by Brad Gooch
Erik had not read a word by the writer with whom he established such sudden intimacy, but she soon gave him Wise Blood, with the inscription “For Erik who has wise blood too,” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” which she was completing when they met. Holding on to his impression of Mrs. O’Connor as “pleasant,” yet “rather restrictive, very much focused on the practical aspects of running the farm,” he continued later in life to interpret the grandmother of the story — wearing her white cotton gloves and blue navy straw hat so that “anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” — as a version of Regina, or others of Flannery’s female relatives. “This woman represented perhaps the essence of members of Flannery’s own family that she distilled into this one character,” says Langkjaer. “Here was a very, very limited person. . . . The grandmother is a completely banal, superficial woman.”
Erik was stimulated enough by the remarkable new friendship to schedule regular visits to Milledgeville on weekends, often needing to rearrange his itinerary and travel a hundred miles or more out of his way. As Regina made clear to Flannery that she considered his staying overnight improper, he rented a room in a local motel, and then made his “calls” to Andalusia. Textbook orders were placed seasonally, clustered over the next fall and spring, so there were ten or twelve such visits. Erik and Flannery would take long walks, go for rides, or have lunch at Sanford House, talking all the while. “Was he ever handsome,” recalls Mary Jo Thompson. “Flannery reserved the table on the porch to have lunch with Erik. It was perfect for a couple.” Flannery was invested enough that when Betty Hester mentioned Helene Iswolsky a few years later, she confided, with unusual candor and spunk, “I used to go with her nephew.”
During the same few weeks that Erik made his surprising first appearance at Andalusia, on the cusp of April and May 1953, Milledgeville also put itself briefly, and sensationally, on the map of current events with an incident O’Connor later described as “the most melodramatic event in the history of the bird sanctuary.” In honor of its sesquicentennial, the town mounted a weeklong celebration, catering exclusively to the white population, full of nostalgia for its antebellum glory days: a pageant climaxing with the Secession Convention; the printing of a half-million dollars’ worth of Confederate twenty-dollar bills; a tour of antebellum homes, including the Cline Mansion; men forced to grow whiskers and sideburn chops, and women to wear hoop skirts. Yet civic pride suffered a blow on Saturday, May 2, when the grocer and moneylender Marion Stembridge, briefly put in stocks for refusing to grow the requisite beard, shot two of the town’s most prominent lawyers — one had prosecuted him for the murder of a black woman, though he avoided serving a prison sentence. Stembridge then turned the gun on himself.
This double homicide and suicide made a lasting impression on Pete Dexter, then a pupil at Peabody Elementary, where he was a student of O’Connor’s high school classmate Deedie Sibley. He had once even been taken on a class trip to Andalusia. “I remember there were cowbells on the front door because I broke those,” says Dexter. “In the barn, I put a girl’s head where you put the cow’s head for milking, so she couldn’t get loose.” As his Boy Scout leader was one of the lawyers killed, and his stepfather, a science teacher at Georgia Military College, had also opted out of growing a beard, the shots reverberated with the young boy. Although his family left Milledgeville later that same year, Dexter was faithful to the facts of the original case when he went on to write his own account in the novel Paris Trout, winner of a 1988 National Book Award.
The crime evidently resonated with Flannery, too. Pete Dexter had not read her story “The Partridge Festival,” turning on the same event, before he wrote Paris Trout, but neither had many of O’Connor’s readers. Her farcical tale of Singleton slaying five members of the Partridge City Council, then being incarcerated in Quincy Asylum, was printed in March 1961 in Critic, a low-circulation Catholic journal specializing in book reviews. Although she portrayed her mother as oblivious to her fiction, Regina’s objections when she read an early draft, begun six years after the event, obviously registered: “my mother still didn’t want me to publish it where it would be read around here,” she wrote Cecil Dawkins. Yet she did proudly inform the novelist John Hawkes, “Quincy State Hospital is actually two miles out of Milledgeville, the same only bigger.” Of its apparent model, Milledgeville State Hospital, an institution for the insane, Langkjaer recalls, “She liked to point it out as being in the neighborhood, with a smile on her face.”
