by Brad Gooch
She had first come upon her title, six years earlier, in an elevator in Davison’s department store, on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta. An elderly woman entered behind Flannery, who was navigating on her newly acquired crutches, and said in a pitying voice, “Bless you, darling!” As Flannery wrote Betty of the incident, the woman then “grabbed my arm and whispered (very loud) in my ear, ‘Remember what they said to John at the gate, darling!’ It was not my floor but I got off and I suppose the old lady was astounded at how quick I could get away on crutches. I have a one-legged friend and I asked her what they said to John at the gate. She said she reckoned they said, ‘The lame shall enter first.’ This may be because the lame will be able to knock everybody else aside with their crutches.” The phrase aptly fit her character Rufus, with his “monstrous club foot.”
But when Caroline read the new pages, she was not impressed. She found them “completely undramatic.” Going beyond her usual criticism, Caroline pierced to the essence of O’Connor’s fiction. As Flannery summed up her comments to Cecil Dawkins, “Caroline says I have been writing too many essays and it is affecting my style. Well I ain’t going to write no more essays.” While she did not keep her promise as far as talks were concerned, she did seem happy for any excuse not to write more magazine articles. She had found such writing paid well but was full of indignities. “I’m amused by the letter from Holiday,” she wrote Elizabeth McKee. “The fellow obviously thinks it’s a great accomplishment to write something for them.” When the magazine requested another piece on a Southern town, she complained that doing so might “activate my lupus.”
As soon as Caroline and Ashley departed, Flannery set to work redeeming her story. “She did think the structure was good and the situation,” she told Betty of further comments from Gordon. “All I got to do is write the story.” So she deepened the drama by borrowing from Hawthorne’s allegory in “The Birthmark.” Her social worker, Sheppard, with his “narrow brush halo” of prematurely white hair and wish to reform wayward boys, shares a penchant for human engineering with Hawthorne’s mad scientist Aylmer. Like Aylmer’s unwitting victim, his wife, Georgiana, who expires along with her blemish, Sheppard’s son Norton, whom his father wishes to teach to be “good and unselfish,” accidentally hangs himself while peering through an attic telescope for some sign of his dead mother. The stand-in for Aylmer’s cloddish assistant, Aminadab, is Rufus, the very incarnation of fundamental evil in the guise of a young boy with a Hitlerian forelock.
Although her story was now moral and nearly allegorical, like Hawthorne’s, rather than “topical,” Flannery used current events and popular culture to update, and to camouflage, the original. In May 1961, Alan Shepard, “America’s first space hero” — his name tantalizingly close to that of her own Sheppard, who buys Rufus a telescope to teach him the wonders of space travel — made a suborbital flight in Freedom 7. Flannery had been following the space race, her new symbol for human pride, on TV, and the next January reported to Betty, regarding the forthcoming televised space launch of John Glenn, “Tomorrow I am orbiting with Glenn.” In July, Wild in the Country, a dramatic film about the “rehabilitation of a country boy from delinquency,” starring Elvis Presley, showed in Milledgeville. So Flannery took great pleasure in having her own country boy, Rufus, shimmy down a hallway in Norton’s dead mother’s corset, belting out Presley’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”
A subtle shift in her fictional world was taking place, too, in the depictions of the ever-present mother figure. While matricide continued as a favorite climax, a softer approach was subtly introduced. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” the fatal clobbering of Julian’s mother is followed by his mournful keening as he discovers “the world of guilt and sorrow.” While Norton’s mother is deceased, her presence in “The Lame Shall Enter First” is benign. “The little boy wouldn’t have been looking for his mother if she hadn’t been a good one when she was alive,” Flannery told Betty. Certainly acceptance of her own mother was a condition to which Flannery aspired, as she gradually shifted, during the 1960s, from using “I” to “we,” when speaking of matters at home. As Maryat wrote, over a decade later, in one of her journals, “I’m convinced that she used Regina in some way as part of her worship. Regina was her cross. She was Regina’s cross. It worked. They both basked now and then in the glow of it.”
