Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  Open season on Wise Blood ended by early summer, culminating with a mostly negative review in the New Republic from Isaac Rosenfeld. His extreme interpretation was that O’Connor “writes of an insane world peopled by monsters and submen, Motes the first among them. . . . Motes is plain crazy. . . . How then can one take his predicament seriously?” He found the characters revealed “in a pallid light reflected mainly, I should say, from Faulkner and Carson McCullers.” As O’Connor reported on the review with humor, seemingly able to rise to any challenge, “He found it completely bogus, at length.” Yet even Rosenfeld allowed that the author exhibited “a variety of sensibility out of which the kind of fiction that matters can be made.” As her friend and champion Robert Fitzgerald put the best face on three months of critical dissonance: “But Rosenfeld and everyone else knew that a strong new writer was at large.”

  IN EARLY JUNE, Flannery finally realized her wish to return to the Fitzgeralds’ Connecticut home, a year and a half later than anticipated. Almost immediately upon her arrival, Robert Fitzgerald needed to depart for six weeks of teaching at the Indiana School of Letters. They now had four children all under four years of age, and he was frantically working wherever he could to support his rapidly multiplying family. But he was present when Flannery arrived, “looking ravaged but pretty, with short soft new curls” and having smuggled three baby ducks on the plane from Georgia, to delight the children. And he remembered joining in the first few meals of cress and herbs that Sally prepared, as their guest was still on a restricted, salt-free diet.

  Except for a day trip to New York for lunch with Caroline Gordon, Flannery tried her best to settle back into her former existence in her garret studio over the garage. But life did not cooperate, and the summer proved much more difficult than the bucolic season, two years earlier, when their greatest nuisance had been swarms of flies. The stone house on the remote, wooded ridge was fuller, with the children growing in size and in their ability to cause trouble. A leader in this trend, three-year-old Benedict, as Flannery reported to Gordon, “climbed in the car, drove it twelve feet over a chair and into a pile of rocks, climbed out the window, looking exactly like Charles Lindburg, and received a whipping from me (Sally was in bed sick) as if it were a great honor.” Flannery remained a proponent of such old-fashioned “cutting a switch” in child rearing.

  Two other additions to the household added to an atmosphere of unruliness, emphasized by the absence of the patriarch subtly depended on by both Flannery and Sally. To help in the care of their clan of small children, the Fitzgeralds had brought over from Yugoslavia Maria Ivancic, an old shepherdess. The Roman Catholic Church was active at the time in putting such “displaced persons,” or “DPs,” whose lives had been disrupted by World War II, in American homes as immigrant workers; Mrs. O’Connor had been trying to secure just such a mutually beneficial arrangement for Andalusia. Yet, as Robert Fitzgerald explained, the old woman from Gorizia, on the border of northern Italy, “after being helpful for a year, had learned from Croatian acquaintances of the comparative delights of life in Jersey City, and had begun to turn nasty.”

  A second unlikely guest, to whom Flannery claimed Maria was “allergic . . . on first sight,” was Mary Loretta Washington, a twelve-year-old African American “slum child” from New York City, charitably invited by Sally Fitzgerald for a country holiday through the Fresh Air Fund. Her two-week stay coincided with the second half of the visit of Flannery, who snitched in a letter to Robert Fitzgerald that Loretta “had to stay in the room with Sally and she was full of wise sass and argument. . . . Loretta would perhaps have been controllable if there had been a Federal Marshall in the house, though I have my doubts.” Such unsympathetic remarks caught Sally up short, and she dismissed them to her husband as “pure Georgia rhetoric,” claiming that Loretta had been “too shy during her visit to do anything but stand around caressing the blond heads of our young.”

  While their time together was chaotic, Sally did use the occasion to share an important truth with Flannery, after uneasily holding back. A few weeks into the visit, they drove to Ridgefield to do household errands. On the way back, on a lovely summer’s afternoon, she glanced over at her passenger, wondering how she could disturb such peace; but she had made up her mind, following much inner struggle, that Flannery should finally know the true nature of her illness. At that instant, Flannery happened to mention her arthritis. “Flannery, you don’t have arthritis,” Sally said quickly. “You have lupus.” Reacting to the sudden revelation, Flannery slowly moved her arm from the car door down into her lap, her hand visibly trembling. Sally felt her own knee shaking against the clutch, too, as she continued driving along Seventy Acre Road.

