Flannery (20 page)
In a polished atmosphere of grandeur past, not unlike the Cline Mansion, though more ostentatious, Flannery descended the red-carpeted staircase each evening for dinner. With the other guests, she lingered in the Great Hall, an eccentric repository of Persian carpets, pink velvet sofas, a Tiffany chandelier and glass mosaic of a phoenix rising above the fireplace, oversized oil portraits of the Trasks, and a pair of painted sleighs, gifts of Queen Marie of the Netherlands. At six thirty, a silver bell rang and everyone passed across oiled hardwood floors and through velvet drapes, to be seated around a carved Tudor table with high-backed, dark oak chairs, the Trasks’ silverware glinting from sideboards. The dress code was jacket-and-tie for men and evening wear for women.
Presiding at the head of the table was Elizabeth Ames, the director of Yaddo since its first season, when she was appointed by Mrs. Trask’s second husband, George Peabody. A widowed schoolteacher from Minnesota, Mrs. Ames affected an imperious, affable air. “She is like a well-meaning early Hanoverian king — but she’s a liberal and doesn’t approve of kings,” commented Robert Lowell, a guest during the summer of 1947. She was also half-deaf, and recycled stories. The novelist Frederick Morton, in residence with O’Connor, recalls someone telling a story that summer about the Hollywood actor Monty Woolley. Mrs. Ames caught his name, and retold exactly the same gossip. “There was the same laughter, mostly staged,” says Morton. “Everybody was very scared of her, because she had a decisive voice in who would be invited.”
Equal parts Mother Superior and monarch, Mrs. Ames ran Yaddo with many of the strict rules of a convent, except for chastity — though spouses
were
discouraged from visiting. This regimen was made to order for Flannery, who suddenly found herself in a world where at least some others, like her, worked “ALL the time.” Following breakfast, the guests were handed a black tin workman’s lunchbox and thermos, and sent off to their studios. Those favored by the kitchen staff sometimes found an extra raw carrot. “I would have been happier writing in my room,” O’Connor said, “but they seem to think it proper you go to a studio.” A great silence, straight out of the Rule of St. Benedict, was imposed from nine until four in the afternoon, with no visiting or talking among guests allowed, and invitees were restricted to the hours of four to ten at night.
Flannery made her way each morning down a dirt road, through the pinewood, most likely to Hillside Studio, built in 1927 as a piggery but never used for that purpose. Instead its hearth and chimney, constructed for smoking hams and curing sides of bacon for Yaddo meals, qualified the outdoor wooden studio as one of the more desirable, along with Meadow Studio to its east, with views all the way across the Hudson Valley to the Green Mountains of Vermont. O’Connor remembered her cottage for June and July simply as “a long single room with a fireplace and chaise longue and a couple of tables and straight chairs.” When not writing, she took “nice walks . . . around the lakes and back towards the race tracks.” Her constant companions were a “studio squirrel,” as well as some “chipmonks and a large important-looking woodchuck.”
Animals turned out to be fitting company that summer, as her own imaginary companion was Enoch Emery, the zoo guard who winds up near her novel’s end donning an ape suit. While many of the characters she was inventing were fated for the cutting-room floor, or spun off into other stories, “grinning” Enoch, in his “yellowish white” suit, “pinkish white” shirt, and “greenpeaish” tie, somehow stuck. First noticed by Haze, in a seventy-five-hundred-word draft, marked “Yaddo,” looking “like a friendly hound dog with light mange,” he became his faithful, if abused, sidekick. “In my whole time of writing the only parts that have come easy for me were Enoch Emery and Hulga,” O’Connor later admitted. During her Yaddo summer, she was sending out, getting back, and rewriting the two stories that brought Enoch to life, “The Peeler” and “The Heart of the Park.”
The downside of Yaddo for Flannery was its artiness, or the “arty” pose she felt that many of her fellow guests adopted. “At the breakfast table they talked about seconol and barbiturates and now maybe it’s marujana,” she warned Dawkins. “You survive in this atmosphere by minding your own business and by having plenty of your own business to mind, and by not being afraid to be different from the rest of them.” The summer was marked by many of the legendary Yaddo parties, of which O’Connor claimed, “I went to one or two of these but always left before they began to break things.” The more extreme action usually took place on weekends at Jimmy’s Bar, on Congress Street, in the black section of town. But at one official Yaddo event, a woman writer, ginned up, felt inspired to perform a combination cancan and cooch dance.
