Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [124]
Still Flannery could not help being pleased with the general reception of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a patent departure from the flat incomprehension that had so often greeted her work. “This book is getting much more attention than Wise Blood and may even sell a few copies,” the surprised author had written the Fitzgeralds. When her editor informed her that the collection was selling better than anything on their list except Thomas Merton, she cracked, “Doesn’t say much for their list.” In quick succession, A Good Man went through three printings, selling 4,000 copies over the summer, and was named a finalist for a 1956 National Book Award, losing out eventually to John O’Hara’s Ten North Frederick. Its inevitable fate was the thirty-five-cent paperback, published by Signet the next year in a run of 173,750 copies, with a lurid cover of Hulga, in an open blouse and red skirt, her leg and foot bare, struggling in a hayloft with a dark stranger.
AMID ALL THESE diverging critical responses, including high praise, and book covers that could seem weird and distorted, Flannery felt something akin to a sigh of gratitude in the middle of July when she received a thoughtful letter from a young woman named Betty Hester, living in Atlanta. The stranger disagreed with The New Yorker review, and asked whether these stories were not truly “about God.” Flannery’s response, on July 20, was full of excitement: “Dear Miss Hester, I am very pleased to have your letter. Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find someone who recognizes my work for what I try to make it than it is for you to find a God-conscious writer near at hand. The distance is 87 miles but I feel the spiritual distance is shorter.”
Although they would not meet in person for another year, Betty Hester and Flannery developed an instant sisterly bond. They shared many similarities, made all the more striking by their unlikely profiles as brainy, independent-minded, unmarried women in the Deep South of the 1950s. Born in Rome, Georgia, thirty-two-year-old Hester was mostly self-educated, having attended a humble local junior college, Young Harris, a two-year Methodist school in the Appalachian Mountains of rural northern Georgia. Serving as a meteorologist with the U.S. Air Force in Germany shortly after World War II, she then moved to 2795 Peachtree Road, at the corner of Rumson Road, in Buckhead, to live, again like Flannery, with a widowed female relative; in her case her aunt, Mrs. Gladstone Pitt, who went by the nickname “Clyde.”
Every morning, like a character out of a Kafka novel, either doomed, or aspiring, to invisibility, Betty took a bus downtown to her job as a clerk at Credit Bureau, Inc., later acquired by Equifax. Resembling Flannery in stature, as well — she was about five three, 130 pounds, with thick horn-rimmed spectacles, a Roman nose, and ash blonde hair — Betty mostly kept to herself. According to a mutual friend, “Betty was very shy. So she and Flannery could be quiet together.” Each night, the reclusive clerk returned to her aunt’s apartment and took up her station on the living room couch, where she slept, as well as read and wrote, surrounded by stacks of books, ashtrays — she was a heavy smoker — and a menagerie of cats. She wrote hundreds of letters to Flannery, and was later iden-tified as “A” in O’Connor’s published correspondence, to protect her privacy.
Perhaps from reading the letters about devotional art between the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and his friend and close reader Robert Bridges, or simply from “apoplexy” at the incomprehension of some reviewers, Flannery, after 1955, felt a pressing need to explain her artistic intentions. Aware of the limits of her understanding of “my own work or even my own motivations,” these letters gave her an opportunity to try to set the record straight, for herself as much as anyone. Already in her initial response, she vented about the New Yorker critic as an example of “a generation of wingless chickens” with “the moral sense . . . bred out.” She set the tone for her forthcoming