Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  Not merely a personal peculiarity, regularity was a civic virtue, too. Flannery was surrounded by family, and friends, who arranged their lives like clockwork. Regina was a stickler, and Flannery could chafe at her rules and regulations, but as long as her own writing time and space were kept sacred (of her writing desk, she said to a friend, “Nobody lays a hand on that, boy”) she could accept other impositions. “She didn’t want to come back to Georgia, she had left it,” observed her cousin Margaret, the oldest of the Florencourt sisters. “But she and Regina had formed some kind of agreement that Regina would not interfere with Flannery’s work. I credit them with that détente, if you will, under which they would live. I think that it obviously worked out because each of them was strong, and they knew how it was going to be, and accepted it.”

  Appearing most Friday afternoons on his way to the Cline Mansion — following work at King Hardware Company in Atlanta, then driving back to Bell House at the same hour each Sunday evening after supper — was Uncle Louis, basically a third member of the household. “My round uncle,” as Flannery described the co-owner of Andalusia, paid special attention to planting fig trees all over the property, as he had an appetite for the sweet fruit. One of his favorites, planted near the back door, was evoked in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”: “A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with the chickens.” Like Regina, who disliked Flannery’s peacocks for eating her Lady Bankshire and Herbert Hoover roses, Louis balked when he discovered their taste for figs. “Get that scoundrel out of that fig bush!” he would roar, rising out of his chair at the sound of a breaking limb.

  Just as regular participants in the life of Andalusia, in the category of “adopted” kin, were Misses White and Thompson. By 1953, the two women were fixed in their schedule of closing Sanford House on Wednesdays and driving out to Andalusia on Tuesday night, taking one of the upstairs bedrooms and spending the next day. “That was our weekend,” says Mary Jo Thompson. They would join the O’Connors for meals and afternoon car rides. “Flannery was the only person I know who liked sharp cheese on her oatmeal,” recalls Mary Jo. While Mary Jo never had literary talks with Flannery, they would chat while washing the dishes (Flannery found the warm water helpful for her aching joints). One of Flannery’s favorite topics was Mrs. Weber, a boarder at the Cline Mansion, who likewise helped to clean up after dinner. “Flannery said Mrs. Weber carried on a two-way conversation the entire time with her deceased husband,” remembers Thompson.

  The models for many of O’Connor’s observations of the lives of the black tenant farmers — as surely as the Stevens family inspired early vignettes of white sharecroppers — were a few longtime African American workers at Andalusia, living in outlying shacks, and eventually in the nearby, darkly weathered clapboard cottage. Jack, “the colored milker,” as Flannery called him, worked with Mr. Stevens in the dairy; Louise, his wife, was a domestic, who cooked and cleaned, “blundering around,” as she said; Willie “Shot” Manson, the youngest, performed hard farm labor, such as plowing fields. Living by himself in a shanty was Henry, “around here . . . a kind of institution,” as Flannery described the yardman, in his eighties, who once fertilized her mother’s flower bulbs with the calves’ worm medicine. “Wormless they did not come up,” she gleefully reported.

  Yet Flannery was adept at shutting herself away during her “set time,” between nine and noon, when she applied herself to her writing. Averaging three pages a day, she told a reporter from the Atlanta newspaper, “But I may tear it all to pieces the next day.” While modest, her desk began to take on the character of a folk sculpture constructed of random parts, utilitarian to her eyes alone. “I have a large ugly brown desk, one of those that the typewriter sits in a depression in the middle of and on either side are drawers,” she wrote, producing a mental snapshot of the assemblage for a friend. “In front I have a mahogany orange crate with the bottom knocked out and a cartridge shell box that I have sat up there to lend height and hold papers and whatnot and all my paraphernalia is around this vital center and a little rooting produces it. Besides which, I always seize on busy-work.”

