Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  That June a second of Flannery’s friendships splintered, this time with her intellectual sparring partner Ted Spivey, who had added to the heat of their debates in recent years by defending the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, of whom she allowed, “There is a lot of ill-directed good in them.” Spivey claims that a noticeable cooling occurred after he announced his engagement to Julia Douglass, a Georgia schoolteacher. When O’Connor “knew I was going to get married it made her real mad,” says Spivey. “I had a feeling she wanted to marry me, as a matter of fact.” Yet Flannery had already refuted this notion in a letter to Betty two years earlier, “My Jung friend is not a little bit in love with me but resents me rather thoroughly I think. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, I just don’t think the first is so.” As likely a cause for the rift was her growing exasperation with his significant dreams, which included Carson McCullers in her closet, Louise and Jim Abbot in her bed, and, most galling, dreams about Regina.

  While speaking with students at Rosary College, Flannery had bemoaned that she had no new novel under way, as much as she wished she did, and so planned on “an awful lot of porch-setting’” on her return home. In June, she tried to put an end to this arid stretch by beginning work on a third novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage? Its title was taken from a conservative religious column printed on Saturdays in the Atlanta Journal. Having long expressed a wish to turn “The Enduring Chill” into the first chapter of a novel, she adopted much of the setup of its country farm: an intellectual son forced home by a bad heart; a snooty schoolteacher sister; a perpetually irate mother; and the addition of an invalid father. Instead of finding Heidegger, Walter’s mother has to suffer the indignity of coming across her son’s copy of The Satiric Letters of St. Jerome. When a section was published in Esquire in July 1963, an accompanying editorial note stated, “Flannery O’Connor’s novel is as yet untitled, and she says it may be years before it’s finished.”

  Yet the character jumping out from hundreds of pages of drafts, written over the next year, was not included in the excerpt, and may have been both the work’s secret motor, and its roadblock. For while Walter, a bookish “secular contemplative,” embodies a side of herself Flannery described as “hermit novelist,” Sarah (sometimes called Oona) Gibbs is an outright satiric cartoon of Maryat Lee: she lives in an apartment on Second Avenue with other members of her commune, the Friendship Fellowship, a send-up of the Koinonia community in Georgia. In a letter, Sarah brags to Walter, “I have broken through the ceiling of a cramping religion.” Yet most of the manuscripts trail off with the activist Sarah speeding southward in her little red car to meet Walter, who has passed himself off as a black man to trick her. As the O’Connor scholar Virginia Wray has plausibly written, “The depth of respect for and genuine warmth evidenced in O’Connor’s letters to Maryat Lee during the 1960s may have led O’Connor to cease her satiric barrage, especially since during this period Lee was suffering from some serious health problems.” (Maryat was having thyroid problems and could not find any helpful medication.)

  Whatever the nature of the block that she was experiencing — not necessarily final for an author averaging seven years for a novel — the character Walter Tillman, dressed, like Flannery in her at-home outfit, in “plaid shirt and . . . jeans and moccasins,” did reflect some of her intellectual interests at the time. A huge event to Flannery in the fall of 1962 was the October 11 convening of the Second Vatican Council, the first ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church in ninety-two years. “But it’s so obviously the work of the Holy Spirit,” she enthusiastically told Louise Abbot. Described in an article by John Kobler in the Saturday Evening Post as an attempt to “reflect the Teilhardian spirit,” the pope’s charge “to open the windows of the Church” encouraged wider scholarship. Like Walter’s, Flannery’s library now included an underlined copy of St. Jerome, the fourth-century “desert father” she was reading, meeting Thomas Merton halfway. The Trappist monk had recently published a book of sayings of the Eastern Desert Fathers.

  In November she embarked on a Southern lecture swing, involving four talks in six days, beginning with East Texas State University, in Commerce, Texas. “Nobody can get me out now but Kruchev,” she groaned before leaving home, referring to the recent standoff between the Russian premier and President Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis. In and around Dallas, she picked up some tasteless jokes about race to relay back to Maryat. Most stimulating was New Orleans, where she arrived to give talks at the Catholic student Newman Club of the University of Southwest Louisiana in Lafayette; the University of Southeast Louisiana in Hammond; and Loyola. Her guide to the city was Richard Allen, once her double date in high school. This encounter was less of a fiasco, as Allen, now curator of a museum of jazz at Tulane, guided her past “a Negro nightclub called ‘Baby Green’s Evening in Paris,’ which I might some day like to investigate.” As she kidded with John Hawkes, “If I had to live in a city I think I would prefer New Orleans to any other — both Southern and Catholic and with indications that the Devil’s existence is freely recognized.”

  On Sunday evening, November 18, she made her way to Marquette Hall to deliver her basic talk on “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” freshened up with introductory quips about Walker Percy, whose recent success, The Moviegoer, had won a 1962 National Book Award and whose answer to newsmen, asking why there were so many good Southern writers — “because we lost the War” — pleased her no end. She planned to meet her fellow Catholic novelist — who also used Caroline Gordon as a first reader — and Percy had made his way over the causeway from Covington. By the time Flannery arrived at the second-floor reception, she was exhausted, having been carried up an unanticipated flight of exterior stairs, slung between Richard Allen and a teenage girl. Even Percy, who grew up in Alabama, found himself “thrown at first by her deep Georgia accent,” until they managed some small talk about Katherine Anne Porter. Yet he always treasured a typescript of her speech, and modeled Val, an ex-nun in his novel The Last Gentleman, on O’Connor.

