Flannery (32 page)

“Her mother was probably traditional in her view of blacks, and Flannery more liberal,” says Langkjaer of the attitudes toward race relations behind these scenes. “She made it very clear to me that she was opposed to the way the ‘Negroes,’ as they were called then, were treated, and I had a strong feeling that she looked forward to the day when things would be different.” Virulent racism was certainly rampant in Milledgeville; in the fall of 1952 the Klan burned a cross on an outlying field of the O’Connor farm while initiating three new members. Alice Walker briefly attended a segregated elementary school in Milledgeville, housed in a former state penitentiary, its execution chamber barely disguised. Yet unlike her mother, an Eisenhower supporter, Flannery voted, in 1952, for Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Democrat, identified with integration. “I remember standing in the playground,” says Pete Dexter’s sister, “and a friend saying, ‘Well, if Stevenson gets elected, we’ll have to go to school with nigrahs.’”

As an ambitious tale of manners and race, “The Displaced Person” soon led O’Connor into political material with global implications, which required her to widen her scope beyond the perimeters of the wire fencing and wooden pasture gates of Andalusia. To establish a historical time line, without being ponderous, she relied on outdated
March of Time
twenty-minute documentary newsreels, popular in movie theaters in the thirties and forties. Obviously having seen one of these news features, such as “What to Do with Germany” (October 1944), “18 Million Orphans” (November 1945), or “Justice Comes to Germany” (November 1945), the fictional Mrs. Shortley “recalled a newsreel she had once seen of a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap. . . . Before you could realize that it was real and take it into your head, the picture changed and a hollow-sounding voice was saying, ‘Time marches on!’” Stubbornly misusing the concentration-camp footage as evidence to further “suspicion” regarding the family she insisted on calling “the Gobblehooks,” Mrs. Shortley concludes of the displaced family, “If they had come from where this kind of thing was done to them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it to others?”

That December, Flannery received in the mail a prayer card that helped her to feel her way to the end of a first draft — a process of divination she once described as “following my nose more or less.” Included, as a Christmas gift, with her
Catholic Worker
subscription, which had arrived regularly since her first conversations with Erik, was “A Prayer to Saint Raphael,” beginning, “O Raphael, lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us: Raphael, Angel of happy meeting, lead us by the hand toward those we are looking for.” Touched by this nineteenth-century prayer, written by the French Catholic Ernest Hello, for the archangel Raphael — popularly considered a patron saint of friendship and marriage — Flannery would recite its invocation daily for the rest of her life. As she explained to a friend about Raphael, who guides Tobias to his wife Sarah in an apocryphal book of the Old Testament, “He leads you to the people you are supposed to meet.”

“The prayer had some imagery in it that I took over and put in ‘The Displaced Person,’” Flannery wrote of its concluding vision of a heavenly home, “the business about Mrs. Shortley looking on the frontiers of her true country.” For at the climax of the story, the Shortleys — like the Stevens family, consisting of a father, mother, and two daughters — drive off in a jalopy, displaced by the Poles, as Mrs. Shortley, spouting Holy Roller prophecies, suffers a stroke, and finds herself, in death, finally
placed.
Borrowing from the prayer for its concluding line, O’Connor, pulling out all the stops, writes of the daughters, “frightened by the grey slick road before them, they kept repeating in higher and higher voices, ‘Where we goin, Ma? Where we goin?’ while their mother, her huge body rolled back still against the seat, seemed to contemplate for the first time the tremendous frontiers of her true country.”

“The Displaced Person,” performed by Flannery on her return to Cold Chimneys, was only part one of the final version, but she considered the story complete at the time. Missing was the transfiguring peacock (a later version was briefly titled “The King of the Birds”), a climactic crucifixion scene leaving Mr. Guizac crushed under a tractor, and Mrs. McIntyre, herself paralyzed by a stroke, taught to make out the contours of her “true country” — purgatory — by the faithful priest. These elements would appear when she turned the story into a three-part, sixty-page “novella” the following year. Yet even part one was a hit, read aloud to a group that included the houseguest Monroe Spears, editor of the
Sewanee Review.
When “The Atlantic kept it 4 months & decided it wasn’t their dish,” Flannery forwarded the story to Spears, who published this version in his fall 1954 issue.

