Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  Yet Flannery’s personal attitudes about race were actually quite progressive during her years in Iowa. “I see I should ride the bus more often,” she wrote to Betty Hester, in 1957. “I used to when I went to school in Iowa, as I rode the train from Atl. and the bus from M’ville, but no more. Once I heard the driver say to the rear occupants, ‘All right, all you stove pipe blonds, git on back there.’ At which moment I became an integrationist.” Having become friendly for a while with a black woman graduate student, she bucked warnings from her mother that interracial friendships were dangerous, refusing to be swayed by such issues. She joked of “Verge” Hancher, complicit in Southern-style segregation on campus, as being president of the “Iowa Barber School.”

  Another story she wrote that year was equally a departure. While she had created a morning discipline of daily mass, followed by hours of writing, she had yet to put the two activities together. She had not treated the religious faith that was sustaining her in a story, even a darkly comic one. Her first attempt was “The Turkey,” which used as its central symbol the bird she had once drawn in a preschool cartoon. In the story, a little boy, Ruller, “captured” a wild turkey, already shot dead in a ditch, interpreting the prize as a sign of favor from God. The juvenile preacher in training fancies himself, in one draft, “like Billy Grahme.” Imagining himself into the 1938 film Boys Town, “He thought of Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy. He might found a place for boys to stay who were going bad.” But when his bird is swiped by just such bad boys, his faith becomes mixed with terror: “He was certain that Something Awful was tearing behind him.”

  As important to the young writer as assiduously imitating the masters were her reading courses. She took Seminar in Literary Criticism, taught by Austin Warren, another rising star among the New Critics, at work at the time with Iowa Professor René Wellek on their landmark Theory of Literature. For her supplementary texts in the class of this cultivated, Jamesian gentleman, with a national reputation as an organist, she chose Joyce’s Dubliners and Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Fiction. During the class segment on Joyce, Warren treated her as the resident expert in Roman Catholicism, asking, “Now, Miss O’Connor, what are we talking about here?” She took, as well, a two-semester course, Philosophy in Literature; Aesthetics in the Philosophy Department; and Select Contemporary Authors, concentrating on modern European novelists.

  By far her most significant literature class was a two-semester independent study, Reading for Final Exam, directed by Engle. “I didn’t really start to read until I went to Graduate School and then I began to read and write at the same time,” she rattled off her regimen to a friend:

  Then I began to read everything at once, so much so that I didn’t have time I suppose to be influenced by any one writer. I read all the Catholic novelists, Mauriac, Bernanos, Bloy, Green, Waugh; I read all the nuts like Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Richardson and Va. Woolfe (unfair to the dear lady of course). I read the best Southern writers like Faulkner and the Tates, K. A. Porter, Eudora Welty and Peter Taylor; read the Russians, not Tolstoy so much but Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol. I became a great admirer of Conrad and have read almost all his fiction.

  Around Christmas 1946, Flannery started work on a new story, “The Train.” She began with the conscious intent to build a novel from its tale of Hazel Wickers, a nineteen-year-old, homesick, country rube returning South after the war. In choosing a first name as unisexual as her own, she relied on a custom she happily noticed among rural families who occasionally gave their sons feminine names — June, for instance. Her readings in Joyce and Faulkner were echoed in neologisms like “greyflying” to describe the train whizzing by. Yet what truly caught her imagination was a train ride home for the holidays. As she later explained the genesis of the story, “It started when I was on a train coming from Chicago. There was a Tennessee boy on it in uniform who was much taken up worrying the porter about how the berths were made up; the porter was so regal he just barely tolerated the boy.”

  On the first leg of that holiday trip, Flannery made her way across downtown Chicago from La Salle Street Station to Dearborn Station, “a journey that never impressed me as beautiful.” She then caught the Dixie Limited, to travel from Illinois through Tennessee to Georgia. A discarded draft gives a glimpse, through Hazel’s eyes, of “the dilapidated [Dearborn] station, where the southern trains came in. There was a strange feeling in it for him, of awayness and homeness mixed. . . . It was a sooted red brick with turrets and inside it was grey and smoked and there were spittoons parked at the end of every third bench.” O’Connor later delighted in telling a friend of one of her own encounters at the terminus, “I sat down next to a colored woman in the waiting room at the Dearborn Street station in Chicago once. She was eating grapes and asked me to have some but I declined. She was very talkative and kept talking and eating grapes. Finally she asked me where I was from and I said, ‘Georgia,’ and she spit a mouthful of grape seeds out on the floor and said, ‘My God,’ and got up and left.”

