Flannery (30 page)

O
NE SPRING AFTERNOON
in late April 1953, a striking-looking young man appeared at the front door. Tall and blond, described by Caroline Gordon as “a Dane with eyes like blue marbles,” Erik Langkjaer was a twenty-six-year-old college textbook salesman for Harcourt Brace, Flannery’s publisher. As his recently assigned territory was the entire South east of the Mississippi, he had been visiting with professors at Georgia State College for Women. Among them was Helen Greene, whose English history textbook was published by Harcourt. “After checking out his current offerings in that field, I asked him if he would like to meet one of his company’s published authors,” Greene has written. As she was his last appointment of the day, the history professor was pleased to take him “out to Andalusia to meet Mary Flannery and Miss Regina.”

While Helen Greene remembered Erik’s response as an enthusiastic “Of course!” he felt, in truth, puzzled. “She was sure that Flannery would be interested in meeting me,” says Langkjaer, “and I must say I couldn’t imagine why, because I hadn’t read the novel, and I hadn’t even been told that she was living in Milledgeville, and why would anyone want to meet a perfect stranger on such a flimsy pretext. But the professor said that she doesn’t see too many people, living as she does with her mother. I went along with that idea. Some time in the afternoon, we rang the doorbell of Andalusia.” Helen Greene judged the introduction a success: “He and Mary Flannery liked each other a great deal, and, as I recall, she guided him on a tour of Baldwin County in his car. . . . He was happily surprised to find such interesting and attractive people in the area.”

Sophisticated, funny, and widely read, Erik possessed a cosmopolitan background rarely encountered in east-central Georgia. The son of a Danish diplomat and lawyer and a Russian émigré mother, he had been born in Shanghai, where his father served as consul-general. After a difficult childhood in Copenhagen, marked by bitter divorce proceedings between his parents, he eventually moved to New York City with his mother. When he graduated, on scholarship, from Princeton in 1948, he was then guided by his grandmother’s cousin, Helene Iswolsky, a Catholic intellectual and activist, to study and teach at Fordham. As a religious skeptic with a Lutheran background, though, Erik did not see much of a future in a Catholic college. One of his Jesuit professors, William Lynch, a favorite theologian of Flannery’s, advised him to seek his fortune elsewhere. Feeling at loose ends, he turned to the publishing industry.

Flannery thought enough of his visit to spill lots of its details into a letter to the Fitzgeralds, jumping off from a conversation she and Erik had on this first meeting about Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, a social justice ministry to the poor, forsaken, hungry, and homeless, begun as a hospitality house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan:

I never heard of
Conversations at Newburgh
(sp?), but there was a man by here the other day who was a textbook salesman from Harcourt, Brace who told me that was one of D Day’s farms. That man was from Denmark, not a Catholic but had some Russian aunt who was a Catholic and somebody or other with a magazine called
Nightwatch
or
Watchguard
or somesuch. Anyway he had studied philosophy at Fordham and taught German there and knew Fr. Lynch and was much interested in Dorothy Day.

Flannery was challenged by her facsimile of a “gentleman caller,” who had a strong Danish-British accent that marked him as a definite outsider. Although they talked theology, he wasn’t Catholic. He was also highly opinionated, and far from shy in voicing his opinions; of Dorothy Day, “He couldn’t see he said why she fed endless lines of endless bums for whom there was no hope, she’d never see any results from that, said he. The only conclusion we came to about this was that Charity was not understandable.” Flannery camouflaged her interest in the young man to the Fitzgeralds with the throwaway remark “Strange people turn up.” Yet she soon ordered a subscription to the
Catholic Worker,
and back issues of the
Third Hour,
the journal edited by Langkjaer’s Russian relative Helene Iswolsky, a regular contributor to Dorothy Day’s newspaper.

They discussed more on this first visit than Day’s social activism, or the ecumenical mission of his “aunt” in reuniting the Russian Orthodox Church with Rome. Erik was quite open about his life situation, “that I had come to the U.S., that I was now traveling somewhat rootlessly in the South, and that I had all these religious concerns and problems.” Flannery was tickled by a traveling salesman carrying “The Bible,” a joke term in publishing for his standard loose-leaf binder of promotional materials and tables. “It amused her very much that something that was not a bible should have been called a bible,” says Langkjaer. And she responded with tenderness to his rootless search. Writing to Erik two years later, Flannery recalled a first rush of empathy with his homelessness: “You wonder how anybody can be happy in his home as long as there is one person without one. I never thought of this so much until I began to know you and your situation and I will never quite have a home again on acct. of it.”

