Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  Admitted to Baldwin County Hospital on Monday, February 24, 1964, Flannery spent the night before her operation correcting the galleys of “Revelation,” which had just come in the mail from the Sewanee Review. As she reread the pages in the hospital light, the story suddenly “didn’t seem so hot.” For the operation the next day the local surgeon, Dr. Walker, enlisted five blood donors and briefly considered an artificial kidney. Over the three days following, she was kept on glucose and cortisone drips. While she shared such surgical details with Maryat, everyone else was treated to a lighter version of events. “One of my nurses was a dead ringer for Mrs. Turpin,” she wrote Betty in a typical dispatch. “Her Claud was named Otis. . . . She didn’t know she was funny and it was agony to laugh and I reckon she increased my pain about 100%.”

  The outcome of this operation, from which she returned home on March 5, was at first deemed positive. “It was all a howling success from their point of view,” she wrote Robert Fitzgerald, “and one of them is going to write it up for a doctor magazine as you usually don’t cut folks with lupus.” Within two weeks, though, she was back in bed, “not doing any brain work but reading,” while subject to postoperative infections and cystitis. Her physical reaction was dramatic enough that by the time of her thirty-ninth birthday, on March 25, she was no longer concealing her inkling that something was gravely wrong. “I suspect it has kicked up the lupus again,” she wrote Betty three days later. “Anyway, I am full of kidney pus and am back on the steroids.” She described for Betty a visit to the doctor’s office the day before: “same scene as in ‘Revelation.’”

  A new friend and correspondent was Cudden Ward Dorrance, a sixty-year-old short story writer, and friend of Allen Tate’s, whom she had met at a breakfast at Georgetown. Dorrance, himself dying of emphysema from smoking, sent her the two books she was closest to during this month. The first was C. S. Lewis’s Miracles, the Anglican author’s meditation on the transformative power of imagination. Flannery noted a correspondence between Lewis’s Christian novels and hers: “we both want to locate our characters . . . right on the border of the natural & the supernatural.” Then, for Easter 1964, Dorrance sent Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, which she regarded “as being probably what I need worse personally.” She confided to him an excess of “nervous energy,” from being back on the steroids she had endured from 1951 to 1961, and requested that he “pray I don’t have to stay on them long.”

  The turn of a month led to a return to the hospital, where Flannery found herself the third week in April for ten days. The antibiotics that Dr. Merrill suggested for treating kidney infection were insufficient to halt her careening physical problems. “Monday I woke up covered from head to foot with the lupus rash,” she alerted Brainard Cheney. “A sign that things are as screwy inside as out so I headed for the hospital and here I am for an indefinite stay.” In a conspiracy of improbabilities, Mary Cline was also in the hospital again, on the floor above Flannery’s, having survived a nearly fatal heart attack. They both returned the same day to Andalusia, where her aunt was set up in a recent back-parlor addition. Her Florencourt cousin Catherine Firth soon arrived from Kansas City to help out at the farmhouse that Flannery nicknamed “Jolly Corners Rest Home.”

  Flannery’s first instinct on her return home was to ensure that a second book of stories would be published, no matter what happened next. So on May 7 she wrote a highly detailed letter of instructions to Elizabeth McKee. Her initial plan had been to go back into the originals with her usual vengeance of rewriting and polishing. But under doctor’s orders to spend the rest of the summer in bed and a prohibition on any typing outside of short business letters, she arrived at a more practical compromise. She simply asked her agent to round up copies of the stories as they had been printed in magazines, and assemble the book from these. “I think I’ll be able to make any really necessary changes on the proofs,” she promised. She then listed the eight stories she was envisioning, winding up with “Revelation.” The book’s title remained an open question.

  Unable to sit for long at the typewriter, in May Flannery shifted to writing stories in her mind. Of one such purely conceptual creation, she told Charlotte Gafford, who had completed a thesis on her work at Birmingham-Southern College, and sent crystallized violets and a book of poems as get-well gifts, “I am writing me this story in my head and I hope by the time they let me up maybe I’ll have it.” Even such mental work, though, was made more difficult by sluggishness; once a week she visited the doctor for a blood transfusion, spiking her energy, and resulting in a few letters to friends. “I havent had it active since 1951 and it is something renewing acquaintance with it,” she alluded to her lupus, in one such missive to the Gossetts. On good days, she worked for an hour. “My my I do like to work,” she wrote Maryat. “I et up that one hour like it was filet mignon.”

