Flannery (22 page)

The arriving guest having the most catalytic social effect was “dimpled agreeable” Elizabeth Hardwick, returning on January 5, as she excited Lowell’s already teeming passions. If their quickly escalating romance bothered Flannery, she did not let on. Indeed for the young lady who wished to remain on the prepubescent side of twelve, and with Lowell who saw her as “our Yaddo child,” the development may have been tolerable, even comfortable. “Lizzie Hardwick and Cal Lowell have become about as close as two people can get,” Wright reported. “I have not infra-red photo phlashes to prove it. Flannery is playing it cool.” As Kazin, who engaged in heated nightly political debates with Lowell, crankily recalled, “Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick were a brilliant couple, but Lowell was just a little too dazzling at the moment.”

Hardwick, too, tended to view Flannery as even younger than her twenty-three years, about seven years younger than she and Lowell: “Most of all she was like some quiet, puritanical convent girl from the harsh provinces of Canada.” Remembered Hardwick, “She was a plain sort of young, unmarried girl, a little bit sickly. And she had a very small-town Southern accent . . . whiney. She whined. She was amusing. She was so gifted, immensely gifted. But the first thing I saw of hers after we met her at Yaddo, I’m sort of ashamed to admit, maybe I saw pages of
Wise Blood,
and I thought, ‘What on earth is this?’ It was just so plain, so reduced, after reading really startling things like
Ulysses.
Of course now I think it’s wonderful, I later did. But at first it didn’t hit me. . . . I think she and Cal were quite friendly. He was very interested in her.”

By early February, political controversies overtook aesthetic distinctions, or became intensely enfolded in them. Engagé Marxists of the thirties, many of whom found a home at Yaddo, had mostly, by 1949, evolved into non-Stalinist leftists, disillusioned by the Trotsky trials and the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 — just as
Partisan Review
outgrew its original thirties stance as official magazine of the Communist-dominated John Reed Club. Yet more conservative Southern Agrarians, and modernists such as Eliot and Lowell — with sympathies for religion, and a visceral response to Communist atheism — still distrusted these reformed “fellow travelers.” Such complex partisan issues were being played out in a nation just a year away from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s speech denouncing Communist infiltration in the State Department and already engaged in “red-baiting,” and a Cold War with the Soviet Union.

During the fall, Lowell’s foil for dinnertime political rows had been Charles Wagner, who was writing a “pious” history of Harvard. “I wouldn’t give the life of one American soldier he betrayed for Pound’s,” Wagner snarled one evening. To which Lowell shot back, “But no one lost his life because of Pound.” Wagner’s adversarial role was taken up by Kazin, who complained in his memoir
New York Jew:
“It was a gloomy time for me; listening to Lowell at his most blissfully high orating against Communist influences at Yaddo and boasting of the veneration in which he was held by those illiberal great men Ezra Pound and George Santayana, made me feel worse.” Wright reported Lowell’s intent to turn Yaddo by the next summer into a haven for “the agrarian–little magazine entente.” Pleading writer’s block, and marital problems, Kazin fled back to Manhattan.

The spark finally set to all this Yaddo tinder was a front-page story in the
New York Times
on February 11, 1949: “Tokyo War Secrets Stolen by Soviet Spy Ring in 1941.” Including an accusation by General Douglas MacArthur, the article reported evidence from the army that Agnes Smedley had run a Soviet spy ring out of Shanghai. A friend of Mrs. Ames, with the special dispensation of being a Yaddo guest from 1943 until March 1948, Smedley was in the midst of writing a biography of Marshal Zhu De, founder of the Chinese Red Army. “She idolized Mao Tse-tung,” remembers Jim Shannon. “She walked around the place like a man, like a soldier marching through the paddy fields.” Eight days later, the army disowned its report. Opposite a February 20 notice of Smedley thanking the army for clearing her name ran the announcement: “Pound, In Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Treason Cell.”

Yet by the date of the retraction, paranoia had been heightened by the appearance, on February 14, of two FBI agents, questioning Hardwick and Maisel about Communist sympathies at Yaddo, tipped off by Mrs. Ames’s secretary. The first casualty of this “Red Scare” was Clifford Wright — sent packing as Mrs. Ames had the “fantastic idea” that he was the FBI informant. At Saturday dinner, with Flannery and Elizabeth Hardwick, Mrs. Ames defended Smedley as “an old-fashioned Jeffersonian Democrat.” Lowell, incensed by Ames’s control of guests’ stays and by the liberal left in general, pushed for a meeting with the board of directors to demand her ouster. Shortly before the meeting, James Ross took off. “I had refused to join with the other guests in bringing charges against you,” he wrote Ames, “and had expressed my opinions rather violently one night at dinner.”