Yet crossbearing was an arduous daily discipline, and much tension remained. Having once accused her of getting “away with murder” for the shocking “likeness” to Regina in the gored Mrs. May of “Greenleaf” (“She don’t read any of it,” assured Flannery), Maryat did witness some difficult moments. She was quite startled one afternoon when Regina barged into Flannery’s room, stormed over, and “smacked the windows open” to scream at Shot for some infraction. After she left, slamming the door behind her, Maryat said, “Surely she doesn’t do that in the mornings!” Flannery nodded vigorously. “She does do it.” Admittedly a girl at the time, Catherine Morai, a parishioner at Sacred Heart Church, felt that she routinely observed friction between them at early mass: “I have a very strong memory of Flannery struggling down the church steps with her crutches and her braces. The look on her mother’s face was angry and annoyed.”
Throughout the summer of 1961, Regina’s all-consuming business project was the transformation of Andalusia from a dairy farm to a beef farm, while also expanding its timber sales. Some of the attraction of the new venture was having a business that would not require as many workers to operate the milk barn. “The staff is non compos mentis every weekend,” Flannery wrote the Gossetts, “and she HAS HAD ENOUGH.” By July, they had sold their dairy herd, bought a purebred shorthorn bull, and were now fully in the beef business. Bulls were enough of a presence by the fall that when talk turned to building a bomb shelter, Flannery claimed to dream nightly of “radiated bulls and peacocks and swans.” Of the constant activity in a stretch of timberland, the critic Richard Gilman recalled, during his visit, “I could hear the dull whine of distant buzz-saws.”
Flannery’s own project was researching a hip operation that she hoped would allow her to walk freely again, without crutches. The Lourdes miracle, as humble as it was, had been short-lived, and she was seeking a more reliable improvement. Her closest confidante in these medical matters had become Maryat, and Flannery was surprisingly receptive as her friend began to explore experimental avenues of treatment; she was conferring especially with Dr. Henry Sprung, a lupus specialist in Providence, Rhode Island. In April, Flannery reported to Maryat that she had visited Dr. Merrill’s office in Atlanta for injections of cortisone and Novocain in both hips to ease her sitting and standing; full relief lasted only about two weeks. In July, she shared her frustration that “Scientist Merrill” had nixed a surgical-steel hip-implant operation, approved by her bone doctor, because he was afraid of reactivating her lupus with a kidney flare or an infection.
Flannery was experiencing some disappointments, too, in her important friendships. Chief among them was Betty Hester, for whom she had such tender feelings. While she had feigned some indifference to Betty’s choice to be confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church five years earlier, the move was actually a source of great joy. She hoped Betty would find in religion the strength that she sensed the fragile young woman, who had such difficult setbacks in life, sorely needed. And so she suffered when Betty told her, shortly after a visit to Andalusia in September, that she had decided to leave the Church. As with her response to news of Erik’s engagement, Flannery retreated into the protective plural, writing Betty that “I don’t know anything that could grieve us here like this news.” She deemed the turn of events “painful.”
Flannery eventually came to blame this loss of faith on Iris Murdoch, the Dublin-born novelist who had been strongly influenced by Simone Weil, and by Wittgenstein, whose lectures she attended at Cambridge. Earlier in the year, Flannery had read two of Murdoch’s novels, The Flight from the Enchanter and A Severed Head, finding them “comp
letely hollow.” But Betty grew infatuated with these works, which were full of ethical questions and sexual complications among the English upper class. “This conversion was achieved by Miss Iris Murdoch,” Flannery wrote Cecil Dawkins of the weird literary battle for Betty’s soul. “It’s as plain as the nose on her face that now she’s being Iris Murdoch, but it is only plain to me, not her.” Flannery’s misgivings were borne out by several bouts of depression suffered by Betty. Their friendship survived, but with less hopefulness on Flannery’s part than in the first years. Betty went on to initiate a correspondence with Murdoch that lasted until her own death — by suicide, in 1998, when she was seventy-six.