Because Erik shared some troubling personal information fairly quickly — childhood in occupied Denmark during the war years, his father’s subsequent death — Flannery was unusually forthcoming, too. She spoke of her lupus, and of her own father’s death, two of her most private topics. The need to discuss her disease, though, was fairly obvious; she was, as she told the Fitzgeralds, in January, “practically bald-headed on top,” with “a watermelon face.” Langkjaer remembered his first impression of her as “a little bloated” from the steroid medicine, with slack muscle tone. “Flannery told me quite openly about her illness,” recalls Langkjaer. “I was told about her father’s death and the unexpected fact of the disease being hereditary, as she had not expected from what the doctors had told them. But she seemed quite composed about this.”

That first afternoon, Mrs. O’Connor served Erik and Flannery tea and then withdrew to take care of various business matters. Erik immediately picked up on the wide gap in sensibility between Flannery and her mother. Not “the saint everyone thinks she was, she was rather rebellious,” says Langkjaer of the young woman who struck him as still far from reconciled to her fate. “I did sense that Flannery had a tense relationship with her mother. I got the impression that she was quite dependent on her mother now that she had come down with this disease, but that she was not an easy person for Flannery to talk to. I mean they were really not of one mind, to put it mildly. It wasn’t that I experienced any altercations between them, but this was something that Flannery told me.”

Erik had not read a word by the writer with whom he established such sudden intimacy, but she soon gave him
Wise Blood,
with the inscription “For Erik who has wise blood too,” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” which she was completing when they met. Holding on to his impression of Mrs. O’Connor as “pleasant,” yet “rather restrictive, very much focused on the practical aspects of running the farm,” he continued later in life to interpret the grandmother of the story — wearing her white cotton gloves and blue navy straw hat so that “anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” — as a version of Regina, or others of Flannery’s female relatives. “This woman represented perhaps the essence of members of Flannery’s own family that she distilled into this one character,” says Langkjaer. “Here was a very, very limited person. . . . The grandmother is a completely banal, superficial woman.”

Erik was stimulated enough by the remarkable new friendship to schedule regular visits to Milledgeville on weekends, often needing to rearrange his itinerary and travel a hundred miles or more out of his way. As Regina made clear to Flannery that she considered his staying overnight improper, he rented a room in a local motel, and then made his “calls” to Andalusia. Textbook orders were placed seasonally, clustered over the next fall and spring, so there were ten or twelve such visits. Erik and Flannery would take long walks, go for rides, or have lunch at Sanford House, talking all the while. “Was he ever handsome,” recalls Mary Jo Thompson. “Flannery reserved the table on the porch to have lunch with Erik. It was perfect for a couple.” Flannery was invested enough that when Betty Hester mentioned Helene Iswolsky a few years later, she confided, with unusual candor and spunk, “I used to go with her nephew.”

During the same few weeks that Erik made his surprising first appearance at Andalusia, on the cusp of April and May 1953, Milledgeville also put itself briefly, and sensationally, on the map of current events with an incident O’Connor later described as “the most melodramatic event in the history of the bird sanctuary.” In honor of its sesquicentennial, the town mounted a weeklong celebration, catering exclusively to the white population, full of nostalgia for its antebellum glory days: a pageant climaxing with the Secession Convention; the printing of a half-million dollars’ worth of Confederate twenty-dollar bills; a tour of antebellum homes, including the Cline Mansion; men forced to grow whiskers and sideburn chops, and women to wear hoop skirts. Yet civic pride suffered a blow on Saturday, May 2, when the grocer and moneylender Marion Stembridge, briefly put in stocks for refusing to grow the requisite beard, shot two of the town’s most prominent lawyers — one had prosecuted him for the murder of a black woman, though he avoided serving a prison sentence. Stembridge then turned the gun on himself.

