Flannery
Page 38
Mary Jo Thompson and Fannie White, of Sanford House, stopped by Andalusia on the evening of Saturday, July 25, on their way to dinner in Macon. They had brought with them some food from the restaurant to drop off with Regina. Over the past decade, the pair had continued to spend nights at the farm once a week; closer to Regina than to Flannery, they remained important members in the O’Connors’ support network, made up mostly of single women. “We had not dreamed we would see Flannery,” recalls Mary Jo Thompson. “But she told her mother to tell us not to leave. And she dressed, even though I know she didn’t have the strength. She came out onto the porch and sat in the rocking chair and visited with us. And that was good-bye, because we never saw her again.”
The following Wednesday, Flannery was once again extremely ill. Her cousin Catherine called an ambulance early in the morning, and she was rushed to the hospital. On Sunday, August 2, many of her close, local friends received calls, alerting them. “A friend, Mary Jo Thompson, has called to tell that Flannery is critically ill,” remembered Louise Abbot. “The end could come at any moment. My impulse is to drive over there, but I’m told she would not know me.” Flannery received the Eucharist, and at some point during a very hot, very still Sunday, as her kidneys began to fail, was administered last rites by Abbot Augustine More of Conyers. Shortly before midnight, she slipped into a coma, and was pronounced dead, at the age of thirty-nine, on August 3, at 12:40 a.m.
A LOW REQUIEM funeral mass was held for Flannery O’Connor the following day, August 4, at 11:00 a.m., at Sacred Heart Church. It was a sunny Tuesday, with temperatures in the low nineties. A sizable number of cars were parked that morning on Hancock and Jefferson streets, bordering the little redbrick church that stood on land given by Flannery’s great-grandmother. The building’s brown shutters were closed against the August heat. “There was a lot of people there,” recalls Alfred Maty-siak, the son of the Polish farm worker. “It was a good crowd. I remember that.” Louise Abbot, informed of the details by Uncle Louis, had driven to Milledgeville with a group of friends from Louisville, and remembered the sanctuary as “full but not crowded.”
Music was playing on the small church organ as mourners filed in, including those nuns and priests who were scattered throughout the congregation. Among them was Monsignor Patrick O’Connor, a cousin from Savannah. Seated to the left of the altar, inside the rail, were Abbot Augustine, Father Paul Bourne, and Brother Pius, all from the Trappist monastery. Flannery’s family members were seated to the left of the altar, at the front of the congregation. Her casket rested in the center aisle. The walls had recently been painted a color that Flannery ruefully described as “nursery pink,” a decision of her rector, Father John Ware, which was rivaled in her disapproval only by his removal of painted statues of the Virgin and saints, given by the Cline family. But on this occasion, the celebrant was Monsignor Joseph Cassidy, pastor of the Cathedral of Christ the King in Atlanta.
Seated at the rear of the chapel, Louise Abbot found herself distracted from the somber atmosphere as she glanced out a nearby window at “a crape myrtle in full fuchsia bloom . . . tossing and blowing in a sudden breeze, catching the sunlight and sending shadows rippling down the louvered blinds.” Her attention was captured, too, by the woman sitting in front of her, whom she believes was Betty Hester: “She sits like a child being punished, her head down as far as it will go, her shoulders sagging, her hands heavy on her lap. An aura of the solitary surrounds her. Her grief exerts an almost magnetic force. . . . During the service the monks have a look of joyous detachment. The woman in front of us shakes with sobs. She tries and is unable to control herself.”
Although Monsignor Cassidy had been rector at Sacred Heart during Flannery’s first year of college, when she was a member of the Newman Club that he advised, the family inexplicably requested that he give no eulogy. Chafing a bit under the restriction, he made a few general remarks in tribute, including the phrase, “When a person has been and has done what can never be forgotten . . .” At the conclusion, flanked by acolytes, he processed around the gray casket, an incense vessel swinging from his left hand, thick smoke swirling up in a large cloud. The casket was then moved slowly up the aisle. Regina rose, genuflected, and followed close behind, as she and her daughter had once walked behind Edward’s casket. The rest of the family paused to allow her space before following. Privately, Regina spoke of not blaming God for her daughter’s early death, but of being grateful for their extra years together. She had lived much longer than expected.
The burial service immediately afterward at Memory Hill Cemetery was brief. A prayer was offered by the elegant, white-haired orator Monsignor Patrick O’Connor, who was a stage actor before entering the seminary and whom Flannery had seen for the first time in thirty years at Conyers. She had been happy to know again this cousin of her father’s, with whom she had a rapport, and they had talked enthusiastically of his memories of the family. The prayer that he offered at her graveside included the words “and if by reason of sin she may have forfeited eternal life in heaven,” yet he rendered the word “may” with such lack of conviction as to make the phrase superfluous. Flannery O’Connor was then laid to rest beside her beloved father, the gravel spot eventually marked with a flat stone of Georgia marble, like the cover of a book, engraved with a cross.
