Flannery (21 page)

As the main mansion was shut for the winter months, Flannery was put up, for “the small season,” in a modest bedroom, and separate work studio, on the first floor of West House, where Mrs. Trask had spent her final years, until her death in 1922. A miniature version of the mansion, with an attached stone tower, the whimsical wooden farmhouse had its own Victorian parlor with chandeliers, marble mantelpiece, shelves lined with cracked library sets, and a grand piano. Flannery loved the quieter mood, as fall transformed Yaddo into what the critic Alfred Kazin, author of the highly successful
On Native Grounds
and among a half-dozen visitors that winter, called “a thorny mysterious return to another century on the rim of the Adirondacks, a mixture of primeval woods and the genteel tradition.” O’Connor assured Cecil Daw-kins, “It is beautiful in the fall and winter, and most of the creepy characters take off at the end of summer.”

Flannery felt herself on deadline at West House to finish a draft of her novel, to send to John Selby at Rinehart in hopes of an advance to cover a year of rewriting. Yet she was already bracing herself — and Elizabeth McKee — for rejection: “I cannot really believe they will want the finished thing.” Laid out on the table before her were chapters in varying states of completion: the opener, “The Train”; a third chapter, “The Peeler,” where Haze (now Motes) meets Enoch, as well as the fake blind man who begins to tap his way through her novel like the truly blind prophet Tiresias of
The Waste Land;
“Woman on the Stairs,” then chapter four; and “The Heart of the Park,” chapter nine. Though unsure about Selby, she was encouraged to learn that Philip Rahv, editor of
Partisan Review,
had decided to publish “The Heart of the Park” in the February issue.

Into Flannery’s seclusion and her pile of plans, six days after her own arrival, walked Robert Lowell, assigned a West House bedroom and studio for the fall and winter, too. Crackling with the sudden literary fame that she had seen him manifesting in Iowa City, Lowell had a knack for stirring up controversy. He arrived fresh from the post of poetry consultant to the Library of Congress — and from a fight, eventually successful, with supporting votes from Eliot, Auden, and Tate, to award Ezra Pound the 1948 Bollingen Prize for his
Pisan Cantos.
Protests had come from leftist poets over Pound’s wartime radio broadcasts for Mussolini. Indeed, one of Lowell’s first letters from Yaddo was to Pound, under sanatorium arrest for treason at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, informing him that “Yaddo is a sort of St. Elizabeths without bars — regular hours, communal meals, grounds, big old buildings etc.”

Except for Elizabeth Hardwick, whom he found charming and convinced to return in midwinter, Lowell could be sharp about the skeleton crew remaining. Clifford Wright was “pleasant,” but with “a rather withering old-maidish torpor.” The English professor J. Saunders Redding and the painter Charles Sebree were pegged as “an introverted and extroverted colored man,” the painter James Harrison as “a boy of 23 who experiments with dope.” He judged Malcolm Cowley likeable but boring. For his part, Cowley was stressed by the endless table talk about politics, both literary and national. Off-season dinners took place on the second floor of the Garage, and the charged topic, in the fall of 1948, was the Progressive Party candidacy of Henry Wallace for president, described by one guest as “the friend of Moscow.” Asked whom he was voting for, Cowley, a radical Marxist during the thirties, cautiously replied, “There’s not one of them I want to see elected.” Then “Someone gave a nervous laugh,” he recalled, “and conversation resumed.”

Lowell’s favorite was Flannery, who treated him at dinner to the surefire story of her backward-walking chicken that had delighted their mutual friend Robie Macauley. Lowell found her “acute and silent,” and quickly became her champion, writing Caroline Gordon, who was teaching Creative Writing in the General Studies program at Columbia: “There’s a girl here named Flannery O’Connor, an admirer of yours, a Catholic and probably a good writer, who is looking for a teaching job. Is there anything at Columbia?” Gordon later told Sally Fitzgerald, of O’Connor’s feelings for her new, larger-than-life friend, “She fell for him; she admitted it to me.” Arriving back in January, Edward Maisel opined theatrically, “I lost her to Robert Lowell.” Whether or not her ardor was romantic remained a well-kept secret. Giroux surmised, “She wasn’t in love with him; she was
impressed
by him.” Yet she did write Betty Hester eight years later, “I feel almost too much about him to be able to get to the heart of it. . . . He is one of the people I love.”

