Flannery (29 page)
Flannery received much praise for the subtle recalibration in her style. Described by Robert Fitzgerald as “a triumph over Erskine Caldwell,” this breakout story, marking her first treatment of a mother-daughter relationship, and introducing a “gentleman caller,” used
Tobacco Road
–type poor-white characters without being clichéd, and to fierce moral ends. By December, Flannery learned that she was the recipient of a two-thousand-dollar
Kenyon Review
fiction fellowship, having been invited to apply by its editor, John Crowe Ransom. Her award was followed by publication, in the spring 1953 issue, of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” which went on to win the second prize in the 1954 O. Henry Award. But Flannery had conveyed that something significant was stirring as soon as she wrote the opening description of the daughter, resembling, as only she knew, her recently delivered bird: “She had long pink-gold hair and eyes as blue as a peacock’s neck.”
The “Bible” Salesman
L
ike all good farm folk, we get up in the morning as soon as the first chicken cackles,” Flannery wrote to her friends Louise and Tom Gossett in 1961. But she could just as easily have written that report during her first few months on the farm, or any time since. Certainly by early 1953 Flannery had settled into a schedule and rhythm that remained unvaried for the rest of her life. The woman who came to believe that “routine is a condition of survival” guarded her daily regimen, with the help of her mother and a self-protective instinct, but also with contentment and joy. As she implied to the Gossetts, each day followed a pattern, beginning with her mother, up first, waiting with a thermos of coffee for the two of them to drink at the kitchen table while listening to the local weather report on the radio.
This cycle of hours and days had a religious significance for Flannery, too. As Thomas Merton, a self-described “14th century man,” abandoned New York City for the life of prayer and farming of a contemplative monk in Kentucky, so Flannery, dubbing herself a “thirteenth century” Catholic at Yaddo and, at Andalusia, a “hermit novelist,” framed her new life in religion. Immediately on waking, she read the prayers for Prime, prescribed for six in the morning, from her 1949 edition of
A Short Breviary.
Following coffee, she and her mother then drove into town to attend mass at Sacred Heart, celebrated most weekday mornings at seven; the priest, for a decade, was the charming, bridge-playing Father John Toomey from Augusta. “Flannery sat in the
fifth
pew on the
right
side,” recalled one parishioner. On Sundays, Flannery pulled on her black wool tam-o’-shanter to get to the earliest seven-fifteen mass. As she wrote a friend, in 1953, “I like to go to early mass so I won’t have to dress up — combining the 7th Deadly Sin with the Sunday obligation.”
Not merely a personal peculiarity, regularity was a civic virtue, too. Flannery was surrounded by family, and friends, who arranged their lives like clockwork. Regina was a stickler, and Flannery could chafe at her rules and regulations, but as long as her own writing time and space were kept sacred (of her writing desk, she said to a friend, “Nobody lays a hand on that, boy”) she could accept other impositions. “She didn’t want to come back to Georgia, she had left it,” observed her cousin Margaret, the oldest of the Florencourt sisters. “But she and Regina had formed some kind of agreement that Regina would not interfere with Flannery’s work. I credit them with that détente, if you will, under which they would live. I think that it obviously worked out because each of them was strong, and they knew how it was going to be, and accepted it.”
Appearing most Friday afternoons on his way to the Cline Mansion — following work at King Hardware Company in Atlanta, then driving back to Bell House at the same hour each Sunday evening after supper — was Uncle Louis, basically a third member of the household. “My round uncle,” as Flannery described the co-owner of Andalusia, paid special attention to planting fig trees all over the property, as he had an appetite for the sweet fruit. One of his favorites, planted near the back door, was evoked in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”: “A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with the chickens.” Like Regina, who disliked Flannery’s peacocks for eating her Lady Bankshire and Herbert Hoover roses, Louis balked when he discovered their taste for figs. “Get that scoundrel out of that fig bush!” he would roar, rising out of his chair at the sound of a breaking limb.