BECAUSE THE FUNERAL had taken place within a single day of her dying, in her hometown, none of Flannery’s friends up north had even a chance to attend. Most of them found out the news when they opened the New York Times that Tuesday morning and felt the shock of seeing her picture staring out at them, the obituary cautiously labeling her as “one of the nation’s most promising writers.” With Everything That Rises Must Converge still in piles on her editor’s desk, the newspaper revived some of the controversies over The Violent Bear It Away. For friends closer to home, the Atlanta Constitution told of a writer “most highly regarded in Europe . . . so quietly did she live among us.”
Her old roommate from Iowa City, Barbara Tunnicliff Hamilton, did not learn of O’Connor’s death until her eyes fell on the “Milestones” page of Time magazine the following week. “Flannery had made it,” she wrote, of her first reaction. “The people who knew about such things valued her as those of us who lived with her and cared about her when she was young had hoped they would.” As one of those who cared about her early on, as well as a prime example of “people who knew about such things,” Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop immediately on hearing the news, “I think the cards seemed heavily stacked against her, and her fates must have felt that they had so thoroughly hemmed her in that they could forget, and all would [have] happened as planned, but really she did what she had decided on and was less passive and dependent than anyone I can think of.”
The man most in a position to know just how independent from some extraordinarily constricting outward circumstances O’Connor could be was her editor Robert Giroux, now in possession of the completed manuscript for her final book. Like many others, though, he felt at loose ends about how to mark his personal grief. So he seized an opportunity when a postal card came in to the Farrar, Straus and Giroux offices, from an unknown friend of Flannery’s, Janet McKane, announcing a memorial mass to be held in the Byzantine rite at a church on Third Avenue. “I went and found only two people present, myself and Miss McKane, and it was a high mass!” he reported to Caroline Gordon. “Behind the altar was a towering mosaic of Christ, and when I read Flannery’s story, I realized that Parker’s choice of tattoo was of course this figure. (Miss McKane told me afterwards that Flannery had always been fascinated by the Byzantine rite.)”
When Everything That Rises Must Converge was published the following April 1965, the response was more powerful, and uniform, than for any of O’Connor’s other books. Playing into the fascination, of course, was the tragedy, as the simple white book cover carried only an epitaph on the back from Thomas Merton, “I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows
man’s fall and his dishonor.” Flap copy described the book as a “worthy memorial,” and began with a factual error, “The death of Flannery O’Connor at 38 marked the loss of one of America’s most gifted contemporary writers at the height of her powers.” Yet such public relations were backed up by general recognition of a vision that now looked full and coherent. The critic Charles Poore in the Times judged “her promise . . . fulfilled”; “the work of a master,” said the Newsweek critic; and so on.
Attuned enough to O’Connor to have recognized her potential without reading a word, when she first walked into his office with Lowell, on a wintry afternoon in 1949, Giroux now wished to secure her literary rank. So he next put together a chronologically arranged collection of her short fiction, from her first published story, “The Geranium,” through to its final, mature rendition, “Judgment Day.” The strategy succeeded; many readers and critics recognized the sort of underlying pattern that Henry James once described as “the figure in the carpet.” And The Complete Stories was awarded the 1972 National Book Award in Fiction, the prize she had lost to John O’Hara in 1956. Backstage at the awards ceremony, Giroux had a bit of a contretemps with a celebrated author who complained, “Do you really think Flannery O’Connor was a great writer? She’s such a Roman Catholic.” But Giroux said, “You can’t pigeonhole her. That’s just the point. I’m surprised at you, to misjudge her so completely. If she were here, she’d set you straight. She’d impress you. You’d have a hard time outtalking her.”
Onstage, Giroux proved quite capable of advocating for her in a convincing way, setting the audience straight. The awards of 1972 were highly politicized, as the Vietnam War dragged on with no end in sight. Accepting the posthumous thousand-dollar prize, on behalf of Regina O’Connor, who was ill at home in Milledgeville, Giroux, “the soft-spoken vice president and editor of Farrar, Straus & Giroux,” gave what the Times called “the sharpest indictment of literary and moral standards”: “In an age of mendacity, duplicity and document-shredders, the clear vision of Flannery O’Connor not only burns brighter than ever but it burns through the masks of what she called ‘blind wills and low dodges of the heart.’ She once said, ‘When I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it’s because we are still able to recognize one.’”
Yet such full-throated acclaim, and all the interest following, would have been impossible had Flannery not kept her eye, during her last six months, on “the pin point of light” that Mrs. Flood kept trying to make out at the end of Wise Blood. As O’Connor took pains to correct the galleys of “Revelation” the night before her operation in Baldwin County Hospital; or hid under her pillow, at Piedmont, the notebook in which she was scratching out “Parker’s Back”; or worked, back home, making changes to “Judgment Day,” on a bedside desk Maryat Lee remembered as “one of those flimsy tables from Woolworth’s,” she was intent on “going home,” closing the circle, making a book, rigging the peacock’s tail to unfurl. It was no accident that Haze had been stuck in a train berth, “like a coffin,” or, O’Connor was anxious to conclude, that Tanner pops up from his, shouting, “Judgment Day!”
