Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  Returning to Europe, within weeks, Langkjaer immersed himself in his new life. He registered for a six-week summer course for foreigners in Marburg, Germany, where he soon became infatuated with an attractive Finnish woman. He wrote Flannery letters about his reading of German authors, including Rilke and Mann, but much of his attention was taken up with this mild flirtation, which lasted only a short time. In the fall, he then decided to return to his native city of Copenhagen and to enroll in courses on Shakespeare, the English Romantic poets, and American writers after 1920. While at the University of Copenhagen, he met Mette Juhl, the daughter of a famous Danish stage and screen character actor. Bonded by a mutual plan of becoming high school teachers, the two began a serious love affair, which Erik did not reveal in any of his letters to Flannery.

  Flannery had no such change of scenery, and her letters to Erik, at his Copenhagen address, are among her most tender. In her first letter of June 13, she writes, longingly, in a closing line, of their car rides, with an implicit memory of their last kiss, “I haven’t seen any dirt roads since you left & I miss you.” Erik responded with a postcard of Billy Graham autographing a Bible during a revival meeting in a public square in Copenhagen. “Thank you for the post card,” she wrote back on July 18. “I put it in the Bible naturally.” When Erik shared his plans to stay through the fall to study American literature, though, Flannery, on October 17, sounded concerned: “You are wonderful and wildly original and I would probably think you even more so if I still didn’t hope you will come back from that awful place.” She ended with a sweet tug: “Did I tell you that I call my baby peachicken Brother in public and Erik in private?”

  Passing the fall anxiously anticipating word from Erik, Flannery resolutely continued her “researches into the ways of the vulgar.” While correspondence from Erik was disappointingly thin, the South continued to provide fulsome inspiration. Sometime during that fall of 1954 she heard, for the first time, the dissonant word pair “artificial nigger,” and instantly knew that here was a “rabbit,” as she once described the trigger for her high school cartoons. Her mother had casually passed on the phrase to her daughter, when she returned from a day of cow shopping. Having asked directions to the house of a cowman, Regina recounted, she had been told, “Well you go into this town and you can’t miss it ’cause it’s the only house in town with a artificial nigger in front of it.” “So I decided I would have to find a story to fit that,” O’Connor later told an audience at Vanderbilt University. “A little lower level than starting with the theme.”

  Referring to the black-jockey hitching posts that Uncle Louis persisted in calling “nigger statuary,” this title phrase instantly got her in trouble. Wishing to publish O’Connor’s country-come-to-town misadventure of Mr. Head, a “Raphael, awakened by a blast of God’s light,” guiding his ten-year-old nephew, Nelson, through an Atlanta straight out of Dante’s Inferno, John Crowe Ransom worried about its racist ring. “I hate to insult the black folks’ sensibilities,” he wrote her. But O’Connor viewed the story’s diminutive plaster-of-Paris statue — provoking the healing of a rift between uncle and nephew — as a textbook Christ symbol, suggesting “the redemptive quality of the Negro’s suffering for us all.” Writing back to Ransom, who had once changed “nigger” to “Negro” when reading aloud her story in Workshop, she insisted that “the story as a whole is much more damaging to white folk’s sensibilities than to black.” Her jarring title stuck.

  Yet even after Ransom’s acceptance of the story, O’Connor remained dissatisfied and rewrote it twice over the fall. Sending the story to her trusted adviser Caroline Gordon, she confided that “Mr. Ransom took the Artificial Nigger for the Kenyon but I think without enthusiasm. He complained that it was very flat and had no beautiful sentences in it. I rewrote it but there still ain’t any beautiful sentences.” Gordon agreed, and told her that she needed, in Flannery’s words, “to gain some altitude and get a larger view.” Working and reworking the ending, she finally achieved a nearly Miltonic description of Mr. Head’s transformation as “the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it.” After the story’s publication in the Kenyon Review in the spring of 1955, she wrote a friend with some pride, of fulfilling her mentor’s wish, “In those last two paragraphs I have practically gone from the Garden of Eden to the Gates of Paradise.”

