Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  To make a point about Rayber’s sentimental utopianism, she tucked in a light parody of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Flannery was a fan of Holden Caulfield, the hard-boiled adolescent pointing out the “phoniness” of adults. When Salinger’s novel first appeared in 1951, she had pored over the book so avidly that Regina warned she was going to “RUIN MY EYES reading all that in one afternoon.” But, by the late fifties, the “Catcher Cult” was the very definition of “cool,” and she felt free to poke fun. Illustrating the naivete of his savior complex, O’Connor swiped Holden’s catcher-in-the-rye fantasy — catching “thousands of little kids” falling off a cliff — for Rayber, who imagined himself in a garden where he would “gather all the exploited children of the world and let the sunshine flood their minds.”

  Flannery, having reached the age of thirty-three, experienced much renewed strength during the summer of 1958. Besides facing down her novel again, she decided to address the fear expressed to Sally on their European train ride, brought on by Regina’s hospitalization for a bruised kidney before their departure. Flannery resolved to learn to drive when she found herself dependent on Aunt Mary, who, she told Betty, “can drive me nuts in about two minutes.” A slight setback occurred when she flunked her test on June 25, plowing in the wrong gear onto the front lawn of a stranger. The attending state police officer advised, “Younglady, I think you need sommo practice.” But two weeks later, she returned and passed. The “swan of old cars,” as Robert Lowell once called her, was now licensed to drive the “hearse-like” black Chevrolet with automatic transmission that she and her mother had ordered, with Uncle Louis’s help.

  About the time of the delivery of this “rolling memento mori,” from Atlanta, she was also visited by a fan of her work, who became identified in her mind with her volatile feelings about the psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and, particularly, theories of the role of dreams and the subconscious in literary production and religious expression. Ted Spivey, a writer on myth and literature, and a professor at Georgia State College, was soon classified by her as “my Jung friend,” and, therefore, a source of mixed feelings. As Louise Abbot, who knew them separately, parsed Flannery’s friendship with her far more extroverted, excitable friend, “She certainly found him an intelligent and good man. But she was not interested when he came to order his own life according to dream interpretations, especially when he started dreaming about her.”

  Spivey, just two years her junior, and briefly a student of Allen Tate’s at the University of Minnesota, had completed a dissertation on George Eliot, launching him on a mission to find an American woman writer with the intellect of Eliot, or Virginia Woolf, another favorite. When he began reading O’Connor’s fiction, he felt that he might well have found her and screwed up his courage to write, suggesting a meeting for August 15, when he would be driving from Atlanta to visit his parents in Swainsboro. Flannery assented, giving directions to show up at two p.m. “When I knocked on her door,” he wrote, “she appeared in a light-colored, rather conservative dress and suggested that we sit in rocking chairs on her porch. She asked me a few questions about myself, and within five minutes we were talking about writers and about their connection, when they had any, with religion. The talk lasted about two hours and was intense.”

  Leaving Andalusia that afternoon, Spivey was unsure whether the meeting had been a success, as he “could sense certain deep and sometimes disturbing currents” running through the author he would later describe as “the most complex person I have ever met.” He soon had his answer, though, as before he even had a chance to write a bread-and-butter note, Flannery sent him a letter at his parents’ home. “I have just finished a book which I am sure you would find relevant to your train of thought,” she began. “This is Israel and Revelation by Eric Voeglin. . . . It has to do with history as being existence under God, the ‘leap in being,’ etc.” Spivey was touched that she had recommended a writer so attuned to his interests, who became a favorite after he borrowed her copy. He was even more encouraged by her closing: “I enjoyed your visit and hope that you will stop again if you find it convenient when you pass this way.”

  Spivey’s second visit took place in November while he was visiting his parents at Thanksgiving. By then, he had sent Flannery a copy of Martin Buber’s Eclipse of God and was eager to hear her reaction to the contemporary Jewish theologian. “Now on a first-name basis, she met me dressed informally in slacks,” remembered Spivey. “Because the weather had turned cold, we sat in the living room under the gaze of her well-known self-portrait.” He interpreted the bird in the painting as an archetype, “a representation of her inner prophetic spirit.” Flannery was surprisingly excited about the “dialogic” Buber, even admitting that she found him a “good antidote to the prevailing tenor of Catholic philosophy.” She began to look beyond the apologetic Thomism of her formative years, while noting the absence of an indwelling Christ in Buber’s God as Other. Of Spivey, she wrote Betty, “He has a very fine mind inspite of the apocalyptic tastes.”