Flannery had spent her life making literary chickens walk backward. But she had also spent much of her adult writing life looking down the barrel of the Misfit’s shotgun. Just as her friends had to discern the contours of true suffering between the lines of her funny vignettes of invalidism, so her stories included a coded spiritual autobiography. In her front room at Andalusia, rewriting some final words while “the grim reaper” waited, she stuck in a last wink and a smirk, not just to Caroline Gordon and Robert Giroux, but to that one reader she claimed she would be happy with “in a hundred years.” After old Tanner’s daughter fulfills her father’s wish to ship his body home to Georgia, Flannery — in the story’s closing line, written mostly in quavering blue ink — endowed her with the hint of a resurrected body:
Now she rests well at night and her good looks have mostly returned.
Acknowledgments
I first stepped into the world of Flannery O’Connor in the late 1970s. She was my favorite fiction writer, and I would often read a few paragraphs of “The Artificial Nigger” or “Revelation” for inspiration while trying my hand at writing stories completely unlike hers. I was a graduate student at Columbia University at the time, too, with a concentration in Medieval and Renaissance Literature and, between the lines of her stories, I imagined that I detected qualities that struck me as “thirteenth-century” — ribald humor, gargoyled faces and bodies, frontal action, threats of violence, and, most of all, the subtle tug of a spiritual quest in a dark universe animated by grace and significance.
The timing of this literary infatuation proved lucky. While I was still under the sway of O’Connor’s fiction, The Habit of Being, a collection of her letters, edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald, appeared in 1979, accompanied by much press attention. I apparently wasn’t the only one with a deep fascination with the mysterious woman behind the striking fiction. I did have an “aha!” experience while reading in the letters of the impact of the theology of Thomas Aquinas on her fiction. But such heady theories quickly became grounded in the even more compelling daily gossip. I would read a few letters and then turn to the back cover to study again the Joe McTyre 1962 photograph of O’Connor on her front steps, seemingly engaged in dialogue with a preening peacock.
Seized with the bright idea that I, and no one else, should attempt a biography of Flannery O’Connor — though I had so far published only a chapbook of poetry — I wrote to Sally Fitzgerald. I had heard somewhere that she was writing a memoir of O’Connor, and I wondered if she would approve my going forward. She responded on February 26, 1980, from the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, where she was a fellow, with the leveling news that she was writing a literary biography and that I would do well to find another subject. “In short,” she wrote, “I am afraid that our projects would overlap in important ways.” She let me down politely, though, kindly adding, “Should I ever feel the need of an assistant, I will certainly think of you and your proposal.”
I awaited the appearance of Fitzgerald’s book for over two decades. Early in 2003, an editor asked me if I had ever considered writing another biography, because I had since written about the poet Frank O’Hara. My first thought: Whatever happened to the biography of Flannery O’Connor? Sally Fitzgerald had died in June 2000, at the age of eighty-three, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript that has yet to appear. As my personal test for deciding on projects has always been to write the book that I want to read but cannot find on the shelf, I could think of no better choice. So I simply began with an exploratory trip to O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia.
Of course the Flannery O’Connor of 2003 was a far more canonic figure than the Flannery O’Connor of 1980. With each passing year, her status as “minor” has been adjusted upward, as her stories have been anthologized, and more high school and college students discover her work. Among their professors, she has become a one-woman academic industry: as of 2008, the Modern Language Association catalogued 1,340 entries under O’Connor, including 195 doctoral dissertations and seventy book-length studies. The annual Flannery O’Connor Bulletin — now Flannery O’Connor Review — begun in 1972, is entirely devoted to critical reevaluations of her work. An important indicator of this shifting assessment was her inclusion as the first postwar woman writer in the Library of America series; her 1988 volume widely outsold Faulkner’s, published three years earlier.
Most startling during my six years of writing this book has been the accompanying spike in interest in O’Connor in popular culture — formerly the domain, according to her, of Miss Watermelon of 1955. John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of Wise Blood is a Netflix staple. Bruce Springsteen has credited O’Connor as the inspiration for his album Nebraska. On The Charlie Rose Show, Conan O’Brien, who wrote his senior thesis at Harvard on O’Connor, spoke of her as “one o
f the funniest, darkest writers in American history . . . I was drawn to her.” (The actor Tommy Lee Jones, too, wrote a senior paper at Harvard on O’Connor.) Andalusia Farm is now a literary shrine, open to the public. O’Connor’s books have been published in translation in more than forty countries: her fame has become global. My daily “Google Alert” for “Flannery O’Connor” attests that the phrase “like something out of Flannery O’Connor” is now accepted shorthand, like “Kafkaesque” before it, for nailing many a funny, dark, askew moment.
GIVING THE LIE to the stereotype of Flannery O’Connor as an eccentric recluse is the number of her friends, classmates, and relatives who shared anecdotes and lively memories with me throughout my research and writing. I found their voices touching, funny, and full of insight, and this book would have lacked much vital spirit without them. Making the following “list of credits” even longer is the inclusion of all the librarians, archivists, curators, scholars, experts, and admirers of various kinds who have devoted so much energy to further understanding, often without having ever met O’Connor, but having been drawn into her force field by stories read early on and never forgotten. To anyone I inadvertently left out, my apologies, and thanks.