Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  The fourth or fifth visitor to become a truly close friend in less than a year was Louise Abbot, a lovely young woman trying to combine motherhood and writing, who lived with her lawyer-husband and small children in Louisville, Georgia, just sixty miles away. Abbot first encountered O’Connor’s stories at St. Joseph’s in Atlanta, where her husband was hospitalized: “I tried reading them aloud to my husband, but had to stop because it hurt him to laugh.” Though a recognized writer, with a prize-winning story published in Mademoiselle, she confessed to almost trying to pass herself off as a journalist to meet O’Connor. “I am very glad that you have decided not to be a lady-journalist,” Flannery wrote back, inviting her to Andalusia, “because I am deathly afraid of the tribe.”

  On the Thursday in late April 1957 when Louise Abbot was invited to Andalusia for the afternoon, her husband had earlier legal business in Milledgeville, so she killed time by taking in Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor, at the local movie theater. Driving up the red clay road at precisely three thirty, she admitted in her own letter to Maryat Lee, years later, of her first meeting with O’Connor, that her reading of the stories had been so superficial that she imagined that “we would have a few beers together and enjoy some dark comedy about Southern small towns.” Abbot wrongly expected that she was going to greet a fellow agnostic with whom she could disparage local manners and mores. She found herself greatly surprised, the first of many surprises being Flannery’s crutches, as she propped open the screen door dressed in blue jeans, a long-tailed plaid shirt, and loafers. But, like Maryat, her visitor soon found herself absorbed instead by her “very expressive” light blue eyes.

  As they sat rocking in the tall, high-backed chairs, Louise was sensitive enough to pick up on some of the tensions between Flannery and her mother. Unlike Maryat, she was able to chat with Mrs. O’Connor quite easily. Yet when Regina seemed about to make a condescending remark, as Louise described herself as “wanting” to write, Flannery interjected, “She’s had a story published. She’s a professional writer.” Before disappearing into her room to fetch copies of Wise Blood and Understanding Fiction, Flannery startled Louise by turning and saying, “You stay here.” Abbot noticed, “There was a quality in Flannery that forbade intimacy.” At the suggestion that she was a “famous writer,” Flannery scowled. “I believe in a good deal of Hell’s fire on this earth, and if I thought of myself in such a way for a minute, I’d consign myself to it promptly.”

  Yet as they found common ground in shared Savannah girlhoods in the 1930s and a perverse love of “The Worry Clinic,” the advice column of Dr. George W. Crane that ran almost daily on the comics page of the Atlanta Constitution until 1957, a friendship flowered: Flannery’s favorite was Crane’s counsel to a lethargic soul to donate a water cooler to his church because “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” When Louise revealed that her family was Associate Reformed Presbyterian, Flannery asked, “What in the wurld-d is that?” Louise, in turn, was surprised to find that Flannery was Roman Catholic. “Yes, we believe . . . ,” she began, and recited the entire Apostles’ Creed, as nineteen peacocks high-stepped across the lawn. Walking together to her car, Louise admitted to being a bit lonely as a housewife-writer in Louisville. “Come back as often as you can,” said Flannery. “I’m in the same position you are.” Louise Abbot was soon returning often, invited to join Flannery and Regina for lunch in the combination sitting and dining room, or at Sanford House; she was one friend Flannery could trust not to judge her mother, or their relationship.

  Over the spring and summer the letters between Flannery and her closer friend Betty Hester turned from theology to the carpentry of constructing a good story and gossip. The true zing in her correspondence that season, though, came from the irrepressible Maryat Lee, living a life of adventure that fulfilled her niece’s characterization of her as Auntie Mame. Maryat had failed to mention that she was engaged to an Australian named David Foulkes-Taylor, whom she met while covering the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1952. When she finally broke the news of a summer wedding, Flannery wrote back, “The following is good Georgia advice: don’t marry no foreigner. Even if his face is white, his heart is black.”

