Flannery (45 page)

Flannery’s own project was researching a hip operation that she hoped would allow her to walk freely again, without crutches. The Lourdes miracle, as humble as it was, had been short-lived, and she was seeking a more reliable improvement. Her closest confidante in these medical matters had become Maryat, and Flannery was surprisingly receptive as her friend began to explore experimental avenues of treatment; she was conferring especially with Dr. Henry Sprung, a lupus specialist in Providence, Rhode Island. In April, Flannery reported to Maryat that she had visited Dr. Merrill’s office in Atlanta for injections of cortisone and Novocain in both hips to ease her sitting and standing; full relief lasted only about two weeks. In July, she shared her frustration that “Scientist Merrill” had nixed a surgical-steel hip-implant operation, approved by her bone doctor, because he was afraid of reactivating her lupus with a kidney flare or an infection.

Flannery was experiencing some disappointments, too, in her important friendships. Chief among them was Betty Hester, for whom she had such tender feelings. While she had feigned some indifference to Betty’s choice to be confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church five years earlier, the move was actually a source of great joy. She hoped Betty would find in religion the strength that she sensed the fragile young woman, who had such difficult setbacks in life, sorely needed. And so she suffered when Betty told her, shortly after a visit to Andalusia in September, that she had decided to leave the Church. As with her response to news of Erik’s engagement, Flannery retreated into the protective plural, writing Betty that “I don’t know anything that could grieve us here like this news.” She deemed the turn of events “painful.”

Flannery eventually came to blame this loss of faith on Iris Murdoch, the Dublin-born novelist who had been strongly influenced by Simone Weil, and by Wittgenstein, whose lectures she attended at Cambridge. Earlier in the year, Flannery had read two of Murdoch’s novels,
The Flight from the Enchanter
and
A Severed Head,
finding them “completely hollow.” But Betty grew infatuated with these works, which were full of ethical questions and sexual complications among the English upper class. “This conversion was achieved by Miss Iris Murdoch,” Flannery wrote Cecil Dawkins of the weird literary battle for Betty’s soul. “It’s as plain as the nose on her face that now she’s being Iris Murdoch, but it is only plain to me, not her.” Flannery’s misgivings were borne out by several bouts of depression suffered by Betty. Their friendship survived, but with less hopefulness on Flannery’s part than in the first years. Betty went on to initiate a correspondence with Murdoch that lasted until her own death — by suicide, in 1998, when she was seventy-six.

Nonetheless, with a brief break in early November to address the cloistered nuns of Marillac College near St. Louis, Missouri, on “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” Flannery did manage to finish “The Lame Shall Enter First” by year’s end. Still angry at Robie Macauley for the illustration that she claimed was a misguided attempt to “compete with PLAYBOY,” she submitted the story instead to her old teacher Andrew Lytle, now editor of the
Sewanee Review.
She never knew that Lytle had passed on reviewing
Wise Blood,
or, as Macauley later revealed, that at Iowa he “found her fiction rather uncouth.” Yet, like many readers, Lytle was won over as her adult stories appeared; he even wrote for her 1956 Guggenheim reapplication that she was “immensely improved since I first taught her.” Lytle not only accepted the story, but planned a special summer issue around O’Connor’s fiction, with essays by Robert Fitzgerald and John Hawkes.

Flannery had actually known Lytle’s intriguing choice, the young novelist John Hawkes, since the summer of 1958, when he and his wife stopped by on their way to Florida from Harvard, where he was teaching. He then mailed her two of his early novels, which she admired as “the grotesque with all stops out.” When James Dickey visited, he surprisingly revealed that he, too, was an avid reader of Hawkes’s dark, surrealist works. “You may state without fear of contradiction that you now have two fans in Georgia,” she quickly wrote Hawkes. Three years later, in a rare blurb, she praised his 1961 novel,
The Lime Twig:
“You suffer
The Lime Twig
like a dream. It seems to be something that is happening to you, that you want to escape from but can’t.” Hawkes, likewise, championed O’Connor, shocking a Brandeis University audience by reading aloud, before its publication, the rape scene of Tarwater from her latest novel.