  Having worked on a first novel for seven years, and never feeling entirely satisfied with the result, Flannery had now written eight or nine new stories within two years, and mostly liked them all. She was especially pleased with “The Artificial Nigger,” which she described as “my favorite and probably the best thing I’ll ever write.” Encouraged by Robert Giroux, she began putting together a collection under the title of his favorite story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” with an October delivery date and tentative spring 1955 publication. By Christmas 1954, Flannery felt assured enough to write to Sally Fitzgerald of the forthcoming volume, “Without yr kind permission I have taken the liberty of dedicating (grand verb) it to you and Robert. This is because you all are my adopted kin and if I dedicated it to any of my blood kin they would think they had to go into hiding. Nine stories about original sin, with my compliments.”

  But soon after the beginning of the New Year, a tenth story about original sin combusted nearly spontaneously within the author, as no story ever had before. She wrote “Good Country People” “in about four days, the shortest I have written any thing in,” and with “less conscious technical control . . . than in any story I’ve ever written.” One morning Flannery simply began writing about her familiar pair, a divorced farm owner, Mrs. Hopewell, and busybody tenant, Mrs. Freeman. To her own surprise, “Before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg.” Even more startling was the appearance of Manley Pointer, the Bible salesman, who tricks Mrs. Hopewell’s thirty-two-year-old daughter, Joy (she prefers “Hulga”) out of her prosthetic leg in a low joke of a hayloft seduction. As O’Connor later revealed at a Southern Writers’ Conference, “I didn’t know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized that it was inevitable. This is a story that produces a shock for the reader, and I think one reason is that it produced a shock for the writer.”

  When Flannery sent this hastily written story to Caroline Gordon, her usually critical first reader was more enthusiastic than she had ever been. Mrs. Tate had a few quibbles about “the Om. Nar.” using phrases such as “kind of,” or some scenes that were weakly visualized, but mostly her letter consisted of unequivocal praise: “GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE is a master-piece. Allen and I are in complete accord on that. Can’t you get it into the volume of short stories?” If Flannery wrote her shocker with unusual ease, Caroline Gordon was likewise remarkably hands-off in her editing. Allen Tate was impressed enough to telegram Robert Giroux his conviction, which he also expressed in a letter to Flannery: “It is without exception the most terrible and powerful story of Maimed Souls I have ever read.” Giroux wired Tate back that the story would indeed be fit into the collection, and perhaps his praise could serve as a jacket blurb.

  Yet the genesis of the story was not entirely between Flannery and her literary friends, or even her subconscious. Developments in her relationship with Erik played a part in its creation, too, even if they were only dimly understood by her. By the beginning of 1955, Flannery knew that Erik was extending his leave of absence to remain in Europe. And “Good Country People” contains many coded references to him, most obviously in Manley’s job as a fake Bible salesman (his hollowed-out tome contains condoms, porn playing cards, and a flask of whiskey), his displaced origins, “not even from a place, just from near a place,” and his exit “over the green speckled lake.” Satirizing herself, Flannery was even sharper: limping Hulga suffers from a heart condition and is not expected to live past forty-five; a “lady Ph.D.,” she reads Heidegger. For the paragraph of Hulga’s ph
ilosophy book that gives her mother a chill, O’Connor copied lines from her own marked-up 1949 translation of Heidegger’s Existence and Being. Most poignantly, Hulga has never been kissed, and her response to Manley’s stolen kiss is far from indifferent: “The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenaline in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain.”

  Between the few letters from Erik and her story, a red flag from the imagination, Flannery might well have controlled herself. But she persisted. In a January 9 letter, written about the time she was percolating “Good Country People,” she nudged him: “Write me an unintelligible post card please so I will have an excuse to write you a letter. My mother don’t think it is proper for me to send mail when I don’t receive it.” When Erik wrote of his summer plans to pursue charitable works with Abbé Pierre, a radical Catholic social thinker dear to the Catholic Worker houses, she wittily answered him on the back of a fund-raising letter from Dorothy Day, including her mother’s response, “Do you think Erik will like being a ragpicker?” She then added a handwritten afterthought to the typed letter: “I feel like if you were here we could talk about a million years without stopping.”