  The marriage did take place, on the freighter Mukahuru Maru, sailing from Long Beach, California, to Japan. But the union did not go off without a hitch. Along the way, Foulkes-Taylor met a man to whom he was attracted, while Maryat, in Tokyo, soon developed a one-sided crush on the film critic and well-known writer on Japanese culture Donald Richie, who remembers her “intense manner and big, square teeth.” In the midst of such news, and plenty of light banter from Flannery about Chairman Mao, opium parlors, and saber-toothed tigers, Maryat sent a four-page letter in late May exclaiming that she loved her, too. While she did not label herself “bisexual” until the seventies, such free love was already part of Maryat’s style. Yet Flannery might well have been surprised to have her confess, from eight thousand miles away, “Oh Flannery, I love you too. Did you know that? I almost said it when we were standing by a fence. . . . What would you have done if I had come up with it? Gone flippity flapping away on your crutches I bet.”

  As with Betty, Flannery did not blink, or “flippity flap” away, but she did transpose the discussion into a more spiritual key. “Everything has to be diluted with time and with matter, even that love of yours which has to come down on many of us to be able to come down on one,” she carefully responded. “It is grace and it is the blood of Christ and I thought, after I had seen you once that you were full of it and didn’t know what to do with it or perhaps even what it was. Even if you loved Faulkes and Ritche and me and Emmet and Emmet’s brother and his girl friend equally and undividedly, it all has to be put somewhere finally.” Maryat groused that her reply was full of pious clichés, not flesh and blood. The line went quiet between them for four months. When Maryat got back in touch, Flannery steadily reassured, “I am not to be got rid of by crusty letters.”

  Where Flannery truly diluted her friendship with Maryat, as with much of the time and matter of her life, was in her fiction. When Maryat sent the letter of rapprochement in October, Flannery was already at work on “The Enduring Chill,” the story that treated her own fluctuating illness, but was also a trial sketch of Maryat as a perfect life model for one of her favorite types, the egoistic artist-intellectual. While the character Asbury shared some of Flannery’s symptoms, he was closer to Maryat: like her, he was a playwright living in a New York tenement walk-up with “a closet with a toilet in it”; his work in progress, “a play about Negroes,” was a swipe at Maryat’s performed in Harlem by an all-black cast; his forced integration, smoking a cigarette with black workers in the milk shed, captured the spirit of her taboo ride to the airport with Emmett.

  The story was also a mulled response to Maryat’s opinions on religion as spouted on their first meeting while Flannery, according to Maryat, “suffered my remarks with curious attention.” The comment that stuck, as Flannery wrote her, concerned “the orthodoxy, which I remember you said was a ceiling you had come through.” In “The Enduring Chill,” the water stains “on the ceiling” above Asbury’s bed transform into the Holy Spirit, surprisingly envisaged as a fierce bird of chill-inducing ice descending, in graceful revenge. “But — the last paragraph! You really seem to have busted a ceiling,” Maryat joked when she read the story in Harper’s Bazaar. “This is the closest I have seen you come to your mind’s passion.” She got its message about Asbury, as well: “the descent of the Holy Icicle, despite himself.” When Maryat sent a gift subscription to the Village Voice, Flannery thanked her for the newspaper, which was founded in 1955 by Norman Mailer and Dan Wolf out of a downtown apartment: it “reminds me of my character, Asbury, and his life in the city.” Maryat signed one of her next letters, “Wishing for an icicle to descend, M.”

  Flannery read “The Enduring Chill” aloud publicly just once, at what she called a “pseudo-literary&theological gathering,” a weekly reading group held a
t Andalusia, instigated by William Kirkland, the local Episcopal minister, where Maryat read a play in progress that spring, too. Lasting from the fall of 1957 until 1960, the group began with a grand plan to discuss “theology in modern literature” and was made up of six to eight regulars, mostly GSCW professors, plus an air force sergeant and a psychiatrist from the mental hospital. Flannery was thankful when their reading list relaxed from Kierkegaard and Sartre to Lardner and Welty. On the evening she presented her new story in the smoke-filled dining room, Kirkland recalls that she played up the comic relationship of Asbury and his physician: “She really bore down with special emphasis on his comment, ‘What’s wrong with me goes way beyond Block.’”

