Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [129]
No sooner had Betty left than Flannery was coaxing her to stay longer next time, feeling that she had been “poised for flight — a lark with a jet engine.” As she had not taken a meal, Regina was not “quite convinced that you exist on a plane with the rest of us.” But their meaningful conversation kept Flannery pondering afterward. Of Betty’s comment that she had evidently given up long ago thinking that anything could be worked out on the surface, Flannery expounded more fully in her next letter that she had come to a deeper understanding only in the last years, as a result of sickness and success: “I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. . . . Success is almost as isolating and nothing points out vanity as well.”
As if such a coy attitude were more ladylike, Regina liked to say that Flannery did not seek out friends but waited until they came to her. Certainly after the publication of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, O’Connor was a target for lots of unsolicited attention. Betty Hester was her happiest connection. Others she simply made fun of. As she wrote Robie Macauley, “I seem to attract the lunatic fringe mainly,” like Mr. Jimmie Crum of Hollywood who asked for an autographed picture for the wall of his rare coin and stamp shop, or two theological students who selected her as “their pin-up girl — the grimmest distinction to date.” She helped Paul Curry Steele, a writer, who had a history in mental institutions, enter the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, based solely on a story he mailed her, although she distanced herself when the tone of his lengthy letters turned angry.
Regina was forced to make sense of the cars driving up more and more during Flannery’s downtime in the afternoons, often filled with strangers. Flannery told the Fitzgeralds that “Some Very Peculiar Types have beat a path to my door these last few years and it is always interesting to see my mother hostessing-it-up on these occasions.” Typical of such a surprise visitor that year was Father James McCown, S.J., assistant pastor at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Macon, who had read A Good Man Is Hard to Find. He commandeered a ride from Horace Ridley, an affable local whiskey salesman, to drive forty miles to seek out its author. In Milledgeville, the rumpled cleric asked directions from Father Toomey’s mother, who replied, “Mary Flannery is a sweet girl. But I’m afraid to go near her. She might put me in one of her stories.”
As Flannery told the Fitzgeralds, “a white Packard drove up to our humble yard and out jumped an unknown Jesuit.” Yet Father McCown was as surprised by the author as she was by him. She appeared at the screen door in old jeans, long before they became modish, and a brown blouse, leaning on aluminum waist-high crutches and staring out for a disquieting few seconds until the priest explained that he liked her stories. “Proud you did,” she said, smiling at last. “Wanna come in?” She told Betty that he was the first priest to say “turkey-dog to me about liking anything I wrote.” When Alfred Kazin spoke that spring at Macon’s Wesleyan College, McCown drove him out for a visit, along with Professors Tom and Louise Gossett. And McCown gradually became a spiritual adviser to Flannery, later characterizing her issues, such as whether to eat ham broth