“Miss Highsmith and Mr. Wright had a taxi driver follow them around from bar to bar and then didn’t have any money to pay him so were taken to jail in a highly uncooperative mood, but managed to talk themselves out before morning,” Clifford Wright recorded of his high jinks with Highsmith, who characterized herself, at Yaddo, as falling “between those two stools” of writing and partying. All of the alcohol consumption — “in any collection of so-called artists you will find a good percentage alcoholic in one degree or another,” sniped O’Connor — combined with late hours, led, of course, to sexual escapades. “In such a place you have to expect them all to sleep around”; she went on, observing satirically, “This is not sin but Experience, and if you do not sleep with the opposite sex, it is assumed that you sleep with your own.”
Having defensively decided that “the help was morally superior to the guests,” Flannery’s initial response was to shrink back from the others, and to make friends, instead, with Jim and Nellie Shannon, the Irish caretaker and head cook, who lived with their three kids in East House, one of three smaller buildings on the property. “Dad had been a ragpicker on the docks until he got in a brawl and someone put a bale hook in his skull, so he moved upstate,” says his son Jim. Although Flannery couldn’t reproduce her daily Iowa City ritual, each Sunday morning she drove with the Shannons in their 1930s Ford station wagon to mass at St. Clement’s Church on Lake Avenue in Saratoga Springs. She kept a close watch, too, on the staff of mostly Irish maids, a type she was familiar with — “all well over forty, large grim and granit-jawed or shriveled and shrunk.”
Flannery did, soon enough, form a close friendship with one other woman writer, Elizabeth Fenwick. A Texas-born author of both thrillers and lyric novels, Fenwick was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, working for a Columbia professor. “I remember she was a kind of sexy creature, very attractive physically,” says Frederick Morton. The coincidence that brought Flannery together with the easygoing “Miss Fenwick,” as she liked to call the more facile writer, was that they were both working on novels for John Selby at Rinehart. As O’Connor later told Betty Hester of Elizabeth Fenwick Way, who remained a lifelong friend: “She lives by a kind of rhythm, has nothing to say but is full of lovely feelings, giggles, is a big soft blond girl and real nice to be around except that she bats her eyelashes. . . . She
is
a kind of complement to me, and we get on famously.”
As in Iowa City, she took up as well with a few protective men who helped her along. One was Paul Moor, who wrote about music, described by Mrs. Ames in her notes as “an accomplished pianist and a socially graceful person.” Moor had an unfortunate summer: he collapsed from heat exhaustion on a visit to Manhattan and had to be flown back to Yaddo; at the end of July, his studio accidentally burned to the ground. Yet he made a most important difference in O’Connor’s professional life by recommending her to Elizabeth McKee, his literary agent. “Elizabeth McKee was a wonderful woman,” recalled Robert Giroux, who eventually became O’Connor’s publisher. “For New York, she was really genteel and didn’t act like most literary agents I knew. She was very loyal to Flannery, was a damn good agent for her, and really helped her.”
In her introductory letter to McKee, on June 19, Flannery apologized for writing to her “in my vague and slack season,” and warned, “I am a very slow worker. . . . I have never had an agent so I have no idea what your disposition might be toward my type of writer.” Evidently charmed by the candor and self-deprecation, McKee responded within a few days: “Your work sounds very interesting. . . . Please don’t let it worry you that you are not a prolific writer.” As they began to discuss the details of the contract for her novel with Rinehart, Flannery, who reported that she was working on the twelfth chapter, further defined her “type of writer” as decidedly not formulaic: “I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.”
McKee showed commitment to her new writer by asking George Davis, a fiction editor at
Mademoiselle,
for a chance, as her agent, to look over the galleys of “The Turkey,” set to be published as “The Capture” in the magazine’s November issue.
The gentleman most taken with the taciturn young lady from the South was Edward Maisel, a musicologist, author, and Harvard graduate in his early thirties, who had published a successful biography of the American composer Charles T. Griffes five years earlier. A confidant of Mrs. Ames, he lived with an overflow of guests out at North Farm, on the far side of Union Avenue, where he could sing at the top of his lungs while writing. He was fond of picking up Flannery after working hours to take long strolls in the woods, and he even led her on a boating expedition on a nearby lake. The two occasionally walked into downtown Saratoga Springs, where he introduced her to some of the townspeople he found amusing. She obviously responded, as she later wrote: “after a few weeks at Yaddo, you long to talk to an insurance salesman, dog-catcher, bricklayer — anybody who isn’t talking about Form or sleeping pills.”
