake” around which the action would swirl; the practice of Flaubert to never “repeat the same word on one page”; Yeats’s recommendation to offset every tense line with “a numb line.”

  Beginning with this “St. Didacus’ Day” letter, November 13, 1951, Flannery entered into an informal, and lifelong, correspondence course that Sally Fitzgerald dubbed a “master class.” Wise Blood was six years in the making partly because Flannery was learning on the job, teaching herself to write as she went along. Although she would eventually wean herself from Gordon’s absolute authority, in the fall of 1951 she was an eager, nearly obedient student. Gordon was quite strict. For instance, she insisted that the omniscient narrator should speak in “Johnsonian English.” Under her guidance, Emory’s necktie was changed from “greenpeaish” to “the color of green peas.” Gordon deemed many scenes “so stripped, so bare.” At her prodding, Flannery added an expansive night sky above Taulkinham that turned into one of the more lifting passages in the book:

  His second night in Taulkinham, Hazel Motes walked along down town close to the store fronts but not looking in them. The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete.

  As Caroline Gordon was now a literary confidante, Flannery felt that she might express to her some vulnerable feelings on the frustrations of exile in middle Georgia. Under the delusion that her ailment was acute rheumatoid arthritis, she was still viewing recuperation at the dairy farm as an inconvenient detour on the way back north to Connecticut, and to her “adopted kin,” the Fitzgeralds. “All these comments on writing and my writing have helped along my education considerably and I am certainly obliged to you,” she thanked Gordon in a draft of a letter. “There is no one around here who knows anything at all about fiction (-every story is ‘your article,’ or ‘your cute piece’) or much about any kind of writing for that matter. Sidney Lanier and Daniel Whitehead Hickey are the Poets and Margaret Mitchell is the Writer. Amen.”

  Yet during these same weeks that she was deriding her fate, she was simultaneously settling, nearly imperceptibly, into the new life that was awaiting her. If she had foretold her own debilitating illness through Haze Motes in Wise Blood — a book that she once described as “autobiographical” — she also sensed her new direction while thinking about her work. In a telling comment to Robert Fitzgerald (he passed it on to Caroline Gordon), Flannery claimed that while her first novel was about “freaks,” her next book would be about “folks.” This prediction began to come true as she adjusted to the land and folks at Andalusia. During this period, she took up oil painting, using scenes of farm life as subjects, and was delighted to be back among those dear companions of her youth, farmyard birds. “I have twenty-one brown ducks with blue wing bars,” she informed the Fitzgeralds. “They walk everywhere they go in single file.”

  The “folks” looming largest in the immediate ken of this young author, discovering the subject matter of her own mature style, were the Stevens family — her mother’s dairyman, his wife, and two daughters — living just beyond the farmyard gate, in the unpainted, gray, wooden plantation cottage, with two front entrances and a long porch. “He was sort of like the foreman,” remembers a friend of Mr. Stevens. “He was a country fellow . . . real easy to get along with.” Flannery enjoyed spying on this tenant family (the house was visible out her bedroom window), picking up dialogue, and mailing off snippets for the amusement of her friends up north. She first introduced Mr. Stevens, much like a character in a story, to the Fitzgeralds in a mid-September letter: “I have just discovered that my mother’s dairyman calls all the cows he: he ain’t give but two gallons, he ain’t come in yet. — also he changes the name endings: if its Maxine, he calls it Maxima. I reckon he doesn’t like to feel surrounded by females or something.”

  Even more fascinating to Flannery was the talkative Mrs. Stevens, a homemaker, who did not participate in the working farm, except for the occasional feeding of some yard chickens. Yet she quickly insinuated herself in the lives of the O’Connors, appearing daily at their back door. “She always tells us every morning what the weather is in different parts of the country, giving exact time and location”; or, feigning s
urprise at having intruded into a roomful of guests, “with some unnecessary message — so as to get a look at them.” Flannery was particularly bemused by Mrs. Stevens’s enthusiastic brand of Protestantism. On Saturday afternoons, Mrs. Stevens regularly had her church ladies over to the house and was charged with preparing an uplifting moral lesson: “She says she ain’t studied it very good yet but she is going to work it up by the time the ladies meet. They have a book with all these lessons in it and I suppose have a lesson each meeting.”

  What she could not discover by direct observation, she picked up by reading, closely, the weekly Union-Recorder, along with Georgia’s agricultural tabloid, the Farmer’s Market Bulletin; she later told a friend that she “gleaned many a character” from its pages. The previous September, the newspaper ran an article, “Want to Win Movie Pass? Shake Hands with Live Gorilla,” on the appearance at the Campus Theatre of Congo, the star of Mark of the Gorilla, in time for her to swipe its handshaking stunt, and the phrase “first ten brave enough,” for Wise Blood. In August 1951, the paper featured the 106-year-old Confederate veteran General William J. Bush, photographed in a “dashing” full-dress uniform and military hat, attending the graduation of his 62-year-old wife from GSCW. O’Connor lifted and doctored the item when she returned to story writing the following summer, in “A Late Encounter with the Enemy.”

  Flannery gained full exposure each noonday, as well, to the social class of ladies, usually in their hats and white gloves, who filed in with the O’Connors for lunch, the main meal of the day, at Sanford House. Opening that fall — just as Flannery was reemerging into daily life — the new tearoom was located in an 1825 Federal-style white-pillared home on Wilkinson Street, directly across from the college. Dubbed by Flannery “the local High Dining Establishment,” the restaurant was the creation of Miss Fannie White, the senior partner, and Miss Mary Thompson, dieticians from Wesleyan, a women’s college in Macon. The two ladies stayed true to the building’s antebellum spirit: in the entrance hall they hung a copy of the Secession Ordinance, printed on silk; over an Adams mantel in the dining room was a large etching of General Robert E. Lee.