Flannery (6 page)
A likeable politician, Ed O’Connor was not simply a glad-hander. He was far more complicated, with an almost dreamy side that could sometimes be construed as diffidence, or lassitude. To Katherine Doyle Groves, who knew him when she was a little girl, he seemed “aloof” or “snooty,” a man with his head “sort of in the clouds” and his nose “a little elevated.” A longtime resident of Savannah reported an impression of him around town as “a dreamer.” O’Connor would later write to her friend Betty Hester, “I am never likely to romanticize him because I carry around most of his faults as well as his tastes.” Fitzgerald surmised that these unnamed “faults” included “sloth,” a vice Flannery O’Connor often claimed for herself, combined with the stubbornness her father showed in pursuing his Legion life against his wife’s wishes. “More likely, she was told this of him,” Sally Fitzgerald guessed, “or heard him being told it of himself, or overheard it implied in some conversation among adults that she was not meant to overhear.”
His touch of poetic inwardness, combined with the patriotism of a boy who grew up in Savannah as a uniformed junior hussar, contributed to his great strength as a Legion commander: speechifying. “He was quite an orator,” says Angela Ryan Dowling, a Sacred Heart classmate of his daughter. Her positive assessment was backed up by the
Savannah Morning News,
which regularly carried reports on the speeches he gave as he traveled around the state to preside at meetings and initiate new projects. “Head of Legion Talks to Rotary” was the headline of a half-column summary of O’Connor’s 1936 pre–Armistice Day talk at the Hotel De Soto in Savannah: “How veterans have picked up the ends of a normal life, disrupted by the World War, gone about constructive pursuits, and the service the American Legion has rendered in aiding the young men to re-orient themselves was brought out in an address yesterday by E. F. O’Connor, Jr.”
Reading through handwritten pages of some of these talks twenty years later, Flannery O’Connor felt reassured that writing constituted her most intimate bond with her “writer” father. On a visit to O’Connor’s family farm, Andalusia, during the summer of 1956, Betty Hester revealed that her own aunt and uncle were active in the American Legion, and had known Ed O’Connor personally. Hester said that her aunt had described him “in tones not usually applied to members of the Legion.” A few weeks later, O’Connor wrote back to her, “Last year I read over some of the speeches he made and I was touched to see a kind of patriotism that most people would just laugh at now, something childlike, that was a good deal too good and innocent for the Legion. But the Legion was the only thing provided by the country to absorb it.”
Still pondering in her heart the few words of praise from Hester’s aunt, she added two weeks later, really giving him credit for her vocation, “My father wanted to write but had not the time or money or training or any of the opportunities I have had. . . . Anyway, whatever I do in the way of writing makes me extra happy in the thought that it is a fulfillment of what he wanted to do himself.” In a monthlong series of exchanges — a rare expression of her tender feelings toward her father — she stressed his likeability: “I suppose what I mean about my father is that he would have written
well
if he could have. He wrote all the time, one thing or another, mostly speeches and local political stuff. Needing people badly and not getting them may turn you in a creative direction, provided you have the other requirements. He needed the people I guess and got them. Or rather wanted them and got them.”
At the height of his term as state commander and public speaker, in 1937, a whitish patch appeared on Edward O’Connor’s forehead. Seemingly innocuous, this skin rash turned out to be the first, visible symptom of an autoimmune disorder that causes the body to produce antibodies that attack its own healthy tissues. Initially thought to be rheumatoid arthritis, the disease was eventually diagnosed as lupus erythematosus, or “red wolf,” after a facial rash associated with it. As an adult suffering from the same disease, following the development of diagnostic blood tests in the 1940s and new treatments, Flannery O’Connor tersely assessed her father’s earlier treatment: “at that time there was nothing for it but the undertaker.” Asked about the disease, Regina O’Connor once surmised, “Oh, I don’t know. He may have had it when we got married.”