  Although she was turning only thirty-eight in March, during 1963 O’Connor was often afforded the treatment of an elder statesman rather than a young woman writer. Her itinerary was full of special bookings: on March 8, at a symposium on religion and the arts, with the poet John Ciardi at Sweet Briar College in Virginia; on April 24, at Troy Stage College in Troy, Alabama; over the week of October 14, at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia; at the College of Notre Dame in Baltimore; and finally, at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. In June, she had been lauded with yet another honorary doctorate at graduation ceremonies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was an “oppressive” day, lightened for her only by the presence of Robert Fitzgerald. Her citation, she told Tom Stritch, was “something (fishy) about ‘man’s inhumanity to man.’”

  Yet her struggle to discover a deeper mode of fiction — tantamount to an extended writer’s block, or at least writer’s puzzlement — continued to agitate beneath the surface of all these awards and honors. In May, clearly echoing concerns expressed fourteen months earlier to Father McCown, she wrote Sister Mariella Gable, a teaching nun she had met at Marillac, who was working on an essay about ecumenism in O’Connor’s stories, “I appreciate and need your prayers. I’ve been writing eighteen years and I’ve reached the point where I can’t do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things that I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing.”

  O’Connor’s novel in progress was certainly not providing the solution. In September, she complained to John Hawkes, “I have been working all summer just like a squirril on a treadmill, trying to make something of Walter and his affairs and the other heathens that rage but I think this is maybe not my material (don’t like that word).”

  Early in the fall, the dry spell finally broke. Flannery had been suffering from increased fatigue, diagnosed as severe anemia, for which she was treated with an iron preparation. She was spending more of h
er afternoon hours in the waiting room of Dr. Fulghum’s office a few blocks from Baldwin County Hospital, on the edge of Milledgeville. Here in his cramped, twelve-by-twelve reception room, with chairs set along the walls, and dominated by a sunburst wall clock, she began gathering impressions of country types and their small talk that felt like a story to her, about Mrs. Ruby Turpin, one of those “country women . . . who just sort of springs to life; you can’t hold them down or shut their mouths.” She later told Cecil Dawkins of her “reward for setting in the doctor’s office. Mrs. Turpin I found in there last fall.”

  As the story she titled “Revelation” opens, an imposingly “stout” Ruby Turpin arrives with her “somewhat shorter” and compliant husband, Claud, at a doctor’s office. He needs treatment for a leg ulcer, caused by a cow kick, and she sets him down beneath a sunburst clock. Taking in a roomful of all strata of white folk, Ruby busies herself with some demanding mental arithmetic about the relative social worth of “white-trash” versus “colored people who owned their homes and land,” while studying a lineup of shoes that includes red high heels, bedroom slippers, and Girl Scout shoes with heavy socks. The wearer of the Girl Scout shoes turns out to be Mrs. Turpin’s nemesis. For as she indulges in cliché-ridden chat, this college student, reading Human Behavior, beans her with the thick, blue textbook, lunges at her throat, and, while being wrestled down by a nurse, delivers the “revelation”: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”

  In the character of this deranged girl, Flannery found a way to pencil in a private joke to Maryat that was not truly hurtful, because it was so exaggerated and comic in its bold outlines. Like her friend Mary “Maryat” Attaway, daughter of Grace Lee, the Mary Grace in “Revelation” is a Wellesley student; and as Flannery borrowed a funny anecdote from her as a trigger for “Everything That Rises,” so a childhood memory of Maryat’s provided the vehicle of violent grace in this story. Maryat had once greatly entertained Flannery by recounting “how in the 6th grade I threw a book ostensibly at a boy who ducked and it hit my detested teacher.” Knowing full well Flannery’s refractory method, Maryat was not at all put off by the satire. When her young niece Mary Dean Lee asked why Flannery “made Mary Grace so ugly,” Maryat wisely answered, “Because Flannery loves her.”

  The stretching into new territory, or “larger things,” occurs in the second part of “Revelation,” when Claud and Ruby Turpin return home from the doctor’s office. In a rare glimpse of marital intimacy, husband and wife take a nap together, while Ruby anguishes about why she had been “singled out for the message . . . a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman.” Compared to Job, and in a letter to Maryat to “a country female Jacob,” Ruby goes off to shout at God across a hog pen while she “scoots” down the pigs. Having been reading, over the summer, the Arden editions of Shakespeare’s plays, ordered for a dollar apiece, O’Connor lets Ruby soliloquize, “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” And then, peering into the dusky sky, Ruby “gets the vision,” a topsy-turvy correction of all she believed:

  a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.