  “Well, that’s not good news,” Flannery said, after a few silent, charged moments. “But I can’t thank you enough for telling me. . . . I thought I had lupus, and I thought I was going crazy. I’d a lot rather be sick than crazy.” Reassured that her friend was not going to fall to pieces, Sally pulled off the hilly road, and up the long driveway. They then walked into the kitchen, where Flannery dutifully drank one of her twelve daily glasses of water, on doctor’s orders, as the sounds of the voices of the children playing in the yard, watched by Maria Ivancic, bounced through the open windows. “There’s not much to say about it,” she went on. “But don’t ever tell Regina you told me, because if you do she will never tell you anything else. I might want to know something else sometime.”

  Sally was only too happy to agree, relieved that she would not need to confess to Mrs. O’Connor. Their intimate conversation was broken, though, as a baby began to wail. “I have to go,” Sally apologized tentatively, unsure about leaving her alone. “Well, I think I’ll go take a little rest,” Flannery responded. Before walking out the kitchen door to the inner staircase, she turned back once; using the polite Southern expression, she added, “I’m obliged to you.”

  “This was devastating knowledge,” Sally Fitzgerald later recalled. “That she was going to have to live with uncertainty, that she would not be autonomous and independent. I didn’t minimize what she would have to go through up in her room over the garage when she left that afternoon after I had told her. But I never really regretted it. I knew it was what Flannery wanted. The atmosphere was cleared.”

  Flannery had initially been planning an open-ended stay with the Fitzgeralds, over Regina’s objection, “You always overdo!” But even her six-week visit to Connecticut was cut short a week by a string of unforeseen problems. Having never before encountered a black person, the Slavic nanny, increasingly upset by the presence of Loretta, began scowling and muttering foul phrases in Slovenian. After a protracted spell of such irrational tantrums, Sally, pregnant with a fifth child, became ill and took to her bedroom, threatened with a miscarriage. And Flannery contracted a virus. But rather than panic at her own momentous news, or the mounting illnesses in the house — Benedict soon came down with smallpox, too — she went about efficiently arranging for Sally’s care while scheduling her own return to Georgia.

  Flannery cleverly recruited a neighbor, Elsie Hill, described by Sally as a “strong-minded Lucy Stoner,” because of her early feminist leanings and strong leadership style, to watch over the situation until Robert Fitzgerald returned. She then brought Loretta along with her on the train to New York City, plying her with candy and a dollar bribe for remaining quiet, until handing her over at the gate to her mother. As she reported on the exchange to Sally Fitzgerald, “She was a very nice-looking pleasant woman and said that she had been very worried that Loretta might have misbehaved. I assured her this wasn’t the case. A noble lie, I thought.” Though her reunion with the Fitzgeralds had been the epitome of a cherished plan run amok, she was sincere when she added her thanks to Robert: “It was a great boon to me to be able to spend a month in Connecticut.”

  From New York City, Flannery flew to Atlanta, where Regina had arranged an immediate appointment with Dr. Merrill, whose offices were located in an old home downtown at
35 Fourth Street, with a lab and X-ray machine on the second floor. The doctor concluded that the lupus had been reactivated by the viral infection, accompanied by an onset of high fevers; he ordered two blood transfusions, and raised her ACTH dosage from 0.25 cc to 1 cc a day. Yet she was able to find good news in the cost of the medicine, not covered by insurance, which she described as “a kind of Guggenheim. The ACTH has been reduced from 19.50 to 7.50.” She felt palpable relief, too, at having the nature of the disease finally out in the open. As she wrote Robert Fitzgerald, in Indiana, “I know now that it is lupus and am very glad to so know.” She even broached the matter with Regina, without implicating Sally as her informant — her mother taking personal pride in informing her that Dr. Merrill had diagnosed lupus before even seeing her, “over the phone.”

