Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [123]
Of course O’Connor received her share of mean reviews. A blind notice in The New Yorker picked up where a 1952 “Briefly Noted” column on Wise Blood had left off, arguing that “there is brutality in these stories, but since the brutes are as mindless as their victims, all we have, in the end, is a series of tales about creatures who collide and drown, or survive to float passively in the isolated sea of the author’s compassion, which accepts them without reflecting anything.” Flannery’s response, to Catharine Carver: “Did you see the nice little notice in the New Yorker? I can see now why those things are anonymous.” And she bristled at many reviews widely considered positive, such as a piece in Time that “was terrible, nearly gave me apoplexy,” describing her stories in punchy phrases, including “highly unladylike . . . brutal irony . . . slam bang humor . . . as balefully direct as a death sentence.”
A keen observer of popular culture, Flannery had joked to Robie Macauley of her need on TV to work herself up into a heady mix of the professional wrestler Gorgeous George and Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, host of the popular ABC show Life Is Worth Living. She was well aware of a cultural trend toward promoting authors as celebrities in what were called “personality stories” in newspapers, and through the new genre of talk shows pioneered at NBC, such as The Today Show (1952) and The Tonight Show (1954) with Steve Allen, and of which Galley Proof was a short-lived example. Uncomfortable with the “horrible pictures of me,” and unwilling to reveal the medical reasons behind her life on the farm, she poked fun at this trend, hoping her private life would remain hidden behind the hard surface of her fiction.
Yet this reserve backfired in 1955, creating an aura of mystery that led only to further curiosity, and never again abated. Sylvia Stallings closed her adulatory Herald Tribune review by citing the “unusual reticence” of the dust jacket that “says very little about the author except that she lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, and is at work on her second novel. Even that is too much probably for the longer she keeps her whereabouts a secret, the sooner she will have finished her next book.” Magazine editors did not concur. Time ran a photo of her looking almost boyish, à la Carson McCullers. A Newsweek year-end roundup of books featured O’Connor as the lead, top-left photograph. Harper’s Bazaar blew up a soft-focus portrait of her, dressed in a work shirt, as if fresh from the typewriter, looking off winsomely, seated on the front steps of Andalusia. “The effect, though ‘glamorous’ as they used to say, isn’t at all natural,” complained Ashley Brown.
The author had to contend with another book release that month, as well. Wise Blood was published in England on June 26, using as its cover blurb a truncated version of Evelyn Waugh’s comment: “It is a remarkable product.” O’Connor wrote the Cheneys, “You should see Hazel Motes picture on the front of the British edition of my book. It came out last month, put out by somebody named Neville Spearman who is apparently always just on the edge of bankruptcy. This one will probably push him over the edge. Anyway, here is the British conception of Mr. Mote’s face (black wool hat on top); also the rat-colored car is there — all this in black and white and pink and blue, the book itself being an unbelievable orange.” The new edition prompted a review in the Times Literary Supplement, warning that the work of this lady author “from the American South” was “intense, erratic