Flannery (27 page)

A prepublication notice, in
Library Journal,
labeled
Wise Blood
“odd,” and set the sharp tone of the more negative reviews: “Written by another of that galaxy of rising young writers who deal with the South, this one was penned at deep-freeze temperatures.” The all-important Sunday
Times
review, “Unending Vengeance,” by William Goyen, introduced O’Connor as “a writer of power,” but slighted her style as “tight to choking” and her novel as “an indefensible blow delivered in the dark.” An anonymous review in
Time
accused her of being “arty,” using Gordon’s blurb as ammo: “All too often it reads as if Kafka had been set to writing continuity for L’il Abner.” The unnamed
New Yorker
critic wondered “if the struggle to get from one sentence to the next is worth while.” After reading Oliver LaFarge in
The Saturday Review
— “sheer monotony” — Flannery wrote to Giroux, “I am steeling myself for even more dreadful reviews.”

Yet the novel eventually found some critical acceptance as more thoughtful notices began to appear. The first break in all the tough talk was a review by Sylvia Stallings, “Young Writer with a Bizarre Tale to Tell,” in the
New York Herald Tribune Book Review:
“Flannery O’Connor, in her first novel, has taken on the difficult subject of religious mania, and succeeds in telling a tale at once delicate and grotesque.”
Newsweek
gave her celebrity treatment by running a profile, including a photograph of her “ancestral mansion”: “Flannery O’Connor is perhaps the most naturally gifted of the youngest generation of American novelists, and her first book, ‘Wise Blood,’ has an imaginative intensity rare in any fiction these days.” John W. Simons, in
Commonweal,
touted
Wise Blood
as “a remarkably accomplished, remarkably precocious beginning.”

Like many a young author, Flannery soon discovered that no critic could cause as much anxiety, or be as incisive, as relatives and friends. Before a single review had appeared, she knew that she had a scandal on her hands in Savannah and Milledgeville. Her mother’s reactions had always been muted, perhaps from sheer incomprehension. When the second draft was completed, she told the Fitzgeralds, “My mother said she wanted to read it again so she went off with it and I found her a half hour later on page 9 and sound asleep.” Cousin Katie Semmes was far more alert to the prospect of her precocious niece in print. She ordered advance copies to be mailed to her inner circle, the priests of Savannah, including Monsignor James T. McNamara, who joked around town that he genuflected whenever passing Mrs. Semmes’s home, as she was a major donor.

Trepidation about Cousin Katie’s reaction was palpable for weeks at Andalusia. If Regina missed some of the subtlety of the work, or its Kafkaesque technique, she knew well that men’s room graffiti and a teenage nymphomaniac in black stockings — a
Chicago Sun
critic would later praise O’Connor for having anticipated Lolita, in Sabbath Lily, five or six years before Nabokov — were far more incendiary than the material in Mary Flannery’s previous scandal, “My Relitives.” “My current literary assignment (from Regina) is to write an introduction for Cousin Katie ‘so she won’t be shocked,’ to be
pasted
on the inside of her book,” she explained to the Fitzgeralds, when the first hardback copies arrived. “This piece has to be in the tone of the Sacred Heart Messenger and carry the burden of contemporary critical thought. I keep putting it off.”

The pasted disclaimer did not convince her overly high-minded cousin. Savannahians still gossip that “Mrs. Semmes went to bed for a week after that incident,” while penning notes of apology to all the priests who received copies. “Wherever did she learn such words?” Cousin Katie cried. In Milledgeville, Aunt Mary Cline was equally horrified, and theatrical. “I can see her right now, after that book came out,” recalls a neighbor, Charlotte Conn Ferris, “drawing herself up, raising her head, crossing her arms, and saying, ‘I don’t know where Mary Flannery met those people she wrote about, but it was certainly not in
my
house.’” One relative remarked, “I wish you could have found some other way to portray your talents.” Yet Flannery weathered the family drama. As she encouraged John Lynch, a writer and teacher at Notre Dame, four years later: “I also had an 83-year-old cousin who was fond of me and I was convinced that my novel was going to give her a stroke and that I was going to be pursued through life by the Furies. After she read it, I waited for a letter announcing her decline but all I got was a curt note saying, ‘I do not like your book.’ She is now 88.”