  During the fall of 1952, and through the spring of 1953, in this “rat’s nest of old papers, clippings, torn manuscripts, ancient quarterlies,” O’Connor began work on a second novel, as well as several short stories that established her control of the genre and were told in an inimitable voice, sliding in and out of the colloquial heads of her characters. Each of these stories concerned death, the powerful theme that had been dealt her, especially since the revelation of her summer visit with the Fitzgeralds. Having described herself as a girl as “a Peter Rabbit man,” menace was always her great effect. But in “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead,” begun as the first chapter of her new novel, the macabre slapstick of the teenage Francis Marion Tarwater (his last name swiped from Tom T. Shiftlet’s hometown) — tempted to shirk burying his great-uncle, but haunted by the old man’s corpse still propped at the breakfast table — had the depth of what Henry James called “felt life.” This quality was missing from the ghoulish tales of stabbings and strangling in O’Connor’s juvenilia.

  In “The River,” finished in November 1952 and full of images of “speckled” skeletons, the preschooler Harry undergoes a drowning-baptism. The next day he tragically finds his way back to the river in the Georgia clay country, red-orange after a rain, where he was baptized by the Reverend Bevel Summers while on an outing with his sitter, Mrs. Connin. As the little boy gives himself over to the undertow of death, and possibly salvation, his parents are nursing hangovers in their city apartment — a satiric cartoon of bohemianism, cluttered with overflowing ashtrays and abstract paintings. To write Mrs. Connin’s adoring attitude toward their hymn-singing minister — “He’s no ordinary preacher” — O’Connor borrowed freely from Mrs. Stevens, who had recently told her of a dramatic sermon by her own preacher, also a fine singer: “Evy eye is on him. . . . Not a breath stirs.”

  Conceiving “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” she connected the dots of a few articles that had mesmerized, or tickled, her: the Atlanta Constitution reported on a petty bank robber with the alias “The Misfit”; she clipped a photograph of a tartly made-up little girl, in a tutu, incongruously mimicking Bessie Smith’s rendition of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” at a talent contest. Yet the laughter in her light tale of a fifties’ suburban Atlanta family waylaid on a road trip is silenced by the gunshots of her own “Misfit,” a prophet of existentialist nihilism, far more harrowing than Haze Motes. The scene of the family’s murder is a dark wood, as foreboding as Hawthorne’s in “Young Goodman Brown,” which is faintly echoed in the title as well. “It was no coincidence that Flannery wrote that story within months of, metaphorically, having a gun aimed at her,” said Sally Fitzgerald, of her reaction when Flannery mailed her a draft in the spring of 1953.

  Flannery sent the stories, as well, to her agent and her publisher. Hired away from Partisan Review by Harcourt Brace’s Robert Giroux, his copy editor and first reader Catharine Carver was excited about O’Connor’s writing. “Catie would read them first and say, ‘Bob, wait till you see this one, a new story has come in,’” Giroux recalled. “This happened, every time, over a series of months. . . . I remember one day Catharine brought me one. I didn’t read it in the office. I had a batch of stuff, and I took it home that night and read ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’ I thought, This is one of the greatest short stories ever written in the United States. It’s equal to Hemingway, or Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener.’ And it absolutely put her on the map.” In his Christmas card of 1953, Lowell included praise of her recent works: “Both the baptizing and the homicidal lunatic are fearfully good.”

  Writing with such intensity, with “a fresh mind” during the mornings, she might well have been entirely spent by afternoon. This normal diastole and systole was accentuated in her case by the disease, generally resulting in fatigue after two or three useful h
ours a day. Afternoons, for Flannery, were a much slower time, marked by flu-like symptoms and overcast by some mental fog. She passed them while “receiving on the front porch”: “I work in the mornings but I am at home every afternoon after 3:30,” was a typical invitation. “One of the few signs of Flannery’s lupus was that you could see her tiring by late afternoon,” remembers Louise Abbot, a friend from nearby Louisville. “But when her eyes were sparkling, those dark blue and quite extraordinarily beautiful eyes, and she was trying to repress her laughter, I knew a story was coming.”