D
URING ONE OF
Erik’s several afternoon visits to Andalusia, Flannery proudly brought out a new painting to show him. Ever one of her favorites, her “self-portrait with a pheasant cock that is really a cutter,” created in the spring of 1953, could be counted on to draw mixed responses from viewers, with its full-on portrayal of herself, oval-eyed, wearing a fiery yellow halo of a sunhat, her arm wrapped about a fearsome dark bird. “He has horns and a face like the Devil,” she wrote her friend Janet McKane, of the pheasant. “The-self portrait was made ten years ago, after a very acute siege of lupus . . . so I looked pretty much like the portrait.” Her friend Louise Abbot felt that Flannery looked “stunned” in the painting. “I praised it,” recalls Erik, “but I said that she was better-looking than the portrait. Flannery responded by saying that, well, this was the way she saw herself.”

Neither Erik nor Flannery based their friendship on the comeliness of her looks. On the contrary, she enjoyed flouting expectations of ladylike beauty, as in this unconventional self-portrait, done in bright Van Gogh reds, oranges, and greens, with vibrant expressionist brushstrokes, which she soon hung between the two long front windows of the dining room, like a parody of the more formal portraits of aunts and cousins on display in the Cline Mansion. And Erik played right along. Of a photograph of Helene Iswolsky in a Catholic magazine, Flannery wrote to Betty Hester that “her kinsman used to tell me that she was the ugliest woman in the world and that I reminded him of her which was why he liked me.” Langkjaer recalls, too, that “She loved to talk about the peacocks because they were so beautiful, and I had a feeling, or maybe she even told me so, that she thought they were so obviously much more beautiful than she was.”

Whatever quality struck Elizabeth Hardwick, at Yaddo, as “plain,” was magnified by O’Connor’s disease and accelerating disability. At Cold Chimneys toward the end of 1953, Ashley Brown noted that Flannery was “rather careful in her movements, going down the two or three steps at the backdoor.” She was beginning to limp from persistent hip pain, attributed to incipient rheumatism. By the spring of 1954, Erik recalls the appearance of a cane: “She was using a stick at the time already. But she could walk about the place, and we did take some walks.” Every bit as unsparing, and funny, in describing herself as the many maimed characters in her stories, such as the “one-arm jackleg” Tom T. Shiflet in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” she wrote Caroline Gordon in November: “I am doing very well these days except for a limp, which I am informed is rheumatism. Colored people call it ‘the misery.’ Anyway I walk like I have one foot in the gutter but it’s not an inconvenience and I get out of doing a great many things I don’t want to do.”

The handicap had no impact on her brisk rate of production, which remained steady throughout the spring of 1954, Erik’s last as a textbook salesman in the Southeast territory. In that season’s
Kenyon Review,
John Crowe Ransom published O’Connor’s latest story, “A Circle in the Fire,” the setting again a doctored photograph of Andalusia. Like a pair of opposite body types out of one of her college cartoons, in this savage tale of vandalism the widowed owner, Mrs. Cope, is “very small and trim,” the foreman’s wife, Mrs. Pritchard, “large . . . her arms folded on a shelf of stomach.” Two indistinguishable black workers shuffle in and out of the action, commenting as they go. Once more relying for material on bits found in the newspaper, O’Connor has Mrs. Pritchard patter about a woman giving birth to a baby in an “iron lung,” based on a front-page article in the
Atlanta Journal
headlined, “Baby Born in Grady Lung!”

The innovation in “A Circle in the Fire” is its portrait of the artist as a twelve-year-old girl, Sally Virginia, with “a large mouth full of silver bands,” peering down onto the action mostly from a second-floor windowsill; and three delinquent teenage boys who wreak havoc, letting loose a black bull and eventually setting an entire farm ablaze. Crackling along with their arson is a subtext of adolescent sexuality, inseparable from violence and danger. Like Walt Whitman’s woman bather peering at nude boys at a swimming hole in
Song of Myself,
Sally Virginia hides behind a pine trunk, “prickle-skinned,” staring out at the naked boys as they splash in a nearby cow trough. In a moment fraught with threat, the three culprits, back in trousers, on the way to commit their crime, pass by “not ten feet from where she was standing, slightly away from the tree now, with the imprint of the bark embossed red and white on the side of her face.”

When Ben C. Griffith, an English professor from Mercer University, visited Flannery and asked about a possible connection between the story’s sexual hint and the ensuing violence, she was surprisingly receptive. “He remarked that in these stories there is usually a strong kind of sex potential that was always turned aside and that this gave the stories some of their tension,” she wrote Betty Hester, “as for instance in A Circle in the Fire where there is a strong possibility that the child in the woods with the boys may be attacked — but the attack takes another form. I really hadn’t thought of it until he pointed it out but I believe it is a very perceptive comment.” Yet she made clear to Hester that any such attack would not be a crime of “passion,” but of “revenge” on Mrs. Cope.