Just as regular participants in the life of Andalusia, in the category of “adopted” kin, were Misses White and Thompson. By 1953, the two women were fixed in their schedule of closing Sanford House on Wednesdays and driving out to Andalusia on Tuesday night, taking one of the upstairs bedrooms and spending the next day. “That was our weekend,” says Mary Jo Thompson. They would join the O’Connors for meals and afternoon car rides. “Flannery was the only person I know who liked sharp cheese on her oatmeal,” recalls Mary Jo. While Mary Jo never had literary talks with Flannery, they would chat while washing the dishes (Flannery found the warm water helpful for her aching joints). One of Flannery’s favorite topics was Mrs. Weber, a boarder at the Cline Mansion, who likewise helped to clean up after dinner. “Flannery said Mrs. Weber carried on a two-way conversation the entire time with her deceased husband,” remembers Thompson.
The models for many of O’Connor’s observations of the lives of the black tenant farmers — as surely as the Stevens family inspired early vignettes of white sharecroppers — were a few longtime African American workers at Andalusia, living in outlying shacks, and eventually in the nearby, darkly weathered clapboard cottage. Jack, “the colored milker,” as Flannery called him, worked with Mr. Stevens in the dairy; Louise, his wife, was a domestic, who cooked and cleaned, “blundering around,” as she said; Willie “Shot” Manson, the youngest, performed hard farm labor, such as plowing fields. Living by himself in a shanty was Henry, “around here . . . a kind of institution,” as Flannery described the yardman, in his eighties, who once fertilized her mother’s flower bulbs with the calves’ worm medicine. “Wormless they did not come up,” she gleefully reported.
Yet Flannery was adept at shutting herself away during her “set time,” between nine and noon, when she applied herself to her writing. Averaging three pages a day, she told a reporter from the Atlanta newspaper, “But I may tear it all to pieces the next day.” While modest, her desk began to take on the character of a folk sculpture constructed of random parts, utilitarian to her eyes alone. “I have a large ugly brown desk, one of those that the typewriter sits in a depression in the middle of and on either side are drawers,” she wrote, producing a mental snapshot of the assemblage for a friend. “In front I have a mahogany orange crate with the bottom knocked out and a cartridge shell box that I have sat up there to lend height and hold papers and whatnot and all my paraphernalia is around this vital center and a little rooting produces it. Besides which, I always seize on busy-work.”
During the fall of 1952, and through the spring of 1953, in this “rat’s nest of old papers, clippings, torn manuscripts, ancient quarterlies,” O’Connor began work on a second novel, as well as several short stories that established her control of the genre and were told in an inimitable voice, sliding in and out of the colloquial heads of her characters. Each of these stories concerned death, the powerful theme that had been dealt her, especially since the revelation of her summer visit with the Fitzgeralds. Having described herself as a girl as “a
Peter Rabbit
man,” menace was always her great effect. But in “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead,” begun as the first chapter of her new novel, the macabre slapstick of the teenage Francis Marion Tarwater (his last name swiped from Tom T. Shiftlet’s hometown) — tempted to shirk burying his great-uncle, but haunted by the old man’s corpse still propped at the breakfast table — had the depth of what Henry James called “felt life.” This quality was missing from the ghoulish tales of stabbings and strangling in O’Connor’s juvenilia.
In “The River,” finished in November 1952 and full of images of “speckled” skeletons, the preschooler Harry undergoes a drowning-baptism. The next day he tragically finds his way back to the river in the Georgia clay country, red-orange after a rain, where he was baptized by the Reverend Bevel Summers while on an outing with his sitter, Mrs. Connin. As the little boy gives himself over to the undertow of death, and possibly salvation, his parents are nursing hangovers in their city apartment — a satiric cartoon of bohemianism, cluttered with overflowing ashtrays and abstract paintings. To write Mrs. Connin’s adoring attitude toward their hymn-singing minister — “He’s no ordinary preacher” — O’Connor borrowed freely from Mrs. Stevens, who had recently told her of a dramatic sermon by her own preacher, also a fine singer: “Evy eye is on him. . . . Not a breath stirs.”
Conceiving “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” she connected the dots of a few articles that had mesmerized, or tickled, her: the
Atlanta Constitution
reported on a petty bank robber with the alias “The Misfit”; she clipped a photograph of a tartly made-up little girl, in a tutu, incongruously mimicking Bessie Smith’s rendition of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” at a talent contest. Yet the laughter in her light tale of a fifties’ suburban Atlanta family waylaid on a road trip is silenced by the gunshots of her own “Misfit,” a prophet of existentialist nihilism, far more harrowing than Haze Motes. The scene of the family’s murder is a dark wood, as foreboding as Hawthorne’s in “Young Goodman Brown,” which is faintly echoed in the title as well. “It was no coincidence that Flannery wrote that story within months of, metaphorically, having a gun aimed at her,” said Sally Fitzgerald, of her reaction when Flannery mailed her a draft in the spring of 1953.
