Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [114]
“The Displaced Person,” performed by Flannery on her return to Cold Chimneys, was only part one of the final version, but she considered the story complete at the time. Missing was the transfiguring peacock (a later version was briefly titled “The King of the Birds”), a climactic crucifixion scene leaving Mr. Guizac crushed under a tractor, and Mrs. McIntyre, herself paralyzed by a stroke, taught to make out the contours of her “true country” — purgatory — by the faithful priest. These elements would appear when she turned the story into a three-part, sixty-page “novella” the following year. Yet even part one was a hit, read aloud to a group that included the houseguest Monroe Spears, editor of the Sewanee Review. When “The Atlantic kept it 4 months & decided it wasn’t their dish,” Flannery forwarded the story to Spears, who published this version in his fall 1954 issue.
DURING ONE OF Erik’s several afternoon visits to Andalusia, Flannery proudly brought out a new painting to show him. Ever one of her favorites, her “self-portrait with a pheasant cock that is really a cutter,” created in the spring of 1953, could be counted on to draw mixed responses from viewers, with its full-on portrayal of herself, oval-eyed, wearing a fiery yellow halo of a sunhat, her arm wrapped about a fearsome dark bird. “He has horns and a face like the Devil,” she wrote her friend Janet McKane, of the pheasant. “The-self portrait was made ten years ago, after a very acute siege of lupus . . . so I looked pretty much like the portrait.” Her friend Louise Abbot felt that Flannery looked “stunned” in the painting. “I praised it,” recalls Erik, “but I said that she was better-looking than the portrait. Flannery responded by saying that, well, this was the way she saw herself.”
Neither Erik nor Flannery based their friendship on the comeliness of her looks. On the contrary, she enjoyed flouting expectations of ladylike beauty, as in this unconventional self-portrait, done in bright Van Gogh reds, oranges, and greens, with vibrant expressionist brushstrokes, which she soon hung between the two long front windows of the dining room, like a parody of the more formal portraits of aunts and cousins on display in the Cline Mansion. And Erik played right along. Of a photograph of Helene Iswolsky in a Catholic magazine, Flannery wrote to Betty Hester that “her kinsman used to tell me that she was the ugliest woman in the world and that I reminded him of her which was why he liked me.” Langkjaer recalls, too, that “She loved to talk about the peacocks because they were so beautiful, and I had a feeling, or maybe she even told me so, that she thought they were so obviously much more beautiful than she was.”
Whatever quality struck Elizabeth Hardwick, at Yaddo, as “plain,” was magnified by O’Connor’s disease and accelerating disability. At Cold Chimneys toward the end of 1953, Ashley Brown noted that Flannery was “rather careful in her movements, going down the two or three steps at the backdoor.” She was beginning to limp from persistent hip pain, attributed to incipient rheumatism. By the spring of 1954, Erik recalls the appearance of a cane: “She was using a stick at the time already. But she could walk about the place, and we did take some walks.” Every bit as unsparing, and funny, in describing herself as the many maimed characters in her stories, such as the “one-arm jackleg” Tom T. Shiflet in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” she wrote Caroline Gordon in November: “I am doing very well these days except for a limp, which I am informed is rheumatism. Colored people call it ‘the misery.’ Anyway I walk like I have one foot in the gutter but it’s not an inconvenience and I get out of doing a great many things I don’t want to do.”
The handicap had no impact on her brisk rate of