Flannery (26 page)

True to character, Gordon did find herself “wanting to make a few suggestions” on improving two “muffed” scenes, and was “presumptuous” enough to send them along. Yet for countless young writers, as Gordon knew, her opinion was most welcome; the literary pedigree of this fifty-five-year-old Kentucky-born author of a half-dozen Southern novels and of such classic stories as “The Captive” and “Old Red” was impeccable. As she liked to point out, she had been Ford Madox Ford’s secretary in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, and he had once been Henry James’s secretary; Lowell thought of her as “almost my mother.” Her fiction workshops at Columbia, where she had taught since 1946, were coveted. One of her students recalls, “She presented herself in class as a correct Southern lady, wearing a frilly dress, polished black shoes, and a hat. But she told fascinating tales of friendships with Hemingway, in Paris, and Hart Crane, and was incredibly generous with her time, and her pages of typed comments.”

Flannery was quite grateful for the “touch here and touch there,” indicated by Gordon, whose criticism obviously struck her as more apt than Selby’s earlier “vague” comments that she suspected were designed to “train it into a conventional novel.” She made her corrections, in ink, while “a lady around here types the first part of it.” But rereading the revised draft in mid-September felt to the novice author like “spending the day eating a horse blanket.” So she asked “Mrs. Tate” if she would mind taking yet another look. Emboldened by the request, Gordon typed back a staccato, nine-page, single-spaced list of suggested edits. Jammed into these tight lines was a crash course in the basics of her fictional creed: Henry James advising a “stout stake” around which the action would swirl; the practice of Flaubert to never “repeat the same word on one page”; Yeats’s recommendation to offset every tense line with “a numb line.”

Beginning with this “St. Didacus’ Day” letter, November 13, 1951, Flannery entered into an informal, and lifelong, correspondence course that Sally Fitzgerald dubbed a “master class.”
Wise Blood
was six years in the making partly because Flannery was learning on the job, teaching herself to write as she went along. Although she would eventually wean herself from Gordon’s absolute authority, in the fall of 1951 she was an eager, nearly obedient student. Gordon was quite strict. For instance, she insisted that the omniscient narrator should speak in “Johnsonian English.” Under her guidance, Emory’s necktie was changed from “greenpeaish” to “the color of green peas.” Gordon deemed many scenes “so stripped, so bare.” At her prodding, Flannery added an expansive night sky above Taulkinham that turned into one of the more lifting passages in the book:

His second night in Taulkinham, Hazel Motes walked along down town close to the store fronts but not looking in them. The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete.

As Caroline Gordon was now a literary confidante, Flannery felt that she might express to her some vulnerable feelings on the frustrations of exile in middle Georgia. Under the delusion that her ailment was acute rheumatoid arthritis, she was still viewing recuperation at the dairy farm as an inconvenient detour on the way back north to Connecticut, and to her “adopted kin,” the Fitzgeralds. “All these comments on writing and my writing have helped along my education considerably and I am certainly obliged to you,” she thanked Gordon in a draft of a letter. “There is no one around here who knows anything at all about fiction (-every story is ‘your article,’ or ‘your cute piece’) or much about any kind of writing for that matter. Sidney Lanier and Daniel Whitehead Hickey are the Poets and Margaret Mitchell is the Writer. Amen.”

Yet during these same weeks that she was deriding her fate, she was simultaneously settling, nearly imperceptibly, into the new life that was awaiting her. If she had foretold her own debilitating illness through Haze Motes in
Wise Blood
— a book that she once described as “autobiographical” — she also sensed her new direction while thinking about her work. In a telling comment to Robert Fitzgerald (he passed it on to Caroline Gordon), Flannery claimed that while her first novel was about “freaks,” her next book would be about “folks.” This prediction began to come true as she adjusted to the land and folks at Andalusia. During this period, she took up oil painting, using scenes of farm life as subjects, and was delighted to be back among those dear companions of her youth, farmyard birds. “I have twenty-one brown ducks with blue wing bars,” she informed the Fitzgeralds. “They walk everywhere they go in single file.”

