Flannery (35 page)

Still Flannery could not help being pleased with the general reception of
A Good Man Is Hard to Find,
a patent departure from the flat incomprehension that had so often greeted her work. “This book is getting much more attention than Wise Blood and may even sell a few copies,” the surprised author had written the Fitzgeralds. When her editor informed her that the collection was selling better than anything on their list except Thomas Merton, she cracked, “Doesn’t say much for their list.” In quick succession,
A Good Man
went through three printings, selling 4,000 copies over the summer, and was named a finalist for a 1956 National Book Award, losing out eventually to John O’Hara’s
Ten North Frederick.
Its inevitable fate was the thirty-five-cent paperback, published by Signet the next year in a run of 173,750 copies, with a lurid cover of Hulga, in an open blouse and red skirt, her leg and foot bare, struggling in a hayloft with a dark stranger.

A
MID ALL THESE
diverging critical responses, including high praise, and book covers that could seem weird and distorted, Flannery felt something akin to a sigh of gratitude in the middle of July when she received a thoughtful letter from a young woman named Betty Hester, living in Atlanta. The stranger disagreed with
The New Yorker
review, and asked whether these stories were not truly “about God.” Flannery’s response, on July 20, was full of excitement: “Dear Miss Hester, I am very pleased to have your letter. Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find someone who recognizes my work for what I try to make it than it is for you to find a God-conscious writer near at hand. The distance is 87 miles but I feel the spiritual distance is shorter.”

Although they would not meet in person for another year, Betty Hester and Flannery developed an instant sisterly bond. They shared many similarities, made all the more striking by their unlikely profiles as brainy, independent-minded, unmarried women in the Deep South of the 1950s. Born in Rome, Georgia, thirty-two-year-old Hester was mostly self-educated, having attended a humble local junior college, Young Harris, a two-year Methodist school in the Appalachian Mountains of rural northern Georgia. Serving as a meteorologist with the U.S. Air Force in Germany shortly after World War II, she then moved to 2795 Peachtree Road, at the corner of Rumson Road, in Buckhead, to live, again like Flannery, with a widowed female relative; in her case her aunt, Mrs. Gladstone Pitt, who went by the nickname “Clyde.”

Every morning, like a character out of a Kafka novel, either doomed, or aspiring, to invisibility, Betty took a bus downtown to her job as a clerk at Credit Bureau, Inc., later acquired by Equifax. Resembling Flannery in stature, as well — she was about five three, 130 pounds, with thick horn-rimmed spectacles, a Roman nose, and ash blonde hair — Betty mostly kept to herself. According to a mutual friend, “Betty was very shy. So she and Flannery could be quiet together.” Each night, the reclusive clerk returned to her aunt’s apartment and took up her station on the living room couch, where she slept, as well as read and wrote, surrounded by stacks of books, ashtrays — she was a heavy smoker — and a menagerie of cats. She wrote hundreds of letters to Flannery, and was later iden-tified as “A” in O’Connor’s published correspondence, to protect her privacy.

Perhaps from reading the letters about devotional art between the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and his friend and close reader Robert Bridges, or simply from “apoplexy” at the incomprehension of some reviewers, Flannery, after 1955, felt a pressing need to explain her artistic intentions. Aware of the limits of her understanding of “my own work or even my own motivations,” these letters gave her an opportunity to try to set the record straight, for herself as much as anyone. Already in her initial response, she vented about the
New Yorker
critic as an example of “a generation of wingless chickens” with “the moral sense . . . bred out.” She set the tone for her forthcoming talks and essays when she told Hester, “I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary and guilty.”

As much as a sympathetic reader, of course, Flannery was in need of a dear friend. Betty’s perceptive letter came just three months after the news from Erik of his engagement, and the same month as his marriage. While Flannery was in New York City, her new friend Fred Darsey had detected on her face a “disappointed look.” She insisted that this expression, which she claimed others had noticed in the city, was congenital: “This is the look I have been carrying around since birth — born disenchanted.” Yet she certainly had cause for disappointment, including, most recently, the loss of her confidant. Like Erik, Betty promised to be able to keep up with her intellectual breadth and curiosity, as they filled their letters that summer with lively debates on Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson, Henry James, Graham Greene, Samuel Beckett, Sigmund Freud, Victor White, and Carl Jung.