  “Prophetic” and “apocalyptic” were catchwords in the conversations of Flannery and Ted Spivey that winter, as they were the through-line of the novel she was writing, especially as she completed its last few pages — Tarwater, his eyes singed from fire, like Jonah returning to Nineveh, sets off “toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping.” Anxious for closure, Flannery had been counting off the pages to her friends. On New Year’s Day 1959, she promised the Fitzgeralds, “I only have to bear with the prophet Tarwater for about ten or twelve more pages.” She told Betty, of her imminent accomplishment, “I must say I attribute this to Lourdes more than the recalcifying bone.” By month’s end she was able to type and send off the forty-three-thousand-word manuscript, as with all her manuscripts since Wise Blood, to Caroline Gordon.

  Flannery took advantage of the turnaround time while Mrs. Tate “had her say” with the draft, preparing for two workshop classes and a public reading of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” which she was giving at the University of Chicago, the week of February 9, as a replacement for Eudora Welty, who needed to cancel her engagement. She claimed the seven-hundred-dollar fee “persuadeth me.” Yet the logistics of this trip proved her most difficult ever. Placing her suitcase in the car on a wintry morning, Louise, their household helper, said mournfully, “Miss Mary, I hopes we meet again.” Flannery dryly replied, “I hopes so too.” En route, a blizzard and ice storm forced her plane down in Louisville, Kentucky, and she was put on a bus for a nine-hour ride. As Richard G. Stern, director of the writing program, recalled, “I met her at two a.m. in the immense terminal building downtown. She was off the bus first, her aluminum crutches in complex negotiation with handrails, helping arms, steps. Tall, pale, spectacled, small-chinned, wearily piquant. I was to recognize her, she’d written, by the light of pure soul shining from her eyes. Fatigue, relief, wit-edged bile were more like it.”

  The requirements for the honorarium included the caveat of living for five nights in the guest room of a women’s residence hall so that she might “confer with the young ladies as to how to attain their ideals — this being a clause in some old lady’s will who is providing 2/7 of the money.” The stilted arrangement went no better than expected, reaching a low point when one of the girls, at tea, wondered, “Miss O’Connor, what are Christmas customs in Georgia?” She asked Stern, “Do they think I’m from Russia?” She read a dozen student manuscripts, “all bad but two,” and gave a sparsely attended public reading, her style, according to her host, “full of wry strength.” But she was happy to be able to meet Cecil Dawkins, who traveled to town with her friend Betty Littleton expressly to meet her mentor, for the first time, at a Saturday morning breakfast.

  Awaiting Flannery, on her return home, was confirmation of news that she had already heard from Henry Rago, the editor of Poetry magazine, at a cocktail party in Chicago: she was a recipient of an eight-thousand-dollar Ford Foundation fellowship, an honor shared
that year by Robert Fitzgerald and eight others. “I hope you are accustoming yourself to the pressure of the grant,” she wrote Fitzgerald. “I feel it myself.” When she had received her earlier Kenyon grant, funded by the Rockefellers, she invested in real estate: a five-room house on East Montgomery Street, on the way to the waterworks. “The house is subject to termite and poor white trash,” she told Tom Stritch, “but I get $55 a month for it.” Now she planned to buy an electric typewriter, a comfortable chair, and, otherwise, make the grant, paid over two years, “stretch into ten.”

  The last week in February she finally heard back from Caroline Gordon, who returned her manuscript covered with “doodles, exclamation points, cheers, growls.” While Flannery cherished Gordon as a first reader, she was beginning to separate from her as sole critical authority. She worried that Gordon was overly “enthusiastic,” and questioned whether her comments tended to the stylistic rather than the substantive. For second opinions, she sent drafts to the Cheneys, the Fitzgeralds, and Catharine Carver, now an editor at Viking. Brainard Cheney found some parts “obscure.” Robert Fitzgerald corroborated her sense that Rayber was “too much a parody”; so she rewrote the middle section for him, inventing the dramatic episode of a girl revivalist. As she kept mailing her redone pages, she complained to Carver, “When the grim reaper comes to get me, he’ll have to give me a few extra hours to revise my last words. No end to this.”