  Flickering through various drafts of “The Train,” marked “Workshop,” is the presence of a more military Haze, recently demobilized, among army buddies en route, like Flannery, from Chicago to Chattanooga. In one version, he is the life of the party, buying them all beers in the club car and passing out cigarettes. While keeping quiet in class, Flannery had evidently been listening closely to the war stories of classmates, like Jim Eriicson, at work on a novel about a veteran in a hospital, suffering, he told the Cedar Rapids Gazette, from “the Oedipus complex.” She borrowed from these war-torn heroes for her own more comic antihero. And although Iowa City never left many traces in her fiction, the minute she hit Dearborn Station, where Hazel felt “a thump of recognition” at hearing “flat and twangish” country voices, her imagination clicked on.

  When she returned to Iowa City, in January 1947, Flannery set to work finishing “The Train,” the last of the six stories in her thesis collection, the writing requirement for an MFA degree. She also began adapting the story as the first chapter of her novel in progress. The novel was inspired not simply by themes of “awayness” and “homeness,” but also by Paul Engle’s announcement in November of an award from Rinehart Publishers of a $750 advance for a novel, to be awarded to a Workshop student in May, with an option, upon acceptance, of another $750. Engle had already sent two of her stories to his friend John Selby, the Rinehart editor in charge of the prize. Flush from the success of their recent bestselling novels, The Lost Weekend, by Charles R. Jackson, and The Hucksters, by Frederic Wakeman, the publishers hoped to sign up hot new talent.

  For help with writing the required outline and four chapters, or twelve thousand words, she turned to Andrew Lytle, brought in by Engle as a visiting lecturer and instructor in February and put up in Quonset hut no. 244. Tall and wiry, Lytle, in his midforties, was a card-carrying Southerner and gentleman farmer. As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, he had been one of the original members of the Agrarians, a literary movement nostalgic for Old South rural, aristocratic values. Before leaving college to go off to Yale Drama School and a stint as a Broadway actor, he was friendly with the founding Fugitive poets, including Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren. In “The Hind Tit,” the essay he contributed to the 1930 Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, he wrote of Tennessee yeomen farmers, much like Hazel, displaced from the land by the “pizen snake” of industrialism.

  Lytle first encountered Flannery while sitting in on a Workshop class, where he was asked to read her student story aloud: “I was told later that it was understood that I would know how to pronounce in good country idiom the word chitling which appeared in the story. At once it was obvious that the author of the story was herself not only Southern but exceptionally gifted.” Flannery responded to Lytle as a protective big brother and consummate prose stylist, known to “make a federal case out of a comma.” It fell to Lytle to help her through a scene involving Hazel and a prostitute th
at wound up in the novel’s second chapter: “She would put a man in bed with a woman, and I would say, ‘Now, Flannery, it’s not done quite that way,’ and we talked a little bit about it, but she couldn’t face up to it, so she put a hat on his head and made a comic figure of him.” He advised her to “sink the theme” and “clobber” her reader more subtly.

  Their master-apprentice relationship irritated those students baffled by the growing recognition of the young lady meanly described by one as having “a bale of cotton in her mouth.” Aware of the rumblings, Lytle said, “She was a lovely girl, but scared the boys to death with her irony.” Lytle did not help matters by talking widely of her talent. “Why, she can just walk by a poolroom and know exactly what’s happening by the smell,” he told James B. Hall, the “second-best” writer in class. As the Brooklyn native Eugene Brown explains, “People who were favored in the Writers’ Workshop at that time were Southern writers.” This suspicion of Southern loyalty was only confirmed with the campus visit during the week of April 21 of the Fugitive poet and Sewanee Review editor Allen Tate. In his class “critique,” Tate likewise paid special attention to Lytle’s protégée.

