Flannery (25 page)
Dr. Fulghum initially concurred with Dr. Maidman’s diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, treating his patient with cortisone, a hormone produced by the adrenal gland, with powerful anti-inflammatory properties. As Flannery informed her agent, “Am in the hospital, taking Cortisone, a new drug for that, & am improving.” While correct about the recent discovery of the treatment — earning a 1950 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, for Drs. Kendall, Hench, and Reichstein — her expected improvement turned out to be wishful. The cortisone kept her alive, but her alarming fevers continued rising. Given the crisis, Dr. Fulghum contacted Dr. Arthur J. Merrill, an internist and Georgia’s first kidney specialist, at Emory University in Atlanta. Over the telephone, Dr. Merrill suggested a likely diagnosis of disseminated lupus erythematosus. He also spoke quite honestly and directly with Mrs. O’Connor about her daughter’s chances.
In February, on the recommendation of Dr. Merrill, Flannery was transferred to Emory University Hospital. Located on the main campus, in the residential Druid Hills neighborhood of Atlanta, the Italianate-style hospital, built in 1922 as Wesley Memorial, was a 320-bed facility, treating more than 11,500 patients a year. Under the care of the forty-two-year-old physician she came to refer to as “Scientist Merrill,” or, simply, “the Scientist,” she underwent a battery of tests. As she told Betty Boyd Love, “I stayed there a month, giving generous samples of my blood to this, that and the other technician, all hours of the day and night.” The LE cell test — the first lupus test, developed in 1948 — confirmed Dr. Merrill’s diagnosis. Yet her mother, fearing the shock of her discovering that she had the same disease that killed her father, chose to conceal the news. “She was already weak and it would have been too awful,” concurred Sally Fitzgerald.
A disorder in which the immune system forms antibodies that attack its own connective tissue, causing chronic inflammation and often affecting multiple organs, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), with no certain viral or genetic trigger, remained nearly as elusive to her doctors as it had in her father’s day, due to a confusing array of possible symptoms. While syphilis, treatable with penicillin, had earned the title “the great imitator” in the nineteenth century, lupus, frequently misdiagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis on first examination, inherited this same distinction by the early fifties, because no two patients exhibited exactly the same symptoms. Like a more virulent undulant fever (“It’ll keep coming back,” Dr. Block warns in “The Enduring Chill”), the disease complicated matters by oscillating between “flares” and “remissions.” As Flannery later wrote to Robert Lowell, “It comes and goes, when it comes I retire and when it goes, I venture forth.”
Since the disease could compromise joints, blood vessels, lungs, kidneys, heart, or brain, its diagnosis involved identifying at least two to four items on a checklist of nearly a dozen symptoms, including rashes, high fevers, photosensitivity, oral ulcers, hema-tologic disorders, and arthritis. Suffering from a severe case, Flannery manifested a number of these markers during her great “flare” of 1951. Of the disease that often announced itself with a wolfish rash across the bridge of the nose, she reported, in 1957, to a friend, “I have not had the rash in several years.” And she wrote to Maryat Lee, “When I was nearly dead with lupus I had these sweats. They are a sign of serious chemical imbalance.” Indicating a low white blood cell count, she recalled, “In ’51 I had about 10 transfusions.” Most obvious, in her case, were the painful, inflamed joints of arthritis.
The lifesaving treatment Dr. Merrill prescribed was a high dosage of ACTH, or adrenocorticotropic hormone, derived from the pituitary glands of pigs. She would eventually sing the praises of this natural hormone, discovered by the same group of scientists who had developed cortisone for treatment: “I owe my existence and cheerful countenance to the pituitary glands of thousands of pigs butchered daily in Chicago Illinois at the Armour packing plant. If pigs wore garments I wouldn’t be worthy to kiss the hems of them.”
As a corticosteroid — one of the hormone groups generally produced by the outer part, or cortex, of the adrenal glands on top of the kidneys — ACTH stimulated the body’s secretion of cortisone. Yet all such new cortisone-related treatments, especially at high doses, had potent side effects. “I was an intern at Columbia Presbyterian Medical School, in the fifties, when cortisone came into widespread use in hospitals,” says the psychiatrist and O’Connor scholar Robert Coles. “One gets stirred by cortisone. I don’t want to turn this into a federal case, or an interpretation of her writing. But the drug that was saving her life was also, to some extent, stirring her body and mind.”
