Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  The decisive event that she related to Flannery, though, occurred in Germany, where she was dishonorably discharged from the military for sexual indiscretion, having been intimately involved with another woman. Such incidents concerning lesbians were treated with special virulence in the Cold War period. Following wartime encouragement of enlistment as Waves or Wacs, women remaining in the military, rather than returning to motherhood, stood out as a deviant group stereotyped as lesbian, and often associated with Communism. Introductory lectures warned newly enlisted women about “confirmed” lesbians, and encouraged informing on them. In her coming-out letter to Flannery, Betty spoke of feeling “unbearably guilty” for her part in the incident, and offered to end their friendship to prevent scandal from being visited on the author.

  Flannery’s response to Betty’s revelation was immediate and caring: “I can’t write you fast enough and tell you that it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference in my opinion of you, which is the same as it was, and that is: based solidly on complete respect.” As to Betty’s point about scandal, Flannery argued, “I’m obscure enough. Nobody knows or cares who I see. If it created any tension in you that I don’t understand, then use your own judgment, but understand that from my point of view, you are always wanted.” Flannery did suggest that they not tell Regina as “she wouldn’t understand.” Given the nature of their friendship, she parsed the matter theologically, “Where you are wrong is in saying that you are a history of horror. The meaning of the Redemption is precisely that we do not have to be our history.” She then invited Betty for Thanksgiving dinner.

  When Betty declined the invitation to a goose dinner with Bill Sessions and Father McCown, she evidently questioned the premise of Flannery’s theology: Did she mean that she was expected to change her nature by entering the Church? Flannery clarified: “I wish you could come but I respect your reasons. Perhaps what I should have said is that you are more than your history. I don’t believe the fundamental nature changes but that it’s put to a different use when a conversion occurs and of course it requires vigilance to put it to the proper use.” Soon enough their friendship was back on track, with a shared secret. For Christmas, Betty sent the Notebooks of Simone Weil, and Flannery thanked her, for “Simone Weil but even more for your own letters.” Within nine months, Betty began to visit Andalusia again, for a few longer stays. As with the Fitzgeralds, Flannery grew to think of her as one of her “adopted kin.”

  Yet Betty did have a crush on Flannery, and, in this case, was the unrequited partner. Forty years later, she wrote a fan letter to the Atlanta novelist Greg Johnson — as she had once written Flannery — and the subject of her “in some odd ways truly strangely innocent” friend took over their correspondence. She addressed Johnson’s remark that he felt “speculating about her sexual feelings in print would no doubt have been extremely distasteful to her,” by agreeing and adding that he might even be underestimating the distaste by limiting it to print alone. Betty confided that Flannery had once said to her, ‘In my stories is where I live.” In a tender confession, she concluded to Johnson, “As you must sense, I did love her very, very much — and, God knows, do.”

  IN THE FALL of 1956, Georgia State College for Women recruited a new president whose name alone would have qualified him for an executive post in many a Southern college: Robert E. Lee, nicknamed “Buzz.” Although he fulfilled some of the expectations raised by his famous name, such as the flourish of ending a public talk with the supposed last words of the Confederate general — “Strike the Tent!” — Lee was actually a tall, handsome young man, in his midthirties, with moderate social views. He was hardly as liberal, though, as Guy Wells, president during O’Connor’s college years, who once inspired a Klan cross-burning on the front lawn of the Governor’s Mansion for holding an integrated meeting of college administrators. As Flannery told of the Wells incident, “The people who burned the cross couldn’t have gone past the fourth grade but, for the time, they were mighty interested in education.”

  When Dr. Lee was appointed by the Regents, though, Flannery was far less involved in the day-to-day life of the college she used to refer to, in shorthand, to Betty Boyd, as “the institution of higher larning across the road.” She kept up friendships with her teachers Hallie Smith and Helen Greene, and English Department chairwoman, Rosa Lee Walston, as well as the librarians who hosted her signing party. She had a nodding acquaintance with faculty who lunched at Sanford House. But the Governor’s Mansion only truly returned to her ken when the new college president invited his sister, Mary Attaway Lee, or “Maryat” — quickly to become the least likely and most challenging of Flannery’s new friends — and their mother, Grace Barbee Dyer Lee, of Covington, Kentucky, to visit him, his wife, and their three little children for Christmas 1956.