Maisel was caricatured by Robert Lowell, in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, as “a real Yaddo ringer who knows everything and everybody — is in on everybody — and is sort of a pain.” He was fond of telling guests’ fortunes with a deck of tarot cards. Yet his very nature as a learned and amusing busybody stood Flannery in good stead when he took it upon himself to become her advocate. As silence was the rule at Yaddo, much communication took place by note passing; Mrs. Ames’s favorite medium was a blue slip on which she often warned guests of infractions. In one typed missive, Maisel diplomatically urged her to notice Flannery’s distinction: “By the way have you got to know Flannery O’Connor at all? Probably not, because she’s so very silent and withdrawn, and needs bringing out; but I have been on several evening walks with her, and find her immensely serious, with a sharp sense of humor; a very devout Catholic (thirteenth century, she describes herself). I think you would enjoy her, Elizabeth.”
Flannery’s describing herself as “thirteenth century” on their walks shows the weightiness of some of these crepuscular conversations; she wasn’t much for small talk. The phrase was also a passkey to her more private thoughts. “She was completely intellectual, and cerebral,” assured Giroux. “She was a thinker. And in those days encountering a philosophical woman thinker was rarer.” The most “thirteenth-century” book she was reading, and avidly underlining, at the time was
Art and Scholasticism,
by Jacques Maritain, a French Thomist, who was teaching at Princeton and helping to make the thought of Thomas Aquinas relevant in forties America. Its eighth chapter, “Christian Art,” was a thunderclap to O’Connor; she drew line markings next to the passage “Do not make the absurd attempt to sever in yourself the artist and the Christian.”
Maisel’s crusade worked, and on July 26, a mere three days before Flannery’s departure, Mrs. Ames sent a note inviting her to return: “Then you may count on staying, definitely, to the end of the year: and I shall do my best for you to remain well after that date.” In a note of thanks, Flannery claimed, “I have worked with much peace here.” Her invitation was a coup, treated as a loud secret, in keeping with the intrigue around most of Ames’s decisions. “Dear Flannery is leaving tomorrow, but is coming back in September to stay all winter (this is a secret from the rest of the guests),” Clifford Wright confided in his diary. Soon after her return to Milledgeville, Flannery wrote “Dear Elizabeth,” that “were it not for my mother, I could easily resolve not to see Georgia again.” Her news of an open-ended stay at the artists’ colony, though, was greeted with far less enthusiasm by Regina, irritated that her daughter would give up a practical Iowa teaching fellowship.
Still, Flannery pushed ahead, writing Paul Engle a postcard suggesting he transfer her grant to Clyde McLeod, while including an inside joke about Haze’s casketlike upper berth in “The Train”: “I sleep in my coffin beginning every evening at 7:30.” The biggest excitement on her visit home was an August 12 rally of 350 Klan members on the steps of the Milledgeville Court House, which she reported, dryly, to Ames: “It’s too hot to burn a fiery cross, so they bring a portable one made with red electric light bulbs.” Likewise regaling Clifford Wright with tales of visiting her “ancient wealthy” cousin Katie, who told her to mind her manners more, she confided her tactic of not telling tales of Yaddo for fear of upsetting her relatives, who “think the height of Bohemianism is wearing slacks out of the house.”
When Flannery returned to Yaddo on the early afternoon of September 16, she joined a reduced group of fifteen guests. Among them, until the end of the month, was Elizabeth Hardwick, a Kentucky-born
Partisan Review
writer in her early thirties, already a lively presence on the literary scene in Manhattan. “She was a brilliant creature, a wonderful conversationalist, who fainted once that summer on the tennis court,” says Morton. When Mrs. Ames invited Hardwick back for January, she signed her note, with unusual warmth, “My love to you.” Staying until mid-October was Malcolm Cowley, assistant editor of the
New Republic
from 1929 until 1944 and one of the Yaddo board members who approved O’Connor’s application, with the comment “She seems to have talent.” (The only naysayer on the board, the Smith College professor Newton Arvin, found her submitted stories “hard to like . . . unrelieved, gray, uncolored.”)
