by Brad Gooch
“It seems like the O’Connors were coming from the beginning,” remembers Mary Jo Thompson. Likewise, Frances Florencourt recalls, “If it opened at twelve, they were right there at quarter to twelve on the front porch, sitting, waiting for people to gather.” They would always request the same corner table, Regina facing the bustling dining room, her daughter staring out a front window toward the Second French Empire clock tower of the brick courthouse, where the Klan had rallied three years earlier. “Flannery mostly ate in silence,” recalls Dorrie Neligan, a town resident, “while Regina visited with everybody she knew.” The menu was typed twice daily, with dishes billed as “unusual”: grits soufflé, rolled flank steak, hand-churned cranberry sherbet. Flannery’s favorites were fried shrimp, on Fridays, and peppermint chiffon pie for dessert.
WISE BLOOD WAS finally published on May 15, 1952, in a modest run of three thousand copies, selling for three dollars apiece. Its abstract, cream-colored cover did not give buyers many clues for prejudging the book, evoking a stylish noir thriller, or an Agatha Christie suspense novel. The words “Wise” and “Blood” were isolated in pools of red and olive, surrounded by jagged, pencil-like ripples emanating outward. The entire back of the book was taken up by a black-and-white portrait of O’Connor, her thinned hair fixed in a standard pageboy. She was still puffy from cortisone and was dressed in a blouse and dark blazer. She resisted having the photograph taken, sending the print a month later than Giroux requested, and was horrified, when first shown a “very pretty” copy by a local bookseller, to find herself “blown up on the back of it, looking like a refugee from deep thought.”
A lone “imprimatur” from Caroline Gordon was printed on the inside flap, comparing her work favorably with the absurdist fables of Franz Kafka, very much in vogue in smart circles in America (Anatole Broyard would title his memoir of postwar Greenwich Village Kafka Was the Rage). Gordon’s blurb claimed, “Her picture of the modern world is literally terrifying. Kafka is almost the only one of our contemporaries who has achieved such effects.”
Yet this praise could backfire for Flannery, who had never made it through Kafka’s novels The Castle and The Trial. As she reported reaction on the home front to the Fitzgeralds: “Regina is getting very literary. ‘Who is this Kafka?’ she says. ‘People ask me.’ A German Jew, I says, I think. He wrote a book about a man that turns into a roach. ‘Well, I can’t tell people that,’ she says.” When speaking with students from Dr. Helen Greene’s history class at the college, O’Connor was “distressed” to find them thinking that she shared in the European intellectual pessimism associated with Kafka that was “just getting to the young people of this country” — a harbinger of misunderstandings to come.
Not simply the neutral package, but the 223-page, unconventional novel itself invited high-contrast reactions. Written in a poker-faced style, its tale of lanky Hazel Motes — truculently arriving in the fictional town of Taulkinham, preaching in his “sharp, high, nasal, Tennessee voice,” conjuring a church where “the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk” — was evidently satiric, but the object of the satire could be a question mark. Playing Sancho Panza to Haze’s Don Quixote, Enoch has the “wise blood” of the title, but he winds up exiting the scene in a foolish monkey suit. Haze is pursued by the hormonal fifteen-year-old Sabbath Lily Hawks, the fake-blind Asa Hawks’s daughter, but no sex or romance occurs. In its final chapters, the episodic novel changes tone, revealing itself to be a morality play, as Haze — his pulpit of a junk car pushed over a cliff by a redneck cop — removes the “mote” in his own eye by self-blinding, and eventual death in a ditch.
Since this singular story of a pilgrim’s backward progress was expressed in poetic shorthand, indicating a high order of talent, the slim novel could not be ignored. Yet by crossing two literary wires — a Southern gothic tale with a medieval saint’s life — O’Connor opened herself up for criticism, somewhat unwittingly, as she was a newcomer to publication. “One reason I like to publish short stories is that nobody pays any attention to them,” she would tell an interviewer several years later. “In ten years or so they begin to be known but the process has not been obnoxious. When you publish a novel, the racket is like a fox in the hen house.” By the time she knew enough to dread the review process, though, she also understood why Haze Motes may have missed his mark with some early readers, a lesson learned: “he was a mystic. . . . The failure of the novel seems to be that he is not believable enough as a human being.”
