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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