Yet the liveliest point of contention — and interest — between the two was Hawkes’s main theory about O’Connor’s writing: that hers was a “black,” even “diabolical,” authorial voice. Since he first read her fiction ten years earlier, at the prompting of Melville’s granddaughter, Eleanor Melville Metcalf, in Cambridge, he had been developing this line of thought, much like William Blake’s perverse reading of John Milton as “of the Devil’s party.” Flannery never sanctioned the notion, but neither was she completely dismissive. She even baited Hawkes a bit. When she learned he would be writing an essay accompanying “The Lame Shall Enter First,” she sent him the story with a teasing note: “In this one, I’ll admit that the devil’s voice is my own.” When Hawkes’s “Flannery O’Connor’s Devil” appeared in the summer of 1962, she wrote him, “I like the piece very very much.” But, privately, to Ted Spivey, she refuted the essay as “off-center”: “Jack Hawkes’ view of the devil is not a theological one. His devil is an impeccable literary spirit whom he makes responsible for all good literature. Anything good he thinks must come from the devil. He is a good friend of mine and I have had this out with him many times, to no avail.”

F
LANNERY TRIED UNSUCCESSFULLY
to withdraw “The Lame Shall Enter First” in final page proofs, when she “decided that I don’t like it.” Over the next year and a half she often spoke of finding herself at a creative impasse. When Father McCown wrote, praising “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” which appeared in
The Best American Short Stories 1962,
she answered vulnerably, “But pray that the Lord will send me some more. I’ve been writing for sixteen years and I have the sense of having exhausted my original potentiality and being now in need of the kind of grace that deepens perception, a new shot of life or something.”

Such reappraising began as she approached her thirty-seventh birthday. Flannery had never marked her birthdays with any celebration. When Betty sent her a birthday card that year, she responded, “When I was a child I used to dread birthdays for fear R. would throw a surprise party for me. My idea of hell was the door bursting open and a flock of children pouring in yelling SURPRISE! Now I don’t mind them. That danger is over.” Yet she was obviously meditating during this Lenten season on a curious quiet in her usually noisy life of the imagination, as she struggled with the flu in her front room, which was thick with the scent of Vicks VapoRub. Her sense of being at a juncture was clearly borne out during the morning work hours: 1962 was remarkable as a year when she created no new stories. Instead she gave nearly a dozen public talks and readings.

In April, she made the first of these “powerful social” appearances by speaking at both Meredith College and North Carolina State College, “strictly a technical school,” in Raleigh, on “The Grotesque in Southern Literature.” Returning home for a week, she was then off again to Converse College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to take part in a literary festival with Eudora Welty, Cleanth Brooks, and Andrew Lytle. Exempting Welty from the scorn she often expressed for her fellow Southern writers — especially Carson McCullers, whose recent novel,
Clock Without Hands,
she derided as “the worst book I have ever read” — Flannery respected the older writer. “I really liked Eudora Welty,” she confirmed to Cecil Dawkins. “No pretence whatsoever, just a real nice woman.” She loved retelling Welty’s anecdote of sending a love scene to Faulkner for criticism, and his replying, “Honey, it isn’t the way I would do it, but you go right ahead.”

She did find time, when she returned to Andalusia, to write a preface for a reissue of
Wise Blood,
to be published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. Her one-paragraph note, requested by Giroux, was mostly a technical requirement for lengthening copyright. She had resisted the assignment for several months, complaining to Betty that “‘Explanations’ are repugnant to me” and feeling that future critics should simply read everything she had written, “even and particularly the Mary Ann piece.” Nonetheless, she set to work constructing a note that she intended to be “light and oblique. No claims & very few assertions.” The final result, though, was rather heavy, and blunt. Forever prevented from mistaking the novel as a satire on religion, readers opening this edition, with its red cover and imagery of blind eyes, were met with a disclaimer from the author stating that she had written “a comic novel about a Christian
malgre lui,
and as such, very serious.”

Maryat was livid when she read the new preface, and shot off an impassioned complaint to her friend: “Now what did you go and put a PREFACE on it for you damn Jeswit, why it’s a ruddy apologia.” Giroux explained, “Flannery was a paradoxical person and a paradoxical writer. It’s what fascinates us. It’s a natural human reaction when a person is so contradictory.” But the reaction among some of her more secular friends to this paradox was to begin to feel that she did not accept, and perhaps in some truly shuttered way did not even allow herself to understand, the implications of her writings. Like John Hawkes, Maryat simply decided to ignore Flannery’s own pronouncements. “The writing is one thing and the thinking and speeches are another,” she wrote a mutual friend. “Jekyl and Hyde if you will. Perhaps.”