Ever the fiction writer, Flannery characterized her friends quickly, and stuck to the categories she imposed. Erik was a “displaced person,” the prototype of a traveling salesman. Betty, she decided early on, was Simone Weil. She saw in this homegrown intellectual — an agnostic obsessed with God — something of the tormented, brilliant French Jew, who was deeply drawn to Christianity, yet agonizing over and never taking the step to baptism. Weil had died of tuberculosis in England, in 1943, refusing food in solidarity with those living in Nazi-occupied France. In her second letter, Flannery asked if Betty had ever read Weil, and, in the next, confessed, “I have thought of Simone Weil in connection with you almost from the first.” She also revealed a wish to write a novel about a character like Weil: “and what is more comic and terrible than the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth?”

Their connection soon went beyond merely typing out thoughts on paper. Flannery was once moved to enclose a peacock feather, and an article on Edith Stein — a Jewish-born Carmelite nun and Catholic saint who died at Auschwitz — clipped from the
Third Hour,
the magazine edited by Erik’s aunt. Betty mailed her a novel by Nelson Algren. “I have read almost 200 pages so far,” Flannery answered. “I don’t think he is a good writer.” They soon developed a system, as they sent books back and forth by post, thriftily turning around the brown packing paper, adding Scotch tape, and addressing the stickers on the reverse side. From her own shelf, Flannery mailed off
The Lord
by Romano Guardini, a contemporary theologian in Germany. From an Atlanta public library, Betty sent back Simone Weil’s
Letters to a Priest
and
Waiting for God.

By early October 1955, Flannery was preparing to visit the Cheneys in Nashville. The challenge was steeper than usual, though, as she had to adjust to crutches. Her doctors had diagnosed a “softening” of the top of the leg bone, and believed that taking weight off the hip for a year or two might allow the bone to harden again; if not, a wheelchair or an operation to insert a steel cap would be necessary. They assured her that the condition was unrelated to lupus, though later studies established an occurrence of this condition of osteonecrosis in twenty percent of lupus patients treated with high-dose corticosteroids. She was also switched to Meticorten, a trade name for prednisone, a new pill form of the drug. “I am learning to walk on crutches,” she wrote Betty, “and I feel like a large stiff anthropoid ape who has no cause to be thinking of St. Thomas or Aristotle.”

She wrote a letter to Betty before leaving, hoping to strengthen their bond. If Betty instigated the relationship, Flannery tended to take responsibility for ensuring its growth. Betty had exhibited a guarded interest in the Thomism that Flannery had been spinning for her over the past three months, and she was an apprentice writer having approached a master. She showed promise as a disciple, a pupil, and a friend. “It occurs to me to ask you if I may stop calling you Miss Hester and if you will stop calling me Miss O’Connor,” Flannery wrote on October 12. “It makes me give myself airs hearing myself called Miss. I have a mental picture of you as a lady 7 ft. tall, weighing 95 lbs. Miss Hester fits this image better than Betty but I think I can still make the shift without disabusing myself of the vision. You can let me know after you meditate on it.”

Her time in Nashville was designed so that Flannery could meet the Cheneys’ other weekend guest at Cold Chimneys, Russell Kirk, who was in town to lecture at Vanderbilt. An old-school conservative thinker in the Anglo-American tradition, popularizing the ideas of Edmund Burke, Kirk was teaching at Michigan State, and had helped found that year the journal
National Review.
Flannery admired his 1953 book,
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana,
which Brainard Cheney had reviewed in
Sewanee.
In her copy, she drew marginal lines next to a phrase that was an important seed in her thinking: “Abstract sentimentality ends in real brutality.” But in person the chemistry was weak. She saw him as “Humpty Dumpty (intact) with constant cigar and (outside) porkpie hat,” and their “attempts to make talk were like the efforts of two midgits to cut down a California redwood.”

Kirk had never read any of O’Connor’s stories. But over the weekend he grew interested, as he heard the young woman on crutches, with a bandaged leg he assumed was broken, reading her reliable “A Good Man” aloud in the library. As Frances Cheney later told a group of students, “She was no beaut, but she could tell a story.” Flannery shared that evening the request of a Theater Arts major in Los Angeles to film the story because it would be cheap to produce. “Cheap and nasty,” responded Kirk. On his way back to Michigan, he read O’Connor’s book and was excited enough to recommend her to T. S. Eliot, his London publisher. Eliot replied that he had seen a book of her stories while in New York City and was “quite horrified by those I read. She has certainly an uncanny talent of a high order but my nerves are just not strong enough to take much of a disturbance.”