  Flannery eventually heard from Robert Giroux with his approval of the plan to go ahead with the book, using stories in print. She had since decided, on looking over them, to withdraw “The Partridge Festival,” as a “very sorry story.” In its place, she mentioned, for the first time, one “that I have been working on off and on for several years that I may be able to finish in time to include.” The intended story was “Judgment Day,” a retelling of her first published story from Iowa, “The Geranium.” Roiling in her head over the month was the notion to circle back to her beginnings and redo her original successful story, revealing how far she had come. As she began retooling the original, old man Tanner, in his daughter’s New York apartment, is not just homesick, but actively plotting his escape, even if in a box. The note he pins to his pocket reads, “IF FOUND DEAD SHIP EXPRESS COLLECT TO COLEMAN PARRUM, CORINTH, GEORGIA.”

  Yet every few weeks brought a new hardship. Toward the end of May, the unfortunate news was a medical decision that O’Connor would need to check back into Piedmont Hospital, the ultramodern, 250-bed redbrick hospital in the Buckhead section of Atlanta, where she had been given a series of bone tests in late 1960. Before leaving for the hospital, she signed a contract for her collection, with the title she had originally suggested: Everything That Rises Must Converge. As she wrote Maryat on May 21, referring to her Milledgeville Drs. Fulghum and Burrell, “Going to Piedmont tomorrow to let Arthur J. Merrill take over. F. & B. give up, more or less, for the present anyways.” She at least felt confident, with Dr. Merrill, that “he knows what he’s doing.”

  Her eye for irony unimpaired, Piedmont Hospital provided much material; and as weak as she was, with visitors discouraged, a number of friends managed to get past Regina, who guarded the door by day and resided nearby with her sister Aunt Cleo at night. The hospital included a nursing school, and among Flannery’s favorite characters to pin to an imaginary wall were its student nurses. As she wrote in an account to Maryat, signed “Excelsior,” “Here the student nurses switch in with very starchy aprons and beehive hairdos and say such things as ‘What’s bugging you, huh?’” Flannery wrote to Betty, “By now, I know all the student nurses who ‘want to write,’ — if they are sloppy & inefficient & can’t make up the bed, that’s them — they want to write. ‘Inspirational stuff I’m good at,’ said one of them. ‘I just get so taken up with it I forget what I’m writing.’”

  The first of her friends to show up was Abbot Augustine More, met by Regina, who warned him he could stay only three minutes, though he stayed thirty. One weekend, Caroline Gordon “breezed in . . . her hair the color of funnytoor polish.” Gordon later recalled, “After the nurse had left the room, Flannery pulled a notebook out from under her pillow, ‘The doctor says I musn’t do any work. But he says it’s all right for me to write a little fiction.’ She paused to grin at us.” Louise Abbot, having received a note from Flannery — “I am sick of being sick” — hurried to her “fourth or fifth floor” hospital room, its bank of windows overlooking the tops of green trees. “Guess who’s here?” Regina sang, as she ushered in Louise. “Flannery has just waked up, and she
pushes herself up on one elbow and smiles,” remembered Abbot. “The afternoon sunlight in the room and the dark blue of her pajamas make her eyes bluer than I have ever seen them.”

  The child psychiatrist and Harvard professor Robert Coles, author of Flannery O’Connor’s South, met O’Connor only once, at her bedside at Piedmont. Involved with issues of race relations in the South, he and his wife had become acquainted with Ruth Anne Jackson, a six-foot, 250-pound, African American woman who worked as a nurse’s aide at Piedmont. She told them of “Mizz O’Connor,” her patient, a writer “who believed in God,” who she wanted them to meet. “I met a woman who was dying,” says Coles, knowing nothing then of her reputation. “Her face was inflamed as a consequence of steroid treatment.” Flannery was “tickled” to discover that Coles was from Concord and preferred Emerson to Thoreau. “You will find here in rural Georgia fallen angels by the thousands,” his wife remembered her telling them, with the thinnest of smiles.