The flaring of this mysterious disease, with no known cause, ten times more likely to occur in women than men, combined with a downward business spiral to create a life crisis. Due to declining health, Edward O’Connor resigned midterm from his position as state commander. Traits that had been thought of as laziness — such as coming home to take afternoon naps — were now understood as symptoms of the illness. Toward the end of a difficult year, O’Connor began a letter-writing campaign to lobby for a job in President Roosevelt’s newly created Federal Housing Administration. On December 23, 1937, he wrote to Erwin Sibley, a well-connected attorney friend of the Cline family, “Tried to get in touch with you while in Milledgeville the other day, but was unable to catch you. Wanted to ask a favor of you.” He hoped Sibley would plead his case with the two Georgia senators and with Congressman Carl Vinson, representative from the Sixth District of Georgia and chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee.
“W
HEN I WAS
twelve I made up my mind absolutely that I would not get any older,” O’Connor wrote in 1956 to her friend Betty Hester, who had pointed out a childlike quality in her. “I don’t remember how I meant to stop it. There was something about ‘teen’ attached to anything that was repulsive to me. I certainly didn’t approve of what I saw of people that age. I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve, or anyway, less burdened. The weight of centuries lies on children, I’m sure of it.”
Some of that burden, “the weight of centuries,” was her father’s illness, and the forces set in motion by his troubles amounted to the abrupt end of her childhood. In the spring of 1937, she was still the little girl who arrived at school in “the electric,” and was taken occasionally by Mrs. Semmes for swimming lessons in the pool of the De Soto, Savannah’s fanciest hotel. During the summer, she wore a yellow-and-white-striped seersucker sundress with shoulder straps tied together in a simple bow, hand-sewn by her mother. She donned, as well, the unlikely green serge dress and jacket uniform of the Girl Scouts; disliking troop hikes, she rarely attended meetings, even though they were held just across Lafayette Square in the carriage house of the pink Italianate villa where Juliette Gordon Low founded the national organization as the Girl Guides in 1912.
Between the lines of this life as usual, though, the watchful girl with keen eavesdropping abilities would have sensed something amiss, as news of her father’s sickness remained hushed and secret. “She never knew her father had lupus,” said her childhood friend Newell Turner Parr. “She never had any idea. In those days, they didn’t tell children those things. You might be told Grandmother’s deaf or Mrs. So and So can’t see very well, be nice to her, don’t knock her down, but diseases and death and things like that, children weren’t told.” In her early, autobiographical story about Mary Flemming, the father is likewise only half seen, imminent, as the mother, slicing tomatoes at the sink, orders “MF,” as she calls her, to the bathroom to wash her hands after “fooling with those chickens” in the backyard: “‘Your father will be here any minute,’ her mother said, ‘and the table won’t be set. Hold your stomach in.’”
During her twelfth year she began a journal that amounted to a collection of random rants. Venting injustices, her funny, outraged voice sounds off in its pages, which she bound together, writing a warning hex on the front: “I know some folks that don’t mind their own bisnis.” She complained that her teacher corrected her spelling, but Mary Flannery thought that skill was unimportant. She likewise brushed off the usefulness of most mathematics, such as geometry, which used letters instead of numbers, as well as multiplication tables, and even having to learn to add and subtract. She railed against her dance classes, and mandatory cleaning of her room, which she preferred to keep filled with all of her own “litter.” She confides of her mother, “R. said I was clumsie.”
Reading books was as dear to the little girl as writing and binding them; her approach was just as personal. During the summer of 1937, she traveled with her mother to enroll in a Vacation Reading Club offered by the Carnegie Library of Atlanta, which awarded a certificate to any child reading and reporting on ten books over the summer. According to a library bulletin from the summer before, the most popular books with the twenty-four hundred children who completed the program were Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women
and
Little Men,
and Jack London’s
The Call of the Wild.
O’Connor agreed about Alcott, as she wrote on the flyleaf of her copy of
Little Men,
“First rate. Splendid.” Mother and daughter stayed with relatives in Atlanta, and spent time with family friend Helen Soul. Back in Savannah, with her inscribed Vacation Reading Certificate, O’Connor wrote a thank-you note to Soul for encouraging her to “read those books,” and ended with a strangely abrupt promise that “Regina says she’ll write you when she has time.”