This double homicide and suicide made a lasting impression on Pete Dexter, then a pupil at Peabody Elementary, where he was a student of O’Connor’s high school classmate Deedie Sibley. He had once even been taken on a class trip to Andalusia. “I remember there were cowbells on the front door because I broke those,” says Dexter. “In the barn, I put a girl’s head where you put the cow’s head for milking, so she couldn’t get loose.” As his Boy Scout leader was one of the lawyers killed, and his stepfather, a science teacher at Georgia Military College, had also opted out of growing a beard, the shots reverberated with the young boy. Although his family left Milledgeville later that same year, Dexter was faithful to the facts of the original case when he went on to write his own account in the novel
Paris Trout,
winner of a 1988 National Book Award.

The crime evidently resonated with Flannery, too. Pete Dexter had not read her story “The Partridge Festival,” turning on the same event, before he wrote
Paris Trout,
but neither had many of O’Connor’s readers. Her farcical tale of Singleton slaying five members of the Partridge City Council, then being incarcerated in Quincy Asylum, was printed in March 1961 in
Critic,
a low-circulation Catholic journal specializing in book reviews. Although she portrayed her mother as oblivious to her fiction, Regina’s objections when she read an early draft, begun six years after the event, obviously registered: “my mother still didn’t want me to publish it where it would be read around here,” she wrote Cecil Dawkins. Yet she did proudly inform the novelist John Hawkes, “Quincy State Hospital is actually two miles out of Milledgeville, the same only bigger.” Of its apparent model, Milledgeville State Hospital, an institution for the insane, Langkjaer recalls, “She liked to point it out as being in the neighborhood, with a smile on her face.”

She certainly did not indicate to the Fitzgeralds at the time that “the most melodramatic event” had made much of an impact on her imagination. Her letter of May 7, written five days after the killing, and following the town funerals of the two victims and the cancellation of the Sesquicentennial Grand Ball, was filled mostly with news of Erik. The only other development she shared was an exchange of letters with Brainard and Frances Cheney, Nashville friends of the Fitzgeralds and the Tates: “The Cheneys said that when they went to St. Simons they would stop by to see me so I am hoping they will.” After Andrew Lytle declined, Brainard Cheney had contributed a perceptive review of the “theologically weighted symbolism” of
Wise Blood
in Washington and Lee University’s literary quarterly,
Shenandoah,
and Flannery invited a friendship by writing to thank him. If mail was “eventful,” so, evidently, were people who “turn up.”

The first weekend in June, the Cheneys, whose appearance in Flannery’s life was to be as immediately welcomed as Erik’s, indeed visited Andalusia on their way to their vacation property off the southeast coast of Georgia. Nicknamed “Lon,” after the Lon Chaney silent movies popular when he was a student at Vanderbilt in the twenties, Brainard Cheney was a newspaper reporter and playwright and the novelist of
Lightwood
(1939) and
River Rogue
(1942). His wife, “Fannie,” had been Allen Tate’s assistant when he held the Poetry chair at the Library of Congress, and, after 1945, was an instructor at the Peabody Library School at Vanderbilt, where she became legendary in the field. “Mrs. C. is a liberry science teacher at Peabody but she is very nice inspite of that,” Flannery told the Fitzgeralds. “In fact you would never know it.” With them was a Japanese Fulbright student “whose gold teeth fascinated Regina.”

Within two months, her creative burst matched by a reflex to reach out to new acquaintances, Flannery boarded a plane for the first of her many visits to Cold Chimneys, the Cheneys’ home in Smyrna, Tennessee, twenty miles southeast of Nashville. A large brick house in the Greek Revival manner, with a broad entrance hall, vegetable garden, and an outdoor swimming pool used daily by Fannie, Cold Chimneys — renamed Idler’s Retreat after central heating was installed in 1957 — was a refuge for many of the leading figures in the “Southern Renaissance,” dating from Brainard Cheney’s Fugitive days at Vanderbilt. Among “the petit cercle” of visitors, as Caroline Gordon called them, were Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, Cleanth Brooks, Andrew Lytle, Eudora Welty, Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford, Peter Taylor, Eleanor Ross, Malcolm Cowley, Russell Kirk, Robert Lowell, and Walker Percy.