Flannery (38 page)

If Fitzgerald’s motives in inviting Flannery had been purely self-serving — he simply wished to see her — he was pleasantly surprised on Monday evening to discover that she “had wonderful things to say as a public speaker.” Her appearance before an audience of three hundred that she reckoned to Maryat was “25% Bumbling Boys, 25% skirted and beretta-ed simmernarians” proved successful enough for extra chairs to be moved into the hall. She read her paper, as Fitzgerald remembered, “intent upon it, hanging on her crutches at the lectern, courteous and earnest and dissolvent of nonsense.” Arguing that she was not your stereotypical Southern gothic writer — “unhappy combinations of Poe and Erskine Caldwell” — O’Connor insisted that her own use of the grotesque was meant to convey a shocking Christian vision of original sin. “To the hard of hearing you shout,” she said, “and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Fitzgerald rightly recognized that the “score” of talks she was beginning to give “brought her into the world again and gave her a whole new range of acquaintances.” But her stories were touching enough readers that even when she stayed home her circle of friends and fans was expanding exponentially, belying the stereotyping of her in the press as a reclusive Emily Dickinson of Milledgeville. She had recently received a letter of praise from Robert Lowell’s friend the poet Elizabeth Bishop. While the two never met, Bishop did telephone once from Savannah: “Quite soon a very collected, very southern voice answered and immediately invited me to ‘Come on over.’” (Bishop later admitted to feeling a bit “intimidated” by O’Connor.) When the poet sent a teeny, carved cross in a bottle from Brazil, Flannery wrote back, “If I were mobile and limber and rich I would come to Brazil at once after one look at this bottle. . . . It’s what I’m born to appreciate.”

A highly informal letter arrived that spring from Cecil Dawkins, a young fiction writer from Alabama, teaching at Stephens College in Missouri. A friend lent Dawkins a copy of
A Good Man,
and she found the stories revelatory. “I sat down with a six pack of beer one night and I started reading this book and I got increasingly excited,” she recalled, “and when I had finished, I wrote a note on just a yellow pad and said, ‘You’re really great. . . . You’re terrific’; and I didn’t know where to send it. I just sent it to Milledgeville and I didn’t know if she’d ever get it. But I got an answer by return mail and we wrote until she died.” Although they met only three times, Flannery recommended Dawkins to her agent, and to Yaddo; she also helped the Roman Catholic writer with her religious doubts. “She became my reader,” said Dawkins. “Her reader was Caroline Gordon and Flannery read everything I wrote when I was finished.”

The fourth or fifth visitor to become a truly close friend in less than a year was Louise Abbot, a lovely young woman trying to combine motherhood and writing, who lived with her lawyer-husband and small children in Louisville, Georgia, just sixty miles away. Abbot first encountered O’Connor’s stories at St. Joseph’s in Atlanta, where her husband was hospitalized: “I tried reading them aloud to my husband, but had to stop because it hurt him to laugh.” Though a recognized writer, with a prize-winning story published in
Mademoiselle,
she confessed to almost trying to pass herself off as a journalist to meet O’Connor. “I am very glad that you have decided not to be a lady-journalist,” Flannery wrote back, inviting her to Andalusia, “because I am deathly afraid of the tribe.”

On the Thursday in late April 1957 when Louise Abbot was invited to Andalusia for the afternoon, her husband had earlier legal business in Milledgeville, so she killed time by taking in
Giant,
starring Elizabeth Taylor, at the local movie theater. Driving up the red clay road at precisely three thirty, she admitted in her own letter to Maryat Lee, years later, of her first meeting with O’Connor, that her reading of the stories had been so superficial that she imagined that “we would have a few beers together and enjoy some dark comedy about Southern small towns.” Abbot wrongly expected that she was going to greet a fellow agnostic with whom she could disparage local manners and mores. She found herself greatly surprised, the first of many surprises being Flannery’s crutches, as she propped open the screen door dressed in blue jeans, a long-tailed plaid shirt, and loafers. But, like Maryat, her visitor soon found herself absorbed instead by her “very expressive” light blue eyes.

