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played a part in its creation, too, even if they were only dimly understood by her. By the beginning of 1955, Flannery knew that Erik was extending his leave of absence to remain in Europe. And “Good Country People” contains many coded references to him, most obviously in Manley’s job as a fake Bible salesman (his hollowed-out tome contains condoms, porn playing cards, and a flask of whiskey), his displaced origins, “not even from a place, just from near a place,” and his exit “over the green speckled lake.” Satirizing herself, Flannery was even sharper: limping Hulga suffers from a heart condition and is not expected to live past forty-five; a “lady Ph.D.,” she reads Heidegger. For the paragraph of Hulga’s philosophy book that gives her mother a chill, O’Connor copied lines from her own marked-up 1949 translation of Heidegger’s Existence and Being. Most poignantly, Hulga has never been kissed, and her response to Manley’s stolen kiss is far from indifferent: “The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenaline in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain.”

Between the few letters from Erik and her story, a red flag from the imagination, Flannery might well have controlled herself. But she persisted. In a January 9 letter, written about the time she was percolating “Good Country People,” she nudged him: “Write me an unintelligible post card please so I will have an excuse to write you a letter. My mother don’t think it is proper for me to send mail when I don’t receive it.” When Erik wrote of his summer plans to pursue charitable works with Abbé Pierre, a radical Catholic social thinker dear to the Catholic Worker houses, she wittily answered him on the back of a fund-raising letter from Dorothy Day, including her mother’s response, “Do you think Erik will like being a ragpicker?” She then added a handwritten afterthought to the typed letter: “I feel like if you were here we could talk about a million years without stopping.”

Her eager April 1 postscript crossed in the mail with a note announcing Erik’s engagement to Mette, and the couple’s plan to return to America, where he would resume his old job with Harcourt Brace in the same southern territory. This was disturbing news for Flannery. If Manley’s making off with Hulga’s wooden leg elicited shock in the writer just ten lines before writing the fierce scene, her inklings of the finality of Erik’s departure likewise did not insulate her from a shock. Years later, when Sally Fitzgerald asked Regina whether Flannery had suffered, her mother looked down, and against her customary reserve, said, “Yes, she did, it was terrible.” Not only did Flannery endure the pain of unrequited affection, but also the bracing clarity that such intimacy was probably never to be hers. With great politesse, she wrote back, subtly shifting from “I” to “we”: “We are glad that you plan to return South and we want you to let us help you make your wife at home in this part of the country. Consider us your people here because that is what we consider ourselves.”

Not surprisingly, Flannery never shared “Good Country People” with Erik, even though she had regularly been sending stories to him in Copenhagen for comment. As late as April 1955, she thanked him for his criticism of “The Displaced Person” and promised changes in page proofs to address his confusion about Mrs. Shortley’s stroke. Yet he did eventually read in print the work she called her “very hot story,” and wrote of recognizing himself “in some sort of disguise.” Flannery wrote back, a bit disingenuously, “Dear boy, remove this delusion from your head at once. As a matter of fact, I wrote that one not too long after your departure and wanted to send you a copy but decided that the better part of tact would be to desist. Your contribution to it was largely in the matter of properties.” She did point out, accurately, “As to the main pattern of that story, it is one of deceit which is something I certainly never