  Complaining of a bed table “too high so you can’t write on it without breaking your arm,” Flannery did manage to accomplish impressive work from her hospital bed. She had actually finished the bulk of her rewriting of “Judgment Day,” which she had briefly been calling “Going Home,” when she completed “Revelation.” In the hospital she mostly concentrated hard, within her flickering imagination, to make out the curious images and plot of her next story, “Parker’s Back.” She wrote to Catharine Carver on June 17, warning her that when she returned home she would be sending her “Judgment Day” for her opinion. “I have another in the making,” she added, “that I scratch on in longhand here at the hospital at night but that’s not my idea of writing. How do those French ladies such as Madame Mallet-Joris write in cafes, for pitys sake?”

  She had slowly been building “Parker’s Back,” layer by layer, over several years. Her first glimmer of the story came when she ordered George Burchett’s Memoirs of a Tattooist from the Marboro bookstore list, which delighted her with its photograph of the old tattooist’s wife covered in tattoos, “like fabric.” Since at least 1960, she had been composing her story of O. E. Parker, a tattoo-covered young man and his disapproving wife, Sarah Ruth, daughter of a “Straight Gospel preacher.” In her unfinished third novel, she briefly found a spot for a man whose body was covered in tattoos — Mr. Gunnels, the farm help, with the face of God tattooed upon his back. When Walter tries to take a picture of the haunting image, his hand trembles and the photo comes out blurry.

  Often more intimate in letters than in person, Flannery, during her grave illness, shared some of her most vulnerable feelings with Cudden Ward Dorrance, whom she had met once, and Janet McKane, a schoolteacher from Manhattan, whom she had never met but who had written her a letter that touched off a flurry of responses, beginning in January 1963, often including childhood memories from Savannah, or her brief time in Manhattan. On April 2, McKane organized a high mass to be said for Flannery’s recovery at a Byzantine rite church in Manhattan. “I read my Mass prayers this morning,” Flannery wrote her on the day, “not Byzantine by any means but with much appreciation of what you were doing for me.” So tucked into her story was a signal to McKane, like so many to Maryat, because she chose as the image for Parker’s back a tattooed Byzantine Christ, done in “little blocks.”

  Flannery’s hospital stay was marked by four blood transfusions and an endless series of tests. Her weight was down about twenty pounds. As days turned into weeks and finally, to her near disbelief, “one month,” the only new prescription by the doctors was a low-protein diet, since her kidneys were unable to refine toxins out of meat, eggs, and cheese. “I’m for medicare; otherwise I got few convictions and almost no blood,” she wrote the Cheneys, as her lupus, and so her hospital bill, was not covered by insurance; she and her family had been paying most of the medicine and hospital bills. But a hint of resignation crept into her tone, amid all the comedy, when Dr. Merrill decided that she would not be helped by further hospitalization. “Dr. Fulghum is back in the driver’s seat,” she ominously informed Maryat, “& Dr. M. has checked out.” When the volunteer ladies in pink smocks brought three letters from Janet McKane, she closed her reply with a heartbreaking couplet from Gerard Manley Hopkins:

  Margaret, are you grieving

  Over Goldengrove unleaving? —.

  On Saturday, June 21, Flannery was once again home at Andalusia, where Regina set up a table and electric typewriter by her bedside. “I can get out & get at it,” she wrote Cudden Ward Dorrance, “work an hour & rest an hour, etc. That’s all I ask.” Within these hour-long reprieves, she secured the last pieces of her book. “I look like a bull frog but I can work,” she guaranteed Tom Stritch, thanking him for her favorite music of the month, liking “the 4-hand piano Chopin thing best; there is a point in it where the peafowls join in.” Feeling tentatively emboldened, she arranged to push back the book’s publication date until spring 1965, so that she could do some rewriting on “The Enduring Chill,” decide whether to include “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead,” let “Judgment Day” sit “a few weeks longer,” finish “Parker’s Back.” She counted nine or ten options for inclusion in the book.

  The stories Flannery finished in this hospital-like setting shared with “Revelation” both maturity of tone and ambitious scope. In the midst of “Judgment Day,” old Tanner remembers being down South, whittling a pair of eyeglasses from wood and fitting them onto the face of the black worker Coleman Parrum — Jim to his Huck Finn — while asking, “What you see through those glasses?” “See a man,” answers Coleman. The point is their spiritual kinship. In “Parker’s Back,” when O. E. Parker unveils the image of God on his back to his pregnant wife, she beats the blasphemous tattoo bloody with a broom. The story ends in a flood of emotion, with Sarah, at dawn, peering through a window at her husband, “leaning against the tree, crying like a baby.” As the O’Connor critic Frederick Asals has written, these last stories were growing somehow “mellower.”

