Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [120]
Though they never saw each other again, Flannery and Erik kept in touch. For the next three years they corresponded, through Erik’s marriage in July 1955, the birth of his two children, and subsequent moves to La Porte, Indiana (he was reassigned to the Midwest territory), and then back to Scarsdale, when he worked in Manhattan as a Scribner’s editor specializing in religious books. But when he published a piece in the Catholic Worker, in 1958, concerning nuclear disarmament, she wrote a letter critical of his naivete and the “bezerk” house style of the magazine, and never answered his reply. In a stray reference, in 1962, she even managed to misspell his name as “Eric.” Yet just as Flannery, for all her distrust of reading fiction for clues to a writer’s life, could describe Hulga to the Tates as the character “I just by the grace of God escape being,” so she skirted the revelation that, like Hulga, she, too, had lost “a wooden part of her soul” in the encounter with Erik, painful as it was, and that the loss may have constituted a kind of grace.
Chapter Eight
Freaks and Folks
Seated before an NBC studio camera in New York City on May 31, 1955, Flannery was visibly ill at ease. Her host, Harvey Breit, assistant editor of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, had invited her to be the first guest on Galley Proof, his new half-hour talk show, broadcast at one thirty on Tuesday afternoon, on WRCA-TV. The program combined an interview with a leading author and a short dramatization from a forthcoming book — in O’Connor’s case, a scene from her story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” She had been nervous about the appearance for weeks, feeling dubious about her presence on the small screen, and mistrusting the show’s awkward, midafternoon time slot. As she had written to Robie Macauley two weeks earlier, “I will be real glad when this television thing is over with. I keep having a mental picture of my glacial glare being sent out over the nation onto millions of children who are waiting impatiently for The Batman to come on.”
A public intellectual in his midforties, formerly married to Alice Morris, Flannery’s editor at Harper’s Bazaar, Breit, in a sack suit — looking every inch an urban professor, with his high forehead and receding wavy hair — chain-smoked in front of a bookcase while fumbling with oversized galley pages. “Galley Proof is an attempt to bring forward in advance, as a kind of preview, the most exciting new books we know of,” he announced. “Such a book is a collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, to be published this Friday. . . . Several years ago she wrote a novel, Wise Blood, which critics hailed as a brilliant book. One critic called her ‘perhaps the most naturally gifted of the youngest generation of American novelists.’ Here she is, Flannery O’Connor.”
Caught in a close-up, Flannery stared sideways, wincing from Breit’s cigarette smoke. Yet she was elegantly dressed in a skirt, a dark blouse with a wide velvet collar fastened at the neck with a clasp, a thin bracelet, and earrings. When a producer had called to warn her not to wear a white dress, she complained to a friend, “I don’t know what she thought I’d come decked out in a white dress for, but anyway she didn’t tell me to wear my shoes.” An interviewer’s nightmare, Flannery stuck, at first, to short, one-line answers. When asked about the genesis of Wise Blood, she replied, “Well I thought I had better get to working on a novel, so I got to work and wrote one.” When Breit mentioned her life on the farm, she corrected him, as he later recalled “quietly (but with quiet fervor)”: “I don’t see much of it. I’m a writer, and I farm from the rocking chair.”
As Flannery gradually relaxed, she grew more articulate, explaining, in response to the inevitable query about her place in Southern literature, “When you’re a Southerner and in pursuit of reality, the reality you come up with is going to have a Southern accent, but that’s just an accent; it’s not the essence of what you’re trying to do.” Before