  Again forced back home by disease — an unmistakable echo of her return eighteen months earlier — Flannery clearly appraised the meaning of her difficult situation. She did not know whether she would be allotted the same three years of borrowed time as her father, following his diagnosis, or if indeed “the Scientist” possessed a miracle cure. She had her doubts. As Mr. Shiftlet speechifies in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”: “There’s one of these doctors in Atlanta that’s taken a knife and cut the human heart . . . and held it in his hand . . . and studied it like it was a day-old chicken, and lady . . . he don’t know more about it than you or me.” Yet she was certain that Connecticut was no longer to be her home, and so asked Sally Fitzgerald to please mail back her things: two suitcases, coat, camera, a copy of Art and Scholasticism, and her Bible.

  If her old life could fit into a couple of trunks, shipped, as old man Tanner’s body would be transported in a rickety casket from up north in her story “Judgment Day,” Flannery was simultaneously looking forward to another crate arriving by rail from the opposite direction: Eustis, Florida. This crate was charged with a contrary significance, as a beginning rather than a closure. After spending six weeks in bed, following her “flare,” but avoiding Emory Hospital — “a gret place to avoid” — Flannery had been reading through the Florida Market Bulletin, when she came across a listing for three-year-old “peafowl,” at sixty-five dollars a pair. Never having seen or heard a peacock, she unhesitatingly circled the ad, seized, as if by instinct, and passed it to her mother. “I’m going to order me those,” she said. “Don’t those things eat flowers?” Regina asked. “They’ll eat Startena like the rest of them,” Flannery answered with fake certitude.

  On a mild day in October, the shipment finally arrived via Railway Express. Driving up to the station, Regina and Flannery saw that the wooden crate had already been unloaded onto the platform. As O’Connor later remembered, “From one end of it protruded a long royal-blue neck and crested head. A white line above and below each eye gave the investigating head an expression of alert composure.” Flannery jumped out of the car and bounded forward as the bird quickly withdrew its head at her approach. Transporting the box back to Andalusia, mother and daughter, with help, undid the lid, unpacking a peacock, a hen, and four seven-week-old “peabiddies.” Knowing the bird so far only by its literary reputation, as the pet of Hera, the wife of Zeus, Flannery would have to wait for the display of its full complement of tail feathers — “a map of the universe” — shed in late summer, and not fully regained until Christmas.

  “As soon as the birds were out of the crate, I sat down and began to look at them,” O’Connor remembered nine years later, in her essay “The King of the Birds.”

  I have been looking at them ever since, from one station or another, and always with the same awe as on that first occasion; though I have always, I feel, been able to keep a balanced view and an impartial attitude. The peacock I had bought had nothing whatsoever in the way of a tail, but he carried himself as if he not only had a train behind him but a retinue to attend it. On that first occasion, my problem was so greatly what to look at first that my gaze moved constantly from the cock to the hen to the four young peachickens, while they, except that they gave me as wide a berth as possible, did nothing to indicate they knew I was in the pen. . . . When I first uncrated these birds, in my frenzy I said, “I want so many of them that every time I go out the door, I’ll run into one.”

  By the time of the arrival of these first peacocks — a sure sign of her intention to settle at home, in earnest — Flannery was already finding new inspiration for her fiction, as well, in the vagaries of small-town life. She had made a first sketchy attempt at rendering down-home material in her savage satire “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” based on the Milledgeville Union-Recorder article about a Confederate general’s appearance at the graduation of his much younger wife. In O’Connor’s tall tale, General Tennessee Flintrock Sash, his name a send-up of Stonewall Jackson, dies of a stroke, following his granddaughter’s graduation. His corpse is then wheeled to a Coca-Cola machine by a clueless Boy Scout — the local paper having likewise been running ads for the Georgia-based soft drink featuring the Scouts. While the conceit of a corpse treated as if it were still alive owed its weirdness to Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” O’Connor sidestepped the master’s tone and language, in what she disparagingly called “my one-cylander syntax.”