She kept up this habit of reading and “reporting” as sister activities, becoming her own book reviewer almost as soon as she was a reader. On the flyleaf of Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
she wrote, “Awful. I wouldn’t read this book”; on Shirley Watkins’s
Georgina Finds Herself,
one of a series of “Books for Girls”: “This is the worst book I ever read next to ‘Pinnochio.’” She held on to these opinions into her thirties, when she wrote to Betty Hester, “Peculiar but I never could stand
Alice in Wonderland
either. It was a terrifying book; so was
Pinocchio.
I was strictly a
Peter Rabbit
man myself.” A cousin once bought her a subscription to
National Geographic
because, whenever she visited her home, she headed straight to the latest issue of the shiny, colorful magazine of global exploration and science. Much of its appeal, O’Connor later admitted, “wasn’t a literary or even a geographical interest. It has a distinct unforgettable transcendent apotheotic (?) and very grave odor. Like no other mere magazine.”
Nothing Mary Flannery was writing, or reading, directly addressed the “ancient” or “weighted” sense she remembered from that year. Yet later on she did evoke these feelings. In a fragment of another early story, an “MF”-style girl named Caulda mourns when her dog trots up carrying in his mouth her pet chicken, Sillow. She thinks of Sillow as her “brother” and fights with her mother to allow her to keep the dead chicken in her bed. Her mother, annoyed at the carcass that “was stiff already and he smelled some,” tries to scare her by telling her that the man in white she spotted walking up the road is Death coming to get her. In an eerie passage, the frightened little girl confronts the fears raised by this shadow of death. “‘Will he cut my tongue?’” she asks. “‘That and more,’ her mother said. ‘That for yer lyin.’” Trapped in bed, Caulda feels as if she’s running: “She had the feeling like a stone was creeping all over her and she was facing a wall of it and another was behind her and one was pushing in on one side and he was coming up the other.”
She may well have sensed the same convergence of threatening forces in her home life at the time. In January 1938, Ed O’Connor received positive news from Erwin Sibley of Congressman Vinson’s intention to help. He responded to Sibley, “Can’t tell you how much I appreciate your kindness.” But the good news was accompanied by a shake-up. By March, with the politicking completed, her father needed to move to Atlanta to take a position as senior zone real estate appraiser for the Federal Housing Administration, or FHA. As he went ahead to arrange a living situation for himself and his family, Mary Flannery was quickly removed from Sacred Heart School, and enrolled, for April and May, the last two months of her seventh grade, in the Peabody Elementary School in Milledgeville. This arrangement began an unsettled two-year period for mother and daughter of shuttling between Atlanta and the Cline familial home in Milledgeville.
At first, her father kept alive the hope of returning to their pleasant town house in Savannah. In the 1939
Savannah City Directory
he was listed as “on govt. service in Atlanta.” In 1940, his name was still listed at 207 East Charlton, but the notice changed to a more final “moved to Atlanta.” The family never did return, and Ed O’Connor never paid off his loan to Katie Semmes, who remained its owner. When Mrs. Semmes died in 1959, she left the property to Flannery O’Connor, who reported the news, simply, to the Fitzgeralds: “Cousin Katie left me the house in Savannah I was raised in.” As its new landlady, she rented out the premises, even though she once complained to a friend of two properties her mother owned, “My papa was a real-estate man and my mamma has two apartment houses and we have gone nuts with renters for years.”
Flannery O’Connor rarely returned to Savannah. Her adult letters contain only a few references, when someone from there sends her mother an azalea, or mother and daughter give three-dollar donations to St. Mary’s Home for girls, or she expresses relief at being unable to accept an invitation to speak to a Savannah Catholic women’s group. Yet for the writer who claimed, “I think you probably collect most of your experience as a child — when you really had nothing else to do — and then transfer it to other situations when you write,” her time in Savannah registered as a strong afterimage in her work. Especially in the guise of the unnamed twelve-year-old girl in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” pacing back and forth in her upstairs bedroom “with her hands locked together behind her back and her head thrust forward and an expression fierce and dreamy both, on her face.”
Milledgeville: “A Bird Sanctuary”