As they sat rocking in the tall, high-backed chairs, Louise was sensitive enough to pick up on some of the tensions between Flannery and her mother. Unlike Maryat, she was able to chat with Mrs. O’Connor quite easily. Yet when Regina seemed about to make a condescending remark, as Louise described herself as “wanting” to write, Flannery interjected, “She’s had a story published. She’s a
professional
writer.” Before disappearing into her room to fetch copies of
Wise Blood
and
Understanding Fiction,
Flannery startled Louise by turning and saying, “
You
stay here.” Abbot noticed, “There was a quality in Flannery that forbade intimacy.” At the suggestion that she was a “famous writer,” Flannery scowled. “I believe in a good deal of Hell’s fire on this earth, and if I thought of myself in such a way for a minute, I’d consign myself to it promptly.”

Yet as they found common ground in shared Savannah girlhoods in the 1930s and a perverse love of “The Worry Clinic,” the advice column of Dr. George W. Crane that ran almost daily on the comics page of the
Atlanta Constitution
until 1957, a friendship flowered: Flannery’s favorite was Crane’s counsel to a lethargic soul to donate a water cooler to his church because “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” When Louise revealed that her family was Associate Reformed Presbyterian, Flannery asked, “What in the wurld-d is that?” Louise, in turn, was surprised to find that Flannery was Roman Catholic. “Yes, we believe . . . ,” she began, and recited the entire Apostles’ Creed, as nineteen peacocks high-stepped across the lawn. Walking together to her car, Louise admitted to being a bit lonely as a housewife-writer in Louisville. “Come back as often as you can,” said Flannery. “I’m in the same position you are.” Louise Abbot was soon returning often, invited to join Flannery and Regina for lunch in the combination sitting and dining room, or at Sanford House; she was one friend Flannery could trust not to judge her mother, or their relationship.

Over the spring and summer the letters between Flannery and her closer friend Betty Hester turned from theology to the carpentry of constructing a good story and gossip. The true zing in her correspondence that season, though, came from the irrepressible Maryat Lee, living a life of adventure that fulfilled her niece’s characterization of her as Auntie Mame. Maryat had failed to mention that she was engaged to an Australian named David Foulkes-Taylor, whom she met while covering the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1952. When she finally broke the news of a summer wedding, Flannery wrote back, “The following is good Georgia advice: don’t marry no foreigner. Even if his face is white, his heart is black.”

The marriage did take place, on the freighter
Mukahuru Maru,
sailing from Long Beach, California, to Japan. But the union did not go off without a hitch. Along the way, Foulkes-Taylor met a man to whom he was attracted, while Maryat, in Tokyo, soon developed a one-sided crush on the film critic and well-known writer on Japanese culture Donald Richie, who remembers her “intense manner and big, square teeth.” In the midst of such news, and plenty of light banter from Flannery about Chairman Mao, opium parlors, and saber-toothed tigers, Maryat sent a four-page letter in late May exclaiming that she loved her, too. While she did not label herself “bisexual” until the seventies, such free love was already part of Maryat’s style. Yet Flannery might well have been surprised to have her confess, from eight thousand miles away, “Oh Flannery, I love you too. Did you know that? I almost said it when we were standing by a fence. . . . What would you have done if I had come up with it? Gone flippity flapping away on your crutches I bet.”

As with Betty, Flannery did not blink, or “flippity flap” away, but she did transpose the discussion into a more spiritual key. “Everything has to be diluted with time and with matter, even that love of yours which has to come down on many of us to be able to come down on one,” she carefully responded. “It is grace and it is the blood of Christ and I thought, after I had seen you once that you were full of it and didn’t know what to do with it or perhaps even what it was. Even if you loved Faulkes and Ritche and me and Emmet and Emmet’s brother and his girl friend equally and undividedly, it all has to be put somewhere finally.” Maryat groused that her reply was full of pious clichés, not flesh and blood. The line went quiet between them for four months. When Maryat got back in touch, Flannery steadily reassured, “I am not to be got rid of by crusty letters.”

Where Flannery truly diluted her friendship with Maryat, as with much of the time and matter of her life, was in her fiction. When Maryat sent the letter of rapprochement in October, Flannery was already at work on “The Enduring Chill,” the story that treated her own fluctuating illness, but was also a trial sketch of Maryat as a perfect life model for one of her favorite types, the egoistic artist-intellectual. While the character Asbury shared some of Flannery’s symptoms, he was closer to Maryat: like her, he was a playwright living in a New York tenement walk-up with “a closet with a toilet in it”; his work in progress, “a play about Negroes,” was a swipe at Maryat’s performed in Harlem by an all-black cast; his forced integration, smoking a cigarette with black workers in the milk shed, captured the spirit of her taboo ride to the airport with Emmett.

