Flannery (34 page)

A public intellectual in his midforties, formerly married to Alice Morris, Flannery’s editor at
Harper’s Bazaar,
Breit, in a sack suit — looking every inch an urban professor, with his high forehead and receding wavy hair — chain-smoked in front of a bookcase while fumbling with oversized galley pages. “
Galley Proof
is an attempt to bring forward in advance, as a kind of preview, the most exciting new books we know of,” he announced. “Such a book is a collection of short stories,
A Good Man Is Hard to Find,
to be published this Friday. . . . Several years ago she wrote a novel,
Wise Blood,
which critics hailed as a brilliant book. One critic called her ‘perhaps the most naturally gifted of the youngest generation of American novelists.’ Here she is, Flannery O’Connor.”

Caught in a close-up, Flannery stared sideways, wincing from Breit’s cigarette smoke. Yet she was elegantly dressed in a skirt, a dark blouse with a wide velvet collar fastened at the neck with a clasp, a thin bracelet, and earrings. When a producer had called to warn her not to wear a white dress, she complained to a friend, “I don’t know what she thought I’d come decked out in a white dress for, but anyway she didn’t tell me to wear my shoes.” An interviewer’s nightmare, Flannery stuck, at first, to short, one-line answers. When asked about the genesis of
Wise Blood,
she replied, “Well I thought I had better get to working on a novel, so I got to work and wrote one.” When Breit mentioned her life on the farm, she corrected him, as he later recalled “quietly (but with quiet fervor)”: “I don’t see much of it. I’m a writer, and I farm from the rocking chair.”

As Flannery gradually relaxed, she grew more articulate, explaining, in response to the inevitable query about her place in Southern literature, “When you’re a Southerner and in pursuit of reality, the reality you come up with is going to have a Southern accent, but that’s just an accent; it’s not the essence of what you’re trying to do.” Before enacting a staged walk with her host to a front-porch set for the dramatization of the opening scene of “The Life You Save,” performed by three actors in thrift-shop-style costumes, she displayed her characteristic grit:

Breit: Flannery, would you like to tell our audience what happens in that story?

O’Connor: No, I certainly would not. I don’t think you can paraphrase a story like that. I think there’s only one way to tell it and that’s the way it is told in the story.

Although no longer showing any signs of puffiness or hair loss, Flannery felt that she looked “very tired” when she watched herself on the kinescope. She had just arrived for the taping the afternoon before, when her Eastern Air Lines flight was met at four twenty at Newark Airport by Catharine Carver, who then accompanied her into the city to a hotel near Grand Central Station. She had originally been booked at the Woodstock Hotel, on the West Side, but, traveling without her cane, wished to be situated in shorter walking distance of the Harcourt Brace offices. Not only was Carver her “nursemaid,” on this trip, as Flannery described her, but she had also now officially been named her editor, in a surprise shake-up as Robert Giroux left to become vice president of Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, and Denver Lindley took over the position of editor in chief at Harcourt.

When she had first received news of Giroux’s departure, a few weeks earlier, Flannery was dismayed. And as soon as possible, during her visit, the two met to discuss the delicate situation. Giroux assured her that she was in good hands. Flannery told Carver of her boss confiding that she “did all the work anyhow.” He also informed Flannery that her book was generating lots of prepublication buzz. As she relayed this news to the Fitzgeralds, “The atmosphere at Harcourt Brace, at least in regard to meself, has changed to one of eager enthusiasm. I had tea with Giroux and he told me all about it.” They spoke of negotiations for a contract for a second novel that he shrewdly suggested to Flannery and Elizabeth McKee should include a “provisional voidance clause,” allowing cancellation if Carver should unexpectedly leave the firm, too.

With its June 6 publication date still days away, Flannery already had an advance copy of her book. “I like it fine,” she said. “It is nice not to have to look at myself on the back of the jacket.” Giroux had not acceded to her wish to use her painted self-portrait as the author photo. “I think it will do justice to the subject for some time to come,” she tried to convince him. Yet the final presentation, without any photograph at all, was just as agreeable, and projected a stylish, literary sensibility similar to their last project,
Wise Blood,
in hardcover — if not to the Signet paperback, then on the racks in a print run of 234,090, featuring a racy cover drawing of Sabbath and Haze flirting in the grass, its steamy tagline “A Searching Novel of Sin and Redemption.” The jacket for
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
was again abstract, with white title words in scarlet pools against a tan background; its modest first printing, 2,500 copies — 500 less than
Wise Blood.

