by Brad Gooch
Flannery remained in Manhattan until Friday, meeting with her agent and journalists, and participating in the literary life she had warily sampled during her years in the north. “I had interviews with this one and that one,” she regaled the Fitzgeralds, “ate with this one and that one, drank with this one and that one, and generally managed to conduct myself as if this were all very well but I had business at home.” She spent most of the time in the company of Catharine Carver, feeling comfortable with the shy, impeccable line editor, who was such a deep fan of her work. In honor of her author’s visit, Carver procured two of the most coveted tickets of the season, to Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, at the Morosco Theatre. Flannery found the play that went on to win a 1955 Pulitzer Prize “melodramatic”: “I thought I could do that good myself,” she told McKee. “However, on reflection I guess it is wise to doubt that.”
Her most unusual assignation was a quick visit with Fred Darsey, a young man recently escaped from Milledgeville State Hospital, where he was committed by his parents during a troubled adolescence. Darsey first caught her interest with a blind letter, in March, from the mental institution, revealing his passion for bird-watching. She was startled when her reply was returned and the envelope marked “eloped.” She sympathized, when Darsey wrote her again from New York City, “When you have a friend there you feel as if you are there yourself, so you see I feel as if I have escaped too.” Carver helped arrange the date, which Flannery kept secret from Regina, in Bryant Park, at the rear of the New York Public Library, with the pen pal she had never met. “I just love to sit and look at the people in New York, or anywhere,” she told him, “even in Milledgeville.”
Flannery wound up her trip north spending the weekend in Connecticut with Caroline Gordon. They stayed at Robber Rocks, the farmhouse of the writer and editor Sue Jenkins, in Tory Valley, a longtime literary enclave on the Connecticut–New York border. Just down the road was a house the Tates had rented in the twenties with the poet Hart Crane. Stopping by, she noted, “There was a lot of his stuff piled up in a corner, a pair of snow shoes and some other things.” In honor of this visit, Jenkins threw a party, inviting the Mark Twain biographer Van Wyck Brooks, and Flannery’s Yaddo acquaintance and leader of a postwar Faulkner revival, Malcolm Cowley. When “Dear old Van Wyke” insisted that Flannery read one of her stories, she began “Good Country People” but was interrupted by Caroline Gordon, who was worried about the response to the hayloft scene, suggesting “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” as shocking enough.
“It was interesting to see the guffaws of the company die away into a kind of frozen silence as they saw which way things were heading,” Gordon reported to Fannie Cheney of Flannery’s reading of “A Good Man.” While exiting, Brooks remarked to his hostess on the shame of someone so talented viewing life as “a horror story.” He felt her characters were “alien to the American way of life.” An amused Flannery added in the detail to the Fitzgeralds that “Malcolm was very polite and asked me if I had a wooden leg.” The next day, Sue Jenkins drove Flannery and Caroline to mass and read the Times while waiting. On the way back, Flannery spoke of Guardini’s Faith and Modern Man, and Caroline excitedly told her about Erich Neumann’s Origins and History of Consciousness, “about the best book I ever read, next to Holy Writ,” while their hostess visibly sulked. “She felt left out,” Caroline wrote her husband. “How childish can grown women get?”
Upon her return to Milledgeville, by June 8, Flannery found a letter waiting from Fred Darsey, written soon after their rendezvous at the New York Public Library, addressed, “Dear Ferocious Flannery,” and accompanied by a small, illustrated booklet, The Life of Jesus. She quickly responded that “I think I am about as ferocious as you are,” adding, “I saw about a million people during the week, and I’m very glad to get back to the chickens who don’t know that I write.” She had indeed reached a point where her heart was decidedly in Georgia, on the farm, savoring the unsophisticated responses of her “good country” neighbors. “I am fast getting a reputation out of all proportion to my desire for one and this largely because I am now competing with The Lone Ranger,” she quipped of a local newspaper announcement of her TV appearance. “Everybody here shakes my hand but nobody reads my stories.”