  Thirty-three-year-old Maryat Lee had a compelling résumé. Having grown up in their Kentucky family home, presided over by her lawyer-businessman father, Dewitt Collins Lee, she attended National Cathedral School, in Washington, DC; studied acting at Northwestern University; and graduated, in 1945, from Wellesley College, majoring in Bible History. Moving to New York City, she worked for the anthropologist Margaret Mead and earned an MA at Union Theological Seminary, where Paul Tillich directed her thesis on the origins of drama in religion. Already an activist, Maryat put theory into practice in her 1951 production, Dope!, a street play in Harlem, covered by Life, and published in Best Short Plays of 1952–53. By the end of 1956 she was living a consummately unconventional life in a walk-up tenement, with a bathtub in the kitchen, at 192 Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, between Prince and Spring streets.

  Unlike Flannery, who adopted in public the cover of a prim, Southern lady, camouflaging what everyone agreed were “highly unladylike” thoughts, Maryat’s appearance was every bit as extreme as her thinking and writing. Nearly six feet tall, with a long face, strong “Lee chin,” and hazel eyes, she strode the streets of Milledgeville outfitted in pants, boots, a black overcoat, and an imposing Russian lamb’s wool hat. “Maryat was the ultimate bohemian aunt who would show up wearing these outrageous clothes in the middle of the night, carrying brown bags with cans of beer, which were illegal, as it was a dry county, and my father was not allowed to have any liquor in the house, as president,” remembers her niece Mary Dean Lee. “Hers was a larger-than-life, charismatic personality. Whenever she visited, it was very exciting for me.”

  Feeling oppressed by the holiday season spent in the antebellum mansion, and beset by family dramas that she helped stir up, Maryat was longing, three days after Christmas, to return north. “I remember that I was feeling churlish,” she recalled, “having been dined and ‘punched’ by my fun-loving sister-in-law for a solid week of parties — dinner parties, luncheon parties, even breakfast parties of forty people — and not having upset the apple cart by word, frown, or deed.” Yet she received a note from Barbara (“Charlye”) Wiggins Prescott, a poet at Macon’s Wesleyan College, where Maryat had briefly taught speech and drama, telling of O’Connor in worshipful tones. On the same day, Flannery, also prodded by Prescott, telephoned Maryat to invite her to Andalusia.

  Expecting the worst — “a local lady writer” — Maryat, having never read or heard of Flannery O’Connor, complied. When she arrived, dressed in pants and pink tennis shoes, Mrs. O’Connor called for her to come through the front way to avoid the peacock droppings. Looking down quickly at a hole in Maryat’s sneaker, Regina hid her disapproval by politely remarking, “My, aren’t you smaht to be prepared.” She then unlocked the front door from a big ring of keys, commenting as she led her into the dining room that you can’t be too careful these days with “the niggahs.” But “Just as I opened my mouth to address myself to the inference that as Southerners we all accepted what the situation really was,” recalled the outspoken and politically liberal Maryat, “Flannery made her entrance,” preceded by “the soft long swinging crutch thud sound.”

  At first sight, Flannery did indeed look the
part of a local lady writer, in her conservative dress, stockings, and shiny patent-leather shoes. “She was so awkward in her get-up that instead of leaving, I began to be curious.” Maryat was especially conscious of the author’s “astonishingly beautiful eyes” grazing over her, and quickly looking away when the glances were returned. Still irked at Regina’s racist comment, Maryat announced that she was catching a ride in a few hours to the Atlanta airport with the family of Emmett Jones, the black gardener at the college — a blatant violation of the code that allowed blacks as chauffeurs, not friends. Sensing the shocked response of her mother, Flannery abruptly suggested a walk, and led them, swinging her crutches, through the house, as Regina called after, “Well, yawl watch out for that ole sun.”