Nonetheless, with a brief break in early November to address the cloistered nuns of Marillac College near St. Louis, Missouri, on “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” Flannery did manage to finish “The Lame Shall Enter First” by year’s end. Still angry at Robie Macauley for the illustration that she claimed was a misguided attempt to “compete with PLAYBOY,” she submitted the story instead to her old teacher Andrew Lytle, now editor of the Sewanee Review. She never knew that Lytle had passed on reviewing Wise Blood, or, as Macauley later revealed, that at Iowa he “found her fiction rather uncouth.” Yet, like many readers, Lytle was won over as her adult stories appeared; he even wrote for her 1956 Guggenheim reapplication that she was “immensely improved since I first taught her.” Lytle not only accepted the story, but planned a special summer issue around O’Connor’s fiction, with essays by Robert Fitzgerald and John Hawkes.
Flannery had actually known Lytle’s intriguing choice, the young novelist John Hawkes, since the summer of 1958, when he and his wife stopped by on their way to Florida from Harvard, where he was teaching. He then mailed her two of his early novels, which she admired as “the grotesque with all stops out.” When James Dickey visited, he surprisingly revealed that he, too, was an avid reader of Hawkes’s dark, surrealist works. “You may state without fear of contradiction that you now have two fans in Georgia,” she quickly wrote Hawkes. Three years later, in a rare blurb, she praised his 1961 novel, The Lime Twig: “You suffer The Lime Twig like a dream. It seems to be something that is happening to you, that you want to escape from but can’t.” Hawkes, likewise, championed O’Connor, shocking a Brandeis University audience by reading aloud, before its publication, the rape scene of Tarwater from her latest novel.
Yet the liveliest point of contention — and interest — between the two was Hawkes’s main theory about O’Connor’s writing: that hers was a “black,” even “diabolical,” authorial voice. Since he first read her fiction ten years earlier, at the prompting of Melville’s granddaughter, Eleanor Melville Metcalf, in Cambridge, he had been developing this line of thought, much like William Blake’s perverse reading of John Milton as “of the Devil’s party.” Flannery never sanctioned the notion, but neither was she completely dismissive. She even baited Hawkes a bit. When she learned he would be writing an essay accompanying “The Lame Shall Enter First,” she sent him the story with a teasing note: “In this one, I’ll admit that the devil’s voice is my own.” When Hawkes’s “Flannery O’Connor’s Devil” appeared in the summer of 1962, she wrote him, “I like the piece very very much.” But, privately, to Ted Spivey, she refuted the essay as “off-center”: “Jack Hawkes’ view of the devil is not a theological one. His devil is an impeccable literary spirit whom he makes responsible for all good literature. Anything good he thinks must come from the devil. He is a good friend of mine and I have had this out with him many times, to no avail.”
FLANNERY TRIED UNSUCCESSFULLY to withdraw “The Lame Shall Enter First” in final page proofs, when she “decided that I don’t like it.” Over the next year and a half she often spoke of finding herself at a creative impasse. When Father McCown wrote, praising “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” which appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1962, she answered vulnerably, “But pray that the Lord will send me some more. I’ve been writing for sixteen years and I have the sense of having exhausted my original potentiality and being now in need of the kind of grace that deepens perception, a new shot of life or something.”
Such reappraising began as she approached her thirty-seventh birthday. Flannery had never marked her birthdays with any celebration. When Betty sent her a birthday card that year, she responded, “When I was a child I used to dread birthdays for fear R. would throw a surprise party for me. My idea of hell was the door bursting open and a flock of children pouring in yelling SURPRISE! Now I don’t mind them. That danger is over.” Yet she was obviously meditating during this Lenten season on a curious quiet in her usually noisy life of the imagination, as she struggled with the flu in her front room, which was thick with the scent of Vicks VapoRub. Her sense of being at a juncture was clearly borne out during the morning work hours: 1962 was remarkable as a year when she created no new stories. Instead she gave nearly a dozen public talks and readings.
In April, she made the first of these “powerful social” appearances by speaking at both Meredith College and North Carolina State College, “strictly a technical school,” in Raleigh, on “The Grotesque in Southern Literature.” Returning home for a week, she was then off again to Converse College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to take part in a literary festival with Eudora Welty, Cleanth Brooks, and Andrew Lytle. Exempting Welty from the scorn she often expressed for her fellow Southern writers — especially Carson McCullers, whose recent novel, Clock Without Hands, she derided as “the worst book I have ever read” — Flannery respected the older writer. “I really liked Eudora Welty,” she confirmed to Cecil Dawkins. “No pretence whatsoever, just a real nice woman.” She loved retelling Welty’s anecdote of sending a love scene to Faulkner for criticism, and his replying, “Honey, it isn’t the way I would do it, but you go right ahead.”