Critical reaction was mixed. Especially during the postwar decades, most of the attention of reviewers was taken up with books in competition for the laurel of the Great American Novel — that year Ernest Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea; John Steinbeck, East of Eden; and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man won the National Book Award. Yet some quieter Catholic literature was succeeding, too: Dorothy Day released her memoir, The Long Loneliness; and François Mauriac, once said by O’Connor to be her single greatest influence, won the 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature. Another adolescent, male antihero was cutting a wide swath across the popular imagination — Holden Caulfield, in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, published the year before; Flannery thought “that man owes a lot to Ring Lardner. Anyway he is very good.”
Yet Haze Motes’s spiritual agon was not as legible to the first line of critics, the guardians of public taste, as Holden Caulfield’s more general teenage angst. “I can tell you that from a publishing point of view Wise Blood was a flop,” said Robert Giroux. “It got three or four bad reviews right off. Then a good one came that began to see something. But I was shocked at the stupidity of these, the lack of perception, or even the lack of having an open mind. The review in the New York Times Book Review was by a Southern writer. He was embarrassed later, too late. Another reviewer said that it’s a work of insanity, the writer is insane.” Giroux succinctly wrote, “I was disappointed by the reviews more than she was; they all recognized her power but missed her point.”
A prepublication notice, in Library Journal, labeled Wise Blood “odd,” and set the sharp tone of the more negative reviews: “Written by another of that galaxy of rising young writers who deal with the South, this one was penned at deep-freeze temperatures.” The all-important Sunday Times review, “Unending Vengeance,” by William Goyen, introduced O’Connor as “a writer of power,” but slighted her style as “tight to choking” and her novel as “an indefensible blow delivered in the dark.” An anonymous review in Time accused her of being “arty,” using Gordon’s blurb as ammo: “All too often it reads as if Kafka had been set to writing continuity for L’il Abner.” The unnamed New Yorker critic wondered “if the struggle to get from one sentence to the next is worth while.” After reading Oliver LaFarge in The Saturday Review — “sheer monotony” — Flannery wrote to Giroux, “I am steeling myself for even more dreadful reviews.”
Yet the novel eventually found some critical acceptance as more thoughtful notices began to appear. The first break in all the tough talk was a review by Sylvia Stallings, “Young Writer with a Bizarre Tale to Tell,” in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review: “Flannery O’Connor, in her first novel, has taken on the difficult subject of religious mania, and succeeds in telling a tale at once delicate and grotesque.” Newsweek gave her celebrity treatment by running a profile, including a photograph of her “ancestral mansion”: “Flannery O’Connor is perhaps the most naturally gifted of the youngest generation of American novelists, and her first book, ‘Wise Blood,’ has an imaginative intensity rare in any fiction these days.” John W. Simons, in Commonweal, touted Wise Blood as “a remarkably accomplished, remarkably precocious beginning.”
Like many a young author, Flannery soon discovered that no critic could cause as much anxiety, or be as incisive, as relatives and friends. Before a single review had appeared, she knew that she had a scandal on her hands in Savannah and Milledgeville. Her mother’s reactions had always been muted, perhaps from sheer incomprehension. When the second d
raft was completed, she told the Fitzgeralds, “My mother said she wanted to read it again so she went off with it and I found her a half hour later on page 9 and sound asleep.” Cousin Katie Semmes was far more alert to the prospect of her precocious niece in print. She ordered advance copies to be mailed to her inner circle, the priests of Savannah, including Monsignor James T. McNamara, who joked around town that he genuflected whenever passing Mrs. Semmes’s home, as she was a major donor.
