Flannery (44 page)
Flannery’s foil in this race business, and a prime motivator of “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” the uncharacteristically “topical” story she decided to write and her fictional comment on racial politics in the South, was Maryat Lee. Maryat had been unflagging in trying to bring Flannery around to a more forward position, perhaps even to use her public stature to advance social justice. In April 1959, Maryat met James Baldwin on the street in Manhattan, prior to his leaving for a trip, without a car, through Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. She wondered if Flannery would welcome a visit from the author whose first novel,
Go Tell It on the Mountain,
a coming-of-age story about growing up in Harlem, had been published within a year of
Wise Blood.
Flannery responded politely enough, though quite firmly: “No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia. It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on — it’s only fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia. I have read one of his stories and it was a good one.”
In other letters to Maryat, Flannery was far less polite. In accordance with the name game they began after
The Violent Bear It Away,
Flannery signed off one of hers “Cheers, Tarklux”; she might well have signed a number of others similarly. For as the two began, comically, to goad each other on the race issue, their little drama escalated rapidly, with Maryat cast as the ultimate Northern liberal, and Flannery a bigoted Southern redneck. Unfortunately, in a number of these letters, many still unpublished, Flannery slipped into her role too easily, her mask fitting disconcertingly well. She turned out to be a connoisseur of racial jokes, regaling Maryat with offensive punch lines.
More productively for O’Connor’s more nuanced fiction, Maryat included in their slapdash correspondence anecdotes of her own misadventures in the shifting world of political etiquette that lodged challengingly with her foil, a.k.a. “Tarconstructed.” She wrote of sitting on the subway next to a “colored” man in an expensive suit who was reading Vance Packard’s
Status Seekers,
a popular book on social stratification in America. And she recounted, at length, a bus trip north from Milledgeville after her recuperation, in April 1960, when a black woman in “her Easter hat which was purplish red” sat beside her as a political act. Rather than be offended, Maryat offered to save her seat after a rest stop, apparently to the woman’s disappointment, as she soon removed herself to a back seat: “I waved to her to join me, but she looked out the window.”
Flannery adored this cautionary tale about the deflation of puffed-up political idealism by petty human conflicts. If not its entire reason for being, the incident became a central ingredient in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” her story of priggish, liberal, college-educated Julian escorting his mother, in her “hideous hat” with “a purple velvet flap,” to a weight-reducing class at the Y on the newly integrated buses. Like Maryat, Julian makes a point of seating himself next to a well-dressed Negro carrying a briefcase. And he experiences an inner yelp of pleasure when a Negro woman, wearing an identical “hideous hat” with “a purple velvet flap” seats herself, with her little boy, across from Julian’s mother — an object lesson he makes every effort to force her to understand. An elaborate interracial ballet of seat shuffling by whites and blacks ensues.
At the College of St. Teresa in Minnesota, O’Connor told a student interviewer, of writing black characters, “I don’t understand them the way I do white people. I don’t feel capable of entering the mind of a Negro. In my stories they’re seen from the outside.” This tack, while it was a type of artistic racism, worked well for her; Alice Walker, for instance, felt that O’Connor’s keeping her distance “from the inner workings of her black characters seems to me all to her credit,” sparing the world more stereotypes. Certainly in “Everything That Rises,” her “one-and-a-half point of view” is reserved for Julian and his mother. Yet in its treatment of a burning social issue, as well as Julian’s acute heartbreak over his mother’s stroke, after she is slugged by the irate black woman with her red pocketbook, the story was a departure. “The topical is poison,” Flannery explained her choice. “I got away with it in ‘Everything That Rises’ but only because I say a plague on everybody’s house as far as the race business goes.”
By the time that “Everything That Rises Must Converge” appeared in
New World Writing
in October 1961, and won the O. Henry Award the following year, Flannery was much further along in her views on the pace of integration. While never giving up playing “Tarfeather” to her “Raybutton,” Flannery would write Maryat in November 1962, “I’m cheered you like the converging one. I guess my mama liked it all right. My stories usually put her to sleep. She’s accepting all the changes in her stride.” And, in 1963, well in advance of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, O’Connor wrote a friend, “I feel very good about those changes in the South that have been long overdue — the whole racial picture. I think it is improving by the minute, particularly in Georgia, and I don’t see how anybody could feel otherwise than good about that.”
