Flannery (31 page)

“Cleanth Brooks and others have suggested that there are some similarities between the literary renaissance in Ireland and that in the Southern United States,” wrote Ashley Brown, a houseguest of the Cheneys the weekend Flannery first visited in the summer of 1953. “In retrospect it seems to me that Cold Chimneys was something like Coole Park in County Galway, Lady Gregory’s house where for thirty years William Butler Yeats and his friends gathered.” A natural guest at almost any time at Cold Chimneys, where he had spent long stretches while a graduate student at Vanderbilt, Brown was a particularly apt invitee at the house party that weekend. He was a young instructor at Virginia’s Washington and Lee University, and had already been in touch with O’Connor, convincing her to allow the publication of “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” the revised version of “Woman on the Stairs,” in the spring 1953 issue of
Shenandoah.

Of a type in academic and literary circles pegged as knowing and cultivating
“everyone,”
Brown, who was to become a good friend of Flannery’s, and a frequent weekend visitor to Andalusia, had first become alert to her byline when the episodic chapters of
Wise Blood
appeared in the
Sewanee Review
and
Partisan Review.
“At that stage, let us say 1948 or 1949, I wasn’t quite sure whether Flannery was male or female,” he says. Quickening his interest was Caroline Gordon’s blurb on the novel’s dust jacket, inspiring him to write an enthusiastic letter, to which Flannery responded, “I’m no Georgia Kafka,” setting what he described as the “flippant” tone of their friendship. “She was intelligent, caustic, with a tremendous sense of humor,” remembers Brown, of meeting her at the Cheneys’. But she stopped him short while he was telling her of an imminent trip to Ireland. “Whatever do you want to go
there
for?” asked Flannery.

Cold Chimneys soon became a retreat for Flannery, and the Cheneys a nearby replacement for the Fitzgeralds, whom she visited in Connecticut for the last time in August 1953, before they left for Italy on a Guggenheim grant, and where they remained for the next eleven years. The bond with the Cheneys was strengthened by their conversion to Catholicism in March, following the lead of the Tates and making them part of a small minority in the South. “I consider Caroline my literary godmother,” Brainard told Flannery, “and now she is my godmother in The Church.” As at the Fitzgeralds’ home, Flannery felt comfortable practicing her religion. “We just hit it off,” said Frances Cheney. “Flannery had a kind of Gothic humor. She used to come see us right often. Her mother always made her buy a new dress. . . . We put her in the junk room and I’d go in there — she spent a good deal of time there — and she would be saying her prayers.”

The high point of the trip for the Cheneys’ friends, and for Flannery, in finding a group that appreciated her sensibility, was her reading aloud of a couple of stories over the weekend in the library, the most impressive spot in the house. As the sun slanted through the blinds of the great study, with its floor-to-ceiling books and old-fashioned sliding shelf ladder, she regaled them with “The River,” just published in the
Sewanee Review.
Prominently on display, the summer 1953 issue also contained essays by Warren and Lytle, and Caroline Gordon’s “Some Readings and Misreadings,” taking Mauriac to task for his denial of the
“natural.”
“She seems a very solid sort and salty,” Brainard reported to “Red” Warren on her reading. “She appeared almost simultaneously with her story, THE RIVER, in the Sewanee Review, and she read it for us in her good Georgia drawl: the exact tone of voice for the story, which I believe is her finest, perhaps.”

Ashley Brown vividly remembered her reading aloud “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” just published as well in
The Avon Book of Modern Writing,
which had been compiled by the
Partisan Review
editors, William Phillips and Philip Rahv. It included stories by “today’s leading writers”: Colette, Diana Trilling, Eleanor Clark, and Isaac Rosenfeld. With “The Life You Save” in the spring 1953
Kenyon Review,
“A Late Encounter” forthcoming in
Harper’s Bazaar,
and Brown having in hand the current
Shenandoah
with “Woman on the Stairs,” the Cheneys’ friends were experiencing O’Connor’s works as they appeared from several directions at once. “This seems to me her great creative moment,” Brown wrote of the stories being widely published between 1952 and 1955. Of her reading of “A Good Man,” he recalled that “by the time that the grandmother found herself alone with The Misfit we were stunned into silence. It was a masterful performance.”