Trepidation about Cousin Katie’s reaction was palpable for weeks at Andalusia. If Regina missed some of the subtlety of the work, or its Kafkaesque technique, she knew well that men’s room graffiti and a teenage nymphomaniac in black stockings — a Chicago Sun critic would later praise O’Connor for having anticipated Lolita, in Sabbath Lily, five or six years before Nabokov — were far more incendiary than the material in Mary Flannery’s previous scandal, “My Relitives.” “My current literary assignment (from Regina) is to write an introduction for Cousin Katie ‘so she won’t be shocked,’ to be pasted on the inside of her book,” she explained to the Fitzgeralds, when the first hardback copies arrived. “This piece has to be in the tone of the Sacred Heart Messenger and carry the burden of contemporary critical thought. I keep putting it off.”
The pasted disclaimer did not convince her overly high-minded cousin. Savannahians still gossip that “Mrs. Semmes went to bed for a week after that incident,” while penning notes of apology to all the priests who received copies. “Wherever did she learn such words?” Cousin Katie cried. In Milledgeville, Aunt Mary Cline was equally horrified, and theatrical. “I can see her right now, after that book came out,” recalls a neighbor, Charlotte Conn Ferris, “drawing herself up, raising her head, crossing her arms, and saying, ‘I don’t know where Mary Flannery met those people she wrote about, but it was certainly not in my house.’” One relative remarked, “I wish you could have found some other way to portray your talents.” Yet Flannery weathered the family drama. As she encouraged John Lynch, a writer and teacher at Notre Dame, four years later: “I also had an 83-year-old cousin who was fond of me and I was convinced that my novel was going to give her a stroke and that I was going to be pursued through life by the Furies. After she read it, I waited for a letter announcing her decline but all I got was a curt note saying, ‘I do not like your book.’ She is now 88.”
Reaction among the ladies who lunch in Milledgeville was just as disapproving. Upon reading the description of Mrs. Watts, lounging in her place of business — “the friendliest bed in town” — Flannery’s first college writing instructor, Katherine Scott, threw the novel across the room. In an interview with a journalist, decades later, Miss Scott said, “When I read her first novel I thought to myself that character who dies in the last chapter could have done the world a great favor by dying in the first chapter instead.” Some townspeople later claimed that they circulated Wise Blood among themselves in brown paper bags, and one upright citizen boasted that she burned her copy in the backyard. “I read Wise Blood when I was ten,” says Mary More Jones, a Sanford House waitress during her college years. “I was attracted because it was hidden in Mother’s and Daddy’s closet.”
Even a few of the men of Milledgeville held opinions. A doctor working at Milledgeville State Hospital read the novel, and remarked, “I enjoyed it, but I know one thing. She don’t know a damn thing about a whore house.” Flannery later admitted to a priest friend that she indeed leaned on conjecture in the brothel episode. And Reynolds Allen, who had once defeated her in the high school essay contest, was attempting to write mystery stories and found that Flannery (they had resumed their friendship when she returned to town) was adept at “spotting inconsistencies in character very quickly.” But she disapproved of some of the British writers he appreciated — Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley — and urged him to read Faulkner. When Wise Blood appeared, he recalled, “I was pleasantly surprised. It was wittier than I would have guessed.”
All of these social tensions were politely ignored when the time came for a public response to the appearance of Mary Flannery’s novel. The headline in the college newspaper was “Flannery O’Connor Wows Critics with New Book”; in the Union-Recorder, “Top Literary Critics in Nation Are High in Praise of ‘Wise Blood.’” Brought up with the rubric “pretty is as pretty does,” many of the same women who expressed distaste were the most active in arranging lovely teas and luncheons for the book’s celebration. Flannery soon found herself preferring the bad reviews to this round of local book parties, which she forbade on all subsequent publications. As she complained to Robie Macauley, whose first novel, The Disguises of Love, would soon be published, “I hope you won’t have as much trouble about keeping people from having parties for you as I am having. Around here if you publish the number of whiskers on the local pigs, everybody has to give you a tea.”