  During these waning hours, Flannery also pursued her hobbies of painting and raising birds, looking and listening. She was taking classes in town from Frank Stanley Herring, the post office muralist, and she hung on the walls of the farmhouse her simple studies of zinnias in bowls, angular cows under bare trees, a worker’s shack in winter, and a rooster’s angry head. “None of my paintings go over very big in this house although mamma puts them up and is loth to take them down again,” she wrote the Fitzgeralds. She collected an entire bestiary of “show birds”: pens of pheasants and quail, a flock of turkeys, Canada geese, Muscovy ducks, Japanese silky bantams, and Polish crested bantams. Keeping her ears cocked for responses to her prized peacock, she got much mileage from a repairman who remarked, after the bird unfurled its magnificent tail, “Never saw such long ugly legs. . . . I bet that rascal could outrun a bus.”

  Sundown and bedtime were nearly synonymous for Flannery. “I go to bed at nine and am always glad to get there,” she told a friend. Occasionally she recited Compline, the last office of the day, from her Breviary, set between a Sunday missal and her Bible on a low bedside table. More reliably, her habitual nighttime reading was the lofty, lucent prose of Thomas Aquinas. For just as significant as ordering peacocks as a signal of her intention to settle, was her obtaining her own copy of the seven-hundred-page Modern Library selection Introduction to Saint Thomas Aquinas, which she signed and dated “1953”: “I read it for about twenty minutes every night before I go to bed. If my mother were to come in during this process and say, ‘Turn off that light. It’s late,’ I with lifted finger and broad bland beatific expression, would reply, ‘On the contrary, I answer that the light, being external and limitless, cannot be turned off. Shut your eyes,’ or some such thing.” Even resting in bed, Flannery was replenishing her writing. “I read a lot of theology because it makes my writing bolder,” she once explained to a friend.

  Spending hours alone in her large front room, among the phantasms of drowning boys, garrulous Southern grandmas, and mean killer-prophets, all created within a span of six months, Flannery struggled to make sense of her life. When her father died, she had compared God’s grace to a bullet in the side. Faced with that same daunting grace, she developed a narrative to explain her situation. For this dedicated writer there was no surer sign of grace than writing a good story, and she had just written several. So when she broke the news of her lupus to Robert Lowell, in March 1953, she swore that “I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.” Spinning her own life as a parable of a prodigal daughter, forced home against her wishes and finding a consoling gift, she later encouraged the young Southern novelist Cecil Dawkins: “I stayed away from the time I was 20 until I was 25 with the notion that the life of my writing depended on my staying away. I would certainly have persisted in that delusion had I not got very ill and had to come home. The best of my writing has been done here.”

  ONE SPRING AFTERNOON in late April 1953, a striking-looking young man appeared at the front door. Tall and blond, described by Caroline Gordon as “a Dane with eyes like blue marbles,” Erik Langkjaer was a twenty-six-year-old college textbook salesman for Harcourt Brace, Flannery’s publisher. As his recently assigned territory was the entire South east of the Mississippi, he had been visiting with professors at Georgia State College for Women. Among them was Helen Greene, whose English history textbook was published by Harcourt. “After checking out his current offerings in that field, I asked him if he would like to meet one of his company’s published authors,” Greene has written. As she was his last appointment of the day, the history professor was pleased to take him “out to Andalusia to meet Mary Flannery and Miss Regina.”

  While Helen Greene remembered Erik’s response as an enthusiastic “Of course!” he felt, in truth, puzzled. “She was sure that Flannery would be interested in meeting me,” says Langkjaer, “and I must say I couldn’t imagine why, because I hadn’t read the novel, and I hadn’t even been told that she was living in Milledgeville, and why would anyone want to meet a perfect stranger on such a flimsy pretext. But the professor said that she doesn’t see too many people, living as she does with her mother. I went along with that idea. Some time in the afternoon, we rang the doorbell of Andalusia.” Helen Greene judged the introduction a success: “He and Mary Flannery liked each other a great deal, and, as I recall, she guided him on a tour of Baldwin County in his car. . . . He was happily surprised to find such interesting and attractive people in the area.”