“I heard a lot of Tennessee politics and more literary talk, most of it over my head, than since I left Iowa,” she summed up the sociable weekend for Robie Macauley. In spite of her barbed remark, she actually found the visit to the Cheneys “most agreeable,” sharing some of Fannie’s sense that “we liked to read the same things and we laughed at the same things.” A photograph taken that weekend with her hosts on the rotting steps of an abandoned smokehouse, wild vines gradually taking over, shows her looking relaxed, if unsmiling, in a ladylike dark blue dress with white trim, and a rare pair of earrings, perhaps suggested by her mother. “I asked the steward on the airplane what he did with the dirty dishes,” she reported about her trip home. “When we get to Chicago, he says, we push them down a slot. I would like to work out some such arrangement.”

W
ITHIN WEEKS
of this return from Tennessee, Flannery was inspired by a newly settled family of tenant farmers at Andalusia to begin work on the story that she would read aloud in the Cold Chimneys library on her next visit, in December. The Matysiaks, a Polish “displaced family,” consisting of Jan, the father; Zofia, the mother; twelve-year-old Alfred; and his younger sister, Hedwig, arrived in the fall of 1953. These Roman Catholic outsiders, speaking in accents more impenetrable than, but reminiscent of, Erik Langkjaer’s, drew from O’Connor a response both moral and comic. In newsy letters to the Cheneys, echoing her story, she persisted in referring to Mr. Matysiak, like an allegorical character, by the flat moniker “the D.P.,” for “displaced person.”

Having arrived in Georgia from West Germany, the Matysiak family had just spent six years as refugees, following the father’s incarceration during World War II in a German labor farm as a prisoner of war. “They had what were called ‘camps’ for people living in Germany who were not natives,” recalls Al Matysiak. “We moved from camp to camp.” A “jack-of-all-trades,” the father’s application to immigrate to the United States was finally accepted in 1951, and they wound up in Gray, Georgia. They traveled twenty miles each Sunday morning to the nearest Catholic church, Sacred Heart, where they met Mrs. O’Connor. By the fall of 1953, alert to reasonably priced labor, Regina had them resettled at Andalusia, and Alfred enrolled in Sacred Heart School, his presence at a school service noted in the
Union-Recorder:
“The boys in white marched in procession. Alfred Matysiak was the leader of the boys.”

The Matysiaks were hardly an unusual case.
Life
magazine reported in July 1945, “In the American and British zones of liberated Europe there had been discovered about 6,700,000 Displaced Persons. . . . More Poles, Balts and Yugoslavs elect not to go home, fearing the Communist domination of their fatherlands. In one group of 3,500 Poles, it was reported, only 19 chose to go back to Poland now.” The Displaced Persons Act of 1948, signed by President Truman, allowed entry of 400,000 of these DPs over a four-year period, against the opposition of many conservative Southern congressmen, including Texas Representative Ed Gossett, who viewed them as “subversives, revolutionists, and crackpots of all colors and hues.” Because half were Roman Catholics, Bishop William Mulloy testified at a 1948 congressional hearing, “It is our Christian duty and moral obligation to remove the displaced persons from their present plight.”

Milledgeville already had its share of such displaced families, with the active involvement of Father John Toomey, working through the Catholic Resettlement Commission. The first of these immigrants, the Jeryczuks, with two children, had arrived in July 1949, rating a feature story and picture in the
Union-Recorder:
“Displaced Family Arrives on Farm from Poland.” After briefly stopping at the parish house of Father Toomey, they had been escorted to a three-room shack on the Thornton dairy farm. Preparing in December 1951 for another displaced family that never finally moved to Andalusia, Regina and Mrs. Stevens sewed curtains for their windows from flowered chicken-feed sacks. Flannery reported to the Fitzgeralds that when Regina complained that the green curtains did not match the pink, Mrs. Stevens, “(who has no teeth on one side of her mouth) says in a very superior voice, ‘Do you think they’ll know what colors even is?’”

The Matysiaks were put up in a four-room shack beyond the lower pond, with no running water and a wood-burning stove. As Jan’s English was broken, and Zofia spoke only Polish, Al, having picked up English at school, served as the family translator. His father, a short man who wore plastic-frame glasses, possessed lots of technical skills. After an old John Deere tractor broke down, he astonished Regina by taking the motor apart. “Miss O’Connor could not believe it,” remembers Al Matysiak. “She said to him, ‘That thing will never work again.’ But Daddy got her to order new parts, put it back together, and it worked just like new. Daddy could fix most anything.” As an official 1951 governmental study of such displaced laborers in the South noted, “They need much less supervision than native Negro workers; they take better care of machine and farm implements — in fact, one employer complained jokingly, ‘They are such darn perfectionists.’”