In addition to taking her title phrase from Teilhard, Flannery identified with his habit of writing for the ages. “As long as he lived,” she told Betty, “he was faithful to his Jesuit superiors but I think he must have figured that in death he would be a citizen of some other sphere and that the fate of his books with the Church would rest with the Lord.” Likewise in her talks on the “Catholic Novelist,” Flannery claimed that she would swap “a hundred readers now” for “one in a hundred years.” As Teilhard wrote for a time when evolution would be universally accepted, so O’Connor wrote for a moment when she was sure the races would converge. No matter what routines she did privately, in her stories she always presented blacks with dignity; indeed, in
The Violent Bear It Away,
only “a Negro named Buford Munson” finally gives the uncle his Christian burial. In literature, as in life, she clearly believed “love to be efficacious in the loooong run.”
“Revelation”
D
uring her next visit to Andalusia, in the summer of 1961, Caroline Gordon gave Flannery a jolt when they discussed, as they always did, her latest writings. As in most of their other visits, Caroline stayed in the left room on the second floor, and Ashley Brown, her “chauffeur,” was assigned the “upstairs junk room.” Because they were arriving on a Friday afternoon, when the O’Connors dined at Sanford House, Flannery left Louise instructions to let them in. Ashley, as usual, brought along a few bottles of sherry, much appreciated by Regina. “We got along right from the beginning,” says Brown. “Regina was not given to having intellectual conversation at the dinner table. But she was a Southern lady of a certain generation I was extremely familiar with. Not too many people were permitted to wash dishes, as I was, after dinner. It was all very easygoing.”
Ashley’s task was to keep Mrs. O’Connor occupied while Caroline and Flannery went off to discuss theology and literature. Even Caroline was impressed by the depth and breadth of Flannery’s growing collection of books. “Few people realized that she actually knew a lot of theology,” she later reminisced to Robert Giroux. “I know I was astonished when I saw her library.” On this trip, Flannery shared an early draft of a new story that she had begun working on, “The Lame Shall Enter First.” Taken from snippets of
The Violent Bear It Away,
left lying about in her imagination, the story was another attempt to get right the triangle of a liberal widower, his “average or below” son, and a tormented, delinquent teenager. As she worked on the second novel in 1953, she had bragged to Robert Fitzgerald of “a nice gangster of 14 in it named Rufus Florida Johnson.” Having decided to excise Rufus, she was now resuscitating him.
She had first come upon her title, six years earlier, in an elevator in Davison’s department store, on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta. An elderly woman entered behind Flannery, who was navigating on her newly acquired crutches, and said in a pitying voice, “Bless you, darling!” As Flannery wrote Betty of the incident, the woman then “grabbed my arm and whispered (very loud) in my ear, ‘Remember what they said to John at the gate, darling!’ It was not my floor but I got off and I suppose the old lady was astounded at how quick I could get away on crutches. I have a one-legged friend and I asked her what they said to John at the gate. She said she reckoned they said, ‘The lame shall enter first.’ This may be because the lame will be able to knock everybody else aside with their crutches.” The phrase aptly fit her character Rufus, with his “monstrous club foot.”
But when Caroline read the new pages, she was not impressed. She found them “completely undramatic.” Going beyond her usual criticism, Caroline pierced to the essence of O’Connor’s fiction. As Flannery summed up her comments to Cecil Dawkins, “Caroline says I have been writing too many essays and it is affecting my style. Well I ain’t going to write no more essays.” While she did not keep her promise as far as talks were concerned, she did seem happy for any excuse not to write more magazine articles. She had found such writing paid well but was full of indignities. “I’m amused by the letter from
Holiday,
” she wrote Elizabeth McKee. “The fellow obviously thinks it’s a great accomplishment to write something for them.” When the magazine requested another piece on a Southern town, she complained that doing so might “activate my lupus.”