Lowell’s feelings for Flannery were not romantic, but they were full of excitement for her Roman Catholicism and her rare brand of Southern literary talent: “I think one of the best to be when she is a little older,” he promised the poet Elizabeth Bishop. “Very moral (in your sense) and witty.” Of strong-jawed New England Puritan stock, Lowell had converted to Catholicism during his marriage to his first wife, Jean Stafford, partly from reading Jacques Maritain; when he left the marriage, he left the Church. As O’Connor later put it, “I watched him that winter come back into the Church. I had nothing to do with it but of course it was a great joy to me.” Writing by day of a “Christ-haunted” character, she confronted one at dinner each night. He, in turn, liked the glamour of canonizing a new saint. As late as 1953, Caroline Gordon wrote to friends, “Cal Lowell says she is a saint, but then he is given to extravagance.”

Lowell was extremely tender, and full of elegy and exactitude, when he later wrote Elizabeth Bishop, on hearing of Flannery’s death. Their Yaddo autumn had been a sort of parenthesis in both their lives, as she worked on her novel, and he on his long narrative poem
The Mills of the Kavanaughs:

It seems such a short time ago that I met her at Yaddo, 23 or 24, always in a blue jean suit, working on the last chapters of
Wise Blood,
suffering from undiagnosed pains, a face formless at times, then, very strong and young and right. She had already really mastered and found her themes and style, knew she wouldn’t marry, would be Southern, shocking and disciplined. In a blunt, disdainful yet somehow very unpretentious and modest way, I think she knew how good she was.

At the time, of course, his tone about her was far more gossipy, and bemused, as he shared news, usually with Robie Macauley, as if she were a little sister passed from the care of one brother to another: “She’s run through the local library, put out crumbs for birds, bought a sternostove — I think she’s planning a sort of half-hibernation to never leave a small dark cheerless room where she’ll subsist on vita-min B soup capsules, and Dr. E. Flanders Dunbars psycho-somatic summa. But we’ve learned her ping-pong.”

The library Flannery read her way through was an ugly brick building at Skidmore, the small liberal arts college housed mostly in antiquated Edwardian and Victorian buildings in downtown Saratoga Springs. Especially absorbing to her was the dark fiction of the eminent French Catholic novelist François Mauriac, which addressed the irreconcilability of sexual passion with the world of pure spirit. Wright complained that he heard so much about Mauriac at dinner that he finally gave in and made a painting titled
The Desert of Love,
after Mauriac’s novel about the romantic triangle of a father, his son, and a fatally attractive woman. Of Mauriac’s books, at least fifteen of which she came to own, Flannery was especially drawn to the novel
Destines,
published in English under the title
Lines of Life,
about a middle-aged widow infatuated with a troubled, dissolute young man. As she later wrote of the novel, to Betty Hester, “I read it about ten years ago in the Skidmore College Library and remember nothing about it but the last sentence, which in that translation was: ‘And (she) was again one of those corpses floating down the stream of life.’”

Flannery received from the lost, often amoral characters of this living Catholic novelist the same thrilling permission she received theologically from the Thomist definition of art, in Maritain’s
Art and Scholasticism,
as a “habit of the practical intellect,” rather than a speculative or moral activity — the territory of theologians and saints. As Maritain concluded, “The pure artist considered in the abstract as such, is something completely unmoral.” The job of the Christian writer, understood in this “thirteenth century” way, was pure devotion to craft, to telling strong stories, even if they involved atheists, hoodlums, or prostitutes — the same craft lifted up by O’Connor’s New Critic teachers. As she would later spell out this enabling notion in folksier language to Betty Hester, “you don’t have to be good to write well. Much to be thankful for.”

As being at Yaddo and having a Guggenheim fellowship (of about twenty-five hundred dollars) were nearly synonymous in the late 1940s, Flannery decided that fall to apply. Clifford Wright, himself applying, described Lowell, when he arrived, as “Guggenheiming it.” Hardwick, likewise “enGuggenheimed,” had received hers in June. Flannery did find herself in the fortunate spot, shared by Lowell but few others, of having crossed a Mason-Dixon Line of literary politics — published by the
Sewanee
and
Kenyon Review
s, associated with conservative, even reactionary Southern writers, as well as by
Partisan Review,
the provenance of left-leaning, often Jewish, New York intellectuals. Her own recommenders were George Davis; Philip Rahv; Paul Engle; Robert Penn Warren; Theodore Amussen, a Rinehart editor, who had moved to Harcourt Brace; and Robert Lowell, providing the inside information that she wrote “sentence by sentence, at snail’s pace.”