The “folks” looming largest in the immediate ken of this young author, discovering the subject matter of her own mature style, were the Stevens family — her mother’s dairyman, his wife, and two daughters — living just beyond the farmyard gate, in the unpainted, gray, wooden plantation cottage, with two front entrances and a long porch. “He was sort of like the foreman,” remembers a friend of Mr. Stevens. “He was a country fellow . . . real easy to get along with.” Flannery enjoyed spying on this tenant family (the house was visible out her bedroom window), picking up dialogue, and mailing off snippets for the amusement of her friends up north. She first introduced Mr. Stevens, much like a character in a story, to the Fitzgeralds in a mid-September letter: “I have just discovered that my mother’s dairyman calls all the cows
he:
he ain’t give but two gallons, he ain’t come in yet. — also he changes the name endings: if its Maxine, he calls it Maxima. I reckon he doesn’t like to feel surrounded by females or something.”

Even more fascinating to Flannery was the talkative Mrs. Stevens, a homemaker, who did not participate in the working farm, except for the occasional feeding of some yard chickens. Yet she quickly insinuated herself in the lives of the O’Connors, appearing daily at their back door. “She always tells us every morning what the weather is in different parts of the country, giving exact time and location”; or, feigning surprise at having intruded into a roomful of guests, “with some unnecessary message — so as to get a look at them.” Flannery was particularly bemused by Mrs. Stevens’s enthusiastic brand of Protestantism. On Saturday afternoons, Mrs. Stevens regularly had her church ladies over to the house and was charged with preparing an uplifting moral lesson: “She says she ain’t studied it very good yet but she is going to work it up by the time the ladies meet. They have a book with all these lessons in it and I suppose have a lesson each meeting.”

What she could not discover by direct observation, she picked up by reading, closely, the weekly
Union-Recorder,
along with Georgia’s agricultural tabloid, the
Farmer’s Market Bulletin;
she later told a friend that she “gleaned many a character” from its pages. The previous September, the newspaper ran an article, “Want to Win Movie Pass? Shake Hands with Live Gorilla,” on the appearance at the Campus Theatre of Congo, the star of
Mark of the Gorilla,
in time for her to swipe its handshaking stunt, and the phrase “first ten brave enough,” for
Wise Blood.
In August 1951, the paper featured the 106-year-old Confederate veteran General William J. Bush, photographed in a “dashing” full-dress uniform and military hat, attending the graduation of his 62-year-old wife from GSCW. O’Connor lifted and doctored the item when she returned to story writing the following summer, in “A Late Encounter with the Enemy.”

Flannery gained full exposure each noonday, as well, to the social class of ladies, usually in their hats and white gloves, who filed in with the O’Connors for lunch, the main meal of the day, at Sanford House. Opening that fall — just as Flannery was reemerging into daily life — the new tearoom was located in an 1825 Federal-style white-pillared home on Wilkinson Street, directly across from the college. Dubbed by Flannery “the local High Dining Establishment,” the restaurant was the creation of Miss Fannie White, the senior partner, and Miss Mary Thompson, dieticians from Wesleyan, a women’s college in Macon. The two ladies stayed true to the building’s antebellum spirit: in the entrance hall they hung a copy of the Secession Ordinance, printed on silk; over an Adams mantel in the dining room was a large etching of General Robert E. Lee.

“It seems like the O’Connors were coming from the beginning,” remembers Mary Jo Thompson. Likewise, Frances Florencourt recalls, “If it opened at twelve, they were right there at quarter to twelve on the front porch, sitting, waiting for people to gather.” They would always request the same corner table, Regina facing the bustling dining room, her daughter staring out a front window toward the Second French Empire clock tower of the brick courthouse, where the Klan had rallied three years earlier. “Flannery mostly ate in silence,” recalls Dorrie Neligan, a town resident, “while Regina visited with everybody she knew.” The menu was typed twice daily, with dishes billed as “unusual”: grits soufflé, rolled flank steak, hand-churned cranberry sherbet. Flannery’s favorites were fried shrimp, on Fridays, and peppermint chiffon pie for dessert.

W
ISE
B
LOOD
WAS
finally published on May 15, 1952, in a modest run of three thousand copies, selling for three dollars apiece. Its abstract, cream-colored cover did not give buyers many clues for prejudging the book, evoking a stylish
noir
thriller, or an Agatha Christie suspense novel. The words “Wise” and “Blood” were isolated in pools of red and olive, surrounded by jagged, pencil-like ripples emanating outward. The entire back of the book was taken up by a black-and-white portrait of O’Connor, her thinned hair fixed in a standard pageboy. She was still puffy from cortisone and was dressed in a blouse and dark blazer. She resisted having the photograph taken, sending the print a month later than Giroux requested, and was horrified, when first shown a “very pretty” copy by a local bookseller, to find herself “blown up on the back of it, looking like a refugee from deep thought.”

