Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [116]
Introducing “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” in Harper’s Bazaar in May 1954, an editor’s urbane note promised “a memorable addition to her gallery of hard-boiled, out-of-the-way but engaging Southerners — this time with a precocious twelve-year-old brat whose curiosity leads her into dark alleys.” The author contributed a plangent, cute personal statement: “I’ve had poor luck with my peafowl and have only one cock and ten hens left, the rest having died of broken hearts or whatever peafowl die of.” But tucked into the conclusion of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” was a profound response to McCullers’s novel. O’Connor’s twelve-year-old discovers her identity in the body of Christ, held up at a Benediction service in a convent chapel, as the girl’s face is mashed, this time, “into a crucifix hitched” on the belt of a nun who hugs her. “Sex potential” deflected can lead to violence; an alternative is evidently sexuality sublimated in religious expression.
Stimulating a response to such romantic issues and “broken hearts” outside the world of her fiction, was Erik Langkjaer, as their close relationship reached a decisive phase. On May 20, Flannery abruptly canceled a trip to visit the Cheneys in Nashville, remaining at Andalusia to entertain Erik. Not telling the full story, she apologized to her hosts: “The weekend I planned to come to Nashville, a friend of mine who was on his way to Denmark to live elected to pay me a visit and there was no way to stop him — otherwise I would have.” Obviously Erik could have been stopped, especially because Flannery, claiming to be “certainly distressed” at forgoing the trip to Cold Chimneys because of her friend’s choice, pointed out that “I already had the ticket.” Rescheduling her visit for later in the year — now one of two or three annual trips to Nashville — she wrote the Cheneys that “barring mortal accidents I will be along.”
The “mortal accident” that kept her at Andalusia on the weekend of May 21 was Langkjaer’s decision to take a six-month leave from Harcourt Brace and return to Europe for the summer. To mark this rupture in a friendship at least tinged with romance, Erik invited Flannery on a farewell car ride, their favorite pastime — for Flannery a savored chance at intimacy and a much-needed escape from farm and mother. “We drove through the countryside and I remember her saying how much she liked the red clay of Georgia,” says Langkjaer, “and she would point to this red clay as we drove along. It gave her a homey feeling.” On this special occasion, Erik parked the car, and decided to lean over and kiss Flannery. “I may not have been in love, but I was very much aware that she was a woman, and so I felt that I’d like to kiss her,” he says. “She may have been surprised that I suggested the kiss, but she was certainly prepared to accept it.”
Yet, for Erik, the kiss felt odd. Remarkably inexperienced for a woman of her age, Flannery’s passivity alarmed him. “As our lips touched I had a feeling that her mouth lacked resilience, as if she had no real muscle tension in her mouth, a result being that my own lips touched her teeth rather than lips, and this gave me an unhappy feeling of a sort of memento mori, and so the kissing stopped. . . . I was not by any means a Don Juan, but in my late twenties I had kissed other girls, and there had been this firm response, which was totally lacking in Flannery. So I had a feeling of kissing a skeleton, and in that sense it was a shocking experience.” Erik’s uneasy reaction touched on unspoken feelings about Flannery being “mildly” in love with him,