A bizarre inquisition, orchestrated by Lowell, and attended by eight of the directors of Yaddo, as well as the four remaining guests, took place in the Garage on Saturday morning, February 26. “I shall compare the institution to a body and the present director to a diseased organ,” Lowell began, with an extended simile, “chronically poisoning the whole system.” Hardwick spoke of a summer party where “Molotov cocktails” were served, and jokes made, “Is it too pink for you?” In an
Et tu, Brute?
moment, Mrs. Ames confronted her accusers: “They frequently came to my house for music or cocktails, a harmonious life, with now and then little affectionate notes . . . then all of this changed with the morning of Tuesday.” The director Everett Stonequist, a Skidmore sociologist, mused aloud that the FBI investigation released “some of the excitement, hysteria, perhaps, which seems to be part of the post-war period in American history.”

Its least likely participant was Flannery O’Connor, ever silent, and keeping a canny distance. Yet the combination of Lowell’s mesmerizing personality, some annoyance with Mrs. Ames’s autocratic style, and a simple view of Communism as evil, all led her to take part. Her cross-examination by Lowell was the least expansive of the testimonies, just a single page of a sixty-page transcript. Describing her relations with Mrs. Ames over the summer as “very pleasant. I saw little of her,” she said matters had devolved to being “precariously cordial”: “I felt more like Mrs. Ames’ personal guest than a guest of the Corporation.” To Lowell’s leading question, “Has Mrs. Ames said anything contrary to her official position?” she replied sharply, “Mrs. Ames said that Agnes Smedley had been living in fear for a long time . . . that seemed different to me. It did not seem to fit in with an impression of her as an old-fashioned Jeffersonian democrat.”

In her testimony on Ames’s arbitrary rule, Flannery told prosecuting Lowell, “I asked to stay through July, largely through economic pressure, which has not improved, but I am leaving next Tuesday.” The last four guests did hastily depart Yaddo within a day or two. Of the “little mix-up,” Hardwick claimed, “It wasn’t as much as it seems now. Flannery wasn’t so much in that.” All was forgiven enough for Elizabeth Ames to invite O’Connor to return, in 1958; she declined, writing back of her peacocks, “When I look at my birds I often think of Yaddo and how well a few of them would go with the place.” Yet at the time much
was
being made, and aftershocks followed the group to New York City, where a board meeting was scheduled the next month to decide the issue. Having been present at the feverish Garage meeting, Malcolm Cowley reported back to a friend: “The guests departed, vowing to blacken the name of Yaddo in all literary circles and call a mass meeting of protest. . . . I left too, feeling as if I had been at a meeting of the Russian Writers’ Union during a big purge. Elizabeth went to a nursing home. Her secretary resigned. Yaddo was left like a stricken battlefield.”

T
HE SELF-IMPOSED EXILE
of the group from Yaddo threw Flannery into confusion, vexing for a young woman whose writing depended so much on cloistered regularity. “We have been very upset at Yaddo lately and all the guests are leaving in a group Tuesday — the revolution,” she reported to Elizabeth McKee on February 24. “All this is very disrupting to the book and has changed my plans entirely.” Arriving in Manhattan during a winter storm that covered everything in snow and ice, with gusting winds, she was nearly as disturbed as she had been during her abrupt girlhood removal to Atlanta. As Enoch cries to Haze, of Taulkinham, in “The Peeler,” published nine months later in
Partisan Review,
“There’s too many people on the street . . . all they want to do is knock you down. I ain’t never been to such a unfriendly place before.”

Flannery was oblivious to most of the changes that were making New York City the “first city” of the postwar world: its population, during the administration of Mayor William O’Dwyer, approaching the 1950 census figure of 7,891,957; construction beginning along the East River of the United Nations Secretariat, the world’s first glass-walled skyscraper; African American sharecroppers migrating from Southern cotton farms to Harlem; Puerto Ricans arriving on daily flights from San Juan. Yet she was painfully aware of the numbers on the streets, the crowds captured in the canonic images of the
Life
photographer Andreas Feininger, using a telephoto lens, to compress lunch-hour workers on Fifth Avenue into even more of a cliché of a “rat race” in a “skyscraper jungle.” As she told Betty Boyd of the anomie she was witnessing daily, “There is one advantage in it because although you see several people you wish you didn’t know, you see thousands you’re glad you don’t know.”