O’Connor returned to a desk even messier than usual. Despite Caroline Gordon’s warning that “I hope you won’t let them bully you into writing a novel if you don’t feel like it,” she had signed the contract for a second novel. Of its working title,
You Can’t Be Any Poorer than Dead,
Flannery joked to Macauley, “Which is the way I feel every time I get to work on it.” She was once more embarked on a novel that would take years to finish, this time her alter ego a fierce, fourteen-year-old, backwoods boy fighting the call to be an Old Testament–style prophet in the contemporary South. To support the work, she applied for a Guggenheim, with references from Giroux, Lindley, and Andrew Lytle, but was again denied. Preparing the way for her new hero, she worked on a talk to be given the next year in Lansing, Michigan, that she was calling “The Freak in Modern Fiction.”

But, in early winter, Flannery found herself once again visualizing her imaginary farm, its widow-owner visited this time by an “uncouth country suitor” in the form of a pawing black bull chewing at a bush beneath her bedroom window in the silvery moonlight. While treating novels as homework assignments to be painfully completed, stories had become for Flannery quick target practice, often resulting in her most successful productions. “I get so sick of my novel that I have to have some diversion,” she told the Cheneys of her new story. As usual, its heroine, Mrs. May, was once removed from Regina, this time in her habit of inspecting the fields. “Miss Regina always picked me up to go riding,” recalls Al Matysiak. “I’d get out of the car and undo the gates and shut them back behind her.” Its overhead sun “like a silver bullet” was also familiar to Flannery, who needed to wear a big hat outdoors to prevent the rash that sunlight could trigger.

Yet her new story, “Greenleaf,” was as much myth as
tranche de vie,
its scrub bull, let loose from his pen by the unreliable tenant farmers, the Greenleaf boys, sporting a hedge-wreath on his horns, “like some patient god come down to woo her.” Flannery had recently befriended Ben Griffith, liking his review of
A Good Man
in the
Savannah Morning News
— “Stories of Gifted Writer Acquire Stature of Myths” — for having “brought out a lot of points I wanted to see brought out.” And “Greenleaf” almost seemed written to prove his theory about the mythic, folkloric elements in her work. For although the bull in the story was a composite of one down the road “that was always getting out and running his head through the fender of the truck” and the O’Connors’ more pleasant Paleface, by the time Mrs. May is gored her bull is at least Zeus, the metamorphosing übergod of Greek myth, if not Christ, the horned unicorn of medieval tapestry: “the bull had buried his head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover, before her expression changed. One of his horns sank until it pierced her heart and the other curved around her side and held her in an unbreakable grip.”

As Flannery was completing the story, she received news that she treated as if it were as much an epiphany as the quake of the bull’s body against Mrs. May. Betty Hester informed her in January that she was going to be baptized. “I’m never prepared for anything,” Flannery quickly reacted. “All voluntary baptisms are a miracle to me and stop my mouth as much as if I had just seen Lazarus walk out of the tomb.” Overlooking her six months’ worth of arguments for faith, from Aquinas, Maritain, and Guardini, she adopted the posture of someone who had been holding back, not wanting “to stuff the Church down your throat.” In honor of her March 31 baptism, Flannery sent a finished copy of “Greenleaf,” just accepted by John Crowe Ransom at
Kenyon Review,
to be published in the Summer 1956 issue, and to earn her a first “1st Prize” O. Henry Award, chosen that year by Paul Engle and Constance Urdang.

Finished by the start of April 1956, as well, was her talk on literary freaks, for the American Association of University Women in Lansing, Michigan. So three weeks later Flannery set off again on the crutches she was calling her “flying buttresses.” The trip involved a plane to Detroit, where she was met by her hosts, Alta Lee and Rumsey Haynes at ten thirty p.m., and taken to their home as a guest for four nights. Finding that she had a talent for such “intellectual vaudeville,” she had already delivered addresses locally: in Macon, for a Women’s Book Review Group; in Atlanta, at a Pen Women tea and for the Georgia Council of Teachers of English. But this trip marked the first of the out-of-state appearances — often physically demanding — that she began making across the nation on a mission to explain her work in speeches painstakingly rewritten for each occasion.