  Her eager April 1 postscript crossed in the mail with a note announcing Erik’s engagement to Mette, and the couple’s plan to return to America, where he would resume his old job with Harcourt Brace in the same southern territory. This was disturbing news for Flannery. If Manley’s making off with Hulga’s wooden leg elicited shock in the writer just ten lines before writing the fierce scene, her inklings of the finality of Erik’s departure likewise did not insulate her from a shock. Years later, when Sally Fitzgerald asked Regina whether Flannery had suffered, her mother looked down, and against her customary reserve, said, “Yes, she did, it was terrible.” Not only did Flannery endure the pain of unrequited affection, but also the bracing clarity that such intimacy was probably never to be hers. With great politesse, she wrote back, subtly shifting from “I” to “we”: “We are glad that you plan to return South and we want you to let us help you make your wife at home in this part of the country. Consider us your people here because that is what we consider ourselves.”

  Not surprisingly, Flannery never shared “Good Country People” with Erik, even though she had regularly been sending stories to him in Copenhagen for comment. As late as April 1955, she thanked him for his criticism of “The Displaced Person” and promised changes in page proofs to address his confusion about Mrs. Shortley’s stroke. Yet he did eventually read in print the work she called her “very hot story,” and wrote of recognizing himself “in some sort of disguise.” Flannery wrote back, a bit disingenuously, “Dear boy, remove this delusion from your head at once. As a matter of fact, I wrote that one not too long after your departure and wanted to send you a copy but decided that the better part of tact would be to desist. Your contribution to it was largely in the matter of properties.” She did point out, accurately, “As to the main pattern of that story, it is one of deceit which is something I certainly never connect with you.”

  Though they never saw each other again, Flannery and Erik kept in touch. For the next three years they corresponded, through Erik’s marriage in July 1955, the birth of his two children, and subsequent moves to La Porte, Indiana (he was reassigned to the Midwest territory), and then back to Scarsdale, when he worked in Manhattan as a Scribner’s editor specializing in religious books. But when he published a piece in the Catholic Worker, in 1958, concerning nuclear disarmament, she wrote a letter critical of his naivete and the “bezerk” house style of the magazine, and never answered his reply. In a stray reference, in 1962, she even managed to misspell his name as “Eric.” Yet just as Flannery, for all her distrust of reading fiction for clues to a writer’s life, could describe Hulga to the Tates as the character “I just by the grace of God escape being,” so she skirted the revelation that, like Hulga, she, too, had lost “a wooden part of her soul” in the encounter with Erik, painful as it was, and that the loss may have constituted a kind of grace.

  Chapter Eight

  Freaks and Folks

  Seated before an NBC studio camera in New York City on May 31, 1955, Flannery was visibly ill at ease. Her host, Harvey Breit, assistant editor of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, had invited her to be the first guest on Galley Proof, his new half-hour talk show, broadcast at one thirty on Tuesday afternoon, on WRCA-TV. The program combined an interview with a leading author and a short dramatization from a forthcoming book — in O’Connor’s case, a scene from her story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” She had been nervous about the appearance for weeks, feeling dubious about her presence on the small screen, and mistrusting the show’s awkward, midafternoon time slot. As she had written to Robie Macauley two weeks earlier, “I will be real glad when this television thing is over with. I keep having a mental picture of my glacial glare being sent out over the nation onto millions of children who are waiting impatiently for The Batman to come on.”

  A public intellectual in his midforties, formerly married to Alice Morris, Flannery’s editor at Harper’s Bazaar, Breit, in a sack suit — looking every inch an urban professor, with his high forehead and receding wavy hair — chain-smoked in front of a bookcase while fumbling with oversized galley pages. “Galley Proof is an attempt to bring forward in advance, as a kind of preview, the most exciting new books we know of,” he announced. “Such a book is a collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, to be published this Friday. . . . Several years ago she wrote a novel, Wise Blood, which critics hailed as a brilliant book. One critic called her ‘perhaps the most naturally gifted of the youngest generation of American novelists.’ Here she is, Flannery O’Connor.”