Praising to Betty the essential ingredients of “much liquor and male companionship, both of which I could stand more of more often,” Flannery then visited the Notre Dame campus on May 4, after two days of her more usual fare of speaking on “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” to the sisters of Rosary College, outside Chicago. Driving her from Rosary, including a stretch in the middle lane of Chicago’s teeming Congress Street Expressway, flanked by “odiferous diesel trucks,” Joel Wells has recalled her candor; when asked what she thought of the recently published sensation
To Kill a Mockingbird,
by Harper Lee, she replied, “It’s a wonderful children’s book.” She then returned to South Bend, just a month later, to receive an honorary doctor of letters at St. Mary’s College, the “sister college” of Notre Dame.

Between her first trip to the Midwest and her second, for collecting her hood, which her mother duly “wrapped up in newspaper against moths and put in the back reaches of the closet,” she made an appearance at Emory to talk about “The South.” When the critic Granville Hicks visited Andalusia in April, Flannery insisted, of her crutches, “They don’t interfere with anything.” Such certainly seemed to be the case with these demanding connections between cars, trains, and plane, as her mother met her at the Atlanta airport with a wheelchair. In the audience on the warm Sunday afternoon of May 20, for the Emory talk, given outside on the Quadrangle, was Alfred Corn, who went on to become a well-known poet and critic. Then a first-year student, studying
Wise Blood
in a Great Books course, he vividly remembers her “wearing a blue plaid skirt and a white blouse, buttoned at the top, of course, and unattractive pointed glasses.”

While too nervous to walk up to speak with her afterward, as “she was that awesome creature, a
famous writer,
” Corn did screw up his courage to write, like Cecil Dawkins before him, putting as the address simply “Milledgeville.” With early aspirations to the Christian ministry, Corn, from South Georgia, confessed to a crisis of faith upon entering college. Flannery carefully addressed these concerns in a handful of profound letters, in the genre of Hügel’s
Letters to a Niece.
In response to his worries about the challenge of secular learning, she shared her own experience: “At one time, the clash of different world religions was a difficulty for me. Where you have absolute solutions, however, you have no need of faith.” Instead she suggested a respect for “mystery,” a term she first applied to illness, but which was increasingly key in her theology. As for the conundrum of predestination and God’s punishment, she offered a literary answer: “Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn’t something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.”

That June a second of Flannery’s friendships splintered, this time with her intellectual sparring partner Ted Spivey, who had added to the heat of their debates in recent years by defending the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, of whom she allowed, “There is a lot of ill-directed good in them.” Spivey claims that a noticeable cooling occurred after he announced his engagement to Julia Douglass, a Georgia schoolteacher. When O’Connor “knew I was going to get married it made her real mad,” says Spivey. “I had a feeling she wanted to marry me, as a matter of fact.” Yet Flannery had already refuted this notion in a letter to Betty two years earlier, “My Jung friend is not a little bit in love with me but resents me rather thoroughly I think. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, I just don’t think the first is so.” As likely a cause for the rift was her growing exasperation with his significant dreams, which included Carson McCullers in her closet, Louise and Jim Abbot in her bed, and, most galling, dreams about Regina.

While speaking with students at Rosary College, Flannery had bemoaned that she had no new novel under way, as much as she wished she did, and so planned on “an awful lot of porch-setting’” on her return home. In June, she tried to put an end to this arid stretch by beginning work on a third novel,
Why Do the Heathen Rage?
Its title was taken from a conservative religious column printed on Saturdays in the
Atlanta Journal.
Having long expressed a wish to turn “The Enduring Chill” into the first chapter of a novel, she adopted much of the setup of its country farm: an intellectual son forced home by a bad heart; a snooty schoolteacher sister; a perpetually irate mother; and the addition of an invalid father. Instead of finding Heidegger, Walter’s mother has to suffer the indignity of coming across her son’s copy of
The Satiric Letters of St. Jerome.
When a section was published in
Esquire
in July 1963, an accompanying editorial note stated, “Flannery O’Connor’s novel is as yet untitled, and she says it may be years before it’s finished.”