On Thursday morning, May 15, from ten o’clock until noon, a kickoff “Autograph Party” was held for “Miss O’Connor” at the Beeson Reading Room at the college library. The room was decorated with bouquets of cut flowers, and several of Flannery’s recent oil paintings hung on the walls. Nearly three hundred guests, including Katie Semmes, driving up from Savannah, and Flannery’s college nemesis Mary Boyd, were received by Regina O’Connor and Mary Cline. Visibly mended from her bout of illness, the prettily made-up author wore a sleeveless silk dress, pinned with a large corsage. She signed copies, seated in a striped chair at a wooden table. “Cocktails were not served but I lived through it anyway and remember signing a book for you sometime during it,” she wrote Betty Boyd. In a thank-you note, she praised the library staff for having been “most brave.”
“I have rarely enjoyed a situation more,” remembered Alumnae Journal editor Margaret Meaders.
For situation it was, first of all, and function only — and barely — second. Having read her book, I understood perfectly the quandary that had befallen so many of the dressed-up visitors. . . . What to do? Everybody liked the child. Everybody was glad that she’d got something published, but one did wish that it had been something ladylike. What to say to her? What to do with your book once you bought it and she had signed it. If you read it, did you say so? If you owned it, did you put it out to be seen — or slip it behind Mama’s copy of The Poems of Father Ryan? . . . From time to time that morning I saw what I’m sure was the quick light of laughter in Flannery’s eyes.
A companion event, a week later, was a luncheon in honor of the book’s publication, held on May 22 at Sanford House, and hosted by Mrs. Nelle Womack Hines — unkindly characterized by Flannery to the Fitzgeralds as “an old dame that I abide with gritted teeth.” Seated around a white-covered table, decorated with sprays of pine and two silver candelabra with green tapers, members of the Milledgeville Book Club were asked to tell what childhood book had impressed them most. “I have been told that everyone tried hard to come up with an impressive choice,” wrote one Milledgeville resident, Mary Barbara Tate, “and the statements were, as Huck said of those in Pilgrim’s Progress, ‘interesting but tough.’” When her turn came, Flannery punctured the pretension by drawling flatly, “The Sears-Roebuck Catalog.” Departing guests were then presented with autographed copies of Hines’s Treasure Album of Milledgeville.
Among her more sophisticated, now epistolary, friends, reactions were just as conflicted. Robert Lowell remained one of the most ardent and committed supporters of the novel. Not yet having seen the final, published version, as he was living in Amsterdam, he did read the “Enoch and the Gorilla” excerpt, sold as second serial rights by Harcourt, in New World Writing, and he dashed off an enthusiastic response in early June: “When I was through reading I could have hugged the gorilla. The whole incident is rather epically dismal.” He suggested for her next book the story of Lizzie Borden, accused of murdering her father and stepmother in 1892. Lowell later informed Flannery, from Manhattan, that the Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv “now goes about enraging New York literati by telling them they should write a Wis
e Blood.”
Andrew Lytle was not as pleased, though he did not relay his disapproval directly to his former student. Having encouraged her during an early, fecund stage of the novel, Lytle did not appreciate the severe religious turn the novel had taken at Yaddo and in Connecticut; he rightly suspected theology in the retooling of the main character into what O’Connor herself later called “a Protestant saint, written from the point of view of a Catholic.” When the Shenandoah editor Thomas Carter asked Lytle to review Wise Blood, he declined, explaining, “I think she left out too much circumstance of sardonic humor. . . . There is a move towards the Old Church on the part of some of my friends, and I’m afraid an extraneous zeal is confusing their artistry.” Mary McCarthy’s husband, Bowden Broadwater, remained unmoved, saying, “I still can’t read Flannel Mouth.”
To try to get out a more sympathetic message about the book, Giroux began to solicit comments that might be useful in ads. He wrote especially to the English Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh, whose satiric Loved One had been cited in the Wise Blood flap copy. Waugh wrote back,
Thank you for sending me WISE BLOOD, which I read with interest. You want a favorable opinion to quote. The best I can say is: “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” End quote. It isn’t the kind of book I like much, but it is good of its kind. It is lively and more imaginative than most modern books. Why are so many characters in recent American fiction sub-human? Kindest regards, E.W.
When Giroux forwarded the pulled quote, Regina was “vastly insulted.” Putting the emphasis on if and lady, she asked, of the author she called “Evalin Wow”: “Does he suppose you’re not a lady? . . . WHO is he?”