She certainly did not indicate to the Fitzgeralds at the time that “the most melodramatic event” had made much of an impact on her imagination. Her letter of May 7, written five days after the killing, and following the town funerals of the two victims and the cancellation of the Sesquicentennial Grand Ball, was filled mostly with news of Erik. The only other development she shared was an exchange of letters with Brainard and Frances Cheney, Nashville friends of the Fitzgeralds and the Tates: “The Cheneys said that when they went to St. Simons they would stop by to see me so I am hoping they will.” After Andrew Lytle declined, Brainard Cheney had contributed a perceptive review of the “theologically weighted symbolism” of Wise Blood in Washington and Lee University’s literary quarterly, Shenandoah, and Flannery invited a friendship by writing to thank him. If mail was “eventful,” so, evidently, were people who “turn up.”
The first weekend in June, the Cheneys, whose appearance in Flannery’s life was to be as immediately welcomed as Erik’s, indeed visited Andalusia on their way to their vacation property off the southeast coast of Georgia. Nicknamed “Lon,” after the Lon Chaney silent movies popular when he was a student at Vanderbilt in the twenties, Brainard Cheney was a newspaper reporter and playwright and the novelist of Lightwood (1939) and River Rogue (1942). His wife, “Fannie,” had been Allen Tate’s assistant when he held the Poetry chair at the Library of Congress, and, after 1945, was an instructor at the Peabody Library School at Vanderbilt, where she became legendary in the field. “Mrs. C. is a liberry science teacher at Peabody but she is very nice inspite of that,” Flannery told the Fitzgeralds. “In fact you would never know it.” With them was a Japanese Fulbright student “whose gold teeth fascinated Regina.”
Within two months, her creative burst matched by a reflex to reach out to new acquaintances, Flannery boarded a plane for the first of her many visits to Cold Chimneys, the Cheneys’ home in Smyrna, Tennessee, twenty miles southeast of Nashville. A large brick house in the Greek Revival manner, with a broad entrance hall, vegetable garden, and an outdoor swimming pool used daily by Fannie, Cold Chimneys — renamed Idler’s Retreat after central heating was installed in 1957 — was a refuge for many of the leading figures in the “Southern Renaissance,” dating from Brainard Cheney’s Fugitive days at Vanderbilt. Among “the petit cercle” of visitors, as Caroline Gordon called them, were Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, Cleanth Brooks, Andrew Lytle, Eudora Welty, Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford, Peter Taylor, Eleanor Ross, Malcolm Cowley, Russell Kirk, Robert Lowell, and Walker Percy.
“Cleanth Brooks and others have suggested that there are some similarities between the literary renaissance in Ireland and that in the Southern United States,” wrote Ashley Brown, a houseguest of the Cheneys the weekend Flannery first visited in the summer of 1953. “In retrospect it seems to me that Cold Chimneys was something like Coole Park in County Galway, Lady Gregory’s house where for thirty years William Butler Yeats and his friends gathered.” A natural guest at almost any time at Cold Chimneys, where he had spent long stretches while a graduate student at Vanderbilt, Brown was a particularly apt invitee at the house party that weekend. He was a young instructor at Virginia’s Washington and Lee University, and had already been in touch with O’Connor, convincing her to allow the publication of “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” the revised version of “Woman on the Stairs,” in the spring 1953 issue of Shenandoah.
Of a type in academic and literary circles pegged as
knowing and cultivating “everyone,” Brown, who was to become a good friend of Flannery’s, and a frequent weekend visitor to Andalusia, had first become alert to her byline when the episodic chapters of Wise Blood appeared in the Sewanee Review and Partisan Review. “At that stage, let us say 1948 or 1949, I wasn’t quite sure whether Flannery was male or female,” he says. Quickening his interest was Caroline Gordon’s blurb on the novel’s dust jacket, inspiring him to write an enthusiastic letter, to which Flannery responded, “I’m no Georgia Kafka,” setting what he described as the “flippant” tone of their friendship. “She was intelligent, caustic, with a tremendous sense of humor,” remembers Brown, of meeting her at the Cheneys’. But she stopped him short while he was telling her of an imminent trip to Ireland. “Whatever do you want to go there for?” asked Flannery.
