It must have been in late spring or early summer that Giroux accepted the first complete draft of the manuscript of Wise Blood for publication at Harcourt, Brace, for I find an undated letter from Regina referring to this, and to attempts at revision that Flannery had been making before a recurrence of high fever sent her back to Emory. When this particular bout was over she slowly improved for the rest of the year and began to write to us regularly. In September she reported being down to two moderate shots a day from four large ones. “The large doses of ACTH send you off in a rocket and are scarcely less disagreeable than the disease, so I am happy to be shut of them. I am working on the end of the book while a lady around here types the first part of it … I have twenty-one brown ducks with blue wing bars.”
She sent the retyped manuscript to us and we forwarded it, at her request, to Caroline Gordon, who had read Flannery’s few stories with intense interest. “She sent it back to me,” Flannery wrote later, “with some nine pages of comments and she certainly increased my education thereby. So I am doing some more things to it and then I mean to send it off for the LAST time … I have got me five geese.” A little later: “Enclosed is Opus Nauseous No. 1. I had to read it over after it came from the typist’s and that was like spending the day eating a horse blanket … Do you think Mrs. Tate would [read it again]? All the changes are efforts after what she suggested in that letter and I am much obliged to her.”
One of Caroline’s main points was that the style of the narrator should be more consistently distinct from the style of the characters, and I believe that Flannery saw the rightness of this and learned quickly when and when not to use a kind of indirect discourse in the country idiom she loved. Before the first of the year the publishers had the manuscript in its final form, and it was published in May, 1952. The reviewers, by and large, didn’t know what to make of it. I don’t think anyone even spotted the bond with Nathanael West. Isaac Rosenfeld in The New Republic objected that since the hero was plain crazy it was difficult to take his religious predicament seriously. But Rosenfeld and everyone else knew that a strong new writer was at large.
Flannery had announced in December that she aimed to visit us sometime in 1952. “I am only a little stiff in the heels so far this winter and am taking a new kind of ACTH, put up in glue…” This worked so well that in the course of the spring she decided to come in June. Reactions to her grisly book around Milledgeville were of course all that could have been expected. One of the kin delighted her with a telling and memorable remark: “I wish you could have found some other way to portray your talents.” In May she wrote: “My current literary assignment (from Regina) is to write an introduction for Cousin Katie ‘so she won’t be shocked,’ to be pasted on the inside of her book. This piece has to be in the tone of the Sacred Heart Messenger and carry the burden of contemporary critical thought. I keep putting it off.”
She came, looking ravaged but pretty, with short soft new curls. She was still on the salt-free diet, so my wife gave her cress and herbs. It proved to be a difficult summer. We now had four small children and were taking a small Negro slum child for a two week country holiday. I had to go off on a six week job in the Middle West. Our D. P., an old shepherdess from Gorizia, after being helpful for a year, had learned from Croatian acquaintances of the comparative delights of life in Jersey City, and had begun to turn nasty. Before I got back, my wife was ill and Flannery, herself on the verge of a relapse, had to return to Milledgeville. She took the Negro child, Loretta, with her as far as New York. I’m afraid she had no high opinion of our quixotic hospitality to Loretta, who, she wrote to me, “might have been controllable if there had been a U.S. marshal in the house.” My wife says this was pure Georgia rhetoric on Flannery’s part, Loretta having been too shy during her visit to do anything but stand around caressing the blond heads of our young. Flannery had picked up a virus infection, which aroused her lupus, and Dr. Merrill had to put her dose of ACTH up temporarily from .25 cc. to 1 cc. a day. As to this, she wrote, “I have gotten a kind of Guggenheim. The ACTH has been reduced from $19.50 per bottle to $7.50.” Soon she was better, up, and working, “and have just ordered myself a pair of peafowl and four peachicks from Florida…”
That year, in spite of illness, she did a lot of writing, some of it as good in its way as she would ever do. The story entitled “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” an inimitably funny one that is also a triumph over Erskine Caldwell and a thing of great beauty, I remember reading in manuscript on the road to Indiana. She showed us, too, the opening of a second novel, so powerful that we felt, one and all, that since it would be very hard to sustain it might have to be toned down. It was later, a little, and became part of The Violent Bear It Away. She wrote “The River.” In the fall John Crowe Ransom invited her to apply for a Kenyon Review Fellowship, and she applied, she said, “before the envelope was opened good.” By Christmas she knew that she had it. “I reckon most of this money will go to blood and ACTH and books, with a few sideline researches into the ways of the vulgar. I would like to go to California for about two minutes to further these researches, though at times I feel that a feeling for the vulgar is my natural talent and don’t need any particular encouragement. Did you see the picture of Roy Rogers’ horse attending a church service in Pasadena?”