  Flannery completed “Revelation” within eight weeks, and, as with “Good Country People,” her only other story written relatively quickly, her first reader, Caroline Gordon, was entirely impressed. “Caroline was crazy about my story,” she wrote Betty. “She read it to her class and they laughed until they cried or so she reported.” The only rewriting occurred when Catharine Carver interpreted the ending as her “blackest” and Ruby as “evil.” Flannery understood that this story was a departure, with its celestial vision of racial convergence — a transposing of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, widely televised that August. But most innovative was the kinder, gentler fate of the big country woman, granted illumination. She wanted no mistaking Ruby as “just an evil Glad Annie.” She told Maryat, “I like Mrs. Turpin as well as Mary Grace,” awarding her friend “half interest in Mary Grace” and signing one letter to her as “Mrs. Turpin.”

  Although she could have sold “Revelation” to Esquire — where “Why Do the Heathen Rage?” appeared — for the grand sum of fifteen hundred dollars, Flannery chose to be paid substantially less to stay loyal to Andrew Lytle and the Sewanee Review. “I emulate my better characters,” she wrote Betty, “and feel like Mr. Shiftlet that there should be some folks that some things mean more to them than money.” Lytle was appreciative, judging both “The Lame Shall Enter First” and “Revelation” to have been “magnificent things.” When her close friends read the story, they concurred. “The breath was pushed out of me by this story,” Maryat wrote her. “You have done it. You have gone past them all. . . . The reception of Violent Bare has obviously not really touched your confidence — as it might have.” Recalls Louise Abbot, “I felt ‘Revelation’ marked a turning point in Flannery’s thinking, feeling, writing, everything. And that she had started in another direction.”

  ON THE MONDAY before Christmas 1963, Flannery fainted, giving Regina a scare, and was immediately put to bed, where she remained for the next ten days. Her weakness was severe enough that this young woman who managed to get to church at seven o’clock most weekday mornings, on crutches, missed even the high festival of Christmas Day mass. “Not enough blood to run the engine or something,” she scribbled a note, in longhand, to Betty. Warning signals had been mounting over the past month — she grew too weak to be “hitting this typewriter” the week following November 22, as she watched the “sad” events of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and funeral on television; new tests revealed a lower blood count. In truth, she had begun the long, slow process of dying.

  Flannery handled her latest medical downturn as she had all the others, by focusing on her writing. Using an electric typewriter to conserve energy, by Sunday, January 5, she took up her correspondence again and was able to return to mass for the first time. The weather cooperated, with ice storms that had frozen the plumbing giving way to near-spring days. Regina, in a red coat, was venturing out, “frisking” her small magnolia, and the peacocks had begun hollering. Flannery took advantage of a rising hemoglobin count — from 8.5 to 11.6, with 13 as normal — to write to Robert Giroux, on January 25, of her resolve to put together a second collection of stories, feeling that “Revelation” would “round it out,” with seven others. Giroux wrote back, encouraging her to aim for the fall list, which would require a finished manuscript by May.

  A recent addition to Andalusia that turned out to be an unpredicted pleasure to both Flannery and her mother that winter was an old record player, which the Sisters, recipients of a new machine, sent down with Louis from Atlanta. Flannery had been mulling over buying one, but instead invested in a new pair of swans to replace a beloved, now deceased, one-eyed female. Hearing of the gift, her friend Tom Stritch sent along a box of records from his basement. While Flannery claimed that “I have the Original Tin Ear,” the music cast her back to Yaddo, where she had listened to classical records chosen by Robert Lowell. To try to understand why she preferred “straight up and down” Haydn, she asked Stritch to send some music reviews from Ave Maria, the Notre Dame weekly. As she wrote to Betty, “All I can say about it is that all classical music sounds alike to me and all the rest of it sounds like the Beatles.”

  Flannery had begun working on a story again, but more of her downtime was now given over to listening to records and watching television than her friends ever expected. TV satisfied a taste for the vulgarities of popular culture that used to be filled for her solely by newspaper coverage — of Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger, attending church i
n Pasadena, or a local beauty contest for “Miss North Georgia Chick.” Now she was up on “Geritol, Pepto-Bismol, Anacin, Bufferin, any kind of soap or floor wax, etc. etc.” A sports fan, her aperçu on the Kennedy assassination was that “all commercial television is stopped until after the funeral and even the football games called off, which is about the extremest sign of grief possible.” She and Tom Stritch communicated about their mutual televised passions, stock-car races and track events. She even “postponed my work an hour” to catch W. C. Fields’s 1941 comedy, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.

  In the third week of February, she received a verdict from her doctors that she would need to have a hysterectomy to remove an enlarged fibroid tumor, the cause of her severe anemia and fainting spells. Dr. Merrill was hesitant to allow any sort of surgery for fear of triggering a lupus flare and wished to have the operation take place in Atlanta. But Flannery refused to leave Milledgeville. Mary Cline had just been released from the hospital, and Regina, recovering from a week in bed with the flu, was caring for her. She did not want to impose the extra strain of an Atlanta hospitalization on her family, or herself. In preparation, she canceled readings scheduled that April for Boston College and Brown University, where John Hawkes was teaching, as well as for the University of Texas. In order to safeguard against reactivating the lupus, she was “loaded with cortisone.”