Cold Chimneys soon became a retreat for Flannery, and the Cheneys a nearby replacement for the Fitzgeralds, whom she visited in Connecticut for the last time in August 1953, before they left for Italy on a Guggenheim grant, and where they remained for the next eleven years. The bond with the Cheneys was strengthened by their conversion to Catholicism in March, following the lead of the Tates and making them part of a small minority in the South. “I consider Caroline my literary godmother,” Brainard told Flannery, “and now she is my godmother in The Church.” As at the Fitzgeralds’ home, Flannery felt comfortable practicing her religion. “We just hit it off,” said Frances Cheney. “Flannery had a kind of Gothic humor. She used to come see us right often. Her mother always made her buy a new dress. . . . We put her in the junk room and I’d go in there — she spent a good deal of time there — and she would be saying her prayers.”
The high point of the trip for the Cheneys’ friends, and for Flannery, in finding a group that appreciated her sensibility, was her reading aloud of a couple of stories over the weekend in the library, the most impressive spot in the house. As the sun slanted through the blinds of the great study, with its floor-to-ceiling books and old-fashioned sliding shelf ladder, she regaled them with “The River,” just published in the Sewanee Review. Prominently on display, the summer 1953 issue also contained essays by Warren and Lytle, and Caroline Gordon’s “Some Readings and Misreadings,” taking Mauriac to task for his denial of the “natural.” “She seems a very solid sort and salty,” Brainard reported to “Red” Warren on her reading. “She appeared almost simultaneously with her story, THE RIVER, in the Sewanee Review, and she read it for us in her good Georgia drawl: the exact tone of voice for the story, which I believe is her finest, perhaps.”
Ashley Brown vividly remembered her reading aloud “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” just published as well in The Avon Book of Modern Writing, which had been compiled by the Partisan Review editors, William Phillips and Philip Rahv. It included stories by “today’s leading writers”: Colette, Diana Trilling, Eleanor Clark, and Isaac Rosenfeld. With “The Life You Save” in the spring 1953 Kenyon Review, “A Late Encounter” forthcoming in Harper’s Bazaar, and Brown having in hand the current Shenandoah with “Woman on the Stairs,” the Cheneys’ friends were experiencing O’Connor’s works as they appeared from several directions at once. “This seems to me her great creative moment,” Brown wrote of the stories being widely published between 1952 and 1955. Of her reading of “A Good Man,” he recalled that “by the time that the grandmother found herself alone with The Misfit we were stunned into silence. It was a masterful performance.”
“I heard a lot of Tennessee politics and more literary talk, most of it over my head, than since I left Iowa,” she summed up the sociable weekend for Robie Macauley. In spite of her barbed remark, she actually found the visit to the Cheneys “most agreeable,” sharing some of Fannie’s sense that “we liked to read the same things and we laughed at the same things.” A photograph taken that weekend with her hosts on the rotting steps of an abandoned smokehouse, wild vines gradually taking over, shows her looking relaxed, if unsmiling, in a ladylike dark blue dress with white trim, and a rare pair of earrings, perhaps suggested by her mother. “I asked the steward on the airplane what he did with the dirty dishes,” she reported about her trip home. “When we get to Chicago, he says, we push them down a slot. I would like to work out some such arrangement.”
WITHIN WEEKS of this return from Tennessee, Flannery was inspired by a newly settled family of tenant farmers at Andalusia to begin work on the story that she would read aloud in the Cold Chimneys library on her next visit, in December. The Matysiaks, a Polish “displaced family,” consisting of Jan, the father; Zofia, the mother; twelve-year-old Alfred; and his younger sister, Hedwig, arrived in the fall of 1953. These Roman Catholic outsiders, speaking in accents more impenetrable than, but reminiscent of, Erik Langkjaer’s, drew from O’Connor a response both moral and comic. In newsy letters to the Cheneys, echoing her story, she persisted in referring to Mr. Matysiak, like an allegorical character, by the flat moniker “the D.P.,” for “displaced person.”
Having arrived in Georgia from West Germany, the Matysiak family had just spent six years as refugees, following the father’s incarceration during World War II in a German labor farm as a prisoner of war. “They had what were called ‘camps’ for people living in Germany who were not natives,” recalls Al Matysiak. “We moved from camp to camp.” A “jack-of-all-trades,” the father’s application to immigrate to the United States was finally accepted in 1951, and they wound up in Gray, Georgia. They traveled twenty miles each Sunday morning to the nearest Catholic church, Sacred Heart, where they met Mrs. O’Connor. By the fall of 1953, alert to reasonably priced labor, Regina had them resettled at Andalusia, and Alfred enrolled in Sacred Heart School, his presence at a school service noted in the Union-Recorder: “The boys in white marched in procession. Alfred Matysiak was the leader of the boys.”
