Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [110]
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,