  Resolving to “work on Tarwater the rest of the summer,” Flannery did manage to entertain a number of visitors crucial to her literary career and, between drafts, even took a few trips herself. In April, her translator Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, teaching French literature at Princeton, arrived for a three-day stay at Andalusia. While most famous for setting off a Faulkner craze in France, with his 1931 essay in La Nouvelle Revue Française, he had recently been translating William Goyen and Truman Capote. Flannery worried about entertaining “an elderly French gentleman” for several days, but he busied himself easily, filming her flock of peacocks with his movie camera, and working on an introduction to La Sagesse dans le Sang (1959), in which he gave a brief history of American revivalism, including sketches of Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson, setting the novel in the context of the “monde tragicomique de ces évangélistes.”

  Two weeks later Flannery stayed again for four days with the Cheneys in Nashville, participating in a literary symposium at Vanderbilt, where she read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Ted Spivey, who was in the audience, remembered her as “sort of uptight . . . but very intense about reading that story.” The next morning she was interviewed by several of the university’s English majors, along with a fellow panelist and guest at the Cheneys’, Robert Penn Warren. She disliked the formalities. “Whoever invented the cocktail party should have been drawn and quartered,” she groused, but she was in awe of “Red” Warren, one of the first established writers to recognize her talent at Iowa. “I found her witty, shrewd, and strangely serene,” Warren later recalled the event, “for you had the sense that she loved the world and even forgave nonsense, none too tardily. Some time later she sent my little girl, whom she had never seen, a bright piece of a peacock’s tail.”

  Soon after she returned home in May, Robert Giroux, on a scouting tour, including visiting “all my famous authors,” fittingly stopped at Andalusia after spending time with Thomas Merton at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. “Brother Louis,” his Trappist name, had shown great interest in O’Connor, of whose work he later wrote, “When I read Flannery O’Connor, I don’t think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles.” He peppered Giroux with questions about her life on the farm, and gave him a beautifully designed presentation copy of his Prometheus: A Meditation to bring to her. “The aura of aloneness surrounding each of them was not an accident,” observed Giroux. “It was their métier, in which they refined and deepened their very different talents in a short span of time.”

  Giroux first stopped at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, a daughter house of Gethsemani in Conyers, just outside Atlanta, where, by chance, he met Bill Sessions. Taking a bus from the monastery, he was then picked up at the gate of Andalusia by mother and daughter. “The car was going about five miles an hour up this road,” remembered Giroux. “As we drove in she had about thirty peacocks strutting around. They’re very beautiful, but very stupid, and their trains were trailing. They were so slow that the car would run over their trains.” He immediately went upstairs to change into his loafers and a flannel shirt: “I tried to be as informal and relaxed as possible. I could see this was all of interest to her, how men behaved.” Giroux thought that the O’Connors were “really putting on the dog for the editor from New York,” as he was then a guest at a formal lunch at the Cline Mansion, replete with silverware and crystal, served by a black butler in white cotton gloves.

  A tense moment occurred at breakfast the next morning when Mrs. O’Connor asked, over cornflakes, “Mister Giroux, can’t you get Flannery to write about nice people?” Giroux said, “I started to laugh. But Flannery was sitting utterly deadpan. I thought, ‘Uh, oh. This is serious to her.’ Flannery never smiled, or raised her eyebrow, or gave me any clue.” On his return to New York he told Lowell of the trip and the poet passed on the news, adding an even sharper edge. “Her life is what you might guess,” he wrote Elizabeth Bishop. “A small, managing indomitable mother, complaining that no one helps her, more or less detesting Flannery’s work, impressed however, wishing she would marry — Flannery silent in her presence. A tall ancient Aunt living next to the old State Capitol, the unwanted peacocks . . . her Mother forcing her to bathe at Lourdes, an improvement, announced as a miracle by the Mother, Flannery silent. Battles between the Mother and the Catholic priest about an unwished-for altar tapestry.”