  Pushing out the unlocked back door, and past Chinese geese, each of which Flannery called “Sister,” as she stroked the orange bumps on their foreheads, and down their soft, stiff necks, the two women paused finally at a pasture fence. As Lee recalled the meeting two decades later, Flannery took the unusual step of sharing some details of her illness, and of her decision to move back home with her mother, as she pulled at the barbed wire in little tugs. The silence following her confidence was broken only by “the croupy cry of a goose, the random buzz of a winter fly.” She then showed Maryat the henhouse that she dreamed of one day furnishing with two cane-bottomed chairs and a refrigerator, as a private office, admitting that “the parental presence never contributes to my articulateness.” The two, of course, also discussed religion. As Lee recalled: “Her words had theological overtones. I asked if she were Catholic. ‘Yes,’ she answered quietly. ‘Really into it?’ ‘Yes, I am.’ ‘Oh,’ I said. Uh-oh, I said to myself.”

  Before Maryat left, Flannery handed her copies of a few stories, including “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead,” published in New World Writing. Fearing that she might not like the work, Maryat read one story before leaving for the airport. “I was excited, relieved, impressed — and mystified.” She wrote of her discovery that “although metaphysics was central, there were simply no false moves.” Immediately on returning to Manhattan, she wrote her reactions, and Flannery responded, starting a correspondence that would amount to more than 250 letters. (Maryat addressed one of her first, “In Care of the Henhouse.”) Maryat soon took her place, too, in the world of O’Connor’s fiction, both as a caricature and as a source of anecdotes and themes from current events. An odd couple of friends, Flannery joked of their “kinship between us, in spite of all the differences there are.”

  In the middle of January, “Buzz” Lee traveled to Philadelphia to interview potential faculty, and took time to pay a rare visit to his sister in New York. She sent him home with a copy of Dope! to deliver to Flannery, which he did, stopping by the farm on a Sunday evening. As Flannery wrote up the visit for Maryat, “I thought now this is a mighty nice man to come all the way out here to bring me a book, but by the time he left, I found myself engaged to talk in the GSCW chapel on the 7th of February. As I say, your brother will go far.” Not a religious event as its name implied, Chapel, as in Flannery’s day, was the weekly student convocation in Russell Auditorium for speakers and cultural events. Lee volunteered to introduce her, and glibly asserted that she had been “on and off the best seller lists.” Flannery wrote Maryat, “I decided this was an innocent calumniation.”

  O’Connor’s address at the Thursday assembly was titled “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” a version of which she had delivered at Wesleyan College, in December. But this talk, with many moving parts she was forever rearranging, held special piquancy delivered in her hometown. Its theme was the local as a portal to the universal. O’Connor made her point with highly regional references to “the reek of Baldwin County.” Its climax could easily have been a response to Maryat. When she read Dope!, Flannery had punned, on Lee’s MA thesis on medieval morality plays, “a real morality play if I ever saw one and altogether powerful in spite of it.” The “in spite of” was an inkling of the conclusion to her speech that morality for an artist meant conveying a vision, not a lesson: “If the writer is successful as artist, his moral judgment will coincide with his dramatic judgment. It will be inseparable from the very act of seeing.”

  While O’Connor’s talk was not covered in the local papers, including the school newspaper, the half-hour teleplay of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” caused more of a stir. Shown on CBS-TV’s Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, which she mistakenly thought was produced “by Ronald Regan (?),” the program starred “a tap-dancer by the name of Gene Kelly” as Tom T. Shiftlet and was broadcast on Friday evening, March 1. The “idiot daughter,” played by Janice Rule (and her mother, by Agnes Moorehead) is swept up at the story’s revised end by a Shiftlet with a conscience, and driven off into a pleasant sunset. Flannery, “disliking it heartily,” watched the production with her aunt Mary Cline, who deemed the ending improved. Reminiscent of Poe, shadowed by children flapping their arms like the Raven after the publication of his famous poem, Flannery told Maryat, “Children now point to me on the street. The city fathers think that I have arrived finally.”

