Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [105]
During these waning hours, Flannery also pursued her hobbies of painting and raising birds, looking and listening. She was taking classes in town from Frank Stanley Herring, the post office muralist, and she hung on the walls of the farmhouse her simple studies of zinnias in bowls, angular cows under bare trees, a worker’s shack in winter, and a rooster’s angry head. “None of my paintings go over very big in this house although mamma puts them up and is loth to take them down again,” she wrote the Fitzgeralds. She collected an entire bestiary of “show birds”: pens of pheasants and quail, a flock of turkeys, Canada geese, Muscovy ducks, Japanese silky bantams, and Polish crested bantams. Keeping her ears cocked for responses to her prized peacock, she got much mileage from a repairman who remarked, after the bird unfurled its magnificent tail, “Never saw such long ugly legs. . . . I bet that rascal could outrun a bus.”
Sundown and bedtime were nearly synonymous for Flannery. “I go to bed at nine and am always glad to get there,” she told a friend. Occasionally she recited Compline, the last office of the day, from her Breviary, set between a Sunday missal and her Bible on a low bedside table. More reliably, her habitual nighttime reading was the lofty, lucent prose of Thomas Aquinas. For just as significant as ordering peacocks as a signal of her intention to settle, was her obtaining her own copy of the seven-hundred-page Modern Library selection Introduction to Saint Thomas Aquinas, which she signed and dated “1953”: “I read it for about twenty minutes every night before I go to bed. If my mother were to come in during this process and say, ‘Turn off that light. It’s late,’ I with lifted finger and broad bland beatific expression, would reply, ‘On the contrary, I answer that the light, being external and limitless, cannot be turned off. Shut your eyes,’ or some such thing.” Even resting in bed, Flannery was replenishing her writing. “I read a lot of theology because it makes my writing bolder,” she once explained to a friend.
Spending hours alone in her large front room, among the phantasms of drowning boys, garrulous Southern grandmas, and mean killer-prophets, all created within a span of six months, Flannery struggled to make sense of her life. When her father died, she had compared God’s grace to a bullet in the side. Faced with that same daunting grace, she developed a narrative to explain her situation. For this dedicated writer there was no surer sign of grace than writing a good story, and she had just written several. So when she broke the news of her lupus to Robert Lowell, in March 1953, she swore that “I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.” Spinning her own life as a parable of a prodigal daughter, forced home against her wishes and finding a consoling gift, she later encouraged the young Southern novelist Cecil Dawkins: “I stayed away from the time I was 20 until I was 25 with the notion that the life of my writing depended on my staying away. I would certainly have persisted in that delusion had I not got very ill and had to come home. The best of my writing has been done here.”
ONE SPRING AFTERNOON in late April 1953, a striking-looking young man appeared at the front door. Tall and blond, described by Caroline Gordon as “a Dane with eyes like blue marbles,” Erik Langkjaer was a twenty-six-year-old college textbook salesman for Harcourt Brace, Flannery’s publisher. As his recently assigned territory was the entire South east of the Mississippi,