  Sophisticated, funny, and widely read, Erik possessed a cosmopolitan background rarely encountered in east-central Georgia. The son of a Danish diplomat and lawyer and a Russian émigré mother, he had been born in Shanghai, where his father served as consul-general. After a difficult childhood in Copenhagen, marked by bitter divorce proceedings between his parents, he eventually moved to New York City with his mother. When he graduated, on scholarship, from Princeton in 1948, he was then guided by his grandmother’s cousin, Helene Iswolsky, a Catholic intellectual and activist, to study and teach at Fordham. As a religious skeptic with a Lutheran background, though, Erik did not see much of a future in a Catholic college. One of his Jesuit professors, William Lynch, a favorite theologian of Flannery’s, advised him to seek his fortune elsewhere. Feeling at loose ends, he turned to the publishing industry.

  Flannery thought enough of his visit to spill lots of its details into a letter to the Fitzgeralds, jumping off from a conversation she and Erik had on this first meeting about Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, a social justice ministry to the poor, forsaken, hungry, and homeless, begun as a hospitality house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan:

  I never heard of Conversations at Newburgh (sp?), but there was a man by here the other day who was a textbook salesman from Harcourt, Brace who told me that was one of D Day’s farms. That man was from Denmark, not a Catholic but had some Russian aunt who was a Catholic and somebody or other with a magazine called Nightwatch or Watchguard or somesuch. Anyway he had studied philosophy at Fordham and taught German there and knew Fr. Lynch and was much interested in Dorothy Day.

  Flannery was challenged by her facsimile of a “gentleman caller,” who had a strong Danish-British accent that marked him as a definite outsider. Although they talked theology, he wasn’t Catholic. He was also highly opinionated, and far from shy in voicing his opinions; of Dorothy Day, “He couldn’t see he said why she fed endless lines of endless bums for whom there was no hope, she’d never see any results from that, said he. The only conclusion we came to about this was that Charity was not understandable.” Flannery camouflaged her interest in the young man to the Fitzgeralds with the throwaway remark “Strange people turn up.” Yet she soon ordered a subscription to the Catholic Worker, and back issues of the Third Hour, the journal edited by Langkjaer’s Russian relative Helene Iswolsky, a regular contributor to Dorothy Day’s newspaper.

  They discussed more on this first visit than Day’s social activism, or the ecumenical mission of his “aunt” in reuniting the Russian Orthodox Church with Rome. Erik was quite open about his life situation, “that I had come to the U.S., that I was now traveling somewhat rootlessly in the South, and that I had all these religious concerns and problems.” Flannery was tickled by a traveling salesman carrying “The Bible,” a joke term in publishing for his standard loose-leaf binder of promotional materials and tables. “It amused her very much that something that was not a bibl
e should have been called a bible,” says Langkjaer. And she responded with tenderness to his rootless search. Writing to Erik two years later, Flannery recalled a first rush of empathy with his homelessness: “You wonder how anybody can be happy in his home as long as there is one person without one. I never thought of this so much until I began to know you and your situation and I will never quite have a home again on acct. of it.”

  Because Erik shared some troubling personal information fairly quickly — childhood in occupied Denmark during the war years, his father’s subsequent death — Flannery was unusually forthcoming, too. She spoke of her lupus, and of her own father’s death, two of her most private topics. The need to discuss her disease, though, was fairly obvious; she was, as she told the Fitzgeralds, in January, “practically bald-headed on top,” with “a watermelon face.” Langkjaer remembered his first impression of her as “a little bloated” from the steroid medicine, with slack muscle tone. “Flannery told me quite openly about her illness,” recalls Langkjaer. “I was told about her father’s death and the unexpected fact of the disease being hereditary, as she had not expected from what the doctors had told them. But she seemed quite composed about this.”

  That first afternoon, Mrs. O’Connor served Erik and Flannery tea and then withdrew to take care of various business matters. Erik immediately picked up on the wide gap in sensibility between Flannery and her mother. Not “the saint everyone thinks she was, she was rather rebellious,” says Langkjaer of the young woman who struck him as still far from reconciled to her fate. “I did sense that Flannery had a tense relationship with her mother. I got the impression that she was quite dependent on her mother now that she had come down with this disease, but that she was not an easy person for Flannery to talk to. I mean they were really not of one mind, to put it mildly. It wasn’t that I experienced any altercations between them, but this was something that Flannery told me.”