As she recovered from her trip, on the farm that she had downplayed to Harvey Breit, this first week in June turned out to be the single most important for her public career as a writer. Beginning on Sunday, with a front-page review by Sylvia Stallings in the Herald Tribune Book Review titled “Flannery O’Connor: A New Shining Talent among Our Storytellers,” a fresh attitude toward her fiction started to take hold. On Friday, the New York Times ran a daily review by Orville Prescott, confirming her claim “to a high rank among our most talented young writers.” Bookstores sold three hundred copies that day, and Harcourt ordered a second printing. On Sunday, a biased rave by Caroline Gordon ran in the Times Book Review, claiming, in its first sentence, O’Connor’s fulfillment of Henry James’s praise of Guy de Maupassant as exhibiting “the artful brevity of a master.” Still Gordon complained to friends of being held to a five-hundred-word limit.
Of course O’Connor received her share of mean reviews. A blind notice in The New Yorker picked up where a 1952 “Briefly Noted” column on Wise Blood had left off, arguing that “there is brutality in these stories, but since the brutes are as mindless as their victims, all we have, in the end, is a series of tales about creatures who collide and drown, or survive to float passively in the isolated sea of the author’s compassion, which accepts them without reflecting anything.” Flannery’s response, to Catharine Carver: “Did you see the nice little notice in the New Yorker? I can see now why those things are anonymous.” And she bristled at many reviews widely considered positive, such as a piece in Time that “was terrible, nearly gave me apoplexy,” describing her stories in punchy phrases, including “highly unladylike . . . brutal irony . . . slam bang humor . . . as balefully direct as a death sentence.”
A keen observer of popular culture, Flannery had joked to Robie Macauley of her need on TV to work herself up into a heady mix of the professional wrestler Gorgeous George and Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, host of the popular ABC show Life Is Worth Living. She was well aware of a cultural trend toward promoting authors as celebrities in what were called “personality stories” in newspapers, and through the new genre of talk shows pioneered at NBC, such as The Today Show (1952) and The Tonight Show (1954) with Steve Allen, and of which Galley Proof was a short-lived example. Uncomfortable with the “horrible pictures of me,” and unwilling to reveal the medical reasons behind her life on the farm, she poked fun at this trend, hoping her private life would remain hidden behind the hard surface of her fiction.
Yet this reserve backfired in 1955, creating an aura of mystery that led only to further curiosity, and never again abated. Sylvia Stallings closed her adulatory Herald Tribune review by citing the “unusual reticence” of the dust jacket that “says very little about the author except that she lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, and is at work on her second novel. Even that is too much probably for the longer she keeps her whereabouts a secret, the sooner she will have finished her next book.” Magazine editors did not concur. Time ran a photo of her looking almost boyish, à la Carson McCullers. A Newsweek year-end roundup of books featured O’Connor as the lead, top-left photograph. Harper’s Bazaar blew up a soft-focus portrait of her, dressed in a work shirt, as if fresh from the typewriter, looking off winsomely, seated on the front steps of Andalusia. “The effect, though ‘glamorous’ as they used to say, isn’t at all natural,” complained Ashley Brown.
The author had to contend with another book release that month, as well. Wise Blood was published in England on June 26, using as its cover blurb a truncated version of Evelyn Waugh’s comment: “It is a remarkable product.” O’Connor wrote the Cheneys, “You should see Hazel Motes picture on the front of the British edition of my book. It came out last month, put out by
somebody named Neville Spearman who is apparently always just on the edge of bankruptcy. This one will probably push him over the edge. Anyway, here is the British conception of Mr. Mote’s face (black wool hat on top); also the rat-colored car is there — all this in black and white and pink and blue, the book itself being an unbelievable orange.” The new edition prompted a review in the Times Literary Supplement, warning that the work of this lady author “from the American South” was “intense, erratic and strange.”