Flannery certainly felt this stirring, lying ravaged in an Atlanta hospital bed, her hair having fallen out during high fevers, her face bloated and “moon-like” from the cortisone. As she later described the mental over-stimulation to Betty Hester, “I was five years writing that book and up to the last I was sure it was a failure and didn’t work. When it was almost finished I came down with my energy-depriving ailment and began to take cortesone in large doses and cortesone makes you think night and day until I suppose the mind dies of exhaustion if you are not rescued.”
She imagined a connection between the disease and the novel that she had worked on so strenuously. By a sort of magical thinking, propelled by the treatment — “the large doses of ACTH send you off in a rocket and are scarcely less disagreeable than the disease” — she wondered if she had perhaps predicted, even shaped, this illness through her writing: “during this time I was more or less living my life and H. Mote’s too and as my disease affected the joints, I conceived the notion that I would eventually become paralized and was going blind and that in the book I had spelled out my own course, or that in the illness I had spelled out the book.”
Though her imaginings may have been delirious, she did hit on a critical truth. For while she “never had a moment’s thought over Enoch . . . everything Enoch said and did was as plain as my hand,” Haze did not truly cohere as a character until the stretch of time between her two hospital visits. In sickness and near death, the author bonded with her “morbid” character. Only in the last few months, and last dozen pages, had Haze moved beyond his snarling sermons atop his “high rat-colored” Essex for the Church Without Christ — preaching that would strike a
Newsweek
reviewer as “a subtle parody of Communist soapboxing” — to a glimmer of humility and self-awareness. As she would tell one interested reader, “I just unfortunately have Haze’s vision and Enoch’s disposition.”
Following a month’s stay, Flannery emerged from Emory, and the harrowing debut of her illness, with a novel that finally felt balanced, after she continued to make changes in the hospital. Recuperating in Milledgeville, she was put by Dr. Merrill on a strict salt-free, milk-free diet, and she learned to give herself four daily shots of ACTH. But, mostly, she focused on preparing for submission the pages that had been typed for her in Atlanta. With Rinehart officially declining to publish the novel, she was now free to mail her manuscript to Robert Giroux, which she did on March 10. Having long ago discarded “The Great Spotted Bird,” and whittled down “Wise Blood and Simple,” the author, who had just been through four months of blood tests and blood transfusions, was set on a title, as well. “I have finished my opus nauseous and expect it to be out one of these days,” she wrote Betty Boyd Love, on April 24. “The name will be
Wise Blood.
”
I
N THE SPRING
of 1951, shortly after her twenty-sixth birthday, Flannery and her mother moved to Andalusia, a practical change motivated by her difficulty navigating all the steps at the Cline Mansion, and allowing more privacy for recovery and writing. Regina O’Connor had already been spending more time at the dairy farm, as she became that most daunting of figures in a small Southern town, a tough businesswoman. After a summer marked by several returns to the Atlanta hospital, Flannery filled in the Fitzgeralds on her situation: “Me & maw are still at the farm and are like to be, I perceive, through the winter. She is nuts about it out here, surrounded by the lowing herd and other details, and considers it beneficial to my health. The same has improved.”
The austere farmhouse where Regina and Flannery took up residence, expecting to stay through the summer, was the two-story, white-frame Plantation Plain–style house, with a steeply pitched red metal roof, built in the 1850s, where the writer had spent so many summer days and evenings with her cousins as a child. From any of the rockers always set in a row on its columned, screened front porch, mother and daughter could look out over a sloping front lawn, full of oak trees, and onto a 550-acre estate of rolling hills, ponds, pastureland, and pine forests, with Tobler Creek, a spring-fed waterway, meandering through hayfields and wetlands at the rear of the property. Sunsets, as O’Connor often paints them in her stories, might be a “purple streak,” or “flame-colored,” or “like a red clay road.” “Does it every evening,” the mother, Lucynell Crater, reminds shiftless Tom T. Shiftlet as he admires one in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”
When they arrived that spring, the property was at its most inviting. The four-mile ride northwest from town on the main paved road toward Eatonton cut through dense woods. Just before Andalusia was a half-mile stretch of fields filled with kudzu vines, and the fragrant purple buds and flowers of tree-climbing wisteria. “You could, literally, with your windows down in the car, smell it coming,” remembers the O’Connor scholar Robert Strozier of passing the spot in the early fifties. Regina, driving her black Chevrolet, would turn left off the public road onto a driveway that cut through a red clay bank and curved gently uphill for a quarter mile, until she swerved around the back of the house to an open carport, paved with flagstones. Rarely using the half-dozen, wide, brick front steps, mother and daughter generally entered by way of the low-ceilinged rear kitchen porch, Regina often fussing with packages, and Flannery moving along more slowly behind.
