Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  Kirk had never read any of O’Connor’s stories. But over the weekend he grew interested, as he heard the young woman on crutches, with a bandaged leg he assumed was broken, reading her reliable “A Good Man” aloud in the library. As Frances Cheney later told a group of students, “She was no beaut, but she could tell a story.” Flannery shared that evening the request of a Theater Arts major in Los Angeles to film the story because it would be cheap to produce. “Cheap and nasty,” responded Kirk. On his way back to Michigan, he read O’Connor’s book and was excited enough to recommend her to T. S. Eliot, his London publisher. Eliot replied that he had seen a book of her stories while in New York City and was “quite horrified by those I read. She has certainly an uncanny talent of a high order but my nerves are just not strong enough to take much of a disturbance.”

  O’Connor returned to a desk even messier than usual. Despite Caroline Gordon’s warning that “I hope you won’t let them bully you into writing a novel if you don’t feel like it,” she had signed the contract for a second novel. Of its working title, You Can’t Be Any Poorer than Dead, Flannery joked to Macauley, “Which is the way I feel every time I get to work on it.” She was once more embarked on a novel that would take years to finish, this time her alter ego a fierce, fourteen-year-old, backwoods boy fighting the call to be an Old Testament–style prophet in the contemporary South. To support the work, she applied for a Guggenheim, with references from Giroux, Lindley, and Andrew Lytle, but was again denied. Preparing the way for her new hero, she worked on a talk to be given the next year in Lansing, Michigan, that she was calling “The Freak in Modern Fiction.”

  But, in early winter, Flannery found herself once again visualizing her imaginary farm, its widow-owner visited this time by an “uncouth country suitor” in the form of a pawing black bull chewing at a bush beneath her bedroom window in the silvery moonlight. While treating novels as homework assignments to be painfully completed, stories had become for Flannery quick target practice, often resulting in her most successful productions. “I get so sick of my novel that I have to have some diversion,” she told the Cheneys of her new story. As usual, its heroine, Mrs. May, was once removed from Regina, this time in her habit of inspecting the fields. “Miss Regina always picked me up to go riding,” recalls Al Matysiak. “I’d get out of the car and undo the gates and shut them back behind her.” Its overhead sun “like a silver bullet” was also familiar to Flannery, who needed to wear a big hat outdoors to prevent the rash that sunlight could trigger.

  Yet her new story, “Greenleaf,” was as much myth as tranche de vie, its scrub bull, let loose from his pen by the unreliable tenant farmers, the Greenleaf boys, sporting a hedge-wreath on his horns, “like some patient god come down to woo her.” Flannery had recently befriended Ben Griffith, liking his review of A Good Man in the Savannah Morning News — “Stories of Gifted Writer Acquire Stature of Myths” — for having “brought out a lot of points I wanted to see brought out.” And “Greenleaf” almost seemed written to prove his theory about the mythic, folkloric elements in her work. For although the bull in the story was a composite of one down the road “that was always getting out and running his head through the fender of the truck” and the O’Connors’ more pleasant Paleface, by the time Mrs. May is gored her bull is at least Zeus, the metamorphosing übergod of Greek myth, if not Christ, the horned unicorn of medieval tapestry: “the bull had buried his head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover, before her expression changed. One of his horns sank until it pierced her heart and the other curved around her side and held her in an unbreakable grip.”

  As Flannery was completing the story, she received news that she treated as if it were as much an epiphany as the quake of the bull’s body against Mrs. May. Betty Hester informed her in January that she was going to be baptized. “I’m never prepared for anything,” Flannery quickly reacted. “All voluntary baptisms are a miracle to me and stop my mouth as much as if I had just seen Lazarus walk out of the tomb.” Overlooking her six months’ worth of arguments for faith, from Aquinas, Maritain, and Guardini, she adopted the posture of someone who had been holding back, not wanting “to stuff the Church down your throat.” In honor of her March 31 baptism, Flannery sent a finished copy of “Greenleaf,” just accepted by John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon Review, to be published in the Summer 1956 issue, and to earn her a first “1st Prize” O. Henry Award, chosen that year by Paul Engle and Constance Urdang.