Still Flannery could not help being pleased with the general reception of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a patent departure from the flat incomprehension that had so often greeted her work. “This book is getting much more attention than Wise Blood and may even sell a few copies,” the surprised author had written the Fitzgeralds. When her editor informed her that the collection was selling better than anything on their list except Thomas Merton, she cracked, “Doesn’t say much for their list.” In quick succession, A Good Man went through three printings, selling 4,000 copies over the summer, and was named a finalist for a 1956 National Book Award, losing out eventually to John O’Hara’s Ten North Frederick. Its inevitable fate was the thirty-five-cent paperback, published by Signet the next year in a run of 173,750 copies, with a lurid cover of Hulga, in an open blouse and red skirt, her leg and foot bare, struggling in a hayloft with a dark stranger.
AMID ALL THESE diverging critical responses, including high praise, and book covers that could seem weird and distorted, Flannery felt something akin to a sigh of gratitude in the middle of July when she received a thoughtful letter from a young woman named Betty Hester, living in Atlanta. The stranger disagreed with The New Yorker review, and asked whether these stories were not truly “about God.” Flannery’s response, on July 20, was full of excitement: “Dear Miss Hester, I am very pleased to have your letter. Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find someone who recognizes my work for what I try to make it than it is for you to find a God-conscious writer near at hand. The distance is 87 miles but I feel the spiritual distance is shorter.”
Although they would not meet in person for another year, Betty Hester and Flannery developed an instant sisterly bond. They shared many similarities, made all the more striking by their unlikely profiles as brainy, independent-minded, unmarried women in the Deep South of the 1950s. Born in Rome, Georgia, thirty-two-year-old Hester was mostly self-educated, having attended a humble local junior college, Young Harris, a two-year Methodist school in the Appalachian Mountains of rural northern Georgia. Serving as a meteorologist with the U.S. Air Force in Germany shortly after World War II, she then moved to 2795 Peachtree Road, at the corner of Rumson Road, in Buckhead, to live, again like Flannery, with a widowed female relative; in her case her aunt, Mrs. Gladstone Pitt, who went by the nickname “Clyde.”
Every morning, like a character out of a Kafka novel, either doomed, or aspiring, to invisibility, Betty took a bus downtown to her job as a clerk at Credit Bureau, Inc., later acquired by Equifax. Resembling Flannery in stature, as well — she was about five three, 130 pounds, with thick horn-rimmed spectacles, a Roman nose, and ash blonde hair — Betty mostly kept to herself. According to a mutual friend, “Betty was very shy. So she and Flannery could be quiet together.” Each night, the reclusive clerk returned to her aunt’s apartment and took up her station on the living room couch, where she slept, as well as read and wrote, surrounded by stacks of books, ashtrays — she was a heavy smoker — and a menagerie of cats. She wrote hundreds of letters to Flannery, and was later iden-tified as “A” in O’Connor’s published correspondence, to protect her privacy.
Perhaps from reading the letters about devotional art between the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and his friend and close reader Robert Bridges, or simply from “apoplexy” at the incomprehension of some reviewers, Flannery, after 1955, felt a pressing need to explain her artistic intentions. Aware of the limits of her understanding of “my own work or even my own motivations,” these letters gave her an opportunity to try to set the record straight, for herself as much as anyone. Already in her initial response, she vented about the New Yorker critic as an example of “a generation of wingless chickens” with “the moral sense . . . bred out.” She set the tone for her forthcoming talks and essays when she told Hester, “I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary and guilty.”
As much as a sympathetic reader, of course, Flannery was in need of a dear friend. Betty’s perceptive letter came just three months after the news from Erik of his engagement, and the same month as his marriage. While Flannery was in New York City, her new friend Fred Darsey had detected on her face a “disappointed look.” She insisted that this expression, which she claimed others had noticed in the city, was congenital: “This is the look I have been carrying around since birth — born disenchanted.” Yet she certainly had cause for disappointment, including, most recently, the loss of her confidant. Like Erik, Betty promised to be able to keep up with her intellectual breadth and curiosity, as they filled their letters that summer with lively debates on Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson, Henry James, Graham Greene, Samuel Beckett, Sigmund Freud, Victor White, and Carl Jung.