Flannery sent the stories, as well, to her agent and her publisher. Hired away from
Partisan Review
by Harcourt Brace’s Robert Giroux, his copy editor and first reader Catharine Carver was excited about O’Connor’s writing. “Catie would read them first and say, ‘Bob, wait till you see this one, a new story has come in,’” Giroux recalled. “This happened, every time, over a series of months. . . . I remember one day Catharine brought me one. I didn’t read it in the office. I had a batch of stuff, and I took it home that night and read ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’ I thought, This is one of the greatest short stories ever written in the United States. It’s equal to Hemingway, or Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener.’ And it absolutely put her on the map.” In his Christmas card of 1953, Lowell included praise of her recent works: “Both the baptizing and the homicidal lunatic are fearfully good.”
Writing with such intensity, with “a fresh mind” during the mornings, she might well have been entirely spent by afternoon. This normal diastole and systole was accentuated in her case by the disease, generally resulting in fatigue after two or three useful hours a day. Afternoons, for Flannery, were a much slower time, marked by flu-like symptoms and overcast by some mental fog. She passed them while “receiving on the front porch”: “I work in the mornings but I am at home every afternoon after 3:30,” was a typical invitation. “One of the few signs of Flannery’s lupus was that you could see her tiring by late afternoon,” remembers Louise Abbot, a friend from nearby Louisville. “But when her eyes were sparkling, those dark blue and quite extraordinarily beautiful eyes, and she was trying to repress her laughter, I knew a story was coming.”
During these waning hours, Flannery also pursued her hobbies of painting and raising birds, looking and listening. She was taking classes in town from Frank Stanley Herring, the post office muralist, and she hung on the walls of the farmhouse her simple studies of zinnias in bowls, angular cows under bare trees, a worker’s shack in winter, and a rooster’s angry head. “None of my paintings go over very big in this house although mamma puts them up and is loth to take them down again,” she wrote the Fitzgeralds. She collected an entire bestiary of “show birds”: pens of pheasants and quail, a flock of turkeys, Canada geese, Muscovy ducks, Japanese silky bantams, and Polish crested bantams. Keeping her ears cocked for responses to her prized peacock, she got much mileage from a repairman who remarked, after the bird unfurled its magnificent tail, “Never saw such long ugly legs. . . . I bet that rascal could outrun a bus.”
Sundown and bedtime were nearly synonymous for Flannery. “I go to bed at nine and am always glad to get there,” she told a friend. Occasionally she recited Compline, the last office of the day, from her
Breviary,
set between a Sunday missal and her Bible on a low bedside table. More reliably, her habitual nighttime reading was the lofty, lucent prose of Thomas Aquinas. For just as significant as ordering peacocks as a signal of her intention to settle, was her obtaining her own copy of the seven-hundred-page Modern Library selection
Introduction to Saint Thomas Aquinas,
which she signed and dated “1953”: “I read it for about twenty minutes every night before I go to bed. If my mother were to come in during this process and say, ‘Turn off that light. It’s late,’ I with lifted finger and broad bland beatific expression, would reply, ‘On the contrary, I answer that the light, being external and limitless, cannot be turned off. Shut your eyes,’ or some such thing.” Even resting in bed, Flannery was replenishing her writing. “I read a lot of theology because it makes my writing bolder,” she once explained to a friend.
Spending hours alone in her large front room, among the phantasms of drowning boys, garrulous Southern grandmas, and mean killer-prophets, all created within a span of six months, Flannery struggled to make sense of her life. When her father died, she had compared God’s grace to a bullet in the side. Faced with that same daunting grace, she developed a narrative to explain her situation. For this dedicated writer there was no surer sign of grace than writing a good story, and she had just written several. So when she broke the news of her lupus to Robert Lowell, in March 1953, she swore that “I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.” Spinning her own life as a parable of a prodigal daughter, forced home against her wishes and finding a consoling gift, she later encouraged the young Southern novelist Cecil Dawkins: “I stayed away from the time I was 20 until I was 25 with the notion that the life of my writing depended on my staying away. I would certainly have persisted in that delusion had I not got very ill and had to come home. The best of my writing has been done here.”
