Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [126]
Her time in Nashville was designed so that Flannery could meet the Cheneys’ other weekend guest at Cold Chimneys, Russell Kirk, who was in town to lecture at Vanderbilt. An old-school conservative thinker in the Anglo-American tradition, popularizing the ideas of Edmund Burke, Kirk was teaching at Michigan State, and had helped found that year the journal National Review. Flannery admired his 1953 book, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, which Brainard Cheney had reviewed in Sewanee. In her copy, she drew marginal lines next to a phrase that was an important seed in her thinking: “Abstract sentimentality ends in real brutality.” But in person the chemistry was weak. She saw him as “Humpty Dumpty (intact) with constant cigar and (outside) porkpie hat,” and their “attempts to make talk were like the efforts of two midgits to cut down a California redwood.”
Kirk had never read any of O’Connor’s stories. But over the weekend he grew interested, as he heard the young woman on crutches, with a bandaged leg he assumed was broken, reading her reliable “A Good Man” aloud in the library. As Frances Cheney later told a group of students, “She was no beaut, but she could tell a story.” Flannery shared that evening the request of a Theater Arts major in Los Angeles to film the story because it would be cheap to produce. “Cheap and nasty,” responded Kirk. On his way back to Michigan, he read O’Connor’s book and was excited enough to recommend her to T. S. Eliot, his London publisher. Eliot replied that he had seen a book of her stories while in New York City and was “quite horrified by those I read. She has certainly an uncanny talent of a high order but my nerves are just not strong enough to take much of a disturbance.”
O’Connor returned to a desk even messier than usual. Despite Caroline Gordon’s warning that “I hope you won’t let them bully you into writing a novel if you don’t feel like it,” she had signed the contract for a second novel. Of its working title, You Can’t Be Any Poorer than Dead, Flannery joked to Macauley, “Which is the way I feel every time I get to work on it.” She was once more embarked on a novel that would take years to finish, this time her alter ego a fierce, fourteen-year-old, backwoods boy fighting the call to be an Old Testament–style prophet in the contemporary South. To support the work, she applied for a Guggenheim, with references from Giroux, Lindley, and Andrew Lytle, but was again denied. Preparing the way for her new hero, she worked on a talk to be given the next year in Lansing, Michigan, that she was calling “The Freak in Modern Fiction.”
But, in early winter, Flannery found herself once again visualizing her imaginary farm, its widow-owner visited this time by an “uncouth country suitor” in the form of a pawing black bull chewing at a bush beneath her bedroom window in the silvery moonlight. While treating novels as homework assignments to be painfully completed, stories had become for Flannery quick target practice, often resulting in her most successful productions. “I get so sick of my novel that I have to have some diversion,” she told the Cheneys of her new story. As usual, its heroine, Mrs. May, was once removed from Regina, this time in her habit of inspecting the fields. “Miss Regina always picked me up to go riding,” recalls Al Matysiak. “I’d get out of the car and undo the gates and shut them back behind her.” Its overhead sun “like a silver bullet” was also familiar to