Ever the fiction writer, Flannery characterized her friends quickly, and stuck to the categories she imposed. Erik was a “displaced person,” the prototype of a traveling salesman. Betty, she decided early on, was Simone Weil. She saw in this homegrown intellectual — an agnostic obsessed with God — something of the tormented, brilliant French Jew, who was deeply drawn to Christianity, yet agonizing over and never taking the step to baptism. Weil had died of tuberculosis in England, in 1943, refusing food in solidarity with those living in Nazi-occupied France. In her second letter, Flannery asked if Betty had ever read Weil, and, in the next, confessed, “I have thought of Simone Weil in connection with you almost from the first.” She also revealed a wish to write a novel about a character like Weil: “and what is more comic and terrible than the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth?”
Their connection soon went beyond merely typing out thoughts on paper. Flannery was once moved to enclose a peacock feather, and an article on Edith Stein — a Jewish-born Carmelite nun and Catholic saint who died at Auschwitz — clipped from the Third Hour, the magazine edited by Erik’s aunt. Betty mailed her a novel by Nelson Algren. “I have read almost 200 pages so far,” Flannery answered. “I don’t think he is a good writer.” They soon developed a system, as they sent books back and forth by post, thriftily turning around the brown packing paper, adding Scotch tape, and addressing the stickers on the reverse side. From her own shelf, Flannery mailed off The Lord by Romano Guardini, a contemporary theologian in Germany. From an Atlanta public library, Betty sent back Simone Weil’s Letters to a Priest and Waiting for God.
By early October 1955, Flannery was preparing to visit the Cheneys in Nashville. The challenge was steeper than usual, though, as she had to adjust to crutches. Her doctors had diagnosed a “softening” of the top of the leg bone, and believed that taking weight off the hip for a year or two might allow the bone to harden again; if not, a wheelchair or an operation to insert a steel cap would be necessary. They assured her that the condition was unrelated to lupus, though later studies established an occurrence of this condition of osteonecrosis in twenty percent of lupus patients treated with high-dose corticosteroids. She was also switched to Meticorten, a trade name for prednisone, a new pill form of the drug. “I am learning to walk on crutches,” she wrote Betty, “and I feel like a large stiff anthropoid ape who has no cause to be thinking of St. Thomas or Aristotle.”
She wrote a letter to Betty before leaving, hoping to strengthen their bond. If Betty instigated the relationship, Flannery tended to take responsibility for ensuring its growth. Betty had exhibited a guarded interest in th
e Thomism that Flannery had been spinning for her over the past three months, and she was an apprentice writer having approached a master. She showed promise as a disciple, a pupil, and a friend. “It occurs to me to ask you if I may stop calling you Miss Hester and if you will stop calling me Miss O’Connor,” Flannery wrote on October 12. “It makes me give myself airs hearing myself called Miss. I have a mental picture of you as a lady 7 ft. tall, weighing 95 lbs. Miss Hester fits this image better than Betty but I think I can still make the shift without disabusing myself of the vision. You can let me know after you meditate on it.”
Her time in Nashville was designed so that Flannery could meet the Cheneys’ other weekend guest at Cold Chimneys, Russell Kirk, who was in town to lecture at Vanderbilt. An old-school conservative thinker in the Anglo-American tradition, popularizing the ideas of Edmund Burke, Kirk was teaching at Michigan State, and had helped found that year the journal National Review. Flannery admired his 1953 book, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, which Brainard Cheney had reviewed in Sewanee. In her copy, she drew marginal lines next to a phrase that was an important seed in her thinking: “Abstract sentimentality ends in real brutality.” But in person the chemistry was weak. She saw him as “Humpty Dumpty (intact) with constant cigar and (outside) porkpie hat,” and their “attempts to make talk were like the efforts of two midgits to cut down a California redwood.”