News and other items in the press of our favored land were always a solace to her. She turned eagerly for years to the testimonial ads for a patent medicine called HADA-COL, and these she would often pass on, especially after we moved to Europe late in ’53 and were cut off from the savor of American life. Early that year, when she began to receive her fellowship money, she reported a mild change in the interest shown her work by the countryside. “My kinfolks think I am a commercial writer now and really they are very proud of me. My uncle Louis is always bringing a message from somebody at the King Hdw. Co. who has read Wise Blood. The last was: ask her why she don’t write about some nice people. Louis says, I told them you wrote what paid … I am doing fairly well these days, though I am practically baldheaded on top and have a watermelon face…”
In another letter of about the same time I find: “The Maple Oats really send me. I mean they are a heap of improvement over saltless oatmeal, horse biscuit, stewed kleenex, and the other delicacies that I have been eating … The novel seems to be doing very well. I have a nice gangster in it named Rufus Florida Johnson…” Disappearing from the novel, he turned up a long time later in one of the stories in this volume. Dr. Merrill, whom she liked and called “the scientist,” told her in the summer that she was “doing better than anybody else has that has what I got,” and she flew up to see us in August. It was our last meeting as a family for five years.
The correspondence for 1954 begins: “I got word the other day that I had been reappointed a Kenyon Fellow, so that means the Rockerfellers [the Foundation supplied funds for the fellowships] will see to my blood and ACTH for another year and I will have to keep on praying for the repose of John D.’s soul … Today I got a letter from one Jimmie Crum of Los Angeles, California, who has just read Wise Blood and wants to know what happened to the guy in the ape suit … I am also corresponding with the secretary of the Chef’s National Magazine, the Culinary Review…” She was acquiring what she called a “gret” reading public. She would soon have enough short stories for a collection. And her disease had apparently been checked. Late in the year, however, we heard of a new ailment in a letter to my wife: “I am walking with a cane these days which gives me a great air of distinction … I now feel that it makes very little difference what you call it. As the niggers say, I have the misery.” In the same letter: “I have finally got off the ms. for my collection and it is scheduled to appear in May. Without your kind permission I have taken the liberty of dedicating (grand verb) it to you and Robert. This is because you all are my adopted kin … Nine stories about original sin, with my compliments…”
The misery referred to in this letter turned out to be disheartening enough. Eithe
r her disease or the drug that controlled it, or both, caused a softening or deterioration of the bones, her jaw bones and also her leg bones at the hip. Finally, a year later, the doctor put her on crutches. At more or less the same time, though, she was able—thank God—to switch from ACTH to a new wonder drug, taken in tablets, in tiny doses, and “for the first time in four years don’t have to give myself shots or conserve on salt.” Meanwhile her book of stories, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, went into a third printing. Early in ’56 she learned that Gallimard was publishing Wise Blood in Paris in an expert translation by Maurice Coindreau. She found herself now and henceforward a woman-of-letters. And in fact she and her devoted and keenwitted mother, who learned thoroughly to understand what Flannery was up to, became an effective team. Regina ran the farm and guarded Flannery’s limited strength and saw to it that she had her mornings free for writing. At noon they would drive in to town for the mail and most often have lunch at the Sanford House, where behind the white pillars there is excellent cooking, and over the mantel there is a photograph of General Lee. In the afternoon Flannery could take the air on her crutches and feed her various fowl. She wrote that she had sixteen pea-chickens and her sense of well-being was at its height.
The new drug and the crutches increased Flannery’s mobility so much that she began to accept invitations to give talks and readings at relatively distant points. After the isolated life in Connecticut and the confinement of her illness, these trips—and in the next six or seven years she made a score of them—brought her into the world again and gave her a whole new range of acquaintances. In her talks she had wonderful things to say. I didn’t quite realize this—I just wanted to see her—when I got her to come to Notre Dame in the spring of ’57 (I was working there on temporary leave, self-accorded, from the job I had in hand in Italy). I met her in Chicago and flew down with her to South Bend. She seemed frail but steady, no longer disfigured by any swelling, and her hair had grown long again. She managed her light crutches with distaste but some dexterity. Her audience that evening was already instructed in a number of topics of concern to her, but it was better instructed when she finished. I have this paper before me now, and can remember my pleasure as she read it out, intent upon it, hanging on her crutches at the lectern, courteous and earnest and dissolvent of nonsense.