Reaction among the ladies who lunch in Milledgeville was just as disapproving. Upon reading the description of Mrs. Watts, lounging in her place of business — “the friendliest bed in town” — Flannery’s first college writing instructor, Katherine Scott, threw the novel across the room. In an interview with a journalist, decades later, Miss Scott said, “When I read her first novel I thought to myself that character who dies in the last chapter could have done the world a great favor by dying in the first chapter instead.” Some townspeople later claimed that they circulated
Wise Blood
among themselves in brown paper bags, and one upright citizen boasted that she burned her copy in the backyard. “I read
Wise Blood
when I was ten,” says Mary More Jones, a Sanford House waitress during her college years. “I was attracted because it was hidden in Mother’s and Daddy’s closet.”

Even a few of the men of Milledgeville held opinions. A doctor working at Milledgeville State Hospital read the novel, and remarked, “I enjoyed it, but I know one thing. She don’t know a damn thing about a whore house.” Flannery later admitted to a priest friend that she indeed leaned on conjecture in the brothel episode. And Reynolds Allen, who had once defeated her in the high school essay contest, was attempting to write mystery stories and found that Flannery (they had resumed their friendship when she returned to town) was adept at “spotting inconsistencies in character very quickly.” But she disapproved of some of the British writers he appreciated — Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley — and urged him to read Faulkner. When
Wise Blood
appeared, he recalled, “I was pleasantly surprised. It was wittier than I would have guessed.”

All of these social tensions were politely ignored when the time came for a public response to the appearance of Mary Flannery’s novel. The headline in the college newspaper was “Flannery O’Connor Wows Critics with New Book”; in the
Union-Recorder,
“Top Literary Critics in Nation Are High in Praise of ‘Wise Blood.’” Brought up with the rubric “pretty is as pretty does,” many of the same women who expressed distaste were the most active in arranging lovely teas and luncheons for the book’s celebration. Flannery soon found herself preferring the bad reviews to this round of local book parties, which she forbade on all subsequent publications. As she complained to Robie Macauley, whose first novel,
The Disguises of Love,
would soon be published, “I hope you won’t have as much trouble about keeping people from having parties for you as I am having. Around here if you publish the number of whiskers on the local pigs, everybody has to give you a tea.”

On Thursday morning, May 15, from ten o’clock until noon, a kickoff “Autograph Party” was held for “Miss O’Connor” at the Beeson Reading Room at the college library. The room was decorated with bouquets of cut flowers, and several of Flannery’s recent oil paintings hung on the walls. Nearly three hundred guests, including Katie Semmes, driving up from Savannah, and Flannery’s college nemesis Mary Boyd, were received by Regina O’Connor and Mary Cline. Visibly mended from her bout of illness, the prettily made-up author wore a sleeveless silk dress, pinned with a large corsage. She signed copies, seated in a striped chair at a wooden table. “Cocktails were not served but I lived through it anyway and remember signing a book for you sometime during it,” she wrote Betty Boyd. In a thank-you note, she praised the library staff for having been “most brave.”

“I have rarely enjoyed a situation more,” remembered
Alumnae Journal
editor Margaret Meaders.

For situation it was, first of all, and function only — and barely — second. Having read her book, I understood perfectly the quandary that had befallen so many of the dressed-up visitors. . . . What to do? Everybody liked the child. Everybody was glad that she’d got something published, but one did wish that it had been something ladylike. What to say to her? What to do with your book once you bought it and she had signed it. If you read it, did you say so? If you owned it, did you put it out to be seen — or slip it behind Mama’s copy of
The Poems of Father Ryan
? . . . From time to time that morning I saw what I’m sure was the quick light of laughter in Flannery’s eyes.