A lone “imprimatur” from Caroline Gordon was printed on the inside flap, comparing her work favorably with the absurdist fables of Franz Kafka, very much in vogue in smart circles in America (Anatole Broyard would title his memoir of postwar Greenwich Village
Kafka Was the Rage
). Gordon’s blurb claimed, “Her picture of the modern world is literally terrifying. Kafka is almost the only one of our contemporaries who has achieved such effects.”

Yet this praise could backfire for Flannery, who had never made it through Kafka’s novels
The Castle
and
The Trial.
As she reported reaction on the home front to the Fitzgeralds: “Regina is getting very literary. ‘Who is this Kafka?’ she says. ‘People ask me.’ A German Jew, I says, I think. He wrote a book about a man that turns into a roach. ‘Well, I can’t tell people
that,
’ she says.” When speaking with students from Dr. Helen Greene’s history class at the college, O’Connor was “distressed” to find them thinking that she shared in the European intellectual pessimism associated with Kafka that was “just getting to the young people of this country” — a harbinger of misunderstandings to come.

Not simply the neutral package, but the 223-page, unconventional novel itself invited high-contrast reactions. Written in a poker-faced style, its tale of lanky Hazel Motes — truculently arriving in the fictional town of Taulkinham, preaching in his “sharp, high, nasal, Tennessee voice,” conjuring a church where “the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk” — was evidently satiric, but the object of the satire could be a question mark. Playing Sancho Panza to Haze’s Don Quixote, Enoch has the “wise blood” of the title, but he winds up exiting the scene in a foolish monkey suit. Haze is pursued by the hormonal fifteen-year-old Sabbath Lily Hawks, the fake-blind Asa Hawks’s daughter, but no sex or romance occurs. In its final chapters, the episodic novel changes tone, revealing itself to be a morality play, as Haze — his pulpit of a junk car pushed over a cliff by a redneck cop — removes the “mote” in his own eye by self-blinding, and eventual death in a ditch.

Since this singular story of a pilgrim’s backward progress was expressed in poetic shorthand, indicating a high order of talent, the slim novel could not be ignored. Yet by crossing two literary wires — a Southern gothic tale with a medieval saint’s life — O’Connor opened herself up for criticism, somewhat unwittingly, as she was a newcomer to publication. “One reason I like to publish short stories is that nobody pays any attention to them,” she would tell an interviewer several years later. “In ten years or so they begin to be known but the process has not been obnoxious. When you publish a novel, the racket is like a fox in the hen house.” By the time she knew enough to dread the review process, though, she also understood why Haze Motes may have missed his mark with some early readers, a lesson learned: “he was a mystic. . . . The failure of the novel seems to be that he is not believable enough as a human being.”

Critical reaction was mixed. Especially during the postwar decades, most of the attention of reviewers was taken up with books in competition for the laurel of the Great American Novel — that year Ernest Hemingway published
The Old Man and the Sea;
John Steinbeck,
East of Eden;
and Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
won the National Book Award. Yet some quieter Catholic literature was succeeding, too: Dorothy Day released her memoir,
The Long Loneliness;
and François Mauriac, once said by O’Connor to be her single greatest influence, won the 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature. Another adolescent, male antihero was cutting a wide swath across the popular imagination — Holden Caulfield, in J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye,
published the year before; Flannery thought “that man owes a lot to Ring Lardner. Anyway he is very good.”

Yet Haze Motes’s spiritual agon was not as legible to the first line of critics, the guardians of public taste, as Holden Caulfield’s more general teenage angst. “I can tell you that from a publishing point of view
Wise Blood
was a flop,” said Robert Giroux. “It got three or four bad reviews right off. Then a good one came that began to see something. But I was shocked at the stupidity of these, the lack of perception, or even the lack of having an open mind. The review in the
New York Times Book Review
was by a Southern writer. He was embarrassed later, too late. Another reviewer said that it’s a work of insanity, the writer is insane.” Giroux succinctly wrote, “I was disappointed by the reviews more than she was; they all recognized her power but missed her point.”