Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [122]
Her most unusual assignation was a quick visit with Fred Darsey, a young man recently escaped from Milledgeville State Hospital, where he was committed by his parents during a troubled adolescence. Darsey first caught her interest with a blind letter, in March, from the mental institution, revealing his passion for bird-watching. She was startled when her reply was returned and the envelope marked “eloped.” She sympathized, when Darsey wrote her again from New York City, “When you have a friend there you feel as if you are there yourself, so you see I feel as if I have escaped too.” Carver helped arrange the date, which Flannery kept secret from Regina, in Bryant Park, at the rear of the New York Public Library, with the pen pal she had never met. “I just love to sit and look at the people in New York, or anywhere,” she told him, “even in Milledgeville.”
Flannery wound up her trip north spending the weekend in Connecticut with Caroline Gordon. They stayed at Robber Rocks, the farmhouse of the writer and editor Sue Jenkins, in Tory Valley, a longtime literary enclave on the Connecticut–New York border. Just down the road was a house the Tates had rented in the twenties with the poet Hart Crane. Stopping by, she noted, “There was a lot of his stuff piled up in a corner, a pair of snow shoes and some other things.” In honor of this visit, Jenkins threw a party, inviting the Mark Twain biographer Van Wyck Brooks, and Flannery’s Yaddo acquaintance and leader of a postwar Faulkner revival, Malcolm Cowley. When “Dear old Van Wyke” insisted that Flannery read one of her stories, she began “Good Country People” but was interrupted by Caroline Gordon, who was worried about the response to the hayloft scene, suggesting “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” as shocking enough.
“It was interesting to see the guffaws of the company die away into a kind of frozen silence as they saw which way things were heading,” Gordon reported to Fannie Cheney of Flannery’s reading of “A Good Man.” While exiting, Brooks remarked to his hostess on the shame of someone so talented viewing life as “a horror story.” He felt her characters were “alien to the American way of life.” An amused Flannery added in the detail to the Fitzgeralds that “Malcolm was very polite and asked me if I had a wooden leg.” The next day, Sue Jenkins drove Flannery and Caroline to mass and read the Times while waiting. On the way back, Flannery spoke of Guardini’s Faith and Modern Man, and Caroline excitedly told her about Erich Neumann’s Origins and History of Consciousness, “about the best book I ever read, next to Holy Writ,” while their hostess visibly sulked. “She felt left out,” Caroline wrote her husband. “How childish can grown women get?”
Upon her return to Milledgeville, by June 8, Flannery found a letter waiting from Fred Darsey, written soon after their rendezvous at the New York Public Library, addressed, “Dear Ferocious Flannery,” and accompanied by a small, illustrated booklet, The Life of Jesus. She quickly responded that “I think I am about as ferocious as you are,” adding, “I saw about a million people during the week, and I’m very glad to get back to the chickens who don’t know that I write.” She had indeed reached a point where her heart was decidedly in Georgia, on the farm, savoring the unsophisticated responses of her “good country” neighbors. “I am fast getting a reputation out of all proportion to my desire for one and this largely because I am now competing with The Lone Ranger,” she quipped of a local newspaper announcement of her TV appearance. “Everybody here shakes my hand but nobody reads my stories.”
As she recovered from her trip, on the farm that she had downplayed to Harvey Breit, this first week in June turned out to be the single most important for her public career as a writer. Beginning on Sunday, with a front-page review by Sylvia Stallings in the Herald Tribune Book Review titled “Flannery O’Connor: A New Shining Talent among Our Storytellers,” a fresh attitude toward her fiction started to take hold. On Friday,