  This same vernacular prose and comic clarity helped her agent to place “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” in August, with Alice Morris, the fiction editor at Harper’s Bazaar, a glossy women’s magazine, which indicated the popular appeal that Flannery’s high art potentially possessed. When the news reached Lowell, he wrote her, “Someone said you had something in Harper’s Bazaar, but I can’t believe it.” She wrote back, of the story not published until the next September, “I did have one in Harper’s Bazaar about a Confederate General who was a hundred and four years old, but nobody sees things in those magazines except the ladies that go to the beauty parlors.” Actually, under Editor in Chief Carmel Snow, whose motto was “well-dressed women with well-dressed minds,” the magazine was including much important fiction by Capote, McCullers, Cheever, Christopher Isherwood, and Katherine Anne Porter, among all its illustrations of haute couture.

  The story that truly showed O’Connor finding her most resonant subject matter, though, was the aptly named “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” — its title suggested by Robert Fitzgerald, based on road signs he had seen while driving through the South, in place of her first two choices: “Personal Interest” and “The World Is Almost Rotten.” For this trickster’s tale, which she sent to her agent in October, Flannery used names that could be found in the local phone book — H. T. Shiftlet lived on Route 1; Lucynell Smith had attended her Wise Blood book party. But as she began to describe the widow Lucynell Crater, and her nearly thirty-year-old mute daughter, also Lucynell Crater, visited by the one-armed handyman, Tom T. Shiftlet, she found herself writing, too, about the grounds of Andalusia, as reflected in the purposely distorting mirror of her imagination: “The old woman and her daughter were sitting on their porch when Mr. Shiftlet came up their road for the first time. The old woman slid to the edge of her chair and leaned forward, shading her eyes from the piercing sunset with her hand. The daughter could not see far in front of her and continued to play with her fingers.”

  Flannery received much praise for the subtle recalibration in her style. Described by Robert Fitzgerald as “a triumph over Erskine Caldwell,” this breakout story, marking her first treatment of a mother-daughter relationship, and introducing a “gentleman caller,” used Tobacco Road–type poor-white characters without being clichéd, and to fierce moral ends. By December, Flannery learned that she was the recipient of a two-thousand-dollar Kenyon Review fiction fellowship, having been invited to apply by its editor, John Crowe Ransom. Her award was followed by publication, in the spring 1953 issue, of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” which went on to win the second prize in the 1954 O. Henry Award. But Flannery had conveyed that something significant was stirring as soon as she wrote the opening description of the daughter, resembling, as o
nly she knew, her recently delivered bird: “She had long pink-gold hair and eyes as blue as a peacock’s neck.”

  Chapter Seven

  The “Bible” Salesman

  Like all good farm folk, we get up in the morning as soon as the first chicken cackles,” Flannery wrote to her friends Louise and Tom Gossett in 1961. But she could just as easily have written that report during her first few months on the farm, or any time since. Certainly by early 1953 Flannery had settled into a schedule and rhythm that remained unvaried for the rest of her life. The woman who came to believe that “routine is a condition of survival” guarded her daily regimen, with the help of her mother and a self-protective instinct, but also with contentment and joy. As she implied to the Gossetts, each day followed a pattern, beginning with her mother, up first, waiting with a thermos of coffee for the two of them to drink at the kitchen table while listening to the local weather report on the radio.

  This cycle of hours and days had a religious significance for Flannery, too. As Thomas Merton, a self-described “14th century man,” abandoned New York City for the life of prayer and farming of a contemplative monk in Kentucky, so Flannery, dubbing herself a “thirteenth century” Catholic at Yaddo and, at Andalusia, a “hermit novelist,” framed her new life in religion. Immediately on waking, she read the prayers for Prime, prescribed for six in the morning, from her 1949 edition of A Short Breviary. Following coffee, she and her mother then drove into town to attend mass at Sacred Heart, celebrated most weekday mornings at seven; the priest, for a decade, was the charming, bridge-playing Father John Toomey from Augusta. “Flannery sat in the fifth pew on the right side,” recalled one parishioner. On Sundays, Flannery pulled on her black wool tam-o’-shanter to get to the earliest seven-fifteen mass. As she wrote a friend, in 1953, “I like to go to early mass so I won’t have to dress up — combining the 7th Deadly Sin with the Sunday obligation.”