She did find time, when she returned to Andalusia, to write a preface for a reissue of Wise Blood, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. Her one-paragraph note, requested by Giroux, was mostly a technical requirement for lengthening copyright. She had resisted the assignment for several months, complaining to Betty that “‘Explanations’ are repugnant to me” and feeling that future critics should simply read everything she had written, “even and particularly the Mary Ann piece.” Nonetheless, she set to work constructing a note that she intended to be “light and oblique. No claims & very few assertions.” The final result, though, was rather heavy, and blunt. Forever prevented from mistaking the novel as a satire on religion, readers opening this edition, with its red cover and imagery of blind eyes, were met with a disclaimer from the author stating that she had written “a comic novel about a Christian malgre lui, and as such, very serious.”
Maryat was livid when she read the new preface, and shot off an impassioned complaint to her friend: “Now what did you go and put a PREFACE on it for you damn Jeswit, why it’s a ruddy apologia.” Giroux explained, “Flannery was a paradoxical person and a paradoxical writer. It’s what fascinates us. It’s a natural human reaction when a person is so contradictory.” But the reaction among some of her more secular friends to this paradox was to begin to feel that she did not accept, and perhaps in some truly shuttered way did not even allow herself to understand, the implications of her writings. Like John Hawkes, Maryat simply decided to ignore Flannery’s own pronouncements. “The writing is one thing and the thinking and speeches are another,” she wrote a mutual friend. “Jekyl and Hyde if you will. Perhaps.”
Praising to Betty the essential ingredients of “much liquor and male companionship, both of which I could stand more of more often,” Flannery then visited the Notre Dame campus on May 4, after two days of her more usual fare of speaking on “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” to the sisters of Rosary College, outside Chicago. Driving her from Rosary, including a stretch in the middle lane of Chicago’s teeming Congress Street Expressway, flanked by “odiferous diesel trucks,” Joel Wells has recalled her candor; when asked what s
he thought of the recently published sensation To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, she replied, “It’s a wonderful children’s book.” She then returned to South Bend, just a month later, to receive an honorary doctor of letters at St. Mary’s College, the “sister college” of Notre Dame.
Between her first trip to the Midwest and her second, for collecting her hood, which her mother duly “wrapped up in newspaper against moths and put in the back reaches of the closet,” she made an appearance at Emory to talk about “The South.” When the critic Granville Hicks visited Andalusia in April, Flannery insisted, of her crutches, “They don’t interfere with anything.” Such certainly seemed to be the case with these demanding connections between cars, trains, and plane, as her mother met her at the Atlanta airport with a wheelchair. In the audience on the warm Sunday afternoon of May 20, for the Emory talk, given outside on the Quadrangle, was Alfred Corn, who went on to become a well-known poet and critic. Then a first-year student, studying Wise Blood in a Great Books course, he vividly remembers her “wearing a blue plaid skirt and a white blouse, buttoned at the top, of course, and unattractive pointed glasses.”
While too nervous to walk up to speak with her afterward, as “she was that awesome creature, a famous writer,” Corn did screw up his courage to write, like Cecil Dawkins before him, putting as the address simply “Milledgeville.” With early aspirations to the Christian ministry, Corn, from South Georgia, confessed to a crisis of faith upon entering college. Flannery carefully addressed these concerns in a handful of profound letters, in the genre of Hügel’s Letters to a Niece. In response to his worries about the challenge of secular learning, she shared her own experience: “At one time, the clash of different world religions was a difficulty for me. Where you have absolute solutions, however, you have no need of faith.” Instead she suggested a respect for “mystery,” a term she first applied to illness, but which was increasingly key in her theology. As for the conundrum of predestination and God’s punishment, she offered a literary answer: “Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn’t something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.”