  Flannery was busily filling out applications and gathering together her finished manuscripts by early May 1947. First she applied for several college teaching positions, just in case. “It comes to us all,” she moaned of the dreaded profession. She then enlisted Barbara Tunnicliff to type her thesis project, The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories. “She paid me for doing it and watched over me as I did,” recalled her former suitemate. O’Connor dedicated the work, for his extraordinary support, “To Paul Engle, whose interest and criticism have made these stories better than they would otherwise have been.” Norma Hodges remembers helping Flannery and a mutual friend, Carol Nutter, carry stacks of its pages from the print shop. According to Hodges, continuously feeling shunned by her, when they arrived at the door of Nutter’s second-floor apartment, Flannery coldly discouraged her from entering, wishing to be alone with her friend Carol: “Her magnified eyes swam up punctuating an unspoken, ‘Don’t you dare come in!’”

  In the synopsis required for her Rinehart application, O’Connor hinted that a starting point, if not blueprint, for Haze’s quest might be found in T. S. Eliot’s shattered epic of modern life, The Waste Land, a poem revered by her New Critic writer-instructors: “His search for a physical home mirrors his search for a spiritual one, and although he finds neither, it is the latter search which saves him from becoming a member of the Wasteland and makes him worth 75,000 words.”

  Partly the reference was parody, a use of a buzzword. But unlike her joke on Proust in high school, she was reading Eliot’s poems and essays very closely and sympathetically. As a poet at once modern and devout, having converted to Anglo-Catholicism a decade after writing his poem of “fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Eliot was a figure of fascination to O’Connor. Traces of this deep interest dot her Iowa pages: a “dead geranium” is a central image of his poem “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”; the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris of The Waste Land shows up in a draft of her novel as Madame Sosistra; her mummy’s colloquial museum label, “once as tall as you or me,” is lifted from Eliot’s line about Phlebas the Phoenician, “once as handsome and tall as you.”

  All of this hard work finally paid off during the fourth week in May, when she received official word that she was the winner of the Rinehart-Iowa Award, and that Engle had pulled strings to secure her a teaching assistantship for the following year. In an interview accompanying her photograph and front-page story in the Daily Iowan, she insisted that her novel about a man searching for a spiritual home was not a “typed” novel: “Any author who follows a hard and fast outline allows himself to become a slave to the typewriter.” To celebrate, on May 29 she traveled by car to Cedar Rapids with her roommate, Martha Bell, and housemother, Sarah Dawson. “We had dinner there,” Bell recorded in her diary, “did some window-shopping and then went to see The Egg and I.” The plot of the light romantic comedy they chose concerned a society girl (Claudette Colbert) who is persuaded by her new husband (Fred MacMurray) to start a chicken farm.

  Also celebrating the end of the semester, Paul Engle and his wife, Mary, threw a picnic at Stone City, their Victorian summer house, previously belonging to Grant Wood, next to a limestone quarry. Charles Embree, a Missouri writer whose first Workshop story, “Concerning the Mop,” about jazz, had just been published in Esquire, drove Flannery to the party in his 1936 Ford coupe. Because of his Southern accent, Flannery often asked him to read her stories in class. “She was a loner,” says Embree. “Yet everybody respected her talent. It was apparent.” In one photograph of a dozen guests taken that day at the quarry, Flannery stands off to the side, in a heavy dark skirt and checked jacket. In a crowded group portrait in the living room, she is hidden behind the woman next to her, with only her knee showing. “It was wholly typical of Flannery that the part of her visible is the right knee,” wrote Engle. “There is a spirit about that knee.”

  Springtime parties, no matter what the excuse, were the norm in Iowa City because of the demands of the extreme winters; the guests at Stone City that afternoon were mostly in high spirits simply from the mild break in the weather. “In spring, it was as though we had come through,” wrote James B. Hall. “The Iowa countryside was one long, low lyric of fields growing.” For the trip back, Andrew Lytle offered rides to both James Hall and Flannery, who tucked herself silently into the back seat, her extreme quietness making her more a potent presence. Hall recalls that “Andrew was talking about Flannery’s recent distinction, her Rinehart Award. He was driving, but looked closely at me, also in the front seat. I thought he was rubbing it in, and also seeing how I was taking the news.”

