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By Root 1532 0

with Rome. Erik was quite open about his life situation, “that I had come to the U.S., that I was now traveling somewhat rootlessly in the South, and that I had all these religious concerns and problems.” Flannery was tickled by a traveling salesman carrying “The Bible,” a joke term in publishing for his standard loose-leaf binder of promotional materials and tables. “It amused her very much that something that was not a bible should have been called a bible,” says Langkjaer. And she responded with tenderness to his rootless search. Writing to Erik two years later, Flannery recalled a first rush of empathy with his homelessness: “You wonder how anybody can be happy in his home as long as there is one person without one. I never thought of this so much until I began to know you and your situation and I will never quite have a home again on acct. of it.”

Because Erik shared some troubling personal information fairly quickly — childhood in occupied Denmark during the war years, his father’s subsequent death — Flannery was unusually forthcoming, too. She spoke of her lupus, and of her own father’s death, two of her most private topics. The need to discuss her disease, though, was fairly obvious; she was, as she told the Fitzgeralds, in January, “practically bald-headed on top,” with “a watermelon face.” Langkjaer remembered his first impression of her as “a little bloated” from the steroid medicine, with slack muscle tone. “Flannery told me quite openly about her illness,” recalls Langkjaer. “I was told about her father’s death and the unexpected fact of the disease being hereditary, as she had not expected from what the doctors had told them. But she seemed quite composed about this.”

That first afternoon, Mrs. O’Connor served Erik and Flannery tea and then withdrew to take care of various business matters. Erik immediately picked up on the wide gap in sensibility between Flannery and her mother. Not “the saint everyone thinks she was, she was rather rebellious,” says Langkjaer of the young woman who struck him as still far from reconciled to her fate. “I did sense that Flannery had a tense relationship with her mother. I got the impression that she was quite dependent on her mother now that she had come down with this disease, but that she was not an easy person for Flannery to talk to. I mean they were really not of one mind, to put it mildly. It wasn’t that I experienced any altercations between them, but this was something that Flannery told me.”

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