Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [121]
Breit: Flannery, would you like to tell our audience what happens in that story?
O’Connor: No, I certainly would not. I don’t think you can paraphrase a story like that. I think there’s only one way to tell it and that’s the way it is told in the story.
Although no longer showing any signs of puffiness or hair loss, Flannery felt that she looked “very tired” when she watched herself on the kinescope. She had just arrived for the taping the afternoon before, when her Eastern Air Lines flight was met at four twenty at Newark Airport by Catharine Carver, who then accompanied her into the city to a hotel near Grand Central Station. She had originally been booked at the Woodstock Hotel, on the West Side, but, traveling without her cane, wished to be situated in shorter walking distance of the Harcourt Brace offices. Not only was Carver her “nursemaid,” on this trip, as Flannery described her, but she had also now officially been named her editor, in a surprise shake-up as Robert Giroux left to become vice president of Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, and Denver Lindley took over the position of editor in chief at Harcourt.
When she had first received news of Giroux’s departure, a few weeks earlier, Flannery was dismayed. And as soon as possible, during her visit, the two met to discuss the delicate situation. Giroux assured her that she was in good hands. Flannery told Carver of her boss confiding that she “did all the work anyhow.” He also informed Flannery that her book was generating lots of prepublication buzz. As she relayed this news to the Fitzgeralds, “The atmosphere at Harcourt Brace, at least in regard to meself, has changed to one of eager enthusiasm. I had tea with Giroux and he told me all about it.” They spoke of negotiations for a contract for a second novel that he shrewdly suggested to Flannery and Elizabeth McKee should include a “provisional voidance clause,” allowing cancellation if Carver should unexpectedly leave the firm, too.
With its June 6 publication date still days away, Flannery already had an advance copy of her book. “I like it fine,” she said. “It is nice not to have to look at myself on the back of the jacket.” Giroux had not acceded to her wish to use her painted self-portrait as the author photo. “I think it will do justice to the subject for some time to come,” she tried to convince him. Yet the final presentation, without any photograph at all, was just as agreeable, and projected a stylish, literary sensibility similar to their last project, Wise Blood, in hardcover — if not to the Signet paperback, then on the racks in a print run of 234,090, featuring a racy cover drawing of Sabbath and Haze flirting in the grass, its steamy tagline “A Searching Novel of Sin and Redemption.” The jacket for A Good Man Is Hard to Find was again abstract, with white title words in scarlet pools against a tan background; its modest first printing, 2,500 copies — 500 less than Wise Blood.
Flannery remained in Manhattan until Friday, meeting with her agent and journalists, and participating in the literary life she had warily sampled during her years in the north. “I had interviews with this one and that one,” she regaled the Fitzgeralds, “ate with this one and that one, drank with this one and that one, and generally managed to conduct myself as if this were all very well but I had business at home.” She spent most of the time in the company of Catharine Carver, feeling comfortable with the shy, impeccable line editor, who was such a deep fan of her work. In honor of her author’s visit, Carver procured two of the most coveted tickets of the season, to Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, at the Morosco Theatre. Flannery found the play that went on to win a 1955 Pulitzer Prize “melodramatic”: “I thought I could do that good myself,” she told McKee. “However, on reflection I guess