Her first stop was Elizabeth Hardwick’s apartment in Devonshire House, a 1920s building in the “Hispano-Mooresque” style at 28 East 10th Street, where she stayed briefly, while Lowell checked into the Hotel Earle, off Washington Square. Always retaining fond feelings for Hardwick, she later wrote of the “very nice girl” to Betty Hester, “I think Elizabeth is a lot better writer than she gets credit for being. She is a long tall girl, one of eleven children, from Kentucky. . . . I used to go up to Elizabeth’s apartment to see her when I lived in New York and the elevator man always thought I was her sister. There was a slight resemblance.” Hardwick felt the mistake had to do with their accents, adding, “But mine was upper South, hers was very deep, small-town Southern.”

She moved next into a two-dollar-a-day room that smelled like “an unopened Bible,” in Tatum House, a “horrible” YWCA residence, at 138 East 38th Street, on Lexington Avenue. The building provided breakfast, and she took most of her other meals at a nearby “very good co-op cafeteria,” on 41st Street between Madison and Park: “The only place in New York that I could afford to eat downtown where I didn’t feel I was going home with pyoria.” She was hardly alone her first week in the city, though, as Lowell introduced her around. Including her in visits to friends, he rallied support for his Yaddo crusade, while announcing his “reconversion” to Catholicism, having attended mass, with Flannery, for the first time in over a year, before leaving Saratoga Springs. Both issues meshed in his psyche into an apocalyptic struggle of good versus evil.

Yet Lowell was quite intuitive in his introductions, helping Flannery make contacts crucial for her life and career. He brought her to meet Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, living with their two young children in a small, two-room apartment on York Avenue. A poet (
A Wreath of the Sea
), critic, and translator of Euripides and Sophocles, Robert Fitzgerald, nearly forty, had been brought up Irish Catholic in Springfield, Illinois, left the Church — O’Connor liked to say, “to become an intellectual” — and then returned to the fold, resulting in an annulled first marriage. Sally, thirty-two, the daughter of a Texas judge, was an aspiring painter who studied at the Art Students League in New York, served as an officer in naval intelligence during the war, and had become an intense convert to Catholicism, briefly considering entering a convent before her marriage.

Responding to their doorbell on the gray, wintry afternoon, the Fitzgeralds discovered, standing in the hallway, their disheveled poet friend, “shooting sparks in every direction,” accompanied by Flannery, slender, sandy-haired, with a straightforward blue-eyed gaze and shy half smile, dressed in corduroy slacks and a navy pea jacket. She bore out Lowell’s account of Yaddo as she sat facing the windows reflecting light off the East River. “She did this with some difficulty, frowning and struggling softly in her drawl to put whatever it was exactly the way it was,” remembered Robert Fitzgerald. “We saw a shy Georgia girl, her face heart-shaped and pale and glum, with fine eyes that could stop frowning and open brilliantly upon everything. We had not then read her first stories, but we knew that Mr. Ransom had said of them that they were
written.
”

She made a strong impression on Sally, too, who grew curious to discover “how this affable, smiling girl from Georgia who didn’t have much to say, wrote, how she went about it.” Finding a copy of “The Train,” she quickly became riveted by its intense tale of Hazel Wickers, “shapes black-spinning past him,” hurtling toward Taulkinham: “I was unprepared for it, for the force, the sheer power of the writing. When I finished the story my hair was standing on end.” By the time Flannery left that afternoon, a sort of familial triangle was already forming, with Robert as the paterfamilias, a font of literary knowledge, and Sally, an older-sister figure. “Mrs. Fitzgerald is 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighs at most 92 pounds except when she is pregnant which is most of the time,” Flannery nailed her in one of her caricatures. “Her face is extremely angular; in fact, horse-like, though attractive, and she does have the pulled-back hair and the bun.”

Equally profound was Lowell’s next introduction, Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace. Still a junior editor, with an alert, open face, Giroux had already published the early novels of Jean Stafford; the poetry of Lowell and T. S. Eliot; Hannah Arendt’s first book,
The Origins of Totalitarianism.
When Lowell brought Flannery by the firm’s modern offices, at Madison Avenue and 46th Street, Giroux was instantly convinced of his “unusual” visitor’s literary future. “She was very quiet,” said Giroux. “She was very chary of words. Lowell of course was vocal and full of interesting phrases, a great talker. But she had electric eyes, very penetrating. She could see right through you, so to speak. I was a young publisher, interested in acquiring writers. I thought, ‘This woman is so committed, as a writer, she’ll do whatever she’s made up her mind to do.’” But he knew that she was signed to Rinehart and felt sure she would not go back on an agreement.