  Maryat’s reading from her play Kairos, set in the South, took place while she was in town for the formal investiture of her brother as college president on April 3, 1958. She later remembered the group as “not particularly scintillating; everybody on good behavior. . . . It was a bit academic for me.” Mary Barbara Tate, a high school English teacher at the time, and a member of the group, recalls, “Maryat read us a play one night that she had written. She was such a nut. She had such an ego. And yet there was something very warm and appealing about her. I liked her.” Maryat’s knack for scandal was accented by the presence of a companion, Jean “Poppy” Raymond, formerly a principal ballerina in an Australian dance company, whom she had met on the eventful Japanese freighter trip and was now living with in New York City; she and Foulkes-Taylor had parted company in Hong Kong, though they still remained married.

  Alert to all the imagery from O’Connor’s stories lurking in the landscape of the farm, established authors began arriving, as well. By the spring of 1958, Andalusia had become a known destination. The young poet James Dickey, later the author of Deliverance, stopped by in early March. Dickey told a friend that when he started writing, O’Connor was the only author in Georgia who “was doing anything.” That day he identified himself mostly as an admirer of Robert Lowell. On a subsequent visit, O’Connor happily reported that he brought his son, “to show his little boy the ponies.” “My father tempted me there with talk of Shetland ponies,” concurs Christopher Dickey, who went on to become Newsweek’s Paris bureau chief. “I was horrified because I had never met anyone so sick and crippled. But, as a child, I kept one of her peacock plumes in my collection of treasures.”

  Katherine Anne Porter, at work for twenty-seven years on her novel Ship of Fools, arrived, too, for lunch after a late-March public reading in Macon; she was driven over by the Gossetts. Flannery was amused when she heard that Porter performed at the college wearing “a black halter type dress sans back, & long black gloves which interfered with her turning the pages. After each story, she made a kind of curtsy, which someone described as ‘wobbly.’” Entertaining the “very pleasant and agreeable” Southern writer — her “Noon Wine” was an early influence at Iowa — Flannery noted that she “plowed all over the yard behind me in her spike-heeled shoes to see my various kinds of chickens.” In a more lyrical account of the afternoon, Porter recalled her “gracious” hostess as “tenderly fresh-colored, young, smiling . . . balanced lightly on her aluminum crutches, whistling to her peacocks who came floating and rustling to her, calling in their rusty voices.”

  Chapter Nine

  Everything That Rises

  Whenever Flannery talked about her upcoming trip to Lourdes, planned for three weeks in April and May 1958, she cast herself as an accidental pilgrim. This sole trip outside the United States, by the woman who had already decided that sickness was “more instructive than a long trip to Europe,” was not of her own design. Hearing of the Lourdes Centennial Pilgrimage — organized as a package tour by the Diocese of Savannah, to the site of Bernadette Soubirous’s vision of the Virgin Mary in the south of France — Cousin Katie Semmes immediately thought of Mary Flannery, and her worsening condition. Knowing the reputation of Bernadette’s spring for physical cures, she insisted on paying the $1,050.40 per-person fee to send both mother and daughter.

  Over the six-month lead-up to their departure, Flannery mined the imminent event for all its comic potential, though her barbs about the “holy exhaustion” anticipated with a dozen fellow pilgrims, mostly “fortress-footed Catholic females herded from holy place to holy place,” belied true anxiety. She blamed the trip entirely on Cousin Katie’s “will of iron.” Her trepidation began to sound reasonable when a final itinerary was presented that included, within a time frame of seventeen days, stops in London, Dublin (“I bet that’ll be real sickening,” she told the Fitzgeralds), Paris, Lourdes, Barcelona, Rome, and Lisbon. According to her math, she concluded to Betty Hester, “7 into 17 is 2 and a fraction and if four days are devoted to Rome, I figure them other places will not see much of us. By my calculations we should see more airports than shrines.”

  A reprieve came in February, when Dr. Merrill advised canceling the trip because her X ray revealed hip deterioration that he now admitted was probably a side effect of the lupus. He suggested possible treatment at Warm Springs. Flannery received the news with secret relief — but not Cousin Katie, who then offered to fund a less taxing trip that would include Lourdes, but not all the other stops. Flannery was hardly eager to take in what she kept calling “Baloney Castle” — the Blarney Castle, in Killarney. But she had hoped to see the Fitzgerald family. So when Sally offered to put the O’Connors up at their home in Italy and accompany them to rejoin the other pilgrims in Paris, Flannery agreed. “Left for two minutes alone in foreign parts,” she joked to Sally, “Regina and I would probably end up behind the Iron Curtain asking the way to Lourdes in sign language.”