As soon as Caroline and Ashley departed, Flannery set to work redeeming her story. “She did think the structure was good and the situation,” she told Betty of further comments from Gordon. “All I got to do is write the story.” So she deepened the drama by borrowing from Hawthorne’s allegory in “The Birthmark.” Her social worker, Sheppard, with his “narrow brush halo” of prematurely white hair and wish to reform wayward boys, shares a penchant for human engineering with Hawthorne’s mad scientist Aylmer. Like Aylmer’s unwitting victim, his wife, Georgiana, who expires along with her blemish, Sheppard’s son Norton, whom his father wishes to teach to be “good and unselfish,” accidentally hangs himself while peering through an attic telescope for some sign of his dead mother. The stand-in for Aylmer’s cloddish assistant, Aminadab, is Rufus, the very incarnation of fundamental evil in the guise of a young boy with a Hitlerian forelock.
Although her story was now moral and nearly allegorical, like Hawthorne’s, rather than “topical,” Flannery used current events and popular culture to update, and to camouflage, the original. In May 1961, Alan Shepard, “America’s first space hero” — his name tantalizingly close to that of her own Sheppard, who buys Rufus a telescope to teach him the wonders of space travel — made a suborbital flight in
Freedom 7.
Flannery had been following the space race, her new symbol for human pride, on TV, and the next January reported to Betty, regarding the forthcoming televised space launch of John Glenn, “Tomorrow I am orbiting with Glenn.” In July,
Wild in the Country,
a dramatic film about the “rehabilitation of a country boy from delinquency,” starring Elvis Presley, showed in Milledgeville. So Flannery took great pleasure in having her own country boy, Rufus, shimmy down a hallway in Norton’s dead mother’s corset, belting out Presley’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”
A subtle shift in her fictional world was taking place, too, in the depictions of the ever-present mother figure. While matricide continued as a favorite climax, a softer approach was subtly introduced. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” the fatal clobbering of Julian’s mother is followed by his mournful keening as he discovers “the world of guilt and sorrow.” While Norton’s mother is deceased, her presence in “The Lame Shall Enter First” is benign. “The little boy wouldn’t have been looking for his mother if she hadn’t been a good one when she was alive,” Flannery told Betty. Certainly acceptance of her own mother was a condition to which Flannery aspired, as she gradually shifted, during the 1960s, from using “I” to “we,” when speaking of matters at home. As Maryat wrote, over a decade later, in one of her journals, “I’m convinced that she used Regina in some way as part of her worship. Regina was her cross. She was Regina’s cross. It worked. They both basked now and then in the glow of it.”
Yet crossbearing was an arduous daily discipline, and much tension remained. Having once accused her of getting “away with murder” for the shocking “likeness” to Regina in the gored Mrs. May of “Greenleaf” (“She don’t read any of it,” assured Flannery), Maryat did witness some difficult moments. She was quite startled one afternoon when Regina barged into Flannery’s room, stormed over, and “smacked the windows open” to scream at Shot for some infraction. After she left, slamming the door behind her, Maryat said, “Surely she doesn’t do that in the mornings!” Flannery nodded vigorously. “She does do it.” Admittedly a girl at the time, Catherine Morai, a parishioner at Sacred Heart Church, felt that she routinely observed friction between them at early mass: “I have a very strong memory of Flannery struggling down the church steps with her crutches and her braces. The look on her mother’s face was angry and annoyed.”
Throughout the summer of 1961, Regina’s all-consuming business project was the transformation of Andalusia from a dairy farm to a beef farm, while also expanding its timber sales. Some of the attraction of the new venture was having a business that would not require as many workers to operate the milk barn. “The staff is non compos mentis every weekend,” Flannery wrote the Gossetts, “and she HAS HAD ENOUGH.” By July, they had sold their dairy herd, bought a purebred shorthorn bull, and were now fully in the beef business. Bulls were enough of a presence by the fall that when talk turned to building a bomb shelter, Flannery claimed to dream nightly of “radiated bulls and peacocks and swans.” Of the constant activity in a stretch of timberland, the critic Richard Gilman recalled, during his visit, “I could hear the dull whine of distant buzz-saws.”