Flannery remained in Manhattan until Friday, meeting with her agent and journalists, and participating in the literary life she had warily sampled during her years in the north. “I had interviews with this one and that one,” she regaled the Fitzgeralds, “ate with this one and that one, drank with this one and that one, and generally managed to conduct myself as if this were all very well but I had business at home.” She spent most of the time in the company of Catharine Carver, feeling comfortable with the shy, impeccable line editor, who was such a deep fan of her work. In honor of her author’s visit, Carver procured two of the most coveted tickets of the season, to Tennessee Williams’s
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
at the Morosco Theatre. Flannery found the play that went on to win a 1955 Pulitzer Prize “melodramatic”: “I thought I could do that good myself,” she told McKee. “However, on reflection I guess it is wise to doubt that.”

Her most unusual assignation was a quick visit with Fred Darsey, a young man recently escaped from Milledgeville State Hospital, where he was committed by his parents during a troubled adolescence. Darsey first caught her interest with a blind letter, in March, from the mental institution, revealing his passion for bird-watching. She was startled when her reply was returned and the envelope marked “eloped.” She sympathized, when Darsey wrote her again from New York City, “When you have a friend there you feel as if you are there yourself, so you see I feel as if I have escaped too.” Carver helped arrange the date, which Flannery kept secret from Regina, in Bryant Park, at the rear of the New York Public Library, with the pen pal she had never met. “I just love to sit and look at the people in New York, or anywhere,” she told him, “even in Milledgeville.”

Flannery wound up her trip north spending the weekend in Connecticut with Caroline Gordon. They stayed at Robber Rocks, the farmhouse of the writer and editor Sue Jenkins, in Tory Valley, a longtime literary enclave on the Connecticut–New York border. Just down the road was a house the Tates had rented in the twenties with the poet Hart Crane. Stopping by, she noted, “There was a lot of his stuff piled up in a corner, a pair of snow shoes and some other things.” In honor of this visit, Jenkins threw a party, inviting the Mark Twain biographer Van Wyck Brooks, and Flannery’s Yaddo acquaintance and leader of a postwar Faulkner revival, Malcolm Cowley. When “Dear old Van Wyke” insisted that Flannery read one of her stories, she began “Good Country People” but was interrupted by Caroline Gordon, who was worried about the response to the hayloft scene, suggesting “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” as shocking enough.

“It was interesting to see the guffaws of the company die away into a kind of frozen silence as they saw which way things were heading,” Gordon reported to Fannie Cheney of Flannery’s reading of “A Good Man.” While exiting, Brooks remarked to his hostess on the shame of someone so talented viewing life as “a horror story.” He felt her characters were “alien to the American way of life.” An amused Flannery added in the detail to the Fitzgeralds that “Malcolm was very polite and asked me if I had a wooden leg.” The next day, Sue Jenkins drove Flannery and Caroline to mass and read the
Times
while waiting. On the way back, Flannery spoke of Guardini’s
Faith and Modern Man,
and Caroline excitedly told her about Erich Neumann’s
Origins and History of Consciousness,
“about the best book I ever read, next to Holy Writ,” while their hostess visibly sulked. “She felt left out,” Caroline wrote her husband. “How childish can grown women get?”

Upon her return to Milledgeville, by June 8, Flannery found a letter waiting from Fred Darsey, written soon after their rendezvous at the New York Public Library, addressed, “Dear Ferocious Flannery,” and accompanied by a small, illustrated booklet,
The Life of Jesus.
She quickly responded that “I think I am about as ferocious as you are,” adding, “I saw about a million people during the week, and I’m very glad to get back to the chickens who don’t know that I write.” She had indeed reached a point where her heart was decidedly in Georgia, on the farm, savoring the unsophisticated responses of her “good country” neighbors. “I am fast getting a reputation out of all proportion to my desire for one and this largely because I am now competing with The Lone Ranger,” she quipped of a local newspaper announcement of her TV appearance. “Everybody here shakes my hand but nobody reads my stories.”