  Yet for all her satire, Flannery was not entirely opposed to the trip. In the face of skeptics, this unlikely “church lady” could be far less sarcastic about it. Flannery was sincere about the upcoming pilgrimage with Katherine Anne Porter, who briefly converted to Catholicism in her youth, during a brush with tuberculosis. She told Betty that when Porter asked, during her March visit, “where we were going in Europe and I said Lourdes, a very strange expression came over her face, just a slight shock as if some sensitive spot had been touched. She said that she had always wanted to go to Lourdes.” She conceded to the Fitzgeralds that “my cousin is certainly very good to give us this trip.” While claiming to prefer to visit the Matisse Chapel, in Vence, just completed in 1951, a journey to the heart of a nearly medieval spirituality was hardly unthinkable.

  Three days before departing she responsibly filed her “Last Will and Testament of Mary Flannery O’Connor,” at the Baldwin County Court House, reflecting a sense at the time of European travel as a major undertaking, and belying her focus, perhaps even more than usual, on her certain mortality. “Item-One” of the will directed her executrix, Regina O’Connor, to “set aside the sum of $100.00 for the purpose to have masses said for the repose of my soul.” Robert Fitzgerald, named literary executor, was assigned care for all unpublished manuscripts and the letters that had been preserved by her in carbon copies. Her books and paintings were to be consigned to the GSCW library. After the filing of the will, the remainder of preparation over the weekend consisted of packing, with much extra fussing by Regina. Flannery relayed one exchange to Betty: “She is reading the Lourds book and every now and then announces a fact, such as, ‘It doesn’t make any difference how much you beg and plead, they won’t let you in.’ ‘Won’t let you in where?’ ‘In Lourds with a short sleeved dress on or low cut.’ ‘I ain’t got any low cut dress.’”

  On Monday, April 21, Flannery and her mother, “like Mr. Head and Nelson facing Atlanta,” she joked to Maryat, boarded a plane bound for Idlewild Airport in New York City. Unlike the other fourteen pilgrims, who took a bus to the Manger-Vanderbilt Hotel, at Park Avenue and 34th Street, Flannery and her mother were met by a limousine dispatched by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, to transport her to a meeting with Mr. Straus and Miss Cudahy. Giroux’s advice on an escape clause had proved to be prescient, as both Carver and Lindley did de
part Harcourt, and Flannery and her agent decided that her novel should be with Mr. Giroux. “I am properly back where I started from,” she said, with delight. The publisher Roger Straus telegrammed ahead to colleagues in Paris and Rome, informing them of the arrival of “our new important American author.”

  On the evening of April 22, O’Connor and her mother returned to the airport by bus, with the group, for a transatlantic flight aboard the TWA Constellation. Separating from the others at Shannon Airport in Dublin, a leg of the trip that Flannery, still holding on to the anti-Irish fervor of her girlhood, was only too happy to miss, they traveled on to London. Early the next morning the pair flew to Milan, where they arrived shortly after noon, and were met by Robert Fitzgerald. Nearly a year after driving Flannery from Chicago to South Bend, he now took her and Regina on a prettier ride from Milan to Levanto, a coastal town on the Ligurian Sea, south of Genoa, at the end of a thickly wooded pine valley. There Flannery was reunited with Sally, and with her three girls and three boys, for whom Flannery brought Uncle Remus tales after promising pocketknives and snuff.

  The four days spent at the Fitzgeralds’ villa — built on several levels on a steep hill dotted with olive trees, and overlooking the light blue sea, where Robert had been translating The Odyssey — certainly fulfilled Dr. Merrill’s orders for Flannery to rest between the strenuous beginning and middle of her trip. On spring days the trees below exploded with white and pink blossoms, the night air grew heavy, and, through open windows, the blond children could often be seen, or heard, playing in the courtyard. O’Connor reread the Uncle Remus tales that she brought as a gift, as well as Nabokov’s Pnin, finding the comic novel about an absentminded professor of Russian literature “wonderful.” Even so, as she reported to Ashley Brown, “The first cold germ I met on the other side moved in and stayed for the 17 days so most everything I saw was through a fog.”