Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [134]
O’Connor’s address at the Thursday assembly was titled “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” a version of which she had delivered at Wesleyan College, in December. But this talk, with many moving parts she was forever rearranging, held special piquancy delivered in her hometown. Its theme was the local as a portal to the universal. O’Connor made her point with highly regional references to “the reek of Baldwin County.” Its climax could easily have been a response to Maryat. When she read Dope!, Flannery had punned, on Lee’s MA thesis on medieval morality plays, “a real morality play if I ever saw one and altogether powerful in spite of it.” The “in spite of” was an inkling of the conclusion to her speech that morality for an artist meant conveying a vision, not a lesson: “If the writer is successful as artist, his moral judgment will coincide with his dramatic judgment. It will be inseparable from the very act of seeing.”
While O’Connor’s talk was not covered in the local papers, including the school newspaper, the half-hour teleplay of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” caused more of a stir. Shown on CBS-TV’s Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, which she mistakenly thought was produced “by Ronald Regan (?),” the program starred “a tap-dancer by the name of Gene Kelly” as Tom T. Shiftlet and was broadcast on Friday evening, March 1. The “idiot daughter,” played by Janice Rule (and her mother, by Agnes Moorehead) is swept up at the story’s revised end by a Shiftlet with a conscience, and driven off into a pleasant sunset. Flannery, “disliking it heartily,” watched the production with her aunt Mary Cline, who deemed the ending improved. Reminiscent of Poe, shadowed by children flapping their arms like the Raven after the publication of his famous poem, Flannery told Maryat, “Children now point to me on the street. The city fathers think that I have arrived finally.”
Though protesting that writing speeches was a distraction from her true vocation, Flannery spent much of the winter and spring of 1957 ignoring this “better judgment,” including an appearance at Emory on “How the Writer Writes.” When Granville Hicks asked for a copy of her GSCW address for his anthology, The Living Novel: A Symposium, including essays by Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Herbert Gold, Flannery complained, “I begin to feel like a displaced person myself, writing papers and not fiction.” Yet rather than decline, she decided to recast the talk, “designed for a student audience,” into a more publishable essay. Her excuse was an invitation from Robert Fitzgerald, who was spending a semester away from Italy as a visiting professor at Notre Dame, to address an audience of faculty and their wives, clergy, graduate students, and seminarians. For these “Cathlick interleckchuls” she felt she could unveil her Christian subtext.
Arriving on Sunday, April 14, at the Chicago airport, where Robert Fitzgerald met her to connect to a flight to South Bend, Flannery was happily reunited with one of her most important friends and mentors for the first time in nearly four years. “She seemed frail but steady, no longer disfigured by any swelling, and her hair had grown long again,” he recalled. “She managed her light crutches with distaste but some dexterity.” Her host put her up at the Morris Inn, the best accommodation in town, built of yellow Indiana stone, on the edge of campus. She visited with her Iowa City housemate Ruth Sullivan Finnegan, now married to a university professor, and met a new friend, Thomas Stritch, a “bachelor don,” the nephew of Cardinal Stritch of Chicago, and another