The story was also a mulled response to Maryat’s opinions on religion as spouted on their first meeting while Flannery, according to Maryat, “suffered my remarks with curious attention.” The comment that stuck, as Flannery wrote her, concerned “the orthodoxy, which I remember you said was a ceiling you had come through.” In “The Enduring Chill,” the water stains “on the ceiling” above Asbury’s bed transform into the Holy Spirit, surprisingly envisaged as a fierce bird of chill-inducing ice
descending,
in graceful revenge. “But — the last paragraph! You really seem to have busted a ceiling,” Maryat joked when she read the story in
Harper’s Bazaar.
“This is the closest I have seen you come to your mind’s passion.” She got its message about Asbury, as well: “the descent of the Holy Icicle, despite himself.” When Maryat sent a gift subscription to the
Village Voice,
Flannery thanked her for the newspaper, which was founded in 1955 by Norman Mailer and Dan Wolf out of a downtown apartment: it “reminds me of my character, Asbury, and his life in the city.” Maryat signed one of her next letters, “Wishing for an icicle to descend, M.”

Flannery read “The Enduring Chill” aloud publicly just once, at what she called a “pseudo-literary&theological gathering,” a weekly reading group held at Andalusia, instigated by William Kirkland, the local Episcopal minister, where Maryat read a play in progress that spring, too. Lasting from the fall of 1957 until 1960, the group began with a grand plan to discuss “theology in modern literature” and was made up of six to eight regulars, mostly GSCW professors, plus an air force sergeant and a psychiatrist from the mental hospital. Flannery was thankful when their reading list relaxed from Kierkegaard and Sartre to Lardner and Welty. On the evening she presented her new story in the smoke-filled dining room, Kirkland recalls that she played up the comic relationship of Asbury and his physician: “She really bore down with special emphasis on his comment, ‘What’s wrong with me goes
way
beyond Block.’”

Maryat’s reading from her play
Kairos,
set in the South, took place while she was in town for the formal investiture of her brother as college president on April 3, 1958. She later remembered the group as “not particularly scintillating; everybody on good behavior. . . . It was a bit academic for me.” Mary Barbara Tate, a high school English teacher at the time, and a member of the group, recalls, “Maryat read us a play one night that she had written. She was such a nut. She had such an ego. And yet there was something very warm and appealing about her. I liked her.” Maryat’s knack for scandal was accented by the presence of a companion, Jean “Poppy” Raymond, formerly a principal ballerina in an Australian dance company, whom she had met on the eventful Japanese freighter trip and was now living with in New York City; she and Foulkes-Taylor had parted company in Hong Kong, though they still remained married.

Alert to all the imagery from O’Connor’s stories lurking in the landscape of the farm, established authors began arriving, as well. By the spring of 1958, Andalusia had become a known destination. The young poet James Dickey, later the author of
Deliverance,
stopped by in early March. Dickey told a friend that when he started writing, O’Connor was the only author in Georgia who “was doing anything.” That day he identified himself mostly as an admirer of Robert Lowell. On a subsequent visit, O’Connor happily reported that he brought his son, “to show his little boy the ponies.” “My father tempted me there with talk of Shetland ponies,” concurs Christopher Dickey, who went on to become
Newsweek
’s Paris bureau chief. “I was horrified because I had never met anyone so sick and crippled. But, as a child, I kept one of her peacock plumes in my collection of treasures.”

Katherine Anne Porter, at work for twenty-seven years on her novel
Ship of Fools,
arrived, too, for lunch after a late-March public reading in Macon; she was driven over by the Gossetts. Flannery was amused when she heard that Porter performed at the college wearing “a black halter type dress sans back, & long black gloves which interfered with her turning the pages. After each story, she made a kind of curtsy, which someone described as ‘wobbly.’” Entertaining the “very pleasant and agreeable” Southern writer — her “Noon Wine” was an early influence at Iowa — Flannery noted that she “plowed all over the yard behind me in her spike-heeled shoes to see my various kinds of chickens.” In a more lyrical account of the afternoon, Porter recalled her “gracious” hostess as “tenderly fresh-colored, young, smiling . . . balanced lightly on her aluminum crutches, whistling to her peacocks who came floating and rustling to her, calling in their rusty voices.”