Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [117]
Returning to Europe, within weeks, Langkjaer immersed himself in his new life. He registered for a six-week summer course for foreigners in Marburg, Germany, where he soon became infatuated with an attractive Finnish woman. He wrote Flannery letters about his reading of German authors, including Rilke and Mann, but much of his attention was taken up with this mild flirtation, which lasted only a short time. In the fall, he then decided to return to his native city of Copenhagen and to enroll in courses on Shakespeare, the English Romantic poets, and American writers after 1920. While at the University of Copenhagen, he met Mette Juhl, the daughter of a famous Danish stage and screen character actor. Bonded by a mutual plan of becoming high school teachers, the two began a serious love affair, which Erik did not reveal in any of his letters to Flannery.
Flannery had no such change of scenery, and her letters to Erik, at his Copenhagen address, are among her most tender. In her first letter of June 13, she writes, longingly, in a closing line, of their car rides, with an implicit memory of their last kiss, “I haven’t seen any dirt roads since you left & I miss you.” Erik responded with a postcard of Billy Graham autographing a Bible during a revival meeting in a public square in Copenhagen. “Thank you for the post card,” she wrote back on July 18. “I put it in the Bible naturally.” When Erik shared his plans to stay through the fall to study American literature, though, Flannery, on October 17, sounded concerned: “You are wonderful and wildly original and I would probably think you even more so if I still didn’t hope you will come back from that awful place.” She ended with a sweet tug: “Did I tell you that I call my baby peachicken Brother in public and Erik in private?”
Passing the fall anxiously anticipating word from Erik, Flannery resolutely continued her “researches into the ways of the vulgar.” While correspondence from Erik was disappointingly thin, the South continued to provide fulsome inspiration. Sometime during that fall of 1954 she heard, for the first time, the dissonant word pair “artificial nigger,” and instantly knew that here was a “rabbit,” as she once described the trigger for her high school cartoons. Her mother had casually passed on the phrase to her daughter, when she returned from a day of cow shopping. Having asked directions to the house of a cowman, Regina recounted, she had been told, “Well you go into this town and you can’t miss it ’cause it’s the only house in town with a artificial nigger in front of it.” “So I decided I would have to find a story to fit that,” O’Connor later told an audience at Vanderbilt University. “A little lower level than starting with the theme.”
Referring to the black-jockey hitching posts that Uncle Louis persisted in calling “nigger statuary,” this title phrase instantly got her in trouble. Wishing to publish O’Connor’s country-come-to-town misadventure of Mr. Head, a “Raphael, awakened by a blast of God’s light,” guiding his ten-year-old nephew, Nelson, through an Atlanta straight out of Dante’s Inferno, John Crowe Ransom worried about its racist ring. “I hate to insult the black folks’ sensibilities,” he wrote her. But O’Connor viewed the story’s diminutive plaster-of-Paris statue — provoking the healing of a rift between uncle and nephew — as a textbook Christ symbol, suggesting “the redemptive quality of the Negro’s suffering for us all.” Writing back to Ransom, who had once changed “nigger” to “Negro” when reading aloud her story in Workshop, she insisted that “the story as a whole is much more damaging to white folk’s sensibilities than to black.” Her jarring title stuck.
Yet even after Ransom’s acceptance of the story, O’Connor remained dissatisfied and