Al Matysiak does not remember much direct contact with Flannery, who struck him as a distant presence. “If I talked with her it was very, very little,” he recalls. “I’d see her occasionally at a distance. She was really, I don’t want to say
fanatic,
but she loved different types of fowl, and feeding them in the pens. I couldn’t believe her peacocks when I first saw them. It was amazing, especially when they spread their feathers out. The male was beautiful. They had feathers all over the ground. Being a nosy kid, I would sometimes pick up those feathers. That was the first time I’d seen a peacock when I came, and the first time I’d seen a guinea hen, the first time I’d ever seen a pheasant, too. I’d seen chickens, ducks, and geese, but not the exotic type animals that she had.”

His favorite of the O’Connors was Regina, who filled the role of a surrogate American parent: “She was like my second Mama basically. I would walk from our house to hers and tell her, ‘I don’t feel good,’ and she would take my temperature and give me an aspirin. She loved to ride her car around the farm, two or three times a week, and she’d come get me.” If crossed, though, Regina could “make you feel knee-high to a duck; she could use words to make you feel way, way down.” Erik Langkjaer was present enough for Al to have a few flickering memories of the visitor: “One Sunday afternoon, a car pulled up to the house, and a tall, lanky, nice-looking young fella, dressed nicely, came out. Flannery got in the car, and they came back later that evening. I asked Mrs. Stevens, ‘Who was that man?’ and she said, ‘That’s her boyfriend. They just went on a date.’”

When she began catching glimmers of her new story, though, Flannery wasn’t thinking entirely of the Matysiaks. The situation they dramatized for her was also Erik’s, as his sales trips were a kind of displacement, too. And his homelessness, she felt — like her own homesickness in Iowa City — had a single antidote, a spiritual one. Sitting on the screened porch, drinking her favorite concoction of Coca-Colas laced with black coffee, they often discussed religion. “We did speak about faith, Flannery and I, an awful lot,” says Langkjaer. “I think she found it extremely difficult to understand how anyone could live without faith. When I told her, soon after we met, that I was somewhere between being a watered down Lutheran and an agnostic, she saw this maybe as a challenge to her faith.” Displacement became their inside joke. “Flannery told me she was working on the story,” says Langkjaer, “and couldn’t help thinking of me also as a ‘displaced person.’”

Yet while Erik remained “displaced” in Flannery’s private associations, she started her story, with bold simplicity, almost as an eyewitness account of daily life on Andalusia, even more baldly rendered than “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” Mrs. Shortley, the fictional dairyman’s wife, swipes some of her dialogue directly from Mrs. Stevens. Over the complaints of the farm owner and widow Mrs. McIntyre, about a mix of red and green curtains, she replies, “You reckon they’ll know what colors even is?” The priest sponsoring the Polish family is as “long-legged” a “black figure” as Father John Toomey. The Guizacs, like their counterparts, the Matysiaks, are a family of four: a father wearing glasses “perfectly round and too small”; a “short and broad” mother who can say only “Ja, Ja”; a twelve-year-old translating son, Rudolph, “pausing at odd places in the sentence”; and a younger sister, not Hedwig, but Sledgewig.

O’Connor also introduced two black characters, the old man, Astor, and “the young Negro,” Sulk, who were basically life drawings of Henry and Shot. “The two colored people in ‘The Displaced Person’ are on this place now,” she admitted to a friend. “The old man is 84 but vertical or more or less so.” Having learned from the failures of her high school and college stories with black central characters, she added, “I can only see them from the outside.” Such sketching could result in routines uncomfortably close to those of Stepin Fetchit, the servile, wily character created by the comic movie actor Lincoln Perry in the thirties: “Never mind,” Astor tells Sulk, “your place too low for anybody to dispute with you for it.” Yet the African American novelist Alice Walker — in 1953, a nine-year-old girl living in a sharecropper shack eighteen miles away in Eatonton — felt the portrayals accurate when she read O’Connor’s stories “endlessly” in college, “scarcely conscious of the difference between her racial and economic background and my own.”