The Matysiaks were hardly an unusual case. Life magazine reported in July 1945, “In the American and British zones of liberated Europe there had been discovered about 6,700,000 Displaced Persons. . . . More Poles, Balts and Yugoslavs elect not to go home, fearing the Communist domination of their fatherlands. In one group of 3,500 Poles, it was reported, only 19 chose to go back to Poland now.” The Displaced Persons Act of 1948, signed by President Truman, allowed entry of 400,000 of these DPs over a four-year period, against the opposition of many conservative Southern congressmen, including Texas Representative Ed Gossett, who viewed them as “subversives, revolutionists, and crackpots of all colors and hues.” Because half were Roman Catholics, Bishop William Mulloy testified at a 1948 congressional hearing, “It is our Christian duty and moral obligation to remove the displaced persons from their present plight.”
Milledgeville already had its share of such displaced families, with the active involvement of Father John Toomey, working through the Catholic Resettlement Commission. The first of these immigrants, the Jeryczuks, with two children, had arrived in July 1949, rating a feature story and picture in the Union-Recorder: “Displaced Family Arrives on Farm from Poland.” After briefly stopping at the parish house of Father Toomey, they had been escorted to a three-room shack on the Thornton dairy farm. Preparing in December 1951 for another displaced family that never finally moved to Andalusia, Regina and Mrs. Stevens sewed curtains for their windows from flowered chicken-feed sacks. Flannery reported to the Fitzgeralds that when Regina complained that the green curtains did not match the pink, Mrs. Stevens, “(who has no teeth on one side of her mouth) says in a very superior voice, ‘Do you think they’ll know what colors even is?’”
The Matysiaks were put up in a four-room shack beyond the lower pond, with no running water and a wood-burning stove. As Jan’s English was broken, and Zofia spoke only Polish, Al, having picked up English at school, served as the family translator. His father, a short man who wore plastic-frame glasses, possessed lots of technical skills. After an old John Deere tractor broke down, he astonished Regina by taking the motor apart. “Miss O’Connor could not believe it,” remembers Al Matysiak. “She said
to him, ‘That thing will never work again.’ But Daddy got her to order new parts, put it back together, and it worked just like new. Daddy could fix most anything.” As an official 1951 governmental study of such displaced laborers in the South noted, “They need much less supervision than native Negro workers; they take better care of machine and farm implements — in fact, one employer complained jokingly, ‘They are such darn perfectionists.’”
Al Matysiak does not remember much direct contact with Flannery, who struck him as a distant presence. “If I talked with her it was very, very little,” he recalls. “I’d see her occasionally at a distance. She was really, I don’t want to say fanatic, but she loved different types of fowl, and feeding them in the pens. I couldn’t believe her peacocks when I first saw them. It was amazing, especially when they spread their feathers out. The male was beautiful. They had feathers all over the ground. Being a nosy kid, I would sometimes pick up those feathers. That was the first time I’d seen a peacock when I came, and the first time I’d seen a guinea hen, the first time I’d ever seen a pheasant, too. I’d seen chickens, ducks, and geese, but not the exotic type animals that she had.”
His favorite of the O’Connors was Regina, who filled the role of a surrogate American parent: “She was like my second Mama basically. I would walk from our house to hers and tell her, ‘I don’t feel good,’ and she would take my temperature and give me an aspirin. She loved to ride her car around the farm, two or three times a week, and she’d come get me.” If crossed, though, Regina could “make you feel knee-high to a duck; she could use words to make you feel way, way down.” Erik Langkjaer was present enough for Al to have a few flickering memories of the visitor: “One Sunday afternoon, a car pulled up to the house, and a tall, lanky, nice-looking young fella, dressed nicely, came out. Flannery got in the car, and they came back later that evening. I asked Mrs. Stevens, ‘Who was that man?’ and she said, ‘That’s her boyfriend. They just went on a date.’”