  Finished by the start of April 1956, as well, was her talk on literary freaks, for the American Association of University Women in Lansing, Michigan. So three weeks later Flannery set off again on the crutches she was calling her “flying buttresses.” The trip involved a plane to Detroit, where she was met by her hosts, Alta Lee and Rumsey Haynes at ten thirty p.m., and taken to their home as a guest for four nights. Finding that she had a talent for such “intellectual vaudeville,” she had already delivered addresses locally: in Macon, for a Women’s Book Review Group; in Atlanta, at a Pen Women tea and for the Georgia Council of Teachers of English. But this trip marked the first of the out-of-state appearances — often physically demanding — that she began making across the nation on a mission to explain her work in speeches painstakingly rewritten for each occasion.

  Alta Lee Haynes was surprised by the modesty of her guest. “There she was, so young and smiling, and fresh despite the late hour and the long trip,” she remembered. “Her crutches, we’d all worried about them, seemed to enhance, to set off her attractiveness. . . . Half way up the stairs I learned a lesson in etiquette. Rumsey was leading the way, Flannery was navigating expertly, and I was following — chattering friendly inanities. Each time I said a word Flannery would stop and turn completely around to face me. Finally I saw the light and stopped talking. . . . Her behavior was consistently gracious.” In her talk at Eastern Lansing High School, O’Connor said that modern writers must often tell “perverse” stories to “shock” a morally blind world. “It requires considerable courage,” she concluded, “not to turn away from the story-teller.”

  Soon after her return home, Betty Hester officially asked Flannery to serve as “sponsor” for her final step of acceptance into the Roman Catholic Church, her confirmation, scheduled for the following June, when she would take the Christian name “Gertrude,” with the blessing of Father John Mulroy of the Cathedral of Christ the King in Atlanta. Flannery’s participation, though, would be by proxy, as the two still had not met in person. Betty cryptically inquired whether she ought first to share some horrible details from her past. “I am highly pleased to be asked and to do it and as for your horrible history, that has nothing to do with it,” Flannery wrote back decisively. “I’m interested in the history because it’s you but not for this or any other occasion.” As a confirmation gift, she sent A Short Breviary in a more “garish-looking” edition than her own. Betty, however, would wait six more months before revealing her secret.

  Because Betty was going public with her conversion, and seemingly shuffling off the coil of Simone Weil’s hesitancy about the Christian religion, Flannery felt empowered to invite her to participate more fully in the Church. As an act of Lenten “mortification,” as well as tapping into a source of free copies of contemporary novels and works of theology, Flannery had begun writing one-page reviews for the Bulletin. A biweekly paper published by the Diocese of Atlanta — newly created that year as an independent diocese under Bishop Francis E. Hyland — the Bulletin ran about twelve of Flannery’s articles a year over the next eight years. Her first review, which appeared in the February 1956 issue, treated an anthology of Catholic short fiction; as she wrote a friend, “I have just had the doubtful honor of reviewing All Manner of Men for the diocesan paper, yclept the Bulletin.” So Flannery recommended Betty to its editor, Eileen Hall, and she was quickly enlisted to write her own 200-word reviews. “The competition is at least not overpowering,” Flannery promised.

  Out of this nexus of the Atlanta diocese, the Bulletin, and Betty He
ster, soon appeared William Sessions, a writer and instructor at West Georgia College. In his twenties, Sessions was likewise reviewing for the diocesan paper while still on the brink of conversion, having been brought up Southern Baptist. When Betty mentioned him in a letter, Flannery recalled admiring his review in the Bulletin of the newly translated English version of Guardini’s The Lord, a book that she had already sent to Hester. She wrote to thank him for the review and to invite him to make a springtime visit to Andalusia, though she pretended to have second thoughts when Betty informed her that following graduation from the University of North Carolina and while pursuing an MA at Columbia, Sessions had spent time as a ballet dancer in Manhattan. “When forced to a program of it,” Flannery proclaimed, “I am liable to twist hideously in my seat.”