“I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why…”
“Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by a strong devotion to the Bible, which has kept our minds attached to the concrete and the living symbol…”
“The Catholic sacramental view of life is one that maintains and supports at every turn the vision that the story teller must have if he is going to write fiction of any depth…”
“The Church, far from restricting the Catholic writer, generally provides him with more advantages than he is able or willing to turn to account; and usually, his sorry productions are a result, not of restrictions that the Church has imposed, but of restrictions that he has failed to impose on himself. Freedom is of no use without taste and without the ordinary competence to follow the particular laws of what we have been given to do…”
Toward the end of the year she wrote to us (we were living in Liguria) that Cousin Katie in Savannah wished to give her and her mother a trip to Lourdes with a company of pilgrims from Savannah. Dr. Merrill permitted this on condition that she depart from the “tour” to rest with us for a week. So in April I brought her and Mrs. O’Connor down to our place from Milan, and after the visit my wife went along to Lourdes to help with the languages and details of travel. Flannery dreaded the possibility of a miracle at Lourdes, and she forced herself to the piety of the bath for her mother’s sake and Cousin Katie’s; she also accompanied the pilgrims to Rome for an audience with Pope Pius XII, who received her with interest and gave her a special blessing. On May 11, home again, she wrote: “I enjoyed most seeing you all and the Pope…” There was no miracle but what seemed a small favor: her bone trouble got no worse.
For the rest of that year she worked on the new novel. Early in ’59 she had finished a draft at about the time the Ford Foundation gave her (as also to me, a bolt from the blue) one of eleven grants for creative writing. Her hip and her general condition now allowed her to drive around Milledgeville “all over the place in the automobile just like a bloody adult.” We had some correspondence about the novel, in particular about reworking the character of Rayber who had been, she said, “the trouble all along.” She made the middle section more dramatic by adding the episode of the girl revivalist. By mid-October it was done, and it was brought out by her present publisher in May, 1960.
I saw Flannery twice again, once on a visit to the farm when the dogwood was flowering in April, 1961, and then at the Smith College commencement in 1963 when she received an honorary degree. The serenity of the natural scene on these occasions now frames for me the serenity of our old boarder, who had fought a good fight and been illuminated by it. In ’63 as in ’56 she won the first prize in the annual O. Henry short story collection, and she was working on a third novel. But early in ’64 her great respite came to an end. She had to have an abdominal operation. In the aftermath of this her lupus returned, in April, and proved uncontrollable. In May, as I learned later, Caroline Gordon found her looking wan and wasted. She was in the Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta for a month in May and June. I heard nothing of this and had no notion that she was seriously ill until a note came from her with a new anecdote of farm life and the single sentence: “Ask Sally to pray that the lupus don’t finish me off too quick.” Late in July she was taken to the Milledgeville hospital with a severe kidney failure, and she died there in a coma on the morning of August 3.
V
The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying any attention to the sky. The stores in Taulkinham stayed open on Thursday nights so that people could have an extra opportunity to see what was for sale.
(Wise Blood)
A catchword when Flannery O’Connor began to write was the German angst, and it seemed that Auden had hit it off in one of his titles as the “Age of Anxiety.” The last word in attitudes was the Existentialist one, resting on the perception that beyond any immediate situation there is possibly nothing—nothing beyond, nothing behind, nada. Now, our country family in 1949 and 1950 believed on excellent grounds that beyond the immediate there was practically everything, like the stars over Taulkinham—the past, the future, and the Creator thereof. But the horror of recent human predicaments had not been lost on us. Flannery felt that an artist who was a Catholic should face all the truth down to the worst of it. If she worried about the side effects of the ungenteel imagination, she took heart that year from Mauriac’s dictum about “purifying the source”—the creative spirit—rather than damming or diverting the stream.
In Wise Blood she did parody the Existentialist point of view, as Brainard Cheney has said (in the Sewanee Review for Autumn, 1964), but the parody was very serious. In this and in most of her later writing she gave to the godless a force proportionate to the force it actually has: in episode after episode, as in the world, as in ourselves, it wins. We can all hear our disbelief, picked out of the air we breathe, when Hazel Motes says, “I’m going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.” And in whom is angst so dead that he never feels, as Haze puts it:
“Where you came from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”
Note the velocity and rightness of these sentences. Many pages and a number of stories by this writer have the same perfection, and the novels have it in sections though they narrowly miss it as wholes. I am speaking now of merits achieved in the reader’s interest: no unliving words, the realization of character by exquisitely chosen speech and interior speech and behavior, the action moving at the right speed so that no part of the situation is left out or blurred and the violent thing, though surprising, happens after due preparation, because it has to. Along with her gifts, patient toil and discipline brought about these merits, and a further question can be asked about that: Why? What was the standard to which the writer felt herself answerable? Well, in 1957 she said:
“The serious fiction writer will think that any story that can be entirely explained by the adequate motivation of the characters or by a believable imitation of a way of life or by a proper theology, will not be a large enough story for him to occupy himself with. This is not to say that he doesn’t have to be concerned with adequate motivation or accurate reference or a right theology; he does; but he has to be concerned with them only because the meaning of his story does not begin except at a depth where these things have been exhausted. The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes, there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula.”