In December, pleading economic worries, Flannery made the bold decision to spend Christmas away from home. Instead, she hunkered down with the two remaining Yaddo guests, Lowell and Wright. By then, their social rhythm was comfortable. After Thanksgiving, Ezra Pound’s son, Omar Shakespeare Pound, visited, and Lowell reported, in a letter to T. S. Eliot, “I introduced him to our Yaddo child, Miss Flannery O’Connor. Weird scenes of Omar trying to help her into her muskrat coat — a new experience for both.” When Lowell recalled her tripping up stairs with a bottle of gin, she corrected him: “It was not gin but rum (unopened) and the steps were slick.” Wright appreciated Flannery’s “high moral tone,” and found “ingeniously funny and ominous” the zoo chapter from her novel, which she told him was titled
The Great Spotted Bird.
He found the title “perfect,” summing up the “grotesque” book as “short . . . the main character is a boy.”

The Christmas holidays were a bit milder than Lowell might have liked. “My suggestion that we have bottled egg-nog for Christmas breakfast fell rather flat,” he complained of his housemates, who were “not celebrating types.” But he consoled himself on Christmas Eve by reading
Pride and Prejudice
“aloud to the two Yaddonians,” and listening to the “Gloria” from three masses — Bach’s B Minor, a Palestrina, and a Gregorian. Remembering her last holiday on the train from Iowa City with Jean Williams, Flannery wrote her friend:

It would be nice to meet you again this year on the train. However, I am glad I won’t be fooling around with any trains this Christmas. I am not budging from this place. The Yuletide Poorhouse fare is very decent. The cook will be off and we three will be sent to the New Worden Hotel for dinner. We have a Christmas tree but will not hang up any stockings. We three are myself, Robert Lowell, and a stray painter.

Indeed the next day, after a week of light snowfall, the three were driven into town for a holiday dinner at the only year-round hotel, courtesy of the Yaddo Corporation.

Soon after the New Year, Flannery mailed her agent a freshly typed manuscript of the first nine chapters of her novel, adding up to 108 pages, with a note: “please show John Selby and let us be on with financial thoughts.” But her steady misgivings came true when the editor in chief responded with his impression that the work needed revision, allowing that its author was “a pretty straight shooter.” McKee forwarded Selby’s letter, which Flannery promptly showed to Lowell. She eventually passed on the poet’s comments to Paul Engle, now caught in the middle: “He too thought that the faults Rinehart mentioned were not the faults of the novel (some of which he had previously pointed out to me).” Engle pleaded, “Send me, please, like a good girl (and whether that designation fits or not) some sense of what the rest of the novel will be about.”

Hardly resistant to rewriting — indeed Selby wondered about “some aspects of the book that have been obscured by your habit of rewriting over and over again” — Flannery was more annoyed by his tone. She asked McKee, “Please tell me what is under this Sears Roebuck Straight Shooter approach,” and she resented the jauntiness of a reply “addressed to a slightly dim-witted Camp-fire Girl.” Emboldened by having Lowell on her side, she wrote back to Selby of her choice to take the high road of art, responding to his sense of a limiting “kind of aloneness in the book, as if you were writing out of the small world of your own experience”: “I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.” Because Selby was disturbed by what he termed “the hardening of the arteries of her cooperative sense . . . most unbecoming to a writer so young,” a decision was made that she come down from Yaddo for a late-February meeting, to clear the air, or part ways.

In the meantime, Yaddo was going through one of its seasonal reshufflings, the deck held entirely in the hands of Mrs. Ames, who informed Flannery that she was free to stay until the end of March, and perhaps beyond — as long as she swept the hallway carpet, each Sunday. Added to the mix, in January, were James Ross, brother-in-law of the Southern novelist Peter Taylor; Edward Maisel,
redux;
and Alfred Kazin, staying with Mrs. Ames at Pine Garde, her English Tudor cottage on the grounds. Kazin’s first impression was that Flannery “seemed to be attending Robert Lowell with rapture.” But he quickly became more interested in her writing, as he read pages from her novel, tipping off Giroux at Harcourt Brace, for whom he was working as a scout. “No fiction writer after the war seemed to me so
deep,
so severely perfect as Flannery,” wrote Kazin. “She would be our classic: I had known that from the day I discovered her stories.”