  Sessions visited Andalusia on Ascension Day, a Thursday, in May 1956, beginning what would constitute a mutual, three-way friendship with Betty and Flannery. The connection was natural and Flannery read his stories, some of which she felt were ready to be sent out; prayed for his intentions before his own confirmation; and, in the fall, looked over his application for a Fulbright to study theology with Guardini at the University of Munich. But she could also make mean, funny remarks about him to Betty. In a hilarious account of his arrival at the farm, she reported that he talked his way up the steps “without pause, break, breath,” until supper when he encountered “a little head wind” from Regina, “also a talker.” If Flannery and Betty were sisters, “Billy” was the younger brother they liked to pick on. Flannery was fond of him, and he was her piñata. “I was basically treated as Billy the Idiot,” Sessions has characterized the situation.

  Finally, the fourth weekend in June, Betty agreed to visit Andalusia herself. Flannery solicitously tried to make the trip as painless as possible, sensing her guest’s hesitation at venturing outside her narrow life in Atlanta, and, as far as their friendship, off the page. She promised an air-conditioned bus and a ride back Sunday evening with Uncle Louis; his young driver, named Franklyn; and their passenger, Betty Watkins, a government worker whose “conversation is limited to where she buys her shoes.” Betty Hester declined both the offer to stay the night and the subsequent car ride, choosing instead to take the bus home, although she disliked air-conditioning. Flannery promised to meet her at the Andalusia gate, “me sitting on bumper waving crutch,” and was quite surprised on first sight to find her guest prettier than she had been led to believe: “I always take people at their word and I was prepared for white hair, horn-rimmed spectacles, nose of eagle and shape of gingerbeer bottle. Seek the truth and pursue it: you ain’t even passably ugly.”

  No sooner had Betty left than Flannery was coaxing her to stay longer next time, feeling that she had been “poised for flight — a lark with a jet engine.” As she had not taken a meal, Regina was not “quite convinced that you exist on a plane with the rest of us.” But their meaningful conversation kept Flannery pondering afterward. Of Betty’s comment that she had evidently given up long ago thinking that anything could be worked out on the surface, Flannery expounded more fully in her next letter that she had come to a deeper understanding only in the last years, as a result of sickness and success: “I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. . . . Success is almost as isolating and nothing points out vanity as well.”

  As if such a coy attitude were more ladylike, Regina liked to say that Flannery did not seek out friends but waited until they came to her. Certainly after the publication of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, O’Connor was a target for lots of unsolicited attention. Betty Hester was her happiest connection. Others she simply made fun of. As she wrote Robie Macauley, “I seem to attract the lunatic fringe mainly,” like Mr. Jimmie Crum of Hollywood who asked for an autographed picture for the wall of his rare coin and stamp shop, or two theological students who selected her as “their pin-up girl — the grimmest distinction to date.” She helped Paul Curry Steele, a writer, who had a history in mental institutions, enter the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, based solely on a story he mailed her, although she distanced herself when the tone of his lengthy letters turned angry.

  Regina was forced to make sense of the cars driving up more and more during Flannery’s downtime in the afternoons, often filled with strangers. Flannery told the Fitzgeralds that “Some Very Peculiar Types have beat a path to my door these last few years and it is always interesting to see my mother hostessing-it-up on these occasions.” Typical of such a surprise visitor that year was Father James McCown, S.J., assistant pastor at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Macon, who had read A Good Man Is Hard to Find. He commandeered a ride from Horace Ridley, an affable local whiskey salesman, to drive forty miles to seek out its author. In Milledgeville, the rumpled cleric asked directions from Father Toomey’s mother, who replied, “Mary Flannery is a sweet girl. But I’m afraid to go near her. She might put me in one of her stories.”

  As Flannery told the Fitzgeralds, “a white Packard drove up to our humble yard and out jumped an unknown Jesuit.” Yet Father McCown was as surprised by the author as she was by him. She appeared at the screen door in old jeans, long before they became modish, and a brown blouse, leaning on aluminum waist-high crutches and staring out for a disquieting few seconds until the priest explained that he liked her stories. “Proud you did,” she said, smiling at last. “Wanna come in?” She told Betty that he was the first priest to say “turkey-dog to me about liking anything I wrote.” When Alfred Kazin spoke that spring at Macon’s Wesleyan College, McCown drove him out for a visit, along with Professors Tom and Louise Gossett. And McCown gradually became a spiritual adviser to Flannery, later characterizing her issues, such as whether to eat ham broth at Sanford House on a fast day, as “of the scope and seriousness of a convent-bred schoolgirl.”