  Though protesting that writing speeches was a distraction from her true vocation, Flannery spent much of the winter and spring of 1957 ignoring this “better judgment,” including an appearance at Emory on “How the Writer Writes.” When Granville Hicks asked for a copy of her GSCW address for his anthology, The Living Novel: A Symposium, including essays by Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Herbert Gold, Flannery complained, “I begin to feel like a displaced person myself, writing papers and not fiction.” Yet rather than decline, she decided to recast the talk, “designed for a student audience,” into a more publishable essay. Her excuse was an invitation from Robert Fitzgerald, who was spending a semester away from Italy as a visiting professor at Notre Dame, to address an audience of faculty and their wives, clergy, graduate students, and seminarians. For these “Cathlick interleckchuls” she felt she could unveil her Christian subtext.

  Arriving on Sunday, April 14, at the Chicago airport, where Robert Fitzgerald met her to connect to a flight to South Bend, Flannery was happily reunited with one of her most important friends and mentors for the first time in nearly four years. “She seemed frail but steady, no longer disfigured by any swelling, and her hair had grown long again,” he recalled. “She managed her light crutches with distaste but some dexterity.” Her host put her up at the Morris Inn, the best accommodation in town, built of yellow Indiana stone, on the edge of campus. She visited with her Iowa City housemate Ruth Sullivan Finnegan, now married to a university professor, and met a new friend, Thomas Stritch, a “bachelor don,” the nephew of Cardinal Stritch of Chicago, and another cradle Catholic publishing short stories, for whom she developed an “inordinate affection.”

  If Fitzgerald’s motives in inviting Flannery had been purely self-serving — he simply wished to see her — he was pleasantly surprised on Monday evening to discover that she “had wonderful things to say as a public speaker.” Her appearance before an audience of three hundred that she reckoned to Maryat was “25% Bumbling Boys, 25% skirted and beretta-ed simmernarians” proved successful enough for extra chairs to be moved into the hall. She read her paper, as Fitzgerald remembered, “intent upon it, hanging on her crutches at the lectern, courteous and earnest and dissolvent of nonsense.” Arguing that she was not your stereotypical Southern gothic writer — “unhappy combinations of Poe and Erskine Caldwell” — O’Connor insisted that her own use of the grotesque was meant to convey a shocking Christian vision of original sin. “To the hard of hearing you shout,” she said, “and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

  Fitzgerald rightly recognized that the “score” of talks she was beginning to give “brought her into the world again and gave her a whole new range of acquaintances.” But her stories were touching enough readers that even when she stayed home her circle of friends and fans was expanding exponentially, belying the stereotyping of her in the pre
ss as a reclusive Emily Dickinson of Milledgeville. She had recently received a letter of praise from Robert Lowell’s friend the poet Elizabeth Bishop. While the two never met, Bishop did telephone once from Savannah: “Quite soon a very collected, very southern voice answered and immediately invited me to ‘Come on over.’” (Bishop later admitted to feeling a bit “intimidated” by O’Connor.) When the poet sent a teeny, carved cross in a bottle from Brazil, Flannery wrote back, “If I were mobile and limber and rich I would come to Brazil at once after one look at this bottle. . . . It’s what I’m born to appreciate.”

  A highly informal letter arrived that spring from Cecil Dawkins, a young fiction writer from Alabama, teaching at Stephens College in Missouri. A friend lent Dawkins a copy of A Good Man, and she found the stories revelatory. “I sat down with a six pack of beer one night and I started reading this book and I got increasingly excited,” she recalled, “and when I had finished, I wrote a note on just a yellow pad and said, ‘You’re really great. . . . You’re terrific’; and I didn’t know where to send it. I just sent it to Milledgeville and I didn’t know if she’d ever get it. But I got an answer by return mail and we wrote until she died.” Although they met only three times, Flannery recommended Dawkins to her agent, and to Yaddo; she also helped the Roman Catholic writer with her religious doubts. “She became my reader,” said Dawkins. “Her reader was Caroline Gordon and Flannery read everything I wrote when I was finished.”