  In the days immediately following, Flannery returned to Milledgeville for the summer, where she joined the Cline family, still mourning the sudden death of Uncle Bernard at the end of January. Her relatives were trying to deal with the practicalities of his will, including his bequest of Sorrel Farm to Regina and Louis. On a bus trip to Atlanta in the fall of 1946, Flannery had chanced to sit next to a descendant of the Hawkins family, the original owners, who informed her that the farm, in the nineteenth century, had been called Andalusia, after a province of southern Spain. She wrote her mother, pushing for reinstating its fanciful name, and her uncle Bernard had been willing. So Andalusia it now was. “I was in Milledgeville in the summer of 1947 with my mother,” says Frances Florencourt. “I remember Flannery was very happy, upbeat, smiling.” The hopeful twenty-two-year-old was in a good humor that season.

  A POSTGRADUATE STUDENT on a fellowship, Flannery made independent living arrangements when she returned to Iowa City in September for her final year. As a teaching assistant, she was given an office in the Old Dental Building, next to University Hall, reserved for junior members of the English faculty. After looking at a number of boardinghouses, she settled on renting a single room in a big, gray, wood-frame house at 115 East Bloomington Street, owned by a Mrs. Guzeman. Like the boardinghouse of Haze Motes in Wise Blood, her new address was “clapboard . . . in a block of them, all alike.” And like Haze’s Mrs. Flood, her own “Mrs.” landlady, whom she surmised “was most a hundred then,” could be penurious. As she later groused, “Mrs. Guzeman was not very fond of me because I stayed at home and required heat to be on — at least ON. It was never UP that I remember. When it was on you could smell it and I got to where I warmed up a little every time I smelled it.”

  On the opening day of the Workshop, she made friends with Jean Williams, a new student-writer from Indianapolis, who sat down in the seat beside her. “Flannery was sitting alone in the front row, over against the wall,” wrote Jean Williams Wylder. “She was wearing what I was soon to think of as her ‘uniform’ for the year: plain gray skirt and neatly-ironed silkish blouse, nylon stockings and penny brown loafers. Her only makeup was a trace of lipstick . . . there was something of the convent about Flannery that d
ay — a certain intentness in the slight girlish figure which set her apart from the rest of us. She seemed out of place in that room composed mostly of veterans returned from World War II. Flannery was only 22 years old then, but . . . could easily have passed for 17 or 18.”

  Jean Williams saw her only a few times that fall, outside of the Monday afternoon Workshop sessions. As Mrs. Guzeman didn’t serve Sunday dinner, Flannery occasionally took her noon meal at the Mad Hatter Tea Room, over Bremer’s Clothing Store, on Washington Street, where Williams worked as a “salad girl.” They once bumped into each other as she was exiting Woolworth’s Five-and-Ten-Cent Store with a single cake of Palmolive soap. “I doubt if Flannery ever bought two of anything at one time,” she recalled. When Williams visited O’Connor’s room at Mrs. Guzeman’s, she was struck by the “monastic simplicity” of its “neatly-made bed, the typewriter waiting on a desk. There was nothing extraneous in that room except a box of vanilla wafers beside the typewriter. She nibbled on cookies while she wrote, she said, because she didn’t smoke.”

  A more involved friendship began at the same time with Robie Macauley. On leave for the year, Engle put Andrew Lytle in charge of the Workshop and brought in Macauley as both a student and instructor, teaching a course in Russian literature. “He was a brilliant young professor,” says Bernie Halperin, a Workshop writer who took his course. “He was a thin, nice-looking fellow, with a tremendous knowledge of those massive Russian novels.” At the age of twenty-eight, the Michigan native had earned a BA at Kenyon College, where he studied under John Crowe Ransom; served during the war in the Army Counterintelligence Corps; taught at Bard College; and worked as an editor at Henry Holt and Company. Upon first hearing O’Connor read from her novel in progress, he was immediately impressed by the work as “entirely original, strange.”