  Stuck on the farm, Flannery depended on these random visitors for a wider social life; likewise she avidly relied on local events for fodder for her fiction. As she had told Erik when he accused her of parlaying their time together into “Good Country People”: “Never let it be said that I don’t make the most of experience and information, no matter how meager.” By the summer of 1956, most noticeable to her was the encroachment of the modern world, as commercialism and industrialization transformed the landscape and Andalusia received its first telephone line — number 2-5335 — described by Flannery as “a great mother-saver.” Georgia Power Company’s Sinclair Dam on the Oconee River had created a high-power generating plant and a fifteen-thousand-acre lake north of town. And Milledgeville was annexing a five-hundred-acre wooded area just across Highway 441 for a housing subdivision.

  Andalusia, five years after mother and daughter took up full-time residence, was now a fully operating dairy farm, with its overseer, Regina O’Connor, characterized by one friend as “very oriented towards making money.” She was helped by the same crew of three or four full-time African American workers, as well as revolving white families, including the Stevenses, the Mays, and the Matysiaks, who departed, disgruntled, the next year, only to return two years later. Regina’s main emphasis was still on herds of milk-producing cows, and artificial breeding was deployed to ensure top milk-producing calves. Shetland ponies were a secondary operation, with six-month-old colts sold at market around Christmastime. But Mrs. O’Connor had also begun considering selling off timber rights; within a few summers, Flannery watched through the screen door as Regina held a front-porch auction for some pinewood acreage, bargaining for twenty-five thousand dollars more than expected.

  O’Connor sketched the dangers of such development for the farm surrounded by a line of black piney woods in “A View of the Woods,” a story as political in its ecological implications as “The Displaced Person.” Completed in September 1956, her tale of greedy Mr. Fortune and his nine-year-old granddaughter — in love with a lawn and view that her grandfather is willing to sell off to a future o
f “houses and stores and parking places” — accurately described the fate of the Eatonton Highway area. “The electric power company had built a dam on the river and flooded great areas of the surrounding country,” she wrote in her story. “There was talk of their getting a telephone line. There was talk of paving the road that ran in front of the Fortune place.” Left standing at its climax, as published the next fall in Partisan Review, in place of the bull of “Greenleaf,” was a true “huge yellow monster,” an earth-digger machine, “gorging itself on clay.”

  Of all Flannery’s new friends, the one she most wished to see at Andalusia, of course, was the one most resistant to visiting. But that fall she finally convinced Betty to return, promising her a ride from Atlanta with “breathless” Bill Sessions, just back from San Francisco, where he had been studying German at Berlitz in anticipation of his Fulbright trip abroad. The two friends visited on Saturday, October 23, with Regina planning a meal around sweet potatoes. Flannery had much to share. She had finished a painting of her chukar quail. And she and her mother were the proud owners of a stainless-steel Hotpoint refrigerator, with an automatic icemaker, bought with proceeds from the sale of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” for a television adaptation. “While they make hash out of my story,” she said, “she and me will make ice in the new refrigerator.”

  But in a letter immediately following the visit, Betty felt compelled to fill in Flannery on the details of what she called her “history of horror” before their friendship went any further. Hester had endured a particularly difficult childhood, as her father abandoned the family when she was young. At age thirteen, she watched her mother commit suicide while neighbors, believing her mother to be playacting, refused to call the police. Shipped off in the late 1930s to Young Harris Academy, she didn’t fit in with most of her fellow Methodist students. Yet the avowed atheist, who disdained “men and men’s ideas,” had her admirers. “I thought she was the pussycat’s whiskers,” recalled her college roommate Anne Dunlap. “I have a vivid picture of her sitting cross-legged in the middle of her bed, smoking one cigarette right after another, expounding deep, dark philosophy.”