  Caught in a close-up, Flannery stared sideways, wincing from Breit’s cigarette smoke. Yet she was elegantly dressed in a skirt, a dark blouse with a wide velvet collar fastened at the neck with a clasp, a thin bracelet, and earrings. When a producer had called to warn her not to wear a white dress, she complained to a friend, “I don’t know what she thought I’d come decked out in a white dress for, but anyway she didn’t tell me to wear my shoes.” An interviewer’s nightmare, Flannery stuck, at first, to short, one-line answers. When asked about the genesis of Wise Blood, she replied, “Well I thought I had better get to working on a novel, so I got to work and wrote one.” When Breit mentioned her life on the farm, she corrected him, as he later recalled “quietly (but with quiet fervor)”: “I don’t see much of it. I’m a writer, and I farm from the rocking chair.”

  As Flannery gradually relaxed, she grew more articulate, explaining, in response to the inevitable query about her place in Southern literature, “When you’re a Southerner and in pursuit of reality, the reality you come up with is going to have a Southern accent, but that’s just an accent; it’s not the essence of what you’re trying to do.” Before enacting a staged walk with her host to a front-porch set for the dramatization of the opening scene of “The Life You Save,” performed by three actors in thrift-shop-style costumes, she displayed her characteristic grit:

  Breit: Flannery, would you like to tell our audience what happens in that story?

  O’Connor: No, I certainly would not. I don’t think you can paraphrase a story like that. I think there’s only one way to tell it and that’s the way it is told in the story.

  Although no longer showing any signs of puffiness or hair loss, Flannery felt that she looked “very tired” when she watched herself on the kinescope. She had just arrived for the taping the afternoon before, when her Eastern Air Lines flight was met at four twenty at Newark Airport by Catharine Carver, who then accompanied her into the city to a hotel near Grand Central Station. She had originally been booked at the Woodstock Hotel, on the West Side, but, traveling without her cane, wished to be situated in shorter walking distance of the Harcourt Brace offices. Not only was Carver her “nursemaid,” on this t
rip, as Flannery described her, but she had also now officially been named her editor, in a surprise shake-up as Robert Giroux left to become vice president of Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, and Denver Lindley took over the position of editor in chief at Harcourt.

  When she had first received news of Giroux’s departure, a few weeks earlier, Flannery was dismayed. And as soon as possible, during her visit, the two met to discuss the delicate situation. Giroux assured her that she was in good hands. Flannery told Carver of her boss confiding that she “did all the work anyhow.” He also informed Flannery that her book was generating lots of prepublication buzz. As she relayed this news to the Fitzgeralds, “The atmosphere at Harcourt Brace, at least in regard to meself, has changed to one of eager enthusiasm. I had tea with Giroux and he told me all about it.” They spoke of negotiations for a contract for a second novel that he shrewdly suggested to Flannery and Elizabeth McKee should include a “provisional voidance clause,” allowing cancellation if Carver should unexpectedly leave the firm, too.

  With its June 6 publication date still days away, Flannery already had an advance copy of her book. “I like it fine,” she said. “It is nice not to have to look at myself on the back of the jacket.” Giroux had not acceded to her wish to use her painted self-portrait as the author photo. “I think it will do justice to the subject for some time to come,” she tried to convince him. Yet the final presentation, without any photograph at all, was just as agreeable, and projected a stylish, literary sensibility similar to their last project, Wise Blood, in hardcover — if not to the Signet paperback, then on the racks in a print run of 234,090, featuring a racy cover drawing of Sabbath and Haze flirting in the grass, its steamy tagline “A Searching Novel of Sin and Redemption.” The jacket for A Good Man Is Hard to Find was again abstract, with white title words in scarlet pools against a tan background; its modest first printing, 2,500 copies — 500 less than Wise Blood.