A companion event, a week later, was a luncheon in honor of the book’s publication, held on May 22 at Sanford House, and hosted by Mrs. Nelle Womack Hines — unkindly characterized by Flannery to the Fitzgeralds as “an old dame that I abide with gritted teeth.” Seated around a white-covered table, decorated with sprays of pine and two silver candelabra with green tapers, members of the Milledgeville Book Club were asked to tell what childhood book had impressed them most. “I have been told that everyone tried hard to come up with an impressive choice,” wrote one Milledgeville resident, Mary Barbara Tate, “and the statements were, as Huck said of those in
Pilgrim’s Progress,
‘interesting but tough.’” When her turn came, Flannery punctured the pretension by drawling flatly, “The Sears-Roebuck Catalog.” Departing guests were then presented with autographed copies of Hines’s
Treasure Album of Milledgeville.

Among her more sophisticated, now epistolary, friends, reactions were just as conflicted. Robert Lowell remained one of the most ardent and committed supporters of the novel. Not yet having seen the final, published version, as he was living in Amsterdam, he did read the “Enoch and the Gorilla” excerpt, sold as second serial rights by Harcourt, in
New World Writing,
and he dashed off an enthusiastic response in early June: “When I was through reading I could have hugged the gorilla. The whole incident is rather epically dismal.” He suggested for her next book the story of Lizzie Borden, accused of murdering her father and stepmother in 1892. Lowell later informed Flannery, from Manhattan, that the
Partisan Review
editor Philip Rahv “now goes about enraging New York literati by telling them they should write a
Wise Blood.
”

Andrew Lytle was not as pleased, though he did not relay his disapproval directly to his former student. Having encouraged her during an early, fecund stage of the novel, Lytle did not appreciate the severe religious turn the novel had taken at Yaddo and in Connecticut; he rightly suspected theology in the retooling of the main character into what O’Connor herself later called “a Protestant saint, written from the point of view of a Catholic.” When the
Shenandoah
editor Thomas Carter asked Lytle to review
Wise Blood,
he declined, explaining, “I think she left out too much circumstance of sardonic humor. . . . There is a move towards the Old Church on the part of some of my friends, and I’m afraid an extraneous zeal is confusing their artistry.” Mary McCarthy’s husband, Bowden Broadwater, remained unmoved, saying, “I still can’t read Flannel Mouth.”

To try to get out a more sympathetic message about the book, Giroux began to solicit comments that might be useful in ads. He wrote especially to the English Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh, whose satiric
Loved One
had been cited in the
Wise Blood
flap copy. Waugh wrote back,

Thank you for sending me WISE BLOOD, which I read with interest. You want a favorable opinion to quote. The best I can say is: “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” End quote. It isn’t the kind of book I like much, but it is good of its kind. It is lively and more imaginative than most modern books. Why are so many characters in recent American fiction sub-human? Kindest regards, E.W.

When Giroux forwarded the pulled quote, Regina was “vastly insulted.” Putting the emphasis on
if
and
lady,
she asked, of the author she called “Evalin Wow”: “Does he suppose you’re not a lady? . . . WHO is he?”

Open season on
Wise Blood
ended by early summer, culminating with a mostly negative review in the
New Republic
from Isaac Rosenfeld. His extreme interpretation was that O’Connor “writes of an insane world peopled by monsters and submen, Motes the first among them. . . . Motes is plain crazy. . . . How then can one take his predicament seriously?” He found the characters revealed “in a pallid light reflected mainly, I should say, from Faulkner and Carson McCullers.” As O’Connor reported on the review with humor, seemingly able to rise to any challenge, “He found it completely bogus, at length.” Yet even Rosenfeld allowed that the author exhibited “a variety of sensibility out of which the kind of fiction that matters can be made.” As her friend and champion Robert Fitzgerald put the best face on three months of critical dissonance: “But Rosenfeld and everyone else knew that a strong new writer was at large.”

I
N EARLY
J
UNE
, Flannery finally realized her wish to return to the Fitzgeralds’ Connecticut home, a year and a half later than anticipated. Almost immediately upon her arrival, Robert Fitzgerald needed to depart for six weeks of teaching at the Indiana School of Letters. They now had four children all under four years of age, and he was frantically working wherever he could to support his rapidly multiplying family. But he was present when Flannery arrived, “looking ravaged but pretty, with short soft new curls” and having smuggled three baby ducks on the plane from Georgia, to delight the children. And he remembered joining in the first few meals of cress and herbs that Sally prepared, as their guest was still on a restricted, salt-free diet.