Due to her convalescence, they chose to set up quarters on the main floor, leaving for guests two upstairs bedrooms, reached by a steep, railed, central staircase, its landing brightly lit by a long window. Flannery claimed, as her bedroom-study, the front corner room on the west side of the south-facing house. She soon had in place a narrow bed with a high Victorian headboard pushed against one tall front window; a few steps away she positioned a writing desk smack onto the back of an armoire, turned away from two corner windows, her attention focused inward rather than on any pastoral views. Her mother’s bedroom was directly behind hers, connected by a doorway. Across the entrance hall was a plain, high-ceilinged, gray-walled combination parlor and dining room; to the rear, the kitchen, where they met for morning coffee — always efficiently prepared by Regina the night before and poured into a thermos — and listened to news on the radio.
Not having lived at home since college, Flannery now found herself faced with coping, as an adult, with her mother, in close quarters. Regina was both a godsend and a challenge for the daughter she persisted in calling “Mary Flannery.” Having matured from a comely Southern belle into a feisty, formidable widow, with a straight back, sharp nose, small chin, and enormous blue eyes, she countered Flannery’s near silence with endless garrulousness, and a zest for moneymaking. As overseer of the farm, she was a natural. According to one friend, “Regina was very petite, in charge. She was a very capable manager.” She was also an ideal nurse and caretaker, but, at times, as trying a companion for Flannery as she had been for Edward. “With me, Flannery tended to be a bit joking and sarcastic about her mother,” remembered Robie Macauley. “But the idea that Regina was a tyrant — though a beloved one — also came through.”
While their former plantation house on a rise of land was the main attraction of the twenty-one-acre central farm complex, its working plant had grown more productive since Uncle Bernard willed the operation to Louis and Regina. Outbuildings now included a low horse barn; a vast, two-story cow barn with hayloft; brick milk-processing shed; well house; pump house; and a white wooden water tower on tall spindly legs. The tenants’ house was an early-nineteenth-century, two-story plantation cottage, with an open porch, just two hundred feet from the main house. Three other workers’ shacks were located in low-lying fields farther out on the property. By the time the
Union-Recorder
ran a feature on Andalusia, in 1958, the dairy farm boasted eighty-five Holstein, Guernsey, and Jersey cows, grazing on fescue grass and crimson and white clover, and supplying milk to the Putnam County Cooperative: “the cows are fat and sleek and giving plenty of milk.”
As Regina busied herself with driving about the property in her stick-shift automobile, inspecting fencing, or planning a livestock pond at the bottom of the hill, her daughter stayed in her room, shades drawn, having reinstated an inviolable regimen of writing for several hours in the morning. Yet during her first season at Andalusia, most of this writing consisted of rewriting. Although she felt that her novel was essentially finished, the publication process was full of starts and stops, beginning with a long silent spell that made the first-time author nervous. In April, she tugged at her agent: “Would you check on my manuscript at Harcourt, Brace? . . . I am anxious to get it off my mind.” She was not aware that Robert Giroux had run into some blank, uncertain reactions from the editorial board and sales department. “I thought, Wow, this is really taking a chance, but it’s the right chance to take,” said Giroux. “It was all against the grain.”
In June, word finally came of the acceptance of
Wise Blood,
and Flannery was “mighty pleased.” Following the good news, Giroux sent a list of suggested additions and corrections. She had also mailed the manuscript to the Fitzgeralds, her steady correspondents throughout her convalescence. With her permission, Robert Fitzgerald passed the manuscript on to Caroline Gordon. Like her husband, Allen Tate — just asked by the Fitzgeralds to stand as godfather for their fourth child, Michael — Caroline Gordon was a recent convert in search of a Catholic literary “renascence.” In
Wise Blood,
and in the manuscript of another first novel,
The Charterhouse,
sent to her almost simultaneously by Walker Percy from Louisiana, though never finally published, she saw some of her wish realized. As she reported the coincidence to Brainard Cheney, a friend in Nashville: “It is no accident, I’m sure, that in the last two months the two best first novels I’ve ever read have been by Catholic writers. The other novel is by Flannery O’Connor. Harcourt, Brace say it is the most shocking book they have ever read but have finally agreed to publish it.” And to Fitzgerald, she wrote back excitedly, “This girl is a real novelist. She is already a rare phenomenon: a Catholic novelist with a real dramatic sense, one who relies more on her technique than her piety.”