As she recovered from her trip, on the farm that she had downplayed to Harvey Breit, this first week in June turned out to be the single most important for her public career as a writer. Beginning on Sunday, with a front-page review by Sylvia Stallings in the
Herald Tribune Book Review
titled “Flannery O’Connor: A New Shining Talent among Our Storytellers,” a fresh attitude toward her fiction started to take hold. On Friday, the
New York Times
ran a daily review by Orville Prescott, confirming her claim “to a high rank among our most talented young writers.” Bookstores sold three hundred copies that day, and Harcourt ordered a second printing. On Sunday, a biased rave by Caroline Gordon ran in the
Times Book Review,
claiming, in its first sentence, O’Connor’s fulfillment of Henry James’s praise of Guy de Maupassant as exhibiting “the artful brevity of a master.” Still Gordon complained to friends of being held to a five-hundred-word limit.

Of course O’Connor received her share of mean reviews. A blind notice in
The New Yorker
picked up where a 1952 “Briefly Noted” column on
Wise Blood
had left off, arguing that “there is brutality in these stories, but since the brutes are as mindless as their victims, all we have, in the end, is a series of tales about creatures who collide and drown, or survive to float passively in the isolated sea of the author’s compassion, which accepts them without reflecting anything.” Flannery’s response, to Catharine Carver: “Did you see the nice little notice in the
New Yorker
? I can see now why those things are anonymous.” And she bristled at many reviews widely considered positive, such as a piece in
Time
that “was terrible, nearly gave me apoplexy,” describing her stories in punchy phrases, including “highly unladylike . . . brutal irony . . . slam bang humor . . . as balefully direct as a death sentence.”

A keen observer of popular culture, Flannery had joked to Robie Macauley of her need on TV to work herself up into a heady mix of the professional wrestler Gorgeous George and Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, host of the popular ABC show
Life Is Worth Living.
She was well aware of a cultural trend toward promoting authors as celebrities in what were called “personality stories” in newspapers, and through the new genre of talk shows pioneered at NBC, such as
The Today Show
(1952) and
The Tonight Show
(1954) with Steve Allen, and of which
Galley Proof
was a short-lived example. Uncomfortable with the “horrible pictures of me,” and unwilling to reveal the medical reasons behind her life on the farm, she poked fun at this trend, hoping her private life would remain hidden behind the hard surface of her fiction.

Yet this reserve backfired in 1955, creating an aura of mystery that led only to further curiosity, and never again abated. Sylvia Stallings closed her adulatory
Herald Tribune
review by citing the “unusual reticence” of the dust jacket that “says very little about the author except that she lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, and is at work on her second novel. Even that is too much probably for the longer she keeps her whereabouts a secret, the sooner she will have finished her next book.” Magazine editors did not concur.
Time
ran a photo of her looking almost boyish, à la Carson McCullers. A
Newsweek
year-end roundup of books featured O’Connor as the lead, top-left photograph.
Harper’s Bazaar
blew up a soft-focus portrait of her, dressed in a work shirt, as if fresh from the typewriter, looking off winsomely, seated on the front steps of Andalusia. “The effect, though ‘glamorous’ as they used to say, isn’t at all natural,” complained Ashley Brown.

The author had to contend with another book release that month, as well.
Wise Blood
was published in England on June 26, using as its cover blurb a truncated version of Evelyn Waugh’s comment: “It is a remarkable product.” O’Connor wrote the Cheneys, “You should see Hazel Motes picture on the front of the British edition of my book. It came out last month, put out by somebody named Neville Spearman who is apparently always just on the edge of bankruptcy. This one will probably push him over the edge. Anyway, here is the British conception of Mr. Mote’s face (black wool hat on top); also the rat-colored car is there — all this in black and white and pink and blue, the book itself being an unbelievable orange.” The new edition prompted a review in the
Times Literary Supplement,
warning that the work of this lady author “from the American South” was “intense, erratic and strange.”