  By the fall Flannery finished typing up her manuscript and enjoyed a brief spell of satisfaction. “I sit all day typing and grinning like the Cheshire cat,” she wrote Maryat of the novel, now clearly organized around the drowning-baptism of Bishop by Tarwater. “Does it have symbolisms in it?” her mother asked. “You know when I was coming along, they didn’t have symbolisms.” Caroline Gordon chose to visit Andalusia in October, after the novel was completed. She was driven there by Ashley Brown, who was teaching at the University of South Carolina. Brown had recently finished his doctoral dissertation on Gordon’s work, including a chapter on her 1956 novel, a roman à clef based loosely on Dorothy Day, which Flannery thought “the best thing I’ve read on The Malefactors.” As Caroline was in the throes of a painful divorce from Allen Tate, though, the weekend was difficult, intensified by a formidable antagonism between her and Mrs. O’Connor.

  Everyone came away a bit weary. Having spotted a dog she decided was lost on the highway, Caroline importuned Ashley to drive back to look for the animal, which they luckily never found. “I was not ABOUT to have that dog spend the night in my car,” Ashley told Regina. On Sunday morning, Caroline gave Flannery a two-hour lecture on the “seems” and “as if” constructions in her prose. “When she is doing something like that she is most nearly herself,” Flannery said. More “nerve-wracking” was “keeping her and my mother’s personalities from meeting headlong with a crash.” A near collision occurred with Caroline’s censure of the O’Connors for using artificial breeding with their cows, which she deemed antithetical to Catholic theology. After her departure, Regina sharply remarked that she understood “why that man would want to divorce her.”

  Flannery took advantage of a two-month lull before the novel’s publication — “this is the best stage,” she told Maryat, “before it is published and begins to be misunderstood.” She returned to story writing, with “The Comforts of Home.” Unusual in its casting of a widowed mother as a bleeding-heart liberal who takes in the caricature of a sex-starved “Nimpermaniac,” Star Drake (real name, Sarah Ham), the story revolves around the widow’s only son, Thomas, driven to matricide by the presence of the “little slut.” Ma
king him resemble his namesake, St. Thomas, in more than “large frame,” O’Connor planted an inside joke: when he chases the girl from his bedroom door by “holding the chair in front of him like an animal trainer.” So, too, had Aquinas been fabled to chase away a prostitute with a red-hot poker. “It would be fashionable today to be in sympathy with the woman,” Flannery archly wrote Betty, “but I am in sympathy with St. Thomas.”

  “The Comforts of Home” afforded a glimpse of a Jansenist aspect of Flannery’s character that she usually kept hidden in her stories, along with the topic of sex altogether. But when Robie Macauley, succeeding John Crowe Ransom as editor of Kenyon Review, published the story a year later, with an inch-high illustration of a naked Star Drake, Flannery fumed. “I was pretty disappointed and sick when I saw the illustration you stuck on my story,” she angrily wrote him. “I don’t know what you’ve gained by it but you’ve lost a contributor.” By way of explanation of such outbursts, Betty Hester, writing to Greg Johnson, fell back on her sense of Flannery’s intact innocence, her professed desire to remain twelve. She presumed Flannery was most likely “unaware of the strangely sexual undertones of . . . Thomas’ murder of his mother” in ‘The Comforts of Home.”

  Ted Spivey, too, quickly became mindful of what he called her “revulsion at the frankly sexual in literature.” She was devastating on the subject of Thomas Wolfe, or of critical praise for D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (“pious slop”), as well as the openly homosexual writings of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. “Mr. Truman Capote makes me plumb sick, as does Mr. Tenn. Williams,” she wrote Betty. When anyone detected a sexual undercurrent in her own stories, she could be as outsized in response as she had been with Macauley. Receiving a letter from an acquaintance, six years earlier, ascribing a lesbian subtext to “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” she protested, “As for lesbianism I regard that as any other form of uncleanness. Purity is the twentieth centuries dirty word but it is the most mysterious of the virtues.”