  Her dosage of prednisone having been ordered cut in half by Dr. Merrill, at the beginning of July, due to a rise in the nitrogen content of her blood, Flannery was now deprived even of “nervous energy.” Yet, as she reported to Maryat, she was at least not experiencing some of the more ethereal side effects she had recorded before the hospitalization and transfusions: “hearing the celestial chorus — ‘Clementine’ is what it renders when I am weak enough to hear it. Over & over. ‘Wooden boxes without topses, They were shoes for Clementine.’” Punning on the Latin “lupus,” she ruefully wrote Sister Mariella Gable of her disease, “The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place. I’ve been in the hospital 50 days already this year.” In an attempt to restore some of her energy, the doctor adjusted her medication to more frequent but smaller doses of prednisone.

  On July 8, Flannery wrote to Janet McKane, apologizing for the “fancy” stationery. She documented an amusing catalog of get-well cards, decorated with chickens, Bugs Bunny, and the “funny” kind with “Get the hell out of that bed” messages, and she bragged that while she tossed the cards in the trash, saying “a prayer for the soul of the sender,” she economically kept any stationery to reuse. Included in this hilarious letter, though, was somber news, shared only with Janet, that when the priest brought her Communion the day before, “I also had him give me the now-called Sacrament of the Sick. Once known as Extreme Unction.” Flannery knew that this sacrament of “final anointing,” renamed by the Second Vatican Council, did not presume death. Yet her special request indicated that she saw herself as dangerously ill.

  For the next three weeks, Flannery devoted every inch of her consciousness to her two stories, climbing out of bed “into the typewriter about 2 hours every morning.” Catharine Carver returned “Judgment Day,” with a few queries, but mainly praise for the story. So Flannery then sent “Parker’s Back” to her, which she also mailed to Caroline Gordon and Betty Hester. This time around, her “first reader” advanced a very theological theory, suggesting that
the story illustrated, in Sarah’s puritanical horror at an iconic tattoo of Christ, the Docetist heresy that Jesus had only a spiritual body, not a physical one. She also sent a heady telegram: “Congratulations on having succeeded where the great Flaubert failed!” But Flannery grumbled to Betty, of “a lot of advice” she was ignoring from Gordon. “I did well to write it at all.” She focused instead on well-timed news about “Revelation”: “We can worry about the in-terpitations of Revelation but not its fortunes. I had a letter from the O. Henry prize people & it got first.”

  Although Flannery was now devoting twenty-two hours a day to resting up for writing, over the last two weeks in July she was forced to return to the doctor’s office and the Baldwin County Hospital several times. Having suffered three coronary arrests, Dr. Fulghum was no longer making house calls. When Flannery’s symptoms of kidney infection returned, he put her on a double dose of antibiotics again and withdrew the cortisone. Bringing along a Günter Grass novel, The Tin Drum, sent by Maryat, O’Connor went once more to the hospital for a blood transfusion to lift her hemoglobin count, again below eight. “It’s six of one and a half dozen of the other,” she decided. As she had once written, “Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.” Among those mercies was evidently acceptance. “They expect me to improve,” she had written Cecil Dawkins. “I expect anything that happens.”

  On July 28, Flannery penned her last letter, a card, in a shaky, nearly illegible hand, addressed to “Dear Raybat.” Adopting a big-sister tone, she worried about an anonymous crank call that Maryat told her of receiving. “Cowards can be just as vicious as those who declare themselves — more so,” Flannery warned. “Dont take any romantic attitude toward that call. Be properly scared and go on doing what you have to do, but take the necessary precautions. And call the police. That might be a lead for them.” She then apologized, “Don’t know when I’ll send those stories. I’ve felt too bad to type them.” Her sign-off: “Cheers, Tarfunk.” When her mother discovered the card a few weeks later, left at the bedside, she sent it on to Maryat, with a note, “Mary Flannery enjoyed your visit to her and I’m so glad you came. The enclosed was on her table.”