The incipient violence of the story, though, isn’t entirely an indication of sexual repression. Fires were indeed an ever-present danger much remarked on by Mrs. O’Connor at Andalusia, with all its flammable pine. An article in the
Union-Recorder
warned, “Baldwin Faces Forest Fire Season with Great Caution,” and advised “the greatest care with matches and cigarets.” Delinquents from the nearby Boys Training School were perceived of as a threat by mother and daughter alike. “The reformatory is about a mile away and the lads escape about this time of year,” she told a friend. “Last week we had six one day, one the next, and two the next. They track them down through the woods with other reformatory boys. We would much prefer they use dogs.” In 1951, Georgia was ranked highest in the nation in the rate of lynching and other murders, often a solution to farm conflicts — 18.23 per 100,000 people, against a national average of 4.88.

Written at almost the same time as “A Circle in the Fire,” and serving as its companion piece, was “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” Its protagonist is again a twelve-year-old girl challenged by adolescent sexuality — this time in the guise of two visiting fourteen-year-old Catholic schoolgirl cousins. As the younger girl sharply observes, “All their sentences began, ‘You know this boy I know, well one time he . . .’” The girl’s fascination mounts as Joanne and Susan date two Church of God boys and whisper of a hermaphrodite exposing private parts at a traveling fair. Though O’Connor claimed to “dislike intensely the work of Carson McCullars,” her story blatantly contains elements of
The Member of the Wedding,
McCullers’s novel of a twelve-year-old haunted by the House of Freaks and provoked by her brother’s wedding to accept her adult female identity. When McCullers read some of O’Connor’s stories she cattily remarked, “I did read enough, though, to know what ‘school’ she attended, and I believe she’d learned her lesson well.”

Introducing “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” in
Harper’s Bazaar
in May 1954, an editor’s urbane note promised “a memorable addition to her gallery of hard-boiled, out-of-the-way but engaging Southerners — this time with a precocious twelve-year-old brat whose curiosity leads her into dark alleys.” The author contributed a plangent, cute personal statement: “I’ve had poor luck with my peafowl and have only one cock and ten hens left, the rest having died of broken hearts or whatever peafowl die of.” But tucked into the conclusion of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” was a profound response to McCullers’s novel. O’Connor’s twelve-year-old discovers
her
identity in the body of Christ, held up at a Benediction service in a convent chapel, as the girl’s face is mashed, this time, “into a crucifix hitched” on the belt of a nun who hugs her. “Sex potential” deflected can lead to violence; an alternative is evidently sexuality sublimated in religious expression.

Stimulating a response to such romantic issues and “broken hearts” outside the world of her fiction, was Erik Langkjaer, as their close relationship reached a decisive phase. On May 20, Flannery abruptly canceled a trip to visit the Cheneys in Nashville, remaining at Andalusia to entertain Erik. Not telling the full story, she apologized to her hosts: “The weekend I planned to come to Nashville, a friend of mine who was on his way to Denmark to live elected to pay me a visit and there was no way to stop him — otherwise I would have.” Obviously Erik could have been stopped, especially because Flannery, claiming to be “certainly distressed” at forgoing the trip to Cold Chimneys because of her friend’s choice, pointed out that “I already had the ticket.” Rescheduling her visit for later in the year — now one of two or three annual trips to Nashville — she wrote the Cheneys that “barring mortal accidents I will be along.”

The “mortal accident” that kept her at Andalusia on the weekend of May 21 was Langkjaer’s decision to take a six-month leave from Harcourt Brace and return to Europe for the summer. To mark this rupture in a friendship at least tinged with romance, Erik invited Flannery on a farewell car ride, their favorite pastime — for Flannery a savored chance at intimacy and a much-needed escape from farm and mother. “We drove through the countryside and I remember her saying how much she liked the red clay of Georgia,” says Langkjaer, “and she would point to this red clay as we drove along. It gave her a homey feeling.” On this special occasion, Erik parked the car, and decided to lean over and kiss Flannery. “I may not have been in love, but I was very much aware that she was a woman, and so I felt that I’d like to kiss her,” he says. “